Inside the Women-Led Uprising in Iran
Getting Out the Vote in the Midterms; Social Justice Fellowship applications due
Today, we feature a terrific guest essay on the uprising in Iran, but first, here are a few words about the midterms and a couple of announcements.
You may have been reading about discouraging polls. Ignore them. Polls in 2020 were the most error-prone in 40 years. All polls tell us is who the pollsters assume will vote. It's up to us to shape the electorate. We encourage everyone to participate in voter engagement work in some way between now and the election. So much is at stake! We recommend groups like Community Change Action, MoveOn.org, People's Action, Working Families Party, UNITE HERE, and local and state-based community organizations like New Georgia Project. These groups run rigorous, metrics-driven programs and make great use of volunteer time.
Get Out the Vote in Philly
If you are in or near Philadelphia or know someone who is, UNITE HERE, the hospitality workers' union, has an incredible ground operation that you can plug into right away — either to volunteer or get paid to knock on doors. To volunteer, complete this form as soon as possible. Volunteers are needed in Philadelphia any and every day between now and the election. If you can go down for one day, a week or anything in between, great. If you are interested in joining the paid canvass team, please reach out to Samir Sonti (sonti7@gmail.com) as soon as possible. Canvassers will be paid $18/hour and provided with lodging. All paid canvassers must be able to work daily between Thursday, October 27 through Tuesday, November 8 (Monday, October 31 will be the only day off).
Nov 15 DEADLINE APPROACHING for Mid-Career Fellowships at Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice
The Movement Leaders Fellowship is a yearlong program designed to give mid-career leaders in social justice work an opportunity to hone their leadership skills, immerse themselves in theory and practice, and expand their community in movement work. The fellowship is for leaders in labor, advocacy, and community organizing with approximately 10-15 years of experience. We are especially seeking applicants from historically marginalized backgrounds such as Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ+ people, and people from low-income, working class, and immigrant backgrounds. Applicants are accepted from across the country, and the deadline to apply for the Movement Leader Fellowship is November 15, 2022 at 11:59pm.
The Regional Organizers for Community Change (ROCC) Fellowship was created to invest in the leadership of organizers in the South, and provide them with an opportunity to hone their leadership skills, immerse themselves in theory and practice, and expand their community in movement work. This 6-month program provides a cohort-based experience, granting fellows the chance to connect and build relationships across issues, take space for reflection, and prepare themselves for the next level of leadership. The ROCC Fellowship offers a unique combination of academic coursework with practical skills such as management, communications, and strategy development to support participants’ growth. The ROCC Fellowship is for leaders in labor, advocacy, and community organizing with approximately 7-10 years of experience in social justice work. We are especially seeking applicants from historically marginalized backgrounds such as Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), women and nonbinary people, LGBTQ+ people, and people from low-income, working class, and immigrant backgrounds. The deadline to apply for the Movement Leader Fellowship is November 15, 2022 at 11:59pm.
More information and application information below. Please spread the word!
The faculty for the programs include Deepak, Heather McGhee, Stephanie Luce, Cristina Jimenez, Mehrdad Azemun, Samir Sonti, and more.
Days of Rage, Blood and Hope in Iran
In The Platypus this week, we feature a guest columnist, who offers informed commentary about the uprising in Iran. A long-time and respected organizer in the U.S., he has chosen to remain anonymous to protect family members still in the Islamic Republic. The column conveys the power and emotion of the women-led movement and reflects on some of the ongoing strategic questions it faces. The links he’s gathered to tell the story are well worth the clicks. We expect that you’ll be moved as we were by the story, and inspired to ask the question: if Iranians can take these enormous risks for freedom and democracy, what are we called to do in our struggles in U.S. in the days, months, and years to come? We’ve reported earlier that dictators around the world are increasingly collaborating. Iran’s provision of drones to Russia to bomb Ukraine was a vivid example. As voting begins in the hugely consequential election for President of Brazil, we are reminded that the fight against authoritarianism is global. We are called to be internationalists. This important story about the uprising in Iran brings that home.
— Editors of The Platypus
Iran is now six astonishing weeks into a remarkable counter-revolution. What we see there tells us a great deal about state repression, the dynamics of organizing, and the magic of the human spirit. It is this last element – and especially the spirit of women – that has sparked a vast, ongoing rebellion.
I’m an experienced organizer in the US, now for over 20 years. I have seen thousands of people contend with apathy, entropy, and fear inside of themselves and summon courage to counter those voices. Those small and big decisions, magnified by millions, are what we’re seeing on the streets of Iran in the past six harrowing weeks.
To place the current struggle in context, imagine no civic infrastructure that could question anything that the Iranian regime does – no free press and no ability to talk openly in a public square. Imagine a massive multi-headed security apparatus with a long history of surveilling, detaining, and killing activists. And imagine trying to coordinate any series of actions, big or small, with intermittent internet access or even text messaging.
It is hard to look at the footage coming out of Iran, and impossible not to. Every day brings new images of creative, heart-stopping actions the likes of which I have never seen. Each day also brings story after story of young people tortured and killed at the hands of Iran’s massive security apparatus. We say their names: Mahsa/Zhina. Nika Shakarami. Sarina Esmailzadeh.
