Disillusioned

A few weeks ago, I was enjoying a rare pedicure (at DH’s insistence… oh, darn), and of course the lady and I were talking about this and that. She brought up the elections in Iran, as she is Iranian, having come to the States during the upheavals after 1979. She didn’t have much good to say about the one referred to derisively on the Internet as “Ahmadinnerjacket.” Straw man, false face, you name it. She couldn’t contact her relatives in her native village, and she was worried.

This was a few days before the protests began in earnest, and the riot police, and Neda, and horrifying pictures leaked by the protesters, and an unknown substance being dropped from a helicopter onto the protesters, and disappearances of protesters, and shooting them and making their bodies disappear, and blocking of hospitals and embassies, and shutting down Internet access. It was before I knew  that “PK” referred to the very reliable  Twitterer called “pe.rsi.an.k.iwi” and other people trying to get around the media blackout to let the world know what is really happening in Iran.

From this world event, I had my suspicions confirmed in that the mainstream media (MSM), once the beacon of information, is now inept, corrupt, infected with glitz and ego, and is useless. I wondered why the MSM refused to cover the horror that was happening there, instead blathering about the impending demise of Jon and Kate and other useless things. Fox jumped on the bandwagon a little late, but at least they tried to be accurate; CNN was blatantly inaccurate, and far too late to the game, and they had Christiane Amanpour sucking up to the regime in power—they lost credibility in many eyes. What a shame.

It’s a shame that to be in the know, you had to be following the events in newsgroups or news aggregator sites on the Internet, because you couldn’t find jack shit on TV or the radio. My personal preference, Fark, had something like 45 numbered separate threads (of 1500-2000 posts per thread!) in the week following the elections with centralized updates by the now-legendary Farker knows as Tatsuma, who continues his work in his blog, Yaakov’s Lament - I strongly suggest you drop by and read his blog.  

Here is today’s unnumbered post on Fark - numbering stopped somewhere after thread 45 or 46 – someone figured out how many actual posts were there, and it was becoming frightening to those joining the fray far too late. Anyway, Farkers and other newsgroups sorted through the chaff in Twitter to mine the legitimate Twitterers out of Iran and gave pertinent, truthful, and near real-time updates. People set aside their personal issues with one another to rally behind the cause, do research, post information and were careful to label it confirmed, unconfirmed, or rumor, then added sources whenever possible. Others set up personal proxy servers so that the Iranians could continue to circumvent the government communications blackout.  There wasn’t much those of us here in the States could do to directly help, but proxies, contributing to the Red Crescent (Red Cross equivalent), and disseminating truthful information as much as possible were done in the spirit of international brotherhood.

Let me just say that if you happen to see someone on the street with a green ribbon on their wrist, it’s likely that they’ve been following the REAL stories coming out of poor Iran.

Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet in general are changing the face of revolutions everywhere. Information that used to be ruthlessly suppressed is now getting out not just to locals, but to the entire world.

Think about it: what would the Russian Revolution (1917-1918) have been like had the Whites been able to instantaneously request help and overwhelm the Reds? Would the Imperial Family have been saved from their ghastly murders?  What about the American Revolution (1775-83) or the French Revolution (1789-99) if, instead of months passing while news crawled across seas, land, and oceans before word of anything got out, they had instant communications with the outside? How different history would have been!

If the only effect the weeks of protests have is their current government being revealed as a sham to the world at large, then the Sea of Green has not truly failed.  The mullahs and the corrupt politicians cannot stem the thirst for a modern society with modern freedoms, and cannot continue to insist on a Dark Ages regime when the people are exposed to the world at large. They cannot, as has been reported today, hang protesters and hide it – the world is now too small. There are eyes everywhere and evil cannot hide anymore.

My prayers are with those in the Sea of Green, whose original aim was to insist on a legitimate election free from fraud, and whose fight has turned into something far greater: the triumph of good over evil.

Peace be upon you, my Iranian friends. You are not alone.