Sunday, January 6, 2008

Diplomatic Faux Pas?

When Deutschland recently officially unofficially declared Iranian uranium enrichment enthusiasts personnae non gratis - effectively sacking them, stripping diplo stats and shipping them home sans atomic fanboy stuff it could have been considered one of the "Grits and Deutschmarks Uber Alles" mach shau. Except Deutschers didn't stop there.

Using a trick like the mullahs wrote the book on, Germany dispatched faux diplomats to Tehran, and they weren't carrying Deutschmarks - as befitting Iran's largest legit trading and biz homies - instead (according to unverified sources) they toted lap top computers. In a crazy command and control caliphate like the Islamic Republic - Das ist Verboten! Iranian Foreign Mis Ministry spokescat Ali Hosseini admitted

"Responsible authorities recognized that this person was engaging in
undiplomatic behavior and has to leave Iran."
Responsible authorities recognize recