Word: dissent
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...democracy effective in India? there is always the inevitable comparison with China, which has progressed spectacularly in spite of a vast, impoverished population and an absence of democracy. China's advantage is its far more homogeneous society and its single-party rule, which can easily suppress any social dissent and move rapidly on any project. Also, China learned the lessons of Mao-era excesses and made necessary course corrections. Similarly India has understood the errors of its socialist beginnings, which suppressed private enterprise in all fields at the cost of developing human resources and infrastructure. But India, too, has made...
...after the election, when protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began escalating and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets in both English and Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level in real time: Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter and we hear 1dead in shiraz, livefire used in other cities...
Over the years, however, certain units among the Basij were trained for state control purposes. In 1999 they appeared prominently as shock troops in quelling urban dissent after student demonstrations that initially sought greater freedom for the press. "Increasingly, Sepah used the Basij as a force for indoctrination and in the role of a watchdog group on campuses, factories and even tribal units," says Frederic Wehrey, adjunct senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp., who has done several joint studies on the Sepah. "The aim was to militarize civil society to prevent currents that the Islamic republic is opposed...
...These past weeks," Sazegara estimates, "the state has used about 12,000 such plainclothes forces in addition to another 28,000 official police and Sepah forces to control the dissent...
...notion that American action is unhelpful to reformers, this simply contradicts historical experience. Successful movements to alter authoritarian and totalitarian regimes almost always depend on internal dissent backed by strong international support. Those key factors are often required to get a regime's enablers - including domestic security forces - to lose confidence and eventually succumb...