bohemian slapfight

kapi:

Do you guys really think that all of your tweets and tumblr posts about Iran or putting a green tint to your online avatars will actually have a game changing impact?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not doubting any of your efforts at all. In fact I applaud them.

It seems to me that the Americans are the most vocal about the whole “Democracy must win” point of view, which is fair.

But, you guys seem to have forgotten when this sort of thing happened in your own country, Florida to be more specific, during the 2000 American Presidential elections.

What happened then? I know that there was no twitter or any other massively popular online medium to voice your protests, but however you chose to protest, did it magically make Al Gore the president?

No. It didn’t.

So what makes you think that it will work this time around?

It won’t Also, there’s always a ‘cause’ or a ‘thing’ or a nation the west needs to take under its wing. Right now, it’s Iran (member when we hated Iran? Then we loved it for a little while? Then we hated it again? Now we love it again, handily, right in the middle of a conflagration in the middle east involving pakistan, afghanistan and Iraq….isn’t THAT weird, cause a liberal west-sensitive leader in a key state in the middle East, like Iran wouldn’t be to ANYONE’s benefit, now would it….moving along….).

This is, of course, cynical but in my opinion it’s also completely true. There is always some cause that the west feels in it’s infinite moral superiority to take up and then promptly drop at some undetermined point in the near or not so near future, depending. It’s Darfur. It’s Rwanda. It’s Somalia. It’s Ethiopia. It’s Iraq. Now it’s Iran. There’s always something else. If any of this was solely about human rights abuses freedom and voting we’d have been up in Chechnya/Russia’s bidness a LONG damn time ago…but we’re not and I doubt we ever will be. Wanna get really sick…go find some info about Chechnya. if you can. Wanna guess why?

There is always some political agenda wrapped in a humanitarian cause, presented as a ‘people’s rights movement’ by the western press that always gets people’s attention, and tweaks their heartstrings, exactly when it happens to be convenient on an economic and/or political and/or military level. It’s a real life Hollywood blockbuster.

You know? The movies that you KNOW are completely manipulative and totally ridiculous but you find yourself rooting for the right person, invested in the love story and feeling triumphant at the end. Yeah. You’re getting played. Here too.

This is not to at all diminish what Iranians are going through, or what they have been going through for decades. But their struggle is their OWN, and very few people are qualified to speak on the realities of what has gone before, what presents now, and what will become. Because most people don’t know anything about Iran.

There are people who will say “well but yes, does it matter what people do because now that it’s got everyones attention and now everyone is learning….” YES IT FUCKING MATTERS! This isn’t attention. This isn’t study. Watching 5 minute…45 minute segments on CNN about Iran from their perspective is NOT ‘learning about Iran’. Calling an uprising of people (mostly young people) who have been living within alternating secular and Islamic states of varying totalitarianism while it’s foreign and domestic policies swing from one extreme to the other, a fucking TWITTER REVOLUTION is about the most ignorant, insulting, self-aggrandizing thing I’ve ever heard. It smacks of cultural imperialism and sanctimonious rhetoric.

What the HELL would you know about what is good for the state of Iran? Really? What? Where are you getting your information? The BBC? The NYT? In the last 2 weeks? Catching a show on Charlie Rose where they have the token Iranian guy? That qualifies you to stick on a green armband and claim you know what’s good for an entire country? Are they interviewing rural folks? Old folks? Or are they showing you the images they know you want to see, the images that they know will illicit the reaction they want you to have?

Now I’m no conspiracy theorist, in fact im much too cranky and cynical to believe that any one group of 12 or more people is capable of doing anything for 10 minutes without fucking it up, but if you think propaganda and media manipulation doesn’t exist on this scale, and that you aren’t falling for it, you must remove your head from your pooper immediately.

So no, Kapi it won’t work. And you can applaud the efforts of the millions of people wearing green, who have absolutely no context for anything happening in Iran right now, but I’m certainly not going to, because I’m not nearly as nice as you.

It’s not as easy as ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’. Things are much much murkier and much more complicated than ‘give people the vote’. This isn’t about a lot of things that people think it’s about. On the other hand, it’s about a lot MORE things than people think it’s about.That sounds asinine but it’s true.

I’m politics-ed out now and this is the last bit I have to say about Iran, because even the little I know is not nearly enough.

...back to your regularly scheduled 4chan memes