| Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran? |
| Friday, 19 June 2009 23:29 |
 Gordon Brown told the Guardian “"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.” Dan Rather suggests “The revolution may not be televised but it will be twittered” and echoes Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran from Read Write Web. The hype is off the wall. Twitter has passed Facebook in some places, and is an enormously important tool that you must learn if you haven't, but politics ain't that simple.
Reza Shah said years ago “If Khomeini came with tapes, Khomeini then will disappear with the Internet.” From a remarkable Tina Brown interview with his mother, the former Queen. http://bit.ly/Mpoyu The U.S. State Department made a bad mistake persuading Twitter to stay up to encourage the revolution, allowing the regime to place blame on the CIA and others who destroyed democracy In Iran in 1951. It's obviously a genuine movement which deserves respect. Nonetheless, one of the untold stories is almost surely the strong role of the U.S. Dick Cheney's boys spoke publicly about spending hundreds of millions for Iranian “regime change.” They've done a remarkable job of keeping a low profile. I've learned from the 2+2=5 guys in D.C. just how much a good operation with that kind of money can accomplish. What's the word for “astroturf” in Farsi? |