Despite the threat and reality of incarceration, torture and death, the people of Iran have created action after action using their imagination, sheer wits, and whatever is within reach. And for the first time in the history of uprisings in Iran, people are fighting back against the police and paramilitary.
Given this background, there is something magical transpiring on the streets of Iran. It’s a story of song, life-giving chants, fearless actions, and creative spectacle.
Any resilient movement has music at its core, and the current uprisings in Iran are no exception. Shervin Hajipour’s “Baraye,” (“For” or “Because”), constructed from a series of crowd-sourced tweets from Iranians listing the reasons they are in the streets, has become an instant anthem for Iranians around the world. People sing it in the metro as a protest, and Iranians at the recent historic rally of 100,000 in Berlin wept as they sang it in unison. Any member of the diaspora will tell you that each line of the song cuts like a knife because of its honest depiction of the daily reality of life in Iran (here is a decent English rendition). Activists have also staged the singing of “Ey Iran,” a patriotic song that has nevertheless been banned by the regime because of its pre-Revolutionary origins. Yet imagine a place where something as joyous as music can lead to detention or to death.
In addition to music, the chants we hear in Iran’s streets give voice to people’s rage, suffering and hope. Farsi, our language, is one of poetry and rhyme. This is why Iranians are the best chanters in the world. We take our chants seriously, and people in the streets have mixed the Iranian penchants for both irreverence and grimness to produce a varied and militant series of chants:
Natarseen, Natarseen,
Mah hameh ba ham hasteem
Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid,
We are all together
Mijangim, mimirim, Irano pas migirim
We will fight, we will die, we will get Iran back
Ma Hameh Mahsa Hastim. Bejang ta Bejangim
We are all Mahsa, we fight and won’t stop fighting
Many of the current chants are far more profane, mocking the dictators or threatening violence (and a bit too much to quote in this family-oriented publication). This is an indication of how fed up and angry people are with 43 years of failed leadership and state-sponsored brutality. (By the way, if you want to chant along but don’t know Farsi, here’s an endearing instructional video by an Iranian-American and his American partner, and a great guide to some of the common chants being heard in the streets.)
Young people and women have taken to the streets in countless creative and brave actions. Some have held what looks like a simple and sweet action but is subversive and courageous to its core: “Open arms for the sad people of Iran,” in which a pair of people offer a hug for passersby. This basic act of embracing a stranger on the street is incredible because hugging someone of another gender is illegal in Iran. The protestors are meeting human needs – catharsis, release, and connection in the wake of the government’s severe repression and murders. These demonstrators are getting to the heart of the best civil disobedience actions, in which the action itself exposes the unjustness of the law.
It’s also clear that Iranians – especially women and young people – are ready for institution-by-institution battles to determine their own futures. One recent field of struggle are university cafeterias in which student leaders want to eliminate gender segregation and have done so after days-long physical confrontations with Basiji paramilitary officers. Keep in mind that every one of these actions will doubtless hold consequences for the individual activists and their families. The security apparatus is known for its cruelty, often taunting a family even after the killing of an activist.
We increasingly see clashes between security forces and unarmed demonstrators in block-by-block skirmishes. In a few rare cases, demonstrators have outnumbered security goons and gave chase. Most recently, actions in the street look more like joyous occupations and street theater.
Youth leaders are demonstrating that they are more than capable – even happy – to confront their so-called leaders. A government spokesperson appeared at a Tehran University and had his speech drowned out part way through his talk by angry, victorious hecklers. He appeared the day after in Qom – a deeply religious city considered to be the capitol of Shi’a Islam – and fared even worse at the hands of students, who chanted “We don’t want a corrupt system, we don’t want a murderous guest.” Only weeks into the demonstrations, students at an all-girls school heckled even President Ebrahim Raisi, shouting “Raisi, get lost” and called out the regime’s own violence by crying out, “Bullets, tanks, firebombs; clerics must get lost.”
And even after watching what is now six weeks of consistent protest, this single action is still so striking and captures what Iranian people are struggling for: schoolgirls taking down the portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini and “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei in their own classroom and tearing it out of its honored place in the frame and their own textbooks (like other dictatorial regimes, these portraits loom all over the country). The audio is the best part; you can hear the girls screaming with such raw glee. I cry every time I watch this video in particular, because you can hear the sound of souls that may be feeling such liberation for the first time. In the end, what are the very best direct actions about but that?
Put any of these actions, created by remarkable young people with little to no protest experience, no "professional" organizers within thousands of miles and a zillion reasons to fear the reaction of authorities armed to the teeth, up against any of our pre-negotiated, photo-friendly, super-staged "civil obedient" actions created by well-paid coordinators.
As a man who was raised around three strong Iranian women and is married to one, I have to say I am not at all surprised that it is women and girls who are the raging frontline and beating heart of the protests. My Iranian sisters were and remain steadfast and relentless. Their struggle for freedom goes back not to last month, or to the beginning of the Iranian Revolution in 1978, but in fact over 100 years.
