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Source: https://www.persuasion.community/p/iranians-just-want-a-normal-country?hide_intro_popup=true
Iranians Want a Return to Secular Nationalism
(Persuasion-Substack) Roohola Ramezani - The movement that has gripped Iran since Dec. 28 is a profound, pragmatic, and increasingly radical return to secular nationalism. Almost 50 years after an "Islamic Revolution" that has delivered only economic ruin and international pariah status, this is a movement of ideological exhaustion. What Iranians want is to cease being an extraordinary ideological project and to finally become a "normal" country. The movement has moved beyond "reform" - the hope that the system can be fixed from within - to a desire to overthrow the system entirely, reclaiming the state from an entity they view as an occupying ideological force. For decades, Western diplomacy has been predicated on the idea that the Iranian people are caught between "hardliners" and "reformists." Today, that binary is dead. The current movement is characterized by a visceral, almost existential rejection of the clerical establishment as a whole. The increasingly prominent slogan "Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, my life only for Iran" is a cry of anti-colonial resistance against their own government. The Iranian street has increasingly come to view the Palestinian cause - to which the Iranian regime has dedicated massive resources - as a black hole into which their life savings, infrastructure, and international standing are disappearing. A widely-held view among the protesters today is that the current regime structure is fundamentally incapable of economic reform because its very survival depends on an anti-Western, anti-American ideology that necessitates isolation. When segments of the Iranian intelligentsia sign letters to Western leaders asking for "maximum pressure" and "targeted strikes," they are articulating a belief that the internal mechanism for change has been so thoroughly crushed that only an external shock can break the stalemate. Iranians want to return to being a normal nation-state that prioritizes its borders over ideological "frontiers," its citizens over "martyrs," and its future over seventh-century grievances. The protest movement is redefining Iranian identity as a struggle to rejoin the West's political and economic orbit in perhaps the most authentic democratic project of our time. The writer is an Iranian journalist.