The Web site called for a general strike and suggested targeting the flow of oil.NBC's Ann Curry is also reporting that Tweets from Iran are urging people to stock up on supplies in preparation for a general strike.
Here is an opportunity for the west to help out. First, outlets such as Radio Farda can be used to help spread the word because it is not likely that the Supreme Leader will leave Mousavi's website alone if he's urging a strike. Now is not the time to be cutting the funding for such efforts.
And here is also an opportunity for unions throughout the U.S. and Europe to step up to help strikers in Iran just as they once supported Solidarity in Poland. Perhaps there is a way for western unions to raise strike funds that could be channeled to help strengthen a general strike. Barack Obama likes to quote Martin Luther King; this seems like a peaceful sort of protest that could help to paralyze the Iranian regime.
This is the type of help that can go on below the radar so to speak. I'm hoping that these are the kinds of assistance that we're doing that we just can't talk about publicly yet.
4 comments:
I like the idea of private sub rosa support for Iran via the unions but somehow the secretaries and janitors of the SEIU and Unite don't strike me as having a particularly internationalist outlook.
Perhaps a boycott of pistachios as Iran supplies 65% of the world's production.
Wait, unions are suddenly a good thing, because you want them to do something to disrupt the internal affairs of another country.
Situationally elastic ethics at its finest.
Looks like a reprise of an old and shameful anti-Reagan argument: "How can he support unions like Solidarity in Poland, while crushing the air traffic controllers' union in the U.S.?"
Of course, there was no contradiction then, and there is none now. Thirty years ago, American unions had ten times the power of Polish unions, and they have ten times the power of Iranian unions today. It is perfectly logical to think that America now and then would be a better place if unions were less powerful, while Poland then and Iran now would be better places if unions were more powerful. Whether unions are "a good thing" depends on how much power they have. As in most things, there's a Golden Mean, and different countries (or the same country at different times) are on opposite sides of it.
Similarly, I personally think that China would be a better place if organized religion (Confucianism, Christianity, Falun Gong, whatever) had more influence, while Iran and Saudi Arabia would undoubtedly be better places if organized religion had a lot less power and influence. Is that a contradiction? Only to those who haven't thought about the issue for more than two minutes.
Plus the help Walesa received during the 70's and 80's was to create an independent trade union. But he was also aware that if Poland became independent one of the first casualties of this independence would be the subsidized and monoplistic shipyards of Gdansk. Luckily there are still people that do the right thing in regards to freedom even if it might damage their particular group in the long run.
It wasn't so long ago that men such as George Meaney, Walter Reuther and Lane Kirkland were castigated by the left as being too interested in spreading freedom throughout the world and not enough confronting the so-called domestic evil empire.
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