The battle in Iran has progessed from a dispute about election results to a fight for for liberation that needs the support of all bloggers and social media communicators.

Foreign governments cannot interfere in the internal workings of Iran but the worldwide blogging community can. Sooner or later information will break through, if it is pushed through enough channels.

• Watch this eloquent, passionate video appeal from Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the great Iranian filmmaker who spoke from Rome on Tuesday to Iranians abroad (in Farsi with English subtitles): “We need to work collectively to spread information coming out of Iran … we have found each other again”

Re-purposed from THE LEDE, The New York Times: 6/24/09 Update | 6:56 p.m. On the New Yorker’s Web site, Laura Secor argues against the theory that there is a fierce battle for power going on behind the scenes in Iran, and that only the fights between clerics matter. This is interesting.  Later in the day the Times published a news story arguing the opposite – that Iran has been taken over by militarists and clerics have been pushed aside. Does anybody really know what is going on in Iran? It is the new “Iron Curtain.” Ms. Secor writes:

The struggle in Iran, we are hearing, really comes down to a fight among the élites inside the power structure.

It is clearly true that Iran’s élites are disunited, but to place great emphasis on this fact is misleading. Factional differences have riven the Iranian political establishment since the Islamic Revolution itself, and sometimes quite dramatically, as during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 through 2005. As for Rafsanjani, about whose possible role much has been made, he has been a rival of Ahmadinejad since losing the presidency to him in 2005; this has increasingly driven him toward the reformist camp, where he has been accepted only partially and reluctantly. None of these cleavages are new. In a country that does not tolerate political parties or associations in its civil society, the contest for power, and over the future of the political system, has been largely confined to the establishment itself. Khamenei has spent much of his twenty years in power checkmating his rivals inside the system and discrediting them with their supporters outside the system.

What is new today is not that cracks have opened inside a monolithic system, or even that particularly powerful figures, like Rafsanjani, have broken onto the side of the reformers. What is new is the fierce mass movement from below, which is not confined to students and intellectuals but seems to span demographics and age groups. Even while exercising legal rights, nonviolent methods, and issuing constant appeals to Islam and to the ideals of the revolution, this movement has openly defied Khamenei, the Basij, and the Revolutionary Guards, by ignoring the threats of bloodshed and mayhem. Nothing like that has happened in thirty years.

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