By way of intro, check out this quote:

"In the history books of the 21st century, the first chapter will be about us. In the introduction, they might write that important events have happened before us, events like 9/11 and war on Iraq and Afghanistan, but those were the remnants of the previous century, with an outdated language and with 20th century tools: airplanes, bombs and bullets. And then they will write that the first chapter is dedicated to us because we have been the true children of our time ... They will write that we were the first social movement of which all of us were its leader and all of us were its organiser ... They may make a subsection to describe how a movement without a command centre was acting so well-orchestrated. How its ideas, desires and slogans were suggested, criticised, and completed so well, and then one day they were expressed in such a harmony as if all these millions had practiced them together for years ... In the same chapter they will write that we lived the last days of guns and bullets and we showed that where awareness, information and channels of communication for human connection exist, bullets are pointless. They may put a picture of a single bullet somewhere in our Freedom Museum and write for its caption "the last bullet that was ever pulled out of a magazine." 

That quote is NOT from a WallStreet Occupier -- its from an anonymous Persian blogger from some time back in *2009* (cited by Hamid Dabashi). Striking, isn't it? While everyone has heard of Tahrir Square, not as many paid attention to the protests that erupted across Iran after the June 2009 Presidential elections. Those protests had many features in common with the later Arab Awakening or Arab Spring, as well as the movements in Europe and OccupyWallStreet.

So, I finished this essay in June 2010, but didn't publish it for various reasons then -- partly I felt it was taking some big speculative leaps I couldn't entirely justify, maybe I was reading too much of my own agenda into it, I thought. But now it seems pretty prophetic, or something... Its quite dense, so will take some patience, but hopefully it will add some useful perspective to this whole thing:

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A BURNING FEATHER

IRAN'S GREEN PATH & PLANETARY CULTURE

"MA BI SHOMARIM" - "We Are Everywhere"

- Slogan of the Persian Green Movement

"June 12th isn’t just the day we died, but the day we chose to live. For my generation, from now ’till forever, the world will be divided into two chunks: before and after 22 khordaad 88 (June 12th, 2009). Something happened that day, and we might spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out what it was exactly." 

                                                                  -- Pedestrian (sidewalklyrics.com)

Its true.

Everyone reads Iran's June 12 Green protests thru their own lenses (or designer shades, as the case may be). 

So we'll state our own bias up front: the Green Wave is EXACTLY WHAT OUR PLANET NEEDS, happening at just the right time in just the right place. To invoke an old Sufi term, the Greens have the 'Baraka' upon them. (Or does it have them?)

DUH: a war with Iran would be deadly for us all, running oil prices sky-high, driving the global economy into freefall (already dangling on the ledge as it is!), and quite possibly inaugurating World War III.

In fact, the Persian Greens have the mix of QUALITIES (note: not ideas, not politics, butqualities) WE can use HERE as we face a high risk future of intersecting dangers: financial collapse, oil decline + declining net energy, corporate strangle-hold over government and the death-thrashings of Empire. 

What if we look to the brilliantly self-organizing, truly grassroots, globally-oriented yet tradition-respecting, tolerant yet critical, playful yet defiant green movement as the best current model of an emergent Planetary Culture?

But first an inventory of the more prominent takes on June 12 election protests and its aftermath:

Non-Iranian Netizens wanted to believe it was the world's first Internet-enabled social revolt -- an intoxicating thought! -- though clearly the vast bulk of the twittering was by those OUTSIDE Iran, since cell phone and Internet were blocked and monitored, on & off, for months. Tehran residents have long long had their own word of mouth self-organizing networks. Which isn't to say green activists didn't use all means at their disposal, when they could. Flickr fotos, tweets, FB posts served more to let us foreigners know what was going down, helping to build moral support.

BUT it's just as possible much of the twitterizing was done by Western intelligence agents out to cast the movement in their own prefab light, as the Iranian government has itself alleged. We'll probably never know for sure. Some of us empathizers-from-afar even had moments of paranoiac delirium: All those gorgeous protest photos posted by 'Faramarz' -- were they the work of CIA admen, marketing Iran's "new face"? Worse yet, could the Mossad have been feeding vast quantities of MDMA into Tehran to foment a subversive youth moment-- sorry, just a brief hallucination!

