Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Khiaban No. 22: People's Organization

Thanks to the sender of this translation of a lead article from issue number 22 of Khiaban newspaper, published in Iran. To get electronic copies of the paper in Persian, write to: khyaboon@gmail.com

For detailed reports of detained, murdered and disappeared, in English, go to
Revolutionary Road ...

People's Organization
Amir K.
Khiaban #22/ July 13, 2009

Thirty days have passed since what they called the presidential elections. Thirty compact days, during which in tandem with the terror, the bullets, torture and the regimes lies, the collective consciousness and awareness of the people have developed and morphed. The true nature of the Islamic Republic and its anti-human laws and regulations has been exposed to all, and people have discovered the power of their numbers and their togetherness.

Those wisps of illusion that had forced many into sweet thoughts of step-by-step change have been blown away, and the flames of awakening have spread across the rooftops in the country. In their fight against the coup regime, people have come to see the deep contradiction between a system based on velayat-e faqih [guardianship/rule of religious jurist] and a popular system based on people's will. When their singing throats became the targets of the regime's bullets, the people saw the anti-human nature of the Sepaah [Revolutionary Guards] and the Basij. People found out all about the regime's daily, hidden crimes, when it became apparent to all that their social wealth has been spent to procure the latest and most sophisticated instruments of police oppression, and the most technologically advanced know-how at the service of spying and controlling the citizens.

Kamenei issued the command for the killings, and every day since a new corpse is handed to yet another grieving yet rage filled family opposing them. That inept clown, Ahmadinejad, talked of freedom, while thousands of the country's youth were lined in death camps, awaiting to receive their daily dose of torture. That regime wrote illusory letters to their promised Mehdi the messiah, while the nation's mothers in search of their disappeared children in the corridors of the Islamic halls of justice were insulted, and saw the catastrophe of the events in their shaken hopes.

This consciousness has grown and a collectivity has made it impossible to breath the suffocating air any more. To make the passage from consciousness to proactive action, to go from understanding the oppressive, unjust and corrupt social relations to changing those relations and building a just, free and equal society -- this passage is dependent on organization. Let them speak of easy solutions for change, those who are horrified of the people's power, and those who have tied their hopes to the replacement of a layer of today's rulers with a layer of tomorrow's rulers. Leave them with their dreams and ideas such as a Green TV station that would remote control the people from afar, and render them into political observers, not actors.

However, the people who did not remain mere observers of the coup and intervened in their fate with their own lives if need be, are marching far ahead of the colored dreams of that crowd. The people have realized that to overthrow this organized injustice, they need their own organization. An organization that, unlike the party suggested by Mousavi, will not submit to an existence in the poisoned crevices of the coup regime's laws, but an organization that will grow in order to smash open the cracks in the system and reach the air of freedom.

A large people's organization is an association of small organizations, which sprout and gather strength from within the heart of the struggle against the coup, and which will guarantee the people's rule by defeating this anti-human system.

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