The state of civil unrest in Iran and how many of us have been responding to it has got me rather bothered. On several occasions, I’ve been accused of “polarising the issue” or making hot-headed judgments about the situation when I don’t have a real understanding of the political climate in Iran.
This note is something of a response to those accusations, but more importantly, a call for us to acknowledge that the rights of Iranian people are being unreasonably and grossly limited and actually speak out against it.

First of all, I will concede that I do not have an integral understanding of what the two prominent camps represent and the extent of the impact it has on the day-to-day lives of Iranians, but I do understand that scores of Iranians are dissatisfied by corruption and deceit to the extent that they are willing to risk their liberty and lives to see that change.

I think it would be arrogant for me or anyone to pick a side and advocate for why theirs should be the government because that is for the people of Iran to decide. South Africans picked Zuma, for god’s sake, so I think I already have enough to deal with there. What upsets me about the situation is not so much who won but, rather, they appear to have won and the treatment of thousands of civilians speaking out against what they believe to have been an unfair and corrupted election that was fixed by biased authorities.

While no government should be expected to announce a re-election every time a group voices its unhappiness about the results not being in their favour, when so massive a wave of dissatisfaction sweeps across the country, carrying with it evidence of ballot-rigging amounting to an excess of 3million votes than there were registered voters – not to mention a Guardian Council that clearly favours Ahmadinejad as the preferred candidate, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for anyone to demand that the government take notice and make concerted efforts to allay the people’s fears and prove its legitimacy.

What we have been seeing instead, is a consistently hard-lined and disproportional response to the series of peaceful protests undertaken by concerned Iranians. International communications about the extent of civil unrest and how it’s being dealt with by government has been censored. Political dissidents including online bloggers are being traced and detained. Over 400 people have been arrested, and the death toll is at 19 – Neda Soltan’s being most illustrative of just how unnecessary the means used by the Basiji have been to disperse the protesters. All of this under Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khomeini’s watch.

How can such a gross violation of the constitutional and civil-political rights of the Iranian people be allowed to continue? What can this mean for their other fundamental human rights which, under highly conservative theocratic rule, have been already been severely restricted? What kind of real engagement can Iranians have with their domestic political affairs when criticism against the government results in detention for sedition? Was it precisely not this kind of oppression that catalysed the 1979 revolution? What Iranians want is a legitimate democratic government that respects protects and promotes its people’s civil liberties of all and that’s precisely what the green revolution has come to represent!

I take a moment to remind us all that what’s happening in Iran is not at all new or unusual to us at all. When it happened in Zimbabwe, we weren’t ‘polarising issues’. We called it gross human rights violations and we all of us demanded re-elections in order to free Zimbabwe. When it happened in Sharpeville, we weren’t ‘polarising issues’ there either. Instead, we called it a massacre and demanded the international community to assist the liberation movement in freeing South Africa. Why is it then that, when the same course of events is running in Iran, we are not demanding that we free Iran?

Jake is reminded every day how banal the gays are.

Democracy is a form of government whereby the demos, or people of a nation, elect representatives who govern the country in the interests of the people, or “government by the people” (Heywood, A (1997, 2007) p15). Individualism is by definition, the belief in the “primacy of the individual over any social group or collective body” (Heywood, A (1997, 2007) p196). It has become a major threat to democracy because, in today’s terms, people are becoming more insular in their existence and on the whole, are more concerned with their own well being than with that of their neighbour, nation, or society. People are not concerned in undertakings that do not benefit themselves, and will over-look laws and general ways-of-being if such lore comes into conflict with their own interests. Identity and self-expression as one concept seems to drive Individualism. Such separatist behaviour, observed daily on any university campus, is detrimental to democracy, because in order for democracy to exist effectively, people are required to act as a group, though not in the socialist sense. Democracy requires participation from all members of a nation; it requires every single citizen to act as a functioning part of the nation. Democracy requires each member of a state to uphold the laws that govern the state, and to uphold each law to its fullest sense. Such a requirement cannot, and will not be preserved, if the forthcoming generation of society is overly concerned with a sense of self, and which upholds the notion of “I” rather than “We” in the moral code that governs their somewhat existentialist existence.

Corruption, which is the disregarding of law and protocol, usually to promote personal agenda, is associated with Individualism because it is a (hostile) “me first” mindset (Ball, T and Dagger, R (2006) p79), and is a serious threat to the calibre and legitimacy of a democracy. In each democracy, there are laws that must be abided by, by every single member of the nation. When those members of the nation, especially those in positions of power, such as in government or big business, disregard the laws of their country, they undermine democracy’s survival. Democracy requires each individual to abide by the laws of their nation, but above this, it requires people to act not in the interests of themselves but in the interests of everyone else in the nation. As Liberalism allows for increasing instances of individualist and insular behaviour among people, exemplified by corruption whereby such behaviour is performed in the interest of oneself, the existence of democracy becomes ever more burdened.

Freedom is “the core value of liberalism,” and is “given priority over equality, justice or authority” (Heywood, A (1997, 2007) p47), though it too is, ironically, a threat to democracy. Too much freedom is detrimental to the functioning of democracy because it grants people the belief that their own individualist existence is more legitimate than that of another entity’s, and therefore, in the extremist sense, justifies any action that would prove the course thereof. In light of this, individual freedoms need to be limited, however, over-governance and control undermines the sense of democracy, which again enforces the key underlying factor in the functioning of democracy, which is that people need to act in the interests of all, and not only in the interests of themselves.

Liberalism allows for individual freedom, but “rests on a conception of all human beings as being fundamentally rational human beings” (Ball, T and Dagger, R (2006) p44). In today’s society, people are beginning to act increasingly insular, and this behaviour is the most significant threat to democratic governance because democracy requires participation from each individual who must act in the interests of society as a whole. Therefore, while Liberalism is the primary concept in the build of democracy, it has been warped into a new sense of being far beyond what so many revolutions fought for. Society has become less and less concerned with Liberty, Freedom and Fraternity, and overly concerned with only the sense of “I,” which will ultimately lead to the failure of democracy altogether.

Graham Robert Pote is a Politics, Film and Law student at the University of Cape Town.