John Rickards and/or Sean Cregan are... the Nameless Horror

Since when did you give two shits about Iran? Really? I mean, yes, the demonstrations are a big deal, for reasons I’m pretty sure not everyone grasps, but frankly the self-righteous “solidarity with our brothers in democracy” shite being peddled by so many otherwise sane and rational people is fucking nauseating. I didn’t notice a mass “green your avatar” campaign in 2005 when there were well-known accusations of vote-rigging in favour of Ahmadinejad. I didn’t see everyone and their fucking dog coming out to condemn the clearly corrupt system in every other election in the country because the Guardian Council (which, incidentally, makes for a fantastic supervillain group name) personally decide who’s allowed to stand and who’s not and which therefore generally don’t allow in anyone who might want to, oooh, get rid of the Guardian Council and leader-for-life Khameni.

No, but now CNN are waving the green fucking flag suddenly we’re all one with the struggle to help the oppressed masses rise up and overthrow someone who might – and might not – actually have won fairly, or not, in support of someone who none of you fucking know a thing about other than “he’s the other one”, who’s really likely to be no practical difference to Ahmadinejad (with the possible exception of not being a Holocaust denier) and who in any case is just a figurehead beneath Khameni. If the opposition parties got their most fervent wish and a rerun of the election, it wouldn’t lead to the downfall of the Guardian Council. That would require another revolution, and that ain’t happening yet.

Paint your Twitter avatar green and pat yourself on the back, you revolutionary soldier of liberty, you. And then carry on doing the absolutely fuck all you were doing before this all kicked off.

(Most of you. Some of you were doing things before, I’m sure, and for some of you, none of what I’m about to say will equally apply.)

I don’t remember a similar vox-pop movement against Musharraf when he was president of Pakistan. (Because Musharraf was, of course, our friend across the Afghan border, and it doesn’t do to cause trouble.) I don’t remember one for every other despot kicked from power in the past few years.

I don’t see you people throwing your weight behind revolutionary, anti-dictatorial or democratic movements in Burma, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo (where somewhere in the region of 1,500 people continue to die every day as a result of the ongoing civil war and rampant human rights abuses), North Korea, Syria, Libya, Sudan or any one of a dozen others I could name.

Because they’re not on TV right now and they don’t have a nice flag you can drape round your shoulders like a replica fucking football shirt and then go back to scratching your arse, happy in the knowledge that you are, spiritually, there in solidarity with your fellow freedom-lovers and that your good deed for the day is done. Well fucking done.

Posted: 8 months, 26 days ago.

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  1. Awe. Some. Nicely played. Guilt Inducing AND mean. You need a monkey reference though.

  2. I did the green-avatar thing for about a day, partially b/c I wanted to change my twitter picture anyway and partially to make the point of solidarity (or “solidarity”?) but not to belabor the point. But ultimately, the groupthink/sheeple thing I think you’re picking up on is less about Iran and more about a larger issue of, um, white liberal guilt maybe? Conformity? Wanting to behave like your friends?

    That said, the Iran situation reminds me a great deal of the Congo, ca. 1997, when Mobuto Sese Seko was overthrown, Laurent Kabila took over and it turned out he kind of sucked, to put it mildly. And obviously, things haven’t gotten much better. But it’s all too easy for Western countries, espec Americans, to think that democracy will save the day immediately. It won’t. (Iraq, anyone?) Not to get all cynical but there’s really no such thing as instant utopia, especially one forced upon a society by agenda-filled groups.

    • by Sarah
    • at 23:19 on 18.06.09

  3. Safe to say, then, that you won’t be sporting this particular wristband…?

  4. I generally respect your opinion, but you’re talking out of your ass here. So the world didn’t get behind other causes as legitimate as this one? Boo fucking hoo. Circimstances have aligned to favor Iran over, say, Zimbabwe, in the public mind. For example, Iran has, on average, a higher level of technology, so we’re able to see cell-phone video and read Twitter posts.

    This is a pivotal moment in a country that has been a force for chaos in the world. Millions of Iranians have defied their regime and are willing to risk life and limb for their freedom. So maybe it’s cool and trendy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not important. We’re not talking about the new Britney Spears album.

    And of course Mousavi is no George Washington, but if this movement succeeds, he or whoever else becomes President will owe his position to the people of Iran, and that’s who he will have to answer to. Iranians are free to vote in whoever they want, from a liberalizing reformer to a hardline conservative, as long as it’s their choice.

    If the movement is successful it could have much wider implications. Perhaps Iran will stop propping up troublemakers like Hamas and Hezbollah – a couple of the biggest stumbling blocks to peace in the Middle East (just to show I’m completely fair-minded, the Israeli settlement movement is another). That’s far from certain, but certainly possible, especially with Iran’s dire economic situation.

    Now let’s face it, anything you or I or anyone else outside of Iran does will shrink into insignificance next to what the Iranians themselves do, but WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU to tell us we’re wrong? If we can’t do good everywhere, we shouldn’t do good anywhere? Well, I’ll try to do whatever tiny little bit I can to help. It’s not much, but network effects require networks.

    Feel free to belittle hipster activism all you want, but this is a little more important than PETA getting pissed at Obama for swatting a fly.

    • by Graham
    • at 00:56 on 19.06.09

  5. (Sorry, I seem to have gotten a little worked up over this. To me, it’s either Tiananmen Square or the Berlin Wall, and I vividly remember when both of those happened.)

    • by Graham
    • at 01:01 on 19.06.09

  6. Read the fucking piece again, mate. I’m pissed at those who have had, and who will continue to have after this, no interest whatsoever in politics or international human and civil rights who’ve suddenly become all self-congratulatory because they’ve discovered the retweet button in Twitter and who are now wandering around all puffed up because they’ve done their bit to make the people of the world freer. As Sarah mentioned, the sheep reflex. Act all proud and feel warmly self-righteous and merrily go on ignoring everything else for the rest of their lives because they know, in their heart of hearts, that they’ve already Done Right. Which is, frankly, horseshit. What they’ve actually achieved is about as meaningful as a sparrow’s fart in a hurricane.

    Now, people who understand that when they paint their avatar green or ill-advisedly pass on proxy IPs on a public system they’re not really likely to make a blind bit of difference, but, hey, it’s five minutes and they might as well – fine. It’s those who kid themselves that they’re now part of the global struggle against oppression and that they’ve done what they can, those are the people who need to be kicked in the head because they’re deluding themselves into believing that they can go on ignoring the shit that goes on elsewhere in the world because it’s no longer their problem. Or to back up their new-found interest in global liberation by getting involved beyond Iran, in one of the many, many places that are worse or that could be more important, globally. China, for instance. To shit or get off the pot.

    Rather, if you will, like the many, many people who claim to be environmentalists because they’ve put in some fluorescent lightbulbs or recycle their empty wine bottles and assume it no longer matters that they holiday in Aruba every year or waste enough food to feed in a week to make a dinner for a hundred people.

    Or, exactly as Steve alluded to, those who buy the wristband to show their support for the whaling ban/carbon caps/ending world poverty/whatever the fucking issue of the moment is, and who do nothing else because they’re happy they’ve made a contribution. Or the people who thought Live8 was actually going to stop third world debt.

    Call me old-fashioned but “activism” used to mean more than changing the colour of a fucking online avatar or endlessly repeating something someone else told you. And there are people doing what by any standards would class as activism on the Iranian front, but those aren’t the people I’m having a go at.

    Who am I to tell the ones that I am speaking to that they’re wrong? I’m someone with more than half a fucking brain cell and enough cynicism to refloat the Titanic, and since they are, frankly, wrong, I shouldn’t be – and rather doubt I am – the only one to point it out to them. That self-delusion and the intellectual and social laziness it engenders is wholly unproductive. I don’t even mind people who do fuck all about things that they know they could – hell, I’m one of them – because at least that’s honest.

    On a few specific points, no, Iranians are not and will not be free to vote in whomever they want unless – as currently seems unlikely – the current system of Iran is overthrown too. All candidates have to be approved by the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader, which immediately writes out whole blocks of people, especially at the council and parliamentary level, who people might otherwise want to vote for. And a change in presidency is likely to do piss bugger all to Iran’s support for Hezbollah, who were established by the Council-loyal Revolutionary Guard and who retained their funding under the relatively liberal reign of Khatami, and nothing to Hamas, whose main source of funds is – like just about every other Middle Eastern terrorist group you care to mention – our good allies in that fine, democratic society of Saudi Arabia.

    Lastly, it’s highly debatable that public outside support for the opposition in Iran is even that helpful to Mousavi or anyone else; it allows their critics to paint them as pawns of Western nations seeking to encourage another in our fine series of well thought-out regime changes. Which is idle speculation on my part, but is at least more thought that the aforementioned posters of proxy IPs put into their mass retweeting effort before they realised that, shit, the bad guys have the internet too.

    • by John R
    • at 13:19 on 19.06.09

  7. Just picking up on what Sarah said, I don’t see it in terms of white liberal guilt, so much as manufacturing the kind of image we want others to have of us. There’s really no reason, say, to wear a ‘make poverty history’ or a ‘bullying is bad’ wristband, because you’re making a statement that shouldn’t actually need making and which achieves nothing for the cause itself. It is, however, a nice, simple way of presenting yourself as someone who’s involved and knowledgable and who cares: constructing the narrative of yourself you want other people to read.

    Not everyone, of course. And I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing. Just a symptom of our increasingly listless, disconnected, bitesize times. Ho hum.

  8. Wasn’t really going to respond because, well, politics generally isn’t my bag. Didn’t even know there were wristbands to be had… I can’t say I’ve cared about Iran all that long, but they are trying to develop nukes (or so I hear) and that raises my level of concern a tad. It also seems to me that the position in question is more than just a figurehead role though not as powerful as, say, the US president. That is, Admadenijad has a bully pulpit which he uses and Mousavi would have the same presumably and the rhetoric might just change. And rhetoric, I think, is a power.

    Also, I’ve heard from the news that many of the protestors have been shouting “Death to Khameni.” Which must be a little uncomfortable for the supreme leader…

    I side with Bryon on the monkey issue.

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