[Reader-list] Will the cat above the precipice fall down?

[Taha Mehmood]

http://www.thecommentfactory.com/will-the-cat-above-the-precipice-fall-down-slavoj-zizek-on-iran-2259

Will the cat above the precipice fall down?: Slavoj Zizek on Iran

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its
dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a
mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the
game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that
the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is
perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene
from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking,
ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to
fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its
authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to
fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…

In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution,
Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a
Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a
policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply
withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident,
and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone
somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?

There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the
protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along
the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a
secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests
as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed
of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think
that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while
the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded
youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in
Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those
who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with
merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to
continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel,
plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in
the years of the war with Iraq.

Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of
Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence.
Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence,
exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of
the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad
beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic.
According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a
repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup
against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts:
the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can
only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness
for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming
that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are
not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.

Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests
along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal
reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi:
is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and
market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual
victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime?
Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true
nature of the protests.

The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah
akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening
darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the
repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its
roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return
to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode
of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their
all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising
of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity
and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete
silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the
deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.

There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this
insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but
a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian
Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power
politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His
demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us:
behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very
Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result
of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a
working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of
wealth in the country).

Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main
candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi.
Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian
version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular
groups. Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for
the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the
Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should
recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this
means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard
line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember
the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution,
with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity,
organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary
people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled
demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political
event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social
transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What
followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political
control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms,
today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the
Khomeini revolution.

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine
liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t
have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front
of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will
contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the
precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same
regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others.
Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we
are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame
of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western
fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the
capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West
are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our
own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others
are waiting in line.