The Next Generation

I sometimes wonder why more people don’t consider my generational theory of revolution and counter-revolution. So, for example, why did Brezhnev hold the Soviet Union together while Gorbachev didn’t? In my view it’s because of the generational difference between the two leaders. While Brezhnev was a teenager at the time of the Russian Revolution, too young to be an actual participant, he was old enough to have the old revolutionary fervor while Gorbachev, a whole generation younger, was a bureaucrat through and through and viewed things like a bureaucrat rather than like a revolutionary. And the same is true of the people of of the Soviet Union in 1979 compared to the people in 1989, generally. In 1989 there were far fewer hopeful revolutionaries and more who saw the dilapidated Soviet Union as it was.

That’s how I’d answer Roger Cohen’s questions:

In 1989, the revolutionary year, the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in Beijing and, five months later, the division of Europe ended with the fall of the Wall in Berlin. Could it have been otherwise? Might China have opened to greater democracy while European uprisings were shot down?

Basically, the answer is no and the reason is generational. That’s my answer about Iran, too. Mr. Cohen reports:

Having been in that Tehran crowd, I know the force was with it. I felt myself how fear evaporates with such numbers. Nobody, not in 2009, can slay millions. Behind those Iranians, too, lay greater forces, all Iran’s centennial and unquenchable quest for some stable balance between representative government and religious faith.

I think he’s judging the Iranian leadership by the standards of effete Western intellectuals. These are the same guys who beheaded thousands after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and despite ecclesiastical curbs, public executions are still televised in Iran.

I doubt that Iran’s leadership has retirement plans. They’ll do whatever they see as necessary to stay in power. They have little choice.

Maybe there will be a successful overthrow of the existing order in Iran in ten or twenty years. But now or next year? I doubt it. It will take the next generation both of leaders and of Iranians.