I’ve been following events in Iran on the Daily Dish and elsewhere and wondering what citizens can do (governments, of course, should do nothing, that would be interference and probably counterproductive).
I sent this link about setting up a proxy to some of my Iranian friends and said that I’d be willing to help. What else can one do?
Watching some of the YouTube coverage I was impressed to see videos taken with cellphones which included other people taking videos with cellphones. The days when autocracies could expect to get away with brutal oppression without the world knowing are ending.
I was in the Philippines when Joseph Estrada was ousted by cellphone.
My employer’s mail system came within a hair’s breadth of running out of disk space such was was the explosion in email messages at the end. To the extent that I succeeded in keeping it up and running I suppose I helped in Estrada’s downfall.
Of course, he was never to be take seriously as a representative of evil. He was just a drunken crook of the lowest sort, but he was elected by the people in the first place. A few years later I had lunch with the bank official whose testimony, in particular, scuttled his presidency and was much impressed by her moral fortitude; the Philippines is a society where journalists are routinely killed with impunity and there is no doubt she risked her life to do what was right.
Iran is very different. I have thought it was a demographic powder keg for years.
Most of the young people I met on my visits, admittedly in Teheran and institutes of higher education, spoke some English — in an accent that I like very much — and they were rather openly critical of the country’s hostile relations with the west, of the religious police and theocratic gerontocracy.
Our driver cum minder kept his cards very close to his chest until one day when I asked him, in the most innocent, non-judgmental way I could, what proportion of women wore the chador on Teheran before the revolution.
He simmered like a volcano, and then said through clenched teeth
There was a lot of very bad dressing before the revolution! VERY BAD DRESSING!
His manner sent a chill down my back. Then he readjusted his composure and everything was back to normal. Apparently hardly any women wore the chador in Teheran, perhaps 5%.
I thought about the girls I’d seen showing an inch of transparent cuff on their sleeves, risking a beating from the religious police, and wondered what he considered so shocking. I didn’t dare ask.
I did however, politely decline to go along with the suggestions of seemingly every senior male official who, immediately upon introduction, invited me to agree that western media were in the grip of a conspiracy to protray Iran in a negative light.
I was actually expected to say that Iran was completely different from its media image. When I failed to do so a variety of leading questions were asked which I had to shrug off (I don’t watch much TV etc.), but even then there were clearly two Irans not talking to each other.
Back then, more than ten years ago, I was talking to people building the Iranian Internet. That they succeeded despite every possible obstacle being put in their way by the US government is a great achievement.
Stupid US government policy has affected me personally today: I have received a letter from Lloyds Bank in the UK declining to accept payment from an international non-governmental organization in Syria for which I did some work recently. It is, no doubt, trying to keep Uncle Sam sweet. The organization in question is supported in part by the British government.
Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times, makes the case for recession triggering the revolution. Maybe. What triggered the successful revolution in the Philippines was theft, popular outrage, a means of communication and… an army unwilling to open fire on citizens.
