The lower strata are suffering all kinds of oppression and the injustice that is inflicted upon them has many faces and many facets. Well-to-do classes are using all kinds of obvious and not-so-obvious benefits that this regime has created for it.
In the West, when all of these reactors, nuclear reactors, are matters...part of the public domain, there are all kinds of supervision over them. We see that the ecological movement, environmentalist movement, organizes all kinds of demonstrations against these. They lie on railroads, they tie themselves to the gates.
We can certainly be on the same side and the same front with the workers and with the oppressed people of Iran. We can certainly be on the same front with them.
I have spent six years in prison, the last six years. Even if I was outside the prison, how much actual space was there for an investigative journalist to do his work in Iran? But I know one thing for sure: That we, the Iranian people, are much more in line of danger than the West.
Would Americans accept if we decided to come here and decide who your rulers should be? So why do you expect us Iranians to accept the idea that the United States shall come in there and decide who shall govern us?Of course, everyone knows that I'm also opposed to the Iranian regime and I have said that we must change the regime. But it is us, the Iranians, that must change the regime.
The number of the opposition has certainly increased [in Iran]. There is more disgruntlement, but because there is no media, the voice of this opposition is not heard outside Iran.
When I say that I am opposed to this budget, everyone says, "Well, what do you think the United States should do?" My response is, "Why should the United States do anything?"
If you look at the discourse before the revolution, whether it is the left communist, whether it is the right secularist...the entirety of this discourse was such that it encouraged the kind of ascendancy for a man like Ayatollah Khomeini.
The solutions to the problems of the distraught lower strata of society are problems that can only be solved in the context of an overall political, cultural, economic development.
All manners of freedom, including freedom of expression, freedom of conscious, freedom of thought...it accepts tolerance. But it is not an atheist society. Religion is the private affair of an individual...be present in the public domain, but state has to be clearly separated from religion. When I'm speaking, I'm speaking only for myself. At the same time, I know that these ideas have wide support among the Iranian population.
The regime kept saying that all of my opponents are lackeys of the United States. We used to say that this is all lie, that we are lackeys of the United States.
There are varieties of theories of revolution. According to one of these theories, only one of these theories, revolutions occur when there is an explosion of rising expectation. And amongst the lower strata in Iranian society, we are witnessing an increasing rise of the expectation and it's clear that the regime is incapable of satisfying these demands.
When I talk about secularism, I'm talking about theories today. To give you for example, one example: Those who consider themselves followers of Mosaddeq today are adamantly against federalism.