The struggles that women have led brings us to the most powerful symbol of what more and more are calling a true revolution: the compulsory hijab itself. Women continue to take it off in cities throughout the country, both as an act of public defiance but more and more often, as a routine part of public life. We could consider this the final flowering of “My Stealthy Freedom” and “White Wednesdays,” courageous actions organized in 2014 in which women took off their hijabs in public. Yet as a contrast to the tone and spirit of White Wednesdays, when women took off their hijab and held it aloft, now women hold their hijab on a stick - and burn it. And in a series of incredibly moving video testimonials, older women, some of whom have worn the hijab for most of their lives, take their head covering off for the very first time in a public setting in an act of legal defiance and cross-generational solidarity.
The regime has invested four decades into making the hijab a potent symbol of its values, identity and practices. As a noted dissident has said, the regime "wrote their ideology on our bodies." So among the current paradoxes of Iran is that in public, every single woman wears a tool that can become a weapon. Any girl or woman can choose to wear the hijab, or not wear it, or wave it in a protest – or burn it. But no matter what may happen to the political order in Iran, the country seems to have turned the page. Many women now simply walk the streets openly without a hijab. In other words, there is no going back to the Iran of mid-September 2022.
Yet, while the current demonstrations have made for sensational flashpoints, they have not yet forced a true crisis for the economic and political elite. And the power structure of the country has shown few cracks in its unity. General strikes, which have become more common in the Kurdish region of Iran and protracted labor struggles could change the entire course of these demonstrations and cause a true crisis for the country. Iranians have a long and strong public memory, and we remember that it was striking oil workers that helped bring the downfall of the Shah in the late 1970’s. So when oil workers and sugar refinery workers called for strikes over a week ago, many sat up and started paying more attention. These strikes are a bit difficult to monitor, but seem to be continuing, from teachers to refinery and industrial workers.
Part of the awful truth of what is happening in Iran is that it will absolutely get worse – likely far worse – before it gets better. The regime’s forces have recently massacred hundreds of people in outlying cities where Kurds, Baluchis and the many ethnic groups that make up the diversity of Iran have been protesting. By some estimates, security forces have arrested over 13,000 people. Diaspora media outlets note that jails are full, security forces are carrying out targeted kidnappings of activists, and the regime is yet again relying on foreign mercenaries to enforce its will, particularly against ethnic minorities such as Kurds. Perhaps worst of all, multiple observers have noted that the regime has kept the Revolutionary Guard, its most elite and feared force, in its back pocket.
But anyone who tells you that the struggle ends here is wrong – and anyone who tells you that they know what happens next is lying. Because the X-factor in all this is what sits in the soul of Iranians, and how they will choose to continue to react to the threats of economic ruin, violence, rape and death leveled and carried out by the massive security apparatus of the state. The regime closed the roads to the cemetery of Mahsa Zhina Amini (where mourners first cried the Kurdish slogan of “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi”) in anticipation of the 40th day after Amini’s murder, a very important day in the Iranian cycle of mourning. Yet a line of tens of thousands of people snaking to the horizon simply walked to the cemetery, chanting ”Woman Life Freedom” and “Kurdistan will be the graveyard of fascists.” The regime detained Elnaz Rekabi, one of Iran’s top female climbers, for competing in South Korea without a hijab. But hundreds of people drove the hour to Tehran’s airport in the middle of the night to wait for hours and give her the hero’s welcome she deserved. Security forces continually infiltrate universities to surveil and arrest activists, recognizing students as a central pillar of the current revolution. Yet these same students, lacking a central organizing hub, defiantly put together an overwhelming wave of demonstrations to coincide with the 40th day of Amini’s muder. I see a steadfastness and brazenness that I simply haven’t seen in past protests, down to women taunting police as they pray with the chant “you pray with blood on your hands.” It is easy to call this bravery. But it simply may be that after 43 years of gender apartheid, severe oppression, flagrant corruption and a bungled economy, millions of people see no way out anymore.
Outside of the larger political machinations, the courage that the Iranian people may choose to summon holds the keys for the future of Iran. And as we here in the US continue to ready ourselves for what will be a long and difficult fight against authoritarianism, we should all draw inspiration, imagination and courage from the people of Iran, particularly women. I stake my bet on the Iranian people.
Zan, Zendegi, Azadi - Woman, Life, Freedom.
An important P.S.: We all appreciate The Platypus because it forces us to think and urges us to take action. This piece is no different. Multiple organizations are supporting Amnesty International’s call on the United Nations to hold a special session and establish an independent mechanism to call out the regime’s countless atrocities against its own citizens. You can take action at this link. And though it may now feel powerless or repetitive to share content on social media, in the case of the counter-revolution in Iran, sharing is actually a useful course of action due to the extensive Internet limitations in the country. Follow any of the absolutely amazing content creators linked in this article and share them. Help amplify the voices of those who the regime is trying to muzzle.
Students of Amir Kabir university protest against the Hijab and the Islamic Republic (Sept 20, 2022)