Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tehran today, in what’s beginning to look like an exercise in futility — because the mullahs are not going to back down, and they have the power of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basiji militias behind them.

One could have said the same about the crowds trying to storm the Bastille in 1789, or staging impotent rallies in St. Petersburg in 1917.

Everything seems futile until it succeeds.