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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.
He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.
In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.
Global Real Estate Project
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Iran: Revolution devoured by its children
 Protesting students in Tehran It's a cliché that revolutions devour their children. This phrase was first coined during the French revolution and had its validity ever since. Broadly speaking it refers to the fact that many people eagerly working for revolutionary goals at the end fall victims of their own Frankenstein. They aren't among the first to be sent to the guillotine but when comes their turn, their heads fall with the same easiness as those of their counterrevolutionary enemies. What applied to post-1789 France and post-1917 Russia was also true for post-1979 Iran. Monarchists were executed first; then came liberals, then left politicians. Despite the revolutionary rhetoric of some clerics inside Iran and many fears outside the country, Tehran in the past 25 years have moved from revolutionary to status quo foreign policy. The whole revolutionary project is at stake. Paradoxically one of the main counterrevolutionary forces was set up in motion by the revolution itself. Iranian revolution if it's overturned, will fall victim of its own successes like the Soviet communism, not of the foreign plots. This main counterrevolutionary force, this principle revolutionary success that may devour the revolution is its children, not symbolic children, but very real and tangible persons, those that was born in the name of this revolution, those that must take or break the revolutionary ideal. Iran isn't a kind of society you may expect to get easy information. Many topics for discussions are still taboo, others aren't but are hidden behind thick layer of revolutionary rhetoric. Despite these obstacles it's possible to get panoramic picture of the Iranian social life after the revolution, to take the pulse of the events, to see some major trends developing and to try to make plausible forecasts. Forecasts about the country as a whole and about the revolution that seems developing in a direction nobody could have predicted a quarter of century ago. I'll stop on one phenomenon that seems very important to me and will try to look at it as factor showing the trends in Iranian public mentality that can't be hidden even under the thickest layer of propaganda. I'll talk about the children of the revolution, the kids that were born just before, during and even since 1979. Their existence or nonexistence as well as their behavior have direct repercussions on the fate of the revolution as theocratic state. It has become banal to link the Iranian revolution with the social reaction against the tyrannical regime of the former Shah. Whether this tyranny was real or invented post-datum by the revolution is another story. What is important for us to know is that the Shah in the name of modernization tried to impose strict birth control over the population beginning in the mid-1960s. His birth control policy was complete disaster. In fact the fertility rates went up, to show that the power of the Shah wasn't so great as he might expected. Between the Shah with his modernization policy and the ayatollahs with their opposition on this issue, the Iranian women chose the later. By the end of 1970s the average woman in Iran had 7 children, level sustained till mid-1980s. Here it comes to my mind an interesting comparison between Iran and Poland. The final decade of the communist regime in Poland saw the same trend, although not the same figures, of new baby boom. Standing between the communist regime with its birth control policy and liberal abortion rights and the Catholic Church the Polish women chose the later. To have more children was mainly ideological decision. On the one hand Poles wanted to outnumber the Soviets in order to get back their independence. On the other hand, they wanted to show their despise toward the communist government. They failed in the first but succeeded in the second task and finally got their independence. The same ideological motivation worked for the spectacular increase of the birth rates in Iran between 1970 and 1986. The result in both countries was strengthening of the clergy's power. In Iran the anti-Shah revolution established theocratic state, in Poland the anti-communist revolution established state with strong clerical influence and special formal relations to Vatican. We should be extremely cautious by drawing too many comparisons between Iran and Poland. In fact Warsaw considered itself to be the bulwark of the West against the communist atheism. At the end this self-perception will gradually reduce the power of the clergy. In long run the strict anti-abortion policy in Poland is doomed if the country wants to be an integral part of the European Union. It's doomed mainly because of the fact that the Polish women have turned back to their former ideological standing. Now in Poland with no right to abortion there are 2-3 times less births per year than in the communist Poland of the 1980s when such rights existed. A policy that its main actors, in our case the women, don't give a penny is doomed. The same interesting phenomenon can be traced in Iran, when less than 20 years after this spectacular baby boom we see the children of the revolution refusing to bear children. Today Iran has lower fertility rate than the United States of America (1.93 against 2.07). The current government birth control policy can partly be credited for this incredible trend, but only partly because nobody intended to have results below the level of reproduction. What's more realistic as explanation is that this official policy coincided with the larger social movement of individual liberation, that linked the large families with the oppression over women. Especially interesting in this respect is the attitude of those who know nothing except the revolutionary rhetoric, the children of the revolution born after 1979. In fact this generation so far shows social behavior much more similar to their western counterparts than the behavior of their parents during 1970-1980s. Looking at their blogs creates impression that they feel very oppressed and unhappy and that the only way to protest against the system is by turning back at everything that they think would be a some value for the clerics. They can't do this unpunished in public but they can create their own private world where there is no place for official ideology. This turning into oneself is also a kind of ideology, very common during the last 2 decades of communism. This is also beginning of the end of the Iranian revolution as coexistence of public and private domain. The revolution will fall not by foreign plot but overburden by its own successes. These 30 million children that had to become guardians of the revolution will in fact devour it.
Iran - country profile: --------------------
See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of Iran.
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