Word: lost
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...agreeing to hear complaints about the conduct of the election from opposition candidates, firing on crowds could have the exact opposite effect. As Trita Parsi noted below, those who protested today took to the streets despite warnings that live ammunition may be used against them. He believes they've lost their fear. And the problem for the authorities is that making martyrs out of demonstrators gives the protest movement its own momentum: regardless of the state of the investigation into the election, the victims have to be buried. Their funerals become the new locus of protest, and their killings...
...like a psychological barrier has been overcome. They've seen [opposition leader Mir-Hossein] Mousavi stand firm and refuse to be intimidated by threats against him. People were warned that the authorities might shoot at them, but still they came out in the hundreds of thousands today. They've lost their fear. And state TV is carrying images of the demonstrations, which they've been avoiding. Something very important is happening here." - Tony Karon...
...elections. The human-rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate believed that Iranians should boycott the vote. She argued coolly that people's participation lent legitimacy to an undemocratic regime's flawed electoral process. At the time, I found her view frustratingly staid, the stance of someone who had lost touch with young people's immediate concerns. I felt that boycotting elections made a prize of abstract ideals over daily realities. I had experienced Iran in both the repressive late 1990s and the relatively more open years of reformist President Mohammed Khatami, and not choosing a more open government - however...
...badly at the polls, told moderate Iranians that they were to blame for Ahmadinejad's victory. If the so-called silent majority - the millions of middle-class, educated Iranians who seek more freedom and economic opportunity - had voted, the emerging wisdom went, then the country wouldn't have been lost to the lunatic with the peculiar Windbreaker. (See pictures from the tumultuous Iranian election...
...watershed moment for Iran. That Iranians buried their cynicism and turned out in such record numbers to vote is what makes this such a bleak and precarious moment for the nation. Any vestige of legitimacy that the government might have had in many Iranians' eyes is now irrevocably lost. Iran is now on par with nations like Egypt and Syria, where leaders are elected by 99% of the vote in sham elections that bear no pretense to democracy...