Bigger Than Tiananmen

Matt Steinglass sounds optimistic:

What we’re looking at in Iran is really on a different scale. It’s certainly as large and sweeping as the revolutions that overturned the Milosevic government in Serbia or the Orange Revolution in Ukraine both also touched off by botched elections. In fact, in every other case I can think of similar to this one, by the time the regime has arrived at this point, the game has been over. I don’t think any regime has put down a mass nonviolent revolt of this size, not in recent history anyway. It seems hard to imagine the regime using the kind of force it would take to get hundreds of thousands of people off the streets of several major Iranian cities.

That’s not to say it’s not possible. Or perhaps the regime can wait out the protests until the crowd sizes shrink, and then targeted violence may work. But I have a hunch that’s not what’s going to happen. It hasn’t worked that way anywhere in the world in the past 23 years, since the People Power revolution in the Philippines. Instead, what has happened is that once huge masses of the populace lose the fear that has kept them atomized and prevented them from engaging in politics, that fear is gone for good, and the security forces ultimately wilt.