Word: dissents
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
...revolution, a repeat of that successful insurrection remains highly improbable. For one thing, the protest movement is being led by a faction of the Islamic Republic's political establishment, whose members stand to lose a great deal if the regime is brought down and thus have to calibrate their dissent. More important, an unarmed popular movement can topple an authoritarian regime only if the security forces switch sides or stay neutral. But Iran's key security forces - the élite Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia - are bastions of support for Ahmadinejad. And they have used hardly a fraction...
...very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in 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...
...motowngrrrl Dissent in Iran regime? CNN reports police in Iran are standing by, not attacking protesters on order of government. #IranElection...