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It’s been a long year in Iran, what with dodgy elections, protesters to abuse & imprison & accusations to level at the rest of the world there’s been hardly any time at all to spend on what Iran really wanted for Christmas, a really big nuclear bomb, it’s lucky that the US had time to fake some documents for their nuclear trigger since otherwise they’d have got nothing at all done. Maybe they’ll have to settle for civilian nuclear power in the end but I can’t see many people being all that happy about Iran having any kind of nuclear power given its’ lightly veiled desire for nuclear weapons. The unrest inspired by the elections has yet to go away no matter how much the government of Iran has hoped it would & has coalesced into a deep resistance to those in power that even violence has failed to disperse, the tactics of harsh reprisals has backfired all year but the hardline authorities are as resistant to learning as the opposition are to caving. It may well be that Iran desperately wants to dominate the Middle East but its’ neighbours seem all too aware of what kind of dominance is implied by this & are less than happy about it, one day it will dawn on Iran that blaming every problem on the lies & deceits of other nations is extremely tedious & childish but that day is as yet some way off.

So far in 2009 Iran has proved several things, one is that the government is always right especially where it’s clearly wrong, two is that mentioning that the government is wrong will adversely impact on your life & may indeed prevent you from having a life to be impacted upon, three is that the thought police are not only out there, they’re everywhere else as well, four is that mixing religion & politics is akin to filling your bottom with gunpowder & then attempting to light your farts. Even now the demonstrations have started again & once more the arrests & calls for fresh trials have accompanied them, there are more protests planned it seems which will doubtless bring more of the same, it’s very tiresome in Iran unless of course you’re an Iranian in which case it’s probably bloody scary whichever side you favour. Freedom of anything isn’t all that revered unless that is the freedom to completely agree mindlessly with whatever the authorities tell you to believe, this includes history, events you’ve personally witnessed & anything else they deign to mention. It’s still chilling to know that there are people in Iran who so wholeheartedly throw themselves into defending Iran against unarmed Iranians who need beating to convince them that Iran is a great place really, I wonder if any of them are surprised that it’s not working?

Whether sanctions will work or not it appears that they will be the next step, Iran may waffle on about their ineffectiveness but they’ll bite somewhere, sadly more on the population as a whole rather than on the government alone but that’s how sanctions tend to work, it’s funny to hear that the Iranian government believes them to be illegal, I was under the impression that they couldn’t tell what is or isn’t illegal these days. It’s not all bad news though, some people are being prosecuted for being a bit harsh on the protesters who were imprisoned, then again not many of them are & they’ll be gutted to be tried for something that seemed so condoned by the ruling powers, they deserve to be though even if justice rarely ventures out much in the Iranian courts.

Perhaps 2010 will be another big year in Iran, maybe common sense will break out & someone will find a dictionary & look up the word ” compromise “, it could happen, then again it looks more likely that after a highly unsettled Christmas period it’ll be business as usual in the fools’ playground that currently rules & more of the same come the New Year, we’ll see, I bet we’re not surprised though.

Update: We’ve not even got to next year yet but already there are fresh reports of unrest & as well as the usual response to them of baton charges & tear gas there seems to be credible reports of live rounds being fired & deaths inflicted, it seems a fair bet that no-one in the Iranian government has much intention of looking for another way to end this conflict of opinions except through violence, Merry Christmas isn’t really a theme.

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