Training | 2009.06.25
In Iran there is no mob but courage, and the mystical power of the crowd | Simon Jenkins
People have cast aside their concern for safety in a unified, unmistakable protest at a sense of being cheated by their rulers
It is the most terrifying group activity on earth. It brought Lenin, Hitler and the ayatollahs to power. To the ancients, it "takes men close to madness". Irrational, inconstant, violent and destructive, it is the enemy of order and the dread of monarchs and democrats alike. It is the crowd or, if we dislike it, the mob.
Yet in Iran this week we cheer it on. We thrill to the smoke billowing, the bodies bleeding, the cars burning. I long to be in Tehran, to feel the same raw, inchoate power I sensed as a reporter, variously on the streets of Paris, Belfast, Johannesburg and Belgrade. It is the closest ordinary people can get to watching politics happen, to witnessing young faces, terrified or exhilarated, in an act of democratic grace. The mob is the procreational urge of politics, anarchy raping order in hope of a better future. At such moments, it is bliss to be alive, and to be young is very heaven.
Yet the consequence of Wordsworth\'s ecstasy was the Terror . The mob is unpredictable and often disastrous. We have no way of knowing which side really won in last week\'s Iranian elections, although everything points to a corrupted and stolen result. As in Ukraine\'s contested election in 2004 and those in Kenya and Zimbabwe last year, rigged ballots led to both sides taking to the streets and a constitutional mess ensuing.
Outsiders yearn to take sides. Good mobs use the internet and tweet. Bad ones are always "bussed in". Yet the internet is no more than another word of mouth, a modern means to a primitive end. To be effective it must induce people to desert their screens and surrender the security of their homes to that of the crowd. Twitter is not real politics, any more than Facebook is real friendship. It is another sort of whisper.
In his work on the power of crowds the philosopher Elias Canetti referred to the mystical transformation of persons into groups. Individuals "discharge difference to become miraculously equal". As a result, moral and social constraints evaporate. Crowds assume a licence to anarchy, to smash, burn and kill. They are proto-armies. The demonstrator is as reckless of his own safety as of others. He is swiftly reduced to a blind cruelty, ultimately to the murderous rampages of Rwanda, Somalia and Kenya.
Surveying the moral wreckage of the mid-20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr warned against the eulogising of the crowd, observing how people tend to behave worse in groups than they would ever do as individuals. He contrasted "moral man and immoral society". His plea for a politics of patience – "nothing worth doing is ever completed in our lifetime" – is as disregarded now as ever. The mob remains the embodiment of "When do we want it: now!".
For all the glory we invest in the power of crowds, their effectiveness is patchy. Rarely in history do sheer numbers win, as at the Bastille or during the Bolshevik revolution. The mob needs more than right on its side, it needs a collapse of confidence on the part of authority, usually leading to a coup. This occurred during the downfall of fascism in Portugal in 1974 , of communism in eastern Europe in 1989 and of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 .
It did not do so at Sharpeville in 1960 , in Tiananmen square in 1989 or in Uzbekistan in 2005. It did not do so last year in Burma or in Zimbabwe. The mob fails when authority has the guts to use its clubs and guns. No regime cares a hoot for the outside world, when survival is at stake. As for the outside world, it goes about its business. After Tiananmen, the west was soon engaging with China, greeting it as a great power and trading partner. And that approach even seemed to work. China today is regarded as a freer and more prosperous place for that engagement than without it.
Why then do we cheer the Iranian mob? Why not leave Iran\'s politics to its own devices and engage with it diplomatically and commercially? Why this obsession with taking sides, especially where, as in Iran, doing so clearly fosters the view of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\'s supporters that its opponents are sponsored and aided by the west? Of course I want the moderates to win, but why shout it from the rooftops when it helps them lose (a point President Obama well understands)?
In writing our own history we admire the Chartists more for their pacifism than for their bursts of militancy. We agree with Thomas Babington Macaulay , that Britain progressed to democracy not with "a beating of drums, a ringing of tocsins, a tearing up of pavements and a running to gunsmiths … but in the force of reason and public opinion."
Throughout the world crowds have taken to the streets as often to demand fundamentalism as to oppose it. In Iran it was the mob that brought the ayatollahs to power in 1979. It was a mob that helped bring Milosevic to power in Serbia, and a mob that helped topple him. In Ukraine in 2004, rival parties to a contested election organised demonstrations which western commentators separated into "good mobs" and bad ones. Even in democracies, the efficacy of the crowd is overrated. The largest demonstrations ever seen in London, against nuclear weapons and against the Iraq war in 2003, were wholly ineffective.
Yet this is not the mood of the moment. The mob may be "poor man\'s politics", in the same sense that revenge is poor man\'s justice. It may not represent a majority and is usually a gathering of urban, often middle-class, youths far removed from the provincial and proletarian masses.
But the forces that drive men and women to take to the streets remain potent. They are the last resort of self-determination, what people do when they believe they are cheated by their rulers and all other redress has failed. People cast aside all concern for safety and attempt, however inadequately, to take power into their own hands.
The result can be a true revolutionary moment. I remember seeing tank crews in Lisbon nervously letting girls put roses in their guns, and soldiers guarding the assembly building in Belgrade during the uprising against Milosevic. Both groups were terrified, not knowing whether to fraternise or shoot. Both moments were a tipping point, where power surged from one fount of authority to another. Yet it needed only a firm order from above to reverse that surge.
The mob represents not politics but the collapse of politics, a challenge to order. In Iran the collapse is peculiarly sacrilegious as it results from the abuse of the holiest ritual of democracy, an election. To many Iranians there seems no answer but to interpose their bodies between ballot and bullet.
That is why, however much we might shudder at the delegation of power to the street, we admire the youths of Tehran. We admire their restraint, their calm and often silent protest. We would also understand their response to violence with violence. Theirs is an affirmation that a universal wrong has occurred. The mob may be an evil, but even in the 21st century it may be a democratic necessity.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/18/iran-protests-twitter
