07:23 pm
Iran: The Struggle to Live in Truth
Via the NYT’s Lede blog, video of the protest today at Tehran’s Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery, site of the grave of Neda Agha-Soltan:
Every time I worry that the government has successfully shut down the Greens, they demonstrate their resilience. I cannot help but be reminded of Vaclav Havel’s extraordinary essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”
The [dissident] has not committed a simple individual offence isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. he has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. . . .
he has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the [dissident] has addressed the world. he has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. he has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.
Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. THere are no terms whatsoever on which it can coexist with living within the truth and therefore everyone who steps out of the line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety. . . .
[A]s long as appearance is not confronted with reality, it does not seem to be appearance. As long as living a lie is not confronted with living the truth, the perspective needed to expose its mendacity is lacking. As soon as the alternative appears, however, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness.
What is happening in Iran is now a collective exercise in which a significant part of the population is trying, as Havel says, to live the truth. The government continues to insist that its lie is reality. But the reality is that it never again can portray its fiction as truth.
Havel, again:
This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance.
Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.
The people of Iran have stopped living within the lie. The only question is whether they can speak truth to power long enough to overcome those in government who still deny to accept the new reality.