Iran, uploaded

In the news...Iran’s contested election results lead to mass uprisings by the opposition.

‘Iranian democracy’ is not a phrase that flows easily off a Western tongue. The chart-topper at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch group and the International Press Institute, modern Persia seems to mock its history as a progenitor of the first recorded human rights declaration. But on Friday, June 12, 2009 over 80% of the Iranian people came out to vote in the presidential election.  When Iran’s supervising theological body - the Guardian Council headed by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - announced on Saturday that the president-incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won with 63% of the national vote, opposition protesters took to the streets. For the past week, Iran has been delivering images of a democratic struggle that would make Che Guevara proud.

Over the past four years of his presidency, Ahmedinejad made the world flinch more than once. Speaking at Columbia University, he announced that homosexuality does not exist in Iran. At the United Nations he infamously declared the Holocaust to be a ‘myth’ and called for the annihilation of the state of Israel. After a negative response from the international community, official Iran tended to blame the mistranslation of the president’s words. In equating Zionism with Nazi Germany’s territorial aggression or in declaring that 9/11 was just a ‘collapsed building’, the Iranian leader has dealt the Western cultural canon a blow below the belt.

Ahmadinejad seemed to perfect his image as a renegade leader of an antagonistic state to the tic. Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, most people associate Iran with the scandalous book-burning of the Satanic Verses and the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, or, more recently, with the mass outrage over the Prophet Mohammed cartoons. In a state where under the Shari’a law adulterers are allowed to be publicly stoned and thieves’ hand cut off, it does not come as a surprise to the Western public that someone like Ahmadinejad would win the public vote.

But it is at best careless to dismiss the current president as a nut-case leader of a backward nation, even though it appears that it’s exactly what the Western media would like us to do. It is very difficult to find any affirmative information about Ahmadinejad in the foreign press, that swells with generalisations like ‘corruption’, ‘cronyism’ and ‘repression’, while the opposition is ubiquitously referred to as ‘liberal’. Like  some sort of a black-and-white game of chess. Iran does not have a government - it has a regime. That’s the Western consensus. Ahmadinejad’s socialist policies of distributing oil revenues to help the poor or his food subsidies are largely ignored. Much like Mir Hussein Mousavi’s support for the Iranian nuclear programme. The international media has come to the information buffet and picked out the junk food.

Mr. Mousavi - the former Prime Minister during the Iran-Iraq war and a favourite of the Revolution’s Supreme Leader - is the new favourite liberal pin-up for the West. Unlike Ahmadinejad, who looks more like a foreman of a not-so-well-off kolhoz from a distant Soviet era, Mr. Mousavi photographs well. He is handsomely intellectual. In a country where women’s rights are a subject of human rights abuse groups, his politically active wife is always by his side. In that he resembles Mihail Gorbachev, who was the first Soviet leader to travel with his university-educated couture-clad wife, unleashing waves of envy and derision in the USSR while promoting the idea of ‘socialism with a human face’ in the West. Similarly, Mr. Mousavi’s tailored suits and stylish glasses make his seem like someone we can talk to, someone we like.

There is a sense of general euphoria about the triumph of information technology over dictatorial governments. In the Soviet Union, it was satellite television - in Iran, the world wide web. YouTube, and - as a consequence of the information ban, the leading networks - are full of images of students being shot in the streets of Tehran. The world is applauding the audacity of the uploading revolutionaries. Iran’s government tried shutting down the social-networking site Facebook as a precaution. But they were just not on the young population’s beat. Who would have thunk that the 20-somethings would prefer Twitter? Exactly.

In accusing the United States of economic and informational terrorism, Ahmadinejad's Iran is ironically not very far from George W. Bush’s famous ‘you are either with us or against us’ stance. Unpopular as he was, Bush had his supporters for a stronger, harder-headed America. Why does Iran have to be different? For us - here inside the mind of Western democracy - the fewer people we see speaking in their strange doctrinal, religious tongues, the tighter we sleep at night. Globalisation is the new, world-wide peace treaty. And it seems to be conquering an insurgent government, click by click.