« The Smearing of Health Care Reform | Main | Realism »

June 15, 2009

Comments

Quite a gallery.

Thanks, publius.

"The Boston Globe's "Big Picture" has a photo gallery of the latest from Iran that's worth checking out...."

Iran for photographers right now seems to be, he observed dryly, what the military calls a "target rich environment."

I particularly found interesting the pictures of the Cannes Film Festival taped to the wall behind the computer. I was trying to make out who was in the photo collages, but couldn't. Actors and such?

There must be someway for people throughout the world to show solidarity with the protestors in Iran. Our government can't do it - for obvious reasons. But somehow - there must be someway for ordinary people to show solidarity. Freedom fighers should not be abandoned!

"But somehow - there must be someway for ordinary people to show solidarity."

Wear a green shirt to a Persian restaurant. It'll probably get back to Iran.

I dunno - his monitor was smashed but they didn't take the computer? (It's down on the right). New monitor and he's back in business - no fit.

From the comments at the Globe:

718.I'm an Iranian woman who was born in Tehran and moved to the United States at the age of 5. America should act in support of the Iranian youth to outs this dictatorhsip after 30 years! An injustice anywhere is an injustice EVERYWHERE & a threat to the ideology of Freedom wholly. Freedom is NOT a right, it must be Fought for, & once attained, it must be protected with the highest diligence from inequality and injustice -- as those are cracks which can eventually break freedom. With that said, Dear Iranian Youth ---- BURN SH*T IN THE STREETS & PROTEST until you are free! Before 1979 Iran was Free!!

Posted by NG June 15, 09 08:44 PM

Before 1979 Iran was free?

Rafsanjani vs Khamenei(behind the scenes?

Batista vs Castro?

Anyway, this really looks like a bourgeois counter-revolution. I am not taking a side in this civil war.

Anyway, this really looks like a bourgeois counter-revolution. I am not taking a side in this civil war.

I have a bunch of Polish friends that might want to talk to you about protests to overthrow a government. Bourgeois or not, we are better off with fewer tyannies.

For sale: 1 computer "Slightly Shotgunned!". (See http://hrwiki.org/wiki/virus#Easter_Eggs if you don't get the reference)

Support Iran This Way

1. Print out a bunch of photos or symbols and have a bunch of people hold them as protest signs.

Use maybe 50 copies of this photo or a version of the graphic in this photo. The black-and-white logo will need to be redrawn, but will go through any copier cheaply.

2. Take a photo your local crowd holding the signs in solidarity with Iran.

3. Send photo of your crowd to Iran for them to print out. Make a flickr page for international support photos.

Support from China, Africa, Los Angeles, would all have an impact...

Images should not use text. They must translate visually.

One of the things I liked best about that photo series was how many women I saw in the crowds. Although I worry about the girl in the very first photograph.

Whether or not this is some kind of "bourgeois counter-revolution," I know why I'm on the Green Side (TM). Look closely at The Big Picture photo array. Where are the women in the pictures? Not many in Ahmadinejad's crowds, which are loaded with 30 to 50 year-old men. Look at the Basij, again 30 to 50 year-old men with pretty free hands with the batons. On the Green side, women are not only among the crowds but they are actors. Glad to see cofax noticed that too.

I am a little too old and cynical to go all moist over student & youth protest simply because it is protest, or because they are young. They are the children of the elite, after all. They are also young.

The Cultural Revolution and the 1979 Iranian Revolution were partially student movements. My quick very ignorant sense of Iranian history was that the 1979 revolution simply shifted power from the secular business/professional class to the religious clerics, and only in degree, with some benefit to the poorer and labour class. I expect Rafsanjani and Mousavi just expected to get a little more feelthy rich from this election, while the rich kids got disco and twitter, and pooer gor pooer.

I specifically do connect the events in Iran to the neo-liberal manipulation of youth, based on identity and social issue politics, with the end goal of further entrenching the financial elites and reducing the size of welfare state. Pitting intellectual elites against blue collar workers in subtle and complicated ways, and making money on the split.

This is happening in other nations.

@bob mcmanus: Your sense of the 1979 revolution is, in your own words, a quick and ignorant one.

This makes a rote translation of your critique of U.S. politics to an Iranian setting a particularly unpromising basis for analysis.

Laura Secor's response to your approach is worth reading. Not that I expect you to do anything but curl your lip (that neoliberal rag The New Yorker?, I hear you sneer).

An even better antidote to facile, stereotyped views of the political situation in Iran is Trita Parsi's Who's Fighting Who in Iran's Struggle?

Nell, I don't understand why you and publius are supporting Rafsanjani's attempted coup.

"The Cultural Revolution and the 1979 Iranian Revolution were partially student movements"

We're talking China, yes? If so: only a student movement in the sense that the students allowed themselves to be used by Mao for his own purposes. Mao wanted violence, and the students were willing to deliver according to his wishes.

Not knowing if there's a parallel to anything that happened in Iran in 1979, I stop after saying this.

The comments to this entry are closed.