Me, Downer & Otpor

Reading this Asia Times Online's article (( That is a very strange article about regime-change school. It is weirdly written and has a bad ending though. But I hope it is true, because it means they've been working with people since last Fall )) regarding the US involvement in efforts related to the freedom movement of Iran reminded me of stories of our former jungle band consisted of me, downer and a few others in Tehran.

Otpor

I never forget that late night back in Iran, when I read a long story on Otpor pro-democracy movement of Serbia in Shargh newspaper .

It was like I had found some thing, a solution on how to initiate a movement to help bring a fascist regime down through peaceful ways.

I immediately phoned Downer and bunch of others for a meeting on top of the roof of one of the members' apartment.

I wanted to tell them that we, small group of young guys, are capable of doing some thing like what Otpor people did back in Serbia.

Downer

Downer is a friend of mine. A former Bass guitar player, also a person with leftist feelings, who has always been my intellectual opponent.

That night, I lectured him and couple of others on the issue of starting doing some thing like what Otpor had done such as writing graffitis against the regime on the walls, distributing educational pamphlets among people, educating our friends about their rights and increase the number of our jungle band members as many as possible and also having a logo to identify ourselves with.

I was told that night that this is not possible in Iran of the Mullahs.

I asked why?!

Downer said that the situation is different here. In Serbia people had some sort of self-claimed freedom to hold rallies without clashing with police or security officers as long as it remained peaceful, but in Iran any gathering would be crushed by security forces.

They were right as well, and I talked about this with Michael Ledeen on a Paltalk conference back in 2004 and he told me that this is going to be possible in the very near future.

Long story short, I just wanted to point at one paragraph of the Asia Times Article:

Once in Dubai, Nilofar was booked by one of two organizations running the program into the Holiday Inn. She recounts that the course organizers were a mixture of Los Angeles-based exiled Iranians, Americans who appeared to supervise the course and whose affiliation remained unclear throughout, and three Serbs who said they belonged to the Otpor democratic movement that overthrew the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

"They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic," Nilofar said. "They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn't mention directly bringing down the regime - they just taught us what they had done in their own country."

If this is the case the US government is working on, I do have to thank them and congratulate them for doing it.

That is the education I have always talked about on my weblog too.

It seems the US government is doing what we expected as best as one may imagine.