Let’s pull some historical analogies out of our butts
The most bizarre tweet I saw rambling out of the mass of Iranian twitterings referenced, of all things, the assualt of Waco and the Branch Davidians. I was puzzled by this, until I learned that it was Khamenei’s brief against — of all people — Hillary Clinton in his “We will release the Hounds” speech.
If it’s safe to make American-centric allusions to the events in Iran right now, the American who best personifies the Crackdown– and the Spirit of Sheer Brutal Force — is
Bull Connor.
The historical analogies are fractuous, though. I am pretty satisfied with “Berlin Wall versus Tiananmen Square”, because it offers up a rough dichotemy of success or failure. The other item swirling around is that a successful Mousavi would be equivalent Gorbachev. This stems from the irony that we’re sitting here in America, basically on the side of a 1979 Revolutionary promising to uphold the Isalmic Revolution — an irony which if you had gone back in time to 1979 and told Americans that in thirty years would be the case, as we sang our Beach Boy song parodies about “Bombing Iran” and as the saw America decried in Iran as the “Great Satan”, you’d have been called insane.
But the worm of history turns. I mean, we’re not even the Great Satan anymore — Great Britain is the Great Satan!!
A Gorbachev suggests there would have to be a Yeltsin. There is no Yeltsin. And would this follow that there would then also be a Putin in the wait down the road?
The other possibility is Khruschev after Stalin. Though in this case, Stalin would be in the offing with a crushed Revolution — stronger strings of Repression to make sure this doesn’t happen again, a more totalitarian state.
Maybe Khamenei can come back and push America into “Great Satan” territory a bit more than he did on Friday. Reference something besides Waco. I don’t know — what are the other cause celebres of the American Militia movement?