Robin Wright on the Eruption of Violence in Iran

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2019

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

In November, Iran announced new fuel rationing and price hikes, just at a time when U.S. sanctions are crippling the economy and especially the middle class. Protests broke out immediately, and the government responded by shutting down access to the Internet, arresting protesters, and using lethal force: more than two hundred people are said to be dead, according to Amnesty International. The Iranian government has laid blame on the United States, which has a campaign of “maximum pressure” aiming to destabilize the country—and Donald Trump is happy to take credit. But Robin Wright, the author of several books on the Middle East, notes that Iran is also facing opposition from some of its Shiite allies in the Middle East. In Iraq and Lebanon, protests have erupted against Iran’s efforts to increase its influence in the region, and the Iraqi Prime Minister announced his resignation partially because of that unrest. The Iranian regime is in real trouble, Wright believes. As she sees it, the country’s Green Movement of a decade ago, and the Arab Spring in the same period, were not a failure or a blip but the start of a process that may yet reshape democracy in the Middle East.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a bonus episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:11.3	I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
0:12.7	Good to talk to you.
0:14.2	Nice to hear your voice.
0:15.7	Oh, my God.
0:18.5	In mid-November, we started hearing about protests in Iran against a sudden rise in gas prices.
0:24.9	Then Iran seemed to explode as the government met the protests with violence.
0:29.7	The Revolutionary Guard is reported to have surrounded and gunned down unarmed protesters.
0:35.6	Amnesty International cites a death toll of more than 200, and the number may
0:40.2	ultimately be quite a bit higher. This appears to be the harshest crackdown in decades, about an
0:46.2	issue Americans had heard very little about. So I wanted to talk with the New Yorkers Robin Wright.
0:52.1	Robin is reported on Iran throughout her career and written
0:55.0	some of the best recent books on the Middle East. Hi, Robin. Hi, Dorothy. So Robin, the New York
1:01.3	Times on Sunday called this Iran's worst unrest in 40 years. That would take us back all the way
1:08.3	back to the Iranian Revolution when the Ayatollah Khomeini first came to power.
1:13.3	Is what's going on now that big, that consequential?
1:17.7	There was one period of much more extensive protesting, and that was in 2009, when during a presidential election,
1:26.9	Iranians felt that there had been widespread fraud and miscounting votes that led to the re-election of Mahmoud Aminin Ajad, a notorious hardliner.
1:37.6	And during those protests, which ran on for, on and off for six months, millions and millions of people turned out on the streets spontaneously
1:46.8	to demand either a revote and, as the protests accelerated, the ousting of the Supreme Leader.
1:55.3	So that was probably the most extensive in the 40 years since the 1979 revolution. But these are different,
2:03.9	in a sense, because they come at a time after the Trump administration has reimposed
	...

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