Though on the other hand, it often seems to me that modern revolutions are also historical singularities in some ways: there are some things that generally seem common to each, but each also turns out to be a confluence of many factors, some of which look predictable only in retrospect and which seem unreproducible in other times and other places. It wouldn’t appear from the outside that some of the important necessary conditions for revolutionary upheaval in Iran are present—but at the same time, the existence of meaningful mass protest of some kind says there is something important going on in urban Iranian civil society, that the current ruling elite is either secretly sympathetic to such protest or for some complicated reason unable to squash it outright through unrestrained use of terror and repression.

BTW, how Skocpol, Tilly, Goldstone and Goodwin (and add to this Gurr) do with Hungary, Poland, Russia, etc.?

my uninformed opinion is rather a lot. two points of evidence: there’s a striking number of dissident clerics, including those who’ve had roles in the formation of the state, and the parliament seems to be full of reformers, eg there are enough elected reformists to pass a bill allowing khatami to over-ride the guardian council’s judicial review.

i’ve mentioned abodlkarim soroush. i also liked ali ansari’s talk on “Islam and Democracy: Managing Change in Contemporary Iran.”

I can’t seem to find it in a quick search, but Juan Cole has discussed the fact that repressive as teh Iranian state has been, it has largely stayed within its legal limits rather than engaging in extralegal terror.

Michael Totten:
You seem to be trying to score points for your Builders vs Defenders theory.

The point of my piece had next to nothing to do with Builders and Defenders. The point was about the Iranian Revolution and how the anti-war left to its shame is ignoring it.

I’m glad Prof Healy isn’t ignoring it. He is the first and so far only exception to what I was grousing about.

I’d like to see more of it, perhaps without the snarky comments, though.

i suggest getting the mote out of your eye might help you see more of it.

i’ll also suggest that if you trouble yourself to read some anti-war leftists with natural tans and/or origins in the muslim world, you’ll find very many people who have been attentive to what’s happening in iran.

if you’re offering monetary prizes, i’ll put up my qualification on both anti-war and attending to iran. hey, i protested halabja before the white right got worried about it too.

“He is the first and so far only exception to what I was grousing about.”

Here’s an article from the antiwar-left on the Iranian uprising that I read the other day:

it was, IIRC, pro-uprising

Counterpunch.org also appears to have articles about Aceh, Peru, Africa and Brazil. Does the current NRO have articles on those places?

Maybe counterpunch can’t jump through all your ideological hoops. But it is part of the “antiwar left”, so now you have two exceptions…