Revolutions Per Minute

(Photo: The Guardian)
If social media tools are enabling the opposition protests in Iran, and helping us outside the country understand what’s transpiring, some credit for this is due to Hossein Derakhshan—Iran’s “Blogfather” and the author of a life that’s taken some very enigmatic turns of late. Derakhshan is currently being detained by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.
In 2001, while living in Toronto, Derakhshan made available online a step-by-step guide to publishing a blog in Farsi (according to Wired, he had “figured out a way to combine Unicode and Blogger.com’s free tools to handle Persian characters”). Derakhshan’s instructions, along with his outspoken blogging, directly influenced thousands of Iranians to create their own web pages. The subject matter of these blogs varied widely—pop culture, sport, personal matters—but much of it was cyber samizdat and critical of the regime, establishing a space where Iranians could communicate openly to each other about living under a theocracy. The outbreak of self-publishing in Iran was so staggering, I gleaned one statistic that suggested Farsi was the internet’s fourth most blogged-in language—Farsi, with about 70-80 million native speakers, ranks as only the 22nd most spoken language in the world. (*Update: a BBC reporter has said Farsi is the second most used language on the internet but I find this impossible.)

(Photo: Hossein Derakhshan, Toronto Star)
Derakhshan’s story has taken some strange and slippery through-the-looking-glass turns since. He travelled to Israel in 2006 on his Canadian passport, and used his blog to challenge Iranian misconceptions about Israelis. After that trip, however, he began writing more favourably about Ahmadinejad, supported Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and was accused of making anti-Israeli comments; he decided to return to Tehran to live in 2008. Shortly after arriving in Iran last November he was arrested on the grounds of spying for Israel; a newspaper affiliated with the government reported that he had “confessed.” After being allowed a few phone calls upon his arrest he hasn’t been heard from. Canadian consular officials have been unable to get access to Derakhshan. His detention has garnered international media attention and a campaign for his release, but some of his former supporters, disturbed by the apparent about-turn in his views, are ambivalent. There are even bizarre internet whispers that Derakhshan is, in fact, an Iranian spy.
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(Photo: The Guardian)
As the regime steps up its efforts to control the information space (blocking websites, shutting down SMS systems, jamming satellite TV—email, it turns out, is the most reliable way to get word out), I found this snippet of history provided by a BBC diplomatic correspondent interesting:
In the old days of the Soviet Union, it was shortwave broadcasts the regime targeted.
But as computers and satellite dishes replaced shortwave radios, the Politburo faced a dilemma.
I remember Mikhail Gorbachov’s former ideology chief, a liberal reformer called Alexander Yakovlev once recalling how his bosses in the old Soviet Politburo ordered him to cost the business of jamming all satellite TV. This was the mid-1980s, in retrospect the last dying decade of the old USSR.
Mr Yakovlev said he looked into it, and reported back: radio jamming was expensive but just about doable. But when it came to TV jamming, it was just too expensive. The genie was effectively out of the bottle. The Politburo had to accept that the USSR could no longer practically enforce an isolated information space.
Which is the situation the Iranian government now finds itself in. It can physically prevent foreign journalists from reporting, but it can hardly keep pace with a growing movement of people, able to capture and transmit events in real-time, and becoming ever more adept at the tactics of digital evasion. The regime will try, and sometimes succeed in holding back the torrent of images and tweets, but these are only temporary, jerry-rigged retaining walls in an escalating game of info-tech cat and mouse.
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(Photo: The Guardian)
For all the talk of a possible behind-the-scenes struggle among country’s ruling clerics (Rafsanjani v. Khameini), an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times argues that the “sham” elections and Ayatollah Khameini’s avowed preference for Ahmadinejad belies an altogether different dynamic—that Iran has, by stealth, evolved from “a theocratic state to military dictatorship.” Although technically the Ayatollah and his Guardian Council retain supreme authority, the authors point to the unprecedented prominence of former members of the Revolutionary Guard (like Ahmadinejad) in central government and among the business elite; they also speculate that Khameini has “deliberately undercut his own clerical class” at times and thrown in his lot with Ahmadinejad, as a survival strategy:
Far from fretting about an impending attack from Israel or America, guard leaders have been warning the ayatollah that the most formidable threat to the Islamic Republic is a “soft regime change policy” involving the use of “orange revolutions” (as the hard-line Iranian newspaper Kayhan recently editorialized).
Encircled by American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, besieged from within by disgruntled citizens, the supreme leader has turned to a bellicose strongman to preserve the system that elevated him. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei — who was scorned as a religious lightweight by many more established mullahs when he was chosen for the top post in 1989 — has repeatedly shown himself willing to undercut the “Islamic” in Islamic revolution. In doing so, he has painted himself into a corner — a permanent alliance with Mr. Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guards. And this fraudulent election will only push them closer together.
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Also of note:
“The Web v. The Republic of Iran”, Anne-Marie Corley, MIT Technology Review
“Iran’s Perpetual Revolution”, Steve Coll, New Yorker (Think Tank blog)
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