By Saladdin Ahmed · Monday, October 3, 2022 On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, died in captivity three days after she was abducted by “morality police” in Tehran for allegedly breaking the dress code imposed by the Iranian ruling regime. Almost immediately protests broke out across the country. As of the time of writing these lines, a week after Mahsa Amini’s death, the popular protests are only intensifying and thereby insisting on the revolutionary event-ness (per Badiou) of the historical moment. What instigated the protests is not the exceptionality of the incident but rather the commonality of what it represents in terms of legalized violence against the doubly and triply marginalized.
In all societies that live under oppressive regimes, revolt takes place regularly and in various individual and collective forms. Once in a while, an incident would have a domino effect triggering a simultaneous, unplanned, popular uprising that overwhelms the police apparatuses for a few days, weeks, or more. Sometimes the protested regime would not get a chance to resume its totalitarian grip on power, which may result in the ultimate collapse of the police state altogether. While the Arab Spring movements successfully brought down several oppressive regimes, the Islamist movements hijacked almost every popular uprising, which resulted in widespread disbelief in the democratic plausibility and strategic effectiveness of uprisings. However, what happened in the Arab Spring is something Iranians already experienced in the 1979 revolution when Khomeini’s followers hijacked the revolution. While this Iranian uprising, like the uprisings of the Arab Spring, might suffer from the absence of a revolutionary agenda for establishing a new social and political order, it will nonetheless be immune to at least one type of counterrevolutionary infection, which is Islamism. This protest movement’s spontaneous adoption of the Rojava-Bakur revolution’s motto, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi,” “Women, Life, Freedom,” is a promising sign in terms of the prospects of moving beyond not only religious fundamentalism but also other forms of male-chauvinism and nationalism.
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By B. Venkat Mani · Friday, March 5, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
On February 2, the second day of Black History Month, a tweet from a Black woman in the United States unleashed a war of words in India, with global resonance. Rihanna, the Barbados-born U.S. singer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and cultural activist posted a one-liner: “why aren’t we talking about this?!” with the hashtag #FarmersProtest and a link to a report about the government of India shutting down internet services in areas bordering the national capital, New Delhi, where farmers have been carrying out a movement to oppose three contentious farm laws.
Rihanna’s tweet went viral. The climate activist Greta Thunberg, Hollywood actor John Cusack, U.S.-based lawyer and supporter of Black Lives Matter Meena Harris, former adult star Mia Khalifa, Instagram influencer Amanda Cerny, R&B singer Jay Sean, and music composer Dr. Zeus all expressed support for the Indian farmers’ protests in their own independent tweets. Kisan Ekta Morcha, the official twitter account of the United Farmers’ Front, thanked Rihanna for her support of the movement, and countless Indians praised her for drawing international attention to the movement.
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By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, October 14, 2020 Are we living once more in a Weimar Republic that no longer knows a center? The toxic climate of public opinion suggests just that. The language of irreconcilability allows some to speak of “covid idiots,” while others see our politics as heading toward dictatorship. And even government pronouncements are sounding more authoritarian, as with the call for a “tightening of the reins” that Bavarian Prime Minister Söder repeated after the chancellor.
Panic and hysteria are the reliable companions to nearly every major political theme today. But of course, corona is central. The most important political effect of the pandemic could well be the growing readiness to endure whatever may come. By contrast, the “corona rebels” wanted to set an example over the weekend. Their protest drew motivation from the impression that with the slogan “because of corona,” one can at any time call a state of emergency, in which freedom and democracy then no longer play a role.
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By Arnold Vaatz · Tuesday, August 18, 2020 The following essay originally appeared in German at Tichys Einblick. Translated by Russell A. Berman, who has written a separate note on the topic here.
At the outset I want to make clear that I view the stipulations of the governments for containing the corona pandemic as appropriate and that it is necessary to obey them.
Yet this is not the central issue. Instead, the central issue is that the BLM demonstration against racism was widely praised and tolerated, while the demonstration of August 1 [against corona restrictions—trans.] was widely condemned, despite posing identical dangers.
The most valuable good for a government is its credibility. One does not need it in a dictatorship, as long as the arguments come from the barrel of a gun. In a democracy, however, credibility is one of the foundational conditions for domestic peace.
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Politicians who warn us against the New Right have been speaking about “Weimar conditions.” Isn’t the comparison with the pre-Hitler era exaggerated?
Not as far as the surprise attack dynamic is concerned. One is in fact reminded of the speed with which the National Socialist party gained political ground in the Weimar Republic. First it had 18%, then suddenly 30%, and soon governing without it became practically impossible. Let’s be honest: Today no one knows where the AfD will reach its limit. In Austria, the candidate of the right-wing populist FPÖ got half the votes. Not that long ago, who would have thought this possible?
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By Kenneth D. Johnson · Monday, February 9, 2015 The recent protests of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, both black males, at the hands of police, ignited what some believe to be a new movement in the vein of the historic black Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Little did Messrs. Brown and Garner know that their tragic deaths would breathe new life into a near-dead progressive Left.
New groupings of Gen Xers and Millennials, networking through the Internet, have now displaced older activist groups led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Other groups, like organized labor (especially SEIU), and perennial malcontents of Marxian legacy, such as the ANSWER coalition and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, have appeared in protests, alongside shadowy cadres of white anarchists, who in some cities have thrown firebombs and damaged property during protest actions. Unlike Occupy Wall Street and its derivatives, the new protest groups have an identifiable leadership, appear regularly in news media, and are building the road as they travel, that is, working out tactics and strategies based on their reading (or misreading) of past protest movements, as they go.
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