The US and its allies saw the protests as a windfall in which Iran's hard-liners might be brought down and their "nuclear threat" neutered. Israel greeted the greens with something like nervous applause. Israel's own right wing hardline government, weird mirror image as it is, stood to lose its biggest enemy, and after all, Power Loves Enemies. The Islamic Republic of Iran needs the Likudniks/IDF just like the US Empire needed the USSR, and once the USA lost the USSR, it had to invent a new enemy to justify its monstrous war industry, ... and so massively funded Islamist madrasas in Pakistan, which bred the mujaheddin, which attracted Bin Laden, who may or may not actually take checks from the CIA, and who notoriously commented re: 911: "nice op - but who did it?" (or words to that effect - not that any video of Bin Laden can be taken at face value!) (a not irrelevant digression). Yes, the whole world is currently held hostage to militarist governments and their war economies--and let's not forget who appoints UN representatives - governments, not the people.

Despotic Arab regimes saw the movement as a potential contagion. Democratic and human rights activists throughout the region looked to the green protestors for inspiration. If Iran is already feared as a regional superpower, how much more powerful, in a different way, might be an open, pluralistic, yet still-Islamicly rooted, Iran?

The "progressive" left (well, other than Persian leftists) was blinded by its romanticization of Ahmadinejad and Chavez, and initially wanted to see the protests as a mere repeat of 1954 (Mossadegh's overthrow) -- more CIA meddling, another US-funded velvet revolution. After some weeks of million person marches, the left began to blink and rub its eyes.

As for the ultra-ultra-lefties, the street fighting got them all hot. Socialist revolution in Iran? Snapshots of women in full chador lobbing rocks at basijis, and increasingly radical chants from the streets, briefly seemed to confirm that vector. But beyond resisting Basiji brutality with cobblestones, the movement has remained largely peaceful, playful, compassionate and creative, in ways that the ultraleft has no appreciation for. Further, few of the demands from either the street or the nominal 'leadership' of Mousavi-Kairoubi et al have been economic. (Although an argument could be made economics is implicit, as the Revolutionary Guard-faction controls a much of the Iranian economy, and the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei gang have run up inflation and unemployment.)

On the other other OTHER hand, is the Green Movement just the work of upper class, Euro-centric North Tehranis, another claim of the left? Vast amounts of evidence seems to show otherwise; it appears to cut across all ages and classes, overflowing religious divides.

Setting the left aside, if we could montage all the Western mass media commentary into one composite cliche, it would be this:

Iran, take your pick: go secular, Turkey-style democracy ... OR BE BOMBED. Dump your Shiite fanatics, keep your Islam at home and in the mosque, shut down your reactors, give us access to your oil, and make way for McDonalds, GE, and pale-green consumerism.

Is that really the only choice? This either-or is pure globalizer BS.

What's going on in Iran has more dimensions and dynamics than anyone's lens seems able to accommodate.

There are myriad interpretations and implementations of Islam (and political Islam), not least of them the widely neglected Sufi inflection, emphasizing inner change, love, creativity, and a sense of the 'siblinghood' of all mankind. In all the commentary, even most of the Persian emigre analysis, almost no one seems to ask, "WHERE ARE THE PERSIAN SUFI/GNOSTICS IN ALL OF THIS?"

That said, let's try on a different viewfinder, and see what happens. True, it may obscure as much as it reveals, but at least it will be fresh. 

Proposition: "A Planetary Culture" is a recognition of a reality that has "ALREADY HAPPENED", taking different shapes in different places, but with some common, convergent, or better, EMERGENT, threads. 

In its default, descriptive form, planetary culture evokes cultural mixing and syncretism--hardly a new phenomenon, but definitely accelerating. 

In its more prescriptive mode, as developed in the writings of William Irwin Thompson, the notion of planetary culture evokes a post-religious spirituality, a quest for new cultural forms. Biology/ecology becomes the new frame of reference. And "noetic polities" emerge as a source of identity: people identify themselves more by affinity with "states of consciousness" than with ethnic, religious or national roots. (cf "It's Already Begun" - http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Thompson.htm and other writings by William Irwin Thompson). In the US, the idea of planetary culture has been connected to the "cultural creative" demographic that grew out of the 60s (Paul Ray). For all its limits, the Burning Man Festival is still probably the best exemplar of planetary culture in the US.

An emergent Planetary Culture is an outgrowth of global trade and communication. And its pretty inarguable, whether or not we like the the way that global trade has been conducted, who it has benefited and who it has exploited, and who as yet has preferred access to clean water, electricity, iPhones, laptops and broadband. Sure, the global economy may crash further as oil dwindles, global commerce may lessen, but will satellites and the Internet really ever go away? Will all maps and globes be destroyed, will we as a human collectivity ever forget the image of "the Whole Earth from Space?"

Not likely.

In the active mode, a planetary culture expresses a growing awareness that we are all immersed in a spherical "eco-system of eco-systems". A Greater Co-Being, of sorts, smaller than God, but way bigger than humanity, that breathes together and dreams together. We all breathe the same air, we are all made up of water, our sweat circulates and turns into rain in the tropics and ice on the poles, we carry almost the same DNA as all other forms of life short of viruses. Ultimately we are all "addicted" to and fed by the light from the sun, absorbed by plants and upgraded into the chemical building blocks of which we're made. We aren't even ourselves. New research shows that the majority of human body weight is made up of non-human-DNA bacteria. Our very cells are made from the union of two different species. We are a community, internally. We're microcosms of a "Gaian" whole, and the planet is a macrocosm of us. All of our experience, factually, functionally, is a subset, an epiphenomenon, of "Gaia's dreaming." In our day to day behavior we still operate from a "me/outside world" notion, but everything we see, hear, touch, smell, sense, imagine, do, is part of an infinitely rich, flowing fabric beyond our imaging, but bound into this one blue-green cell (or torus, depending on your analysis ;-)).

So what does any of that have to do with Iran's Green Wave?

Well... let's take an instance: Tehran kids making rap in Persian, using memes and moves borrowed from the Bronx, on gear made by multinational corporations.

Let's ask: is this "globalization," "cultural imperialism" of the kind we love to hate?

Or is it better framed as one example of a "planetary culture" in formation? Are these rappers in fact abandoning their own cultural roots for big cars, high fashion, bling and English? Well, maybe a few are, but an awful lot seem to be using hiphop stylings to protest their own repressive government, all the while invoking the spirit of Rumi, Hafez and Saadi (and frequently the actual words as well--check out Mohsen Namjoo). As best as we can tell from over here in Tehrangeles, the Persian youth underground is steeped in the ethos of sufism (if not in the practices of any particular sufi lineage - all of which are persecuted). Which should hardly be surprising -- greater Persia was always one of the centers for neo-gnosticism, aka 'the Masters of Wisdom', back to Mohammed's day, and further back into the dawn of Zoroastrianism and its Haoma-using Magi (Esfand + acacia root?). From one angle, these kids are rejecting their musical heritage of tars and santurs. They're wrapping themselves in Western trappings, themselves "stolen" from black slaves, ultimately going back to African roots. Working illegally in basements, distributing CDs by hand or online, "Zirzamini" (basement) kids meld heavy metal, hiphop, psychedelia and social critique in Farsi, sometimes veiled in symbols, sometimes not. Their music defiantly blares all across the car-jammed streets of Tehran. It's been argued that the music paved the way for protests.

And what about the demands of Persian women? By rejecting the veil, are they simply agitating for Western feminist freedoms? Or are they rejecting an abusive patriarchality that was transmitted through Arabic tribal culture, and not necessarily native to Persia, just as many protestors reject political Islam as an Arab imposition? It's the microscopic, day-to-day struggles of Persian women, pushing the boundaries, fighting for their lipstick, their colors, their hemlines, not to mention full legal rights, that also paved the way for the unique personality of the green movement, which is as much about a shift in culture and a quest for personal freedom as a set of narrowly political demands.

But are they simply asking for "Freedom to Shop"? To have their sexuality used and abused for the sake of commerce? Will the Persian women's movement content itself with the Isphahan outlet of Victoria's Secret, while BP, ExxonMobil and Shell take over their oil fields? Hmm. If they got into power, would they BAN the roozari (headscarf), as Turkey once banned the veil? Would they abolish references to the Koran in government? Would they imprison and torture conservative mullahs? Who knows, but sounds unlikely. The green movement appears to be reaching for something different. Not left, not right, not fundamentalist, not necessarily secular. What will the social philosophers born of the green wave produce in the coming years?

SO: Are we in Globalistan? Or this something else, something new?

Does the "Rahe Sabz" really have to conform to the ideal of secular, corporate-controlled democracy, genuflecting at the foot of the Empire? Does anybody outside Iran really know what the green movement wants, where it wants to, or should, go?

On the other hand, is the green movement really just the 'property' of protesting Iranians, in Iran? What about emigre Persian supporters? What about sympathizers who may not have ever been to Iran, may not even speak Farsi--is it really "none of their business"? An Israeli/US bombing of Iran would certainly induce a massive run-up in oil prices, collapsing the global economy. Not to mention possibly triggering WWIII. Either of which option would affect anyone anywhere. What happens in Iran is everyone's business, even beyond support for their human rights. We're all in each other's hair. There's your planetary culture, by default. 

Maybe the green wave is bigger than anyone's conscious agenda, just as the biosphere has its own uses for us, whether we understand them or like them or not.

How about this?

What if we look to the brilliantly self-organizing, truly grassroots, globally-oriented yet tradition-respecting, tolerant yet critical, playful yet defiant green movement as the best current model of a Planetary Culture?

How about IF WE LOOK TO IRAN for the new QUALITIES we need over here, stuck as we are in fake political dualities, astroturf teaparties, foundation-funded "alternative media," sentimental new age-ism, eco-fashionabilism? Doesn't it strike anybody else that right now, we are kind of energetically frozen? The hip hoppers are largely sold out, the hipsters have put NOTHING of substance on the table (yet), the ravers are just going through motions, but the baraka has moved on. The eco-greenies are self-satisfied, moralistic and slightly delusional. They think we can "go green" without abolishing the growth mechanism built into interest banking, and run the global consumption machine on windmills and PV (sorry, NOT).

What gives? Only the 911-truthers and permaculturists have a fresh and vital stance. The rest of us have taken the freedoms won by the civil rights movement and the hippies for granted. We're lazy, meek, and bought off by digital stimuli. Yet here we are about to go another leg down into the Greater Depression, oil hasn't even started on its downpath yet, and climate chaos is upon us, human-driven or not.

As movements go, Rahe Sabz (Green Path) is pretty non-ideological. Some participants may just want jobs & easier sex, others want their share of the oil money, most are demanding their constitutional rights, others want to swap in more liberal clerics, and yet others want overthrow of the system in toto. You could say that this pluralism is inevitable, just the result of censorship, and lack of any other political outlets. Secular leftists, feminists, religious scholars, angry youth march side-by-side. (And there is a religious Left as well, Ayatollah Montazeri its spiritual figurehead (now deceased), Khatami, Mousavi and Kairoubi its political leaders.)

But as the movement has evolved and defined itself, it so far is ENACTING the real values of democracy: tolerance, debate, pluralism, and direct participation -- "of the people, by the people, for the people". Without deeply-ingrained democratic habits, values and non-governmental institutions, formal democracies are hollow and corrupt (rather like ours over here!). The Green Wave may even be catalysing an entirely new frame of reference for Islamic culture and the world at large - a cultural phase shift, to borrow a metaphor from chaos theory. In the same way the behavior of emergent phenomena in nature can't be predicted by the behavior of their parts, the green movement may be catalysing something beyond the immediate goals or visions of its myriad partisans. To label it a civil rights movement, as Hamid Debashi and many others do, is useful, but maybe limiting in its own right. Somehow there is a magic, a collective genius, in the Green movement. We've seen this magic before, in other people power moments, but the Greens seem to have it in spades. 

SO, MAYBE the Persian Greens will have no interest in fanciful notions of some planetary culture conjectured by white male dissident philosophers like Thompson & this one here. Maybe it's a notion that has zero relevance for their day-to-day struggles.

But if that's true, why did the weeks following June 12 see thousands of signs, "WHERE'S MY VOTE?" in English? Was it just happenstance that non-violent street tactics bore a striking resemblance to Seattle WTO protests? Even if they borrowed a page from the book of "color-coded revolutions" -- the CIA didn't write that book, they just made use of it. And in any case green wasn't exactly a random color -- just happens to be the color of Islam itself, not to mention the color of Khidr, the otherworld guide of sufis. What about Mousavi's FaceBook page? What do you do with the millions of emigre Iranians around the world, immersed in foreign cultures, still practicing ancient customs at home, and baking something new of it all?

Where did the iconic green 'V' two fingered salute come from - is that really an indigenous meme?

Pray tell, what was the last obvious use of that symbol outside Iran?

"In the history books of the 21st century, the first chapter will be about us. In the introduction, they might write that important events have happened before us, events like 9/11 and war on Iraq and Afghanistan, but those were the remnants of the previous century, with an outdated language and with 20th century tools: airplanes, bombs and bullets. And then they will write that the first chapter is dedicated to us because we have been the true children of our time ... They will write that we were the first social movement of which all of us were its leader and all of us were its organiser ... They may make a subsection to describe how a movement without a command centre was acting so well-orchestrated. How its ideas, desires and slogans were suggested, criticised, and completed so well, and then one day they were expressed in such a harmony as if all these millions had practiced them together for years ... In the same chapter they will write that we lived the last days of guns and bullets and we showed that where awareness, information and channels of communication for human connection exist, bullets are pointless. They may put a picture of a single bullet somewhere in our Freedom Museum and write for its caption "the last bullet that was ever pulled out of a magazine." 

-- Persian blogger cited by Hamid Dabashi

--Twist

octopyLA@yahoo.com

June 12-20, 2010