The angry stalemate continues in Iran, with numerous subtle developments that make it hard to draw any conclusions from the outside about where things are heading. There are reports that the police have stopped repressing protest; that they may have been ordered to do so by no less than the Supreme Leader; that the numbers at the protests have been plummeting; that outside of Tehran the movement is close to over… I don’t know how accurate any of these claims are but I’ve read all of them in multiple venues over the last few days.
In any case, it is clear that protests are continuing, the Iranian regime is not making any concessions of substance, and that the resistance/”reform movement” is not just the wealthy, Westernized people of north Tehran but a wider movement that cuts across class boundaries. My instinct is that the regime will be able to wait out the protests, but that this run of action will not be forgotten in Iran – that there will be no immediate change but the political landscape will have shifted as a result. That’s just a guess.
The resistance in Iran has also been a case study in the value of the new media. Twitter has come of age during this run of events. It has been fascinating to watch Twitter used not just as a reporting tool but also an organization and identity-creation tool, and even more fascinating to watch in real time as government-supporters (or government employees) try and insert disinformation into the converation and get quickly exposed and denounced. It is certain that the dissident youth and the authorities in China have been taking careful notes.
Twitter coverage of Iran has also been bouncing around the celebrity Twitter-net; frex, Eliza Dushku (45K followers) has been pushing this a lot thanks to her recent visit there via Global Exchange (I love this inadvertantly hilarious pic: can you possibly guess which one of these people grew up in Hollywood?) and Twitter’s uber-celeb Ashton Kutcher (nearing 2.5M followers) has been passing on street resistance techniques to Iranian protesters. This petition to the UN has been circulating on Twitter too. I’m still unconvinced about the long-term viability of Twitter – I don’t like how it scales at the personal level, the difference in experience between following 20 people and following 200 people is massively negative – but it’s certainly making an impact. (That said, Google Wave will change the paradigm again. Anyone want to guess what the Iranian crisis would look like if Wave was up and running in the digital wild?)
My pick of the reportage has to be Robert Fisk’s coverage. He puts it together smartly.
Category: Everything Political
Here come the Iran experts
As you’ll note from every news service, something’s up in Iran. They just completed their Presidential elections and announced a big victory for regime favourite Ahmadinejad; now there are protests that the result is fraudulent. The word ‘coup’ is being bandied about.
The overall result doesn’t seem out of line with what little I know about Iran; Ahmadinejad has a lot of support out of the cities. That said, the details I’ve seen talked about certainly raise eyebrows. The reported victory margin is huge for a President whose only consistent public-image successes were in his interactions with the U.S. More alarming signs are noted by Juan Cole, such as Ahmadinejad reported as taking Tehran by over 50%. Cole is of course cautious about whether this is proof of tampering, but he concludes that it “looks to me like a crime scene”.
In any case, it is clear that the big cities are hosting a challenge to the legitimacy of the election result, and that the regime is mobilising in force to put down the dissent. If the election was stolen, there’s no way to hand it back to the rightful owner now – the regime has thrown its weight behind this and unless the Supreme Leader goes down we’re stuck with four more years of Ahmadinejad. What’s at stake now is the terms on which the regime operates from here on. Things have got a bit rougher and tighter since Khatami’s term as President but overall the Revolutionary Council and the Supreme Leader have been able to exert a lot of control relatively softly; expect that to change, and for political battles to get a lot more upfront in the coming four years.
Iran exerts a lot of power over the region, so there will be global consequences for this sequence of events. We all just have to wait for the battles to be fought and resolved. Of course, the rest of the world should be quick to demand transparency of election processes and the right to protest freely. Soft support for the relatively-reform friendly candidate Mousavi isn’t a bad idea either. Still, Ahmadinejad will be in the seat for the next four years and it’s important to keep talking with the man. He’s far more conservative than I’d like but he’s also smart and principled; we could do a lot worse than him.
And don’t get carried away. This is hardly a coup; the President of Iran isn’t even the head of state. It isn’t a civil war either and isn’t going to become one. And as dramatic as the photos of protest are, they do not tell more than a tiny part of the story.
Also worth a look: Laura Secor at the New Yorker.
Race Issues
Last few months have been awash in race issues. Going to note ’em down here, for my own reference as much as anything else. There are no conclusions.
Pocket God controversy: an iPod game called Pocket God comes to broad notice for its depiction of primitive and stupid islanders, which borrows imagery from stereotypes of pacific islanders (with a dash of other “primitives” imagery thrown in). Pasifika people are not happy; anthropologists dissect the representations used; the makers make respond with some token changes. Most fans of the game don’t see what is the big deal.
Eskimo candy controversy: Canadian tourist in NZ calls out our iconic “Eskimo” lolly for using an offensive term for the Inuit people. The company announces it has no plans to make any changes. New Zealanders are outspoken in their venom towards this PC-gone-mad tourist. Canadian media is bemused, even though the expert on the term says it’s offensive.
People of Colour and SF/Fantasy: an epic, sprawling argument over depiction of people of colour in genre fiction; became known as Racefail. Good summary here. More recently, a new alt-history book proposes an alternate history of America where the native Americans have never existed. Comment thread about the book explodes as native Americans express concern about being removed from history. Somewhere in the chaos, people note that a common assumption is that the SF/F audience is pretty much white, leading to much sarcastic self-identification as “unicorns” by PoC fans of the genre. This leads to a “Wild unicorn herd check-in” where PoC genre fans by the hundred raise their hands and announce their existence. (Been following this one mostly through the coverage of Bruce Baugh, who draws some good conclusions from this speaking as a white creator).
Melissa Lee: Government wunderkind bye-election candidate Melissa Lee, who is Asian, causes a huge storm by suggesting that heavily-Polynesian South Auckland is full of criminals who are… there’s a motorway… actually, it doesn’t make any sense, so don’t worry about the detail, or check out the Gordon Campbell report. Race is not overtly mentioned here but sits just under the surface. A commenter on the Aotearoa Ethnic Network mailing list cheekily applauds the government’s racial progress in successfully bringing the wealthy elite of all ethnic groups together through their shared fear of the underclass.
Hmm. There have been other prominent race-related stories in the media, although curiously Obama has not been any of them. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
No, Seriously?
I have slept on this, and now that I have a new day before me and I can perhaps view things in their proper perspective, can I say:
Christine Rankin as families commissioner? W T monkey-fighting F is this insanity?
And she was offered the children’s commissioner position before that? (Can’t find a linky for this, it was in the Dom Post yesterday.)
For the furriners who have made the mistake of reading this far:
* Take the most divisive public argument in recent NZ history, the so-called “anti-smacking legislation” that removed the defence of reasonable force for prosecutions of physical abuse of children
* Add the most divisive and despised civil servant in the last couple decades, the brash overconfident wonder who took our social safety net provider and ran it gleefully into the ground in the bad old 90s, under a welfare-is-bad National government; she was of course on the side of the reactionaries in the smacking argument
* Serve hot!
Says Ms Rankin: “We need to stop being politically correct.”
*head smash wall – repeat until fade*
Rodney being a Rodney
I cannot comfortably express how infuriated I am by this. I was so angry about the demand for a review that I put a campaign together to resist the time-wasting. And now I find that the people who made the demand are so cynical about it they’re not even participating in the process?
*deep breaths*
On the bright side, an ACT-less committee will probably do a better job of engaging with the science, right?
(Man, this turned into week-of-climate-change-posts. Huh.)
Affirmed
That’s the best word I can come up with right now to describe how it feels to see my submission to the climate change committee on the parliament website.
It shows that the effort I went to didn’t just disappear into the aether, never to be seen again.
It shows that my voice has been heard by everyone sitting on that committee. (Not listened to, necessarily, but certainly it has been heard.)
It shows that our democracy has functioning channels of straightforward communication.
It’s a good feeling, actually. I recommend it. Participate.
Bill McKibben and 350
Friday night, I went to a public lecture by Bill McKibben, who is the originator of the 350 movement. This movement is based on the work of top climate scientist Jim Hansen, who has said that atmospheric CO2 levels above 350ppm are not compatible with human civilization. We’re already over that concentration.
Bill was a funny and engaging speaker, well-polished. He spoke about the social justice aspects of climate change – his personal turning point was looking at a crowded ward of shivering victims of Dengue fever and wondering how many of those beds were attributable to the emissions of his home country, the USA. (Answer: a quarter of them.)
It is crucial to get CO2 levels down. Crucial doesn’t even begin to describe it, actually. This is the most important work there is right now. Individual action isn’t enough; we need to achieve a global agreement for a carbon pricing system. Only with a strong price signal can we achieve the change we need in the time we have.
In December, the world meets at Copenhagen to discuss these issues. It is pretty much our last chance to get this global agreement before we’re committed to very dangerous levels of climate change. Bill and 350 are pushing Oct 24 as a global day of action, to send the message to our leaders that we want Copenhagen to deliver. My views on the value of public protest have waxed and waned over the years, but I am optimistic about this day of action. Partly because the 350 crew have thought about this hard and have already had some success at pushing political change; partly because I haven’t heard of any better plan than this.
So, this is a heads-up. I talked about the 350 movement, and the necessity of political leadership, this time a year ago. I’ll be talking about it more over the coming months. This is important.
NZ outpost of the 350 movement.
(Idiot of NRT was also at the talk. We did some plotting and scheming afterwards.)
Ian Tomlinson
At the big protests in London against the G20, a man named Ian Tomlinson died. The official story described the man as an innocent bystander dying from a heart attack unrelated to the protest; furthermore, police attempts to help him were hindered by violent protesters.
This sparked a post by lew at kiwipolitico, about anti-police bias in the media coverage of the protests; I commented to agree with him, which I thought was remarkable given my experience at the G8 protests and the way coverage there skewed heavily pro the official line. I had no doubt that many among the police were adding to the violence, but I also didn’t question the official version of Tomlinson’s death and its aftermath.
More fool me.
The Guardian has footage of Tomlinson moments before his death. It shows him walking away from the police with his hands in his pockets, not in the throng of protesters but by himself. A police officer approaches him from behind, batons his legs and then pushes him down. The police stand over him as he talks up at them from where he landed; a protester comes over and helps him up.
There is testimony that he was assaulted by the police a few minutes before this footage as well; I have no reason to doubt it, given the emergence of this confirmatory record.
Duncan Campbell writes well about the situation and how the police have not learned any lessons from the de Menezes shooting.
It makes me second-guess my response to this blog post by George Monbiot. I have huge respect for Monbiot, but this went too far for me: “…there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job.” Reading over it, it still strikes me as a rubbish argument that does not hold up at all. But the overall thrust of the piece, that the police are pushed into violent confrontation with protesters by structural necessities, isn’t something I can argue with.
Add into the picture the UK’s new laws against photographing police and you have a deeply unpleasant set-up that is outright dangerous for democracy. There is a real risk that this kind of footage – the only way to counteract the police’s self-serving official stories of this and many other events – will be itself be forbidden.
Here’s part of one of my comments to Lew’s post. This holds up still.
Ultimately though, I point at the the media and police and almost every pundit with a public voice who unerringly frame approaching protests as riots in the making; this framing always goes substantially beyond what is reasonable. Furthermore, it fosters the conditions needed for things to escalate quickly. I think it is incumbent on the media and law enforcement to adopt more responsible policies in their treatment of protest, as they have much more power than the protesters do. (Not that police/media using a fully responsible frame would result in a fully responsible protest; but it would be nice to see such an improvement.)
I have no neat summary of this event. The Met have always been thugs; at the Edinburgh G8 it was widely known that the policing done by Met officers shipped up for the occasion was provocative and dangerous while the local Scottish police were much more reasonable. Its just an unpleasant surprise to see it captured so starkly like this.
Something has got to give.
How To Get Out Of A Recession
The same way you got in, apparently.
Front page of the DomPost today, the nation’s Head Boy John Key talks about how very much he agrees with his finance minister about getting NZ out of recession:
“We have the same strategy and … we are in agreement about what is required,” he said. “The speed you can argue about, but the prescription’s the same.”
That included getting better performance from the government sector, less regulation, a lower tax environment, trade links with the world, and policy reforms, such as to the Resource Management Act.
Hmmm. That prescription sounds suspiciously familiar. Is it, perhaps, exactly the same prescription offered by the Nats consistently for the last decade, regardless of the prevailing economic conditions? And, in fact, isn’t it exactly the same prescription offered by the right everywhere around the world, for every problem? Lily the Pink would be envious of the broad applicability of this particular medicinal compound…
(Edit: of course, I misrepresent the Head Boy’s plan, which has got one new bit in it – a national cycleway! Oh – hang on…)
People and Borders
The Alligator‘s gone back home. Hopefully not for too long; he’s undergoing immigration department processes to get back here and be able to work. He’s young with no dependents, a skillset that’s in the NZ skill shortage list, experience running a successful business and plans to start a new one here; just the kind of person our systems should be set up to encourage, one would think. It still seems to be a long slog with little comfort to be had and little certainty in outcome
He’s not alone of course. Sonal is searching for a way to get back into the UK, for love, for work, for every good reason. 2trees went through epic battles with the same country’s immigration section that only begun to be resolved when he married the local girl he’d been with for years; and that still hasn’t been the end of it.
Sonal asks bluntly what immigration controls achieve. And certainly, there is plenty of room to question that, in a globalised world where money flows easily.
I don’t have any answers, at least none that I can vouch for – I could happily expound on some random theory or other but that would have only a stopped-clock’s chance of being correct. In fact I don’t really have anything much to say at all. I just wanted to mark this stuff out for future though. And perhaps to suggest that, this thing we have of seeing the promise of the world, and allowing people to sink connections into different places but then making it so hard for them to stick around unless they can buy their passage? That isn’t a good way of doing things. Not at all.
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Wellingtonians: I am rather excited by the arrival in our fair city of the Gamblers, one of Korea’s premiere b-boy teams. I highlighted these guys in a Friday Linky back in June last year – linking to this incredible article about them at Salon. Sunday, Capital E, 2.30-3.30 is showtime. They’re touring other centres in NZ too.