Hosni Mubarak made clear yesterday that he lives in some sort of reality-distorted bubble that makes sane interpretations of events on the ground impossible for him. One hopes that he has not set the stage for massive bloodshed.

The groundwork for the protests in Egypt were laid in part by the Iran’s Green Movement, and the great fear is that the result will end with a similarly violent crackdown by the repressive dictatorship. In Chicago last Friday, at a launch party for The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future, co-editors Danny Postel and Nader Hashemi spoke about the connections between Egypt’s current critical moment and Iran’s ongoing political crisis.

Postel opens the evening by reading the poem by the Persian poet Hafez titled “Those Who Stood Up For Tolerance.”

Hashemi argues that the current Egyptian democratic uprising should not be compared to the 1979 Iranian Revolution (as is being done by many conservative commentators and by the Iranian government itself) that led to the current repressive theocracy. He denies that the people of Tunisia and Egypt aspire to Ahmadinejad‘s Iran, a “society where clerics are in power, where elections are rigged, where media censorship is widespread, where executions are at record levels, where there is no freedom of speech or assembly, where the jails are filled with political prisoners.” Rather, the pro-democracy vision of Tunisia and Egypt have much more in common with the humane and civil-rights oriented vision of Iran’s Green Movement.

Additionally, Hashemi speaks to the shocking similarity between the strategies employed by Iran’s regime against the protesters of The Green Movement and the strategies that we are seeing repeated now by Mubarak in Egypt—strategies that we can only hope result in different outcomes.

Tonight at MIT, Hashemi and Postel will join a distinguished panel of Iran experts to discuss The People Reloaded, the future of Iran, and, surely, of Egypt. Full details of the event can be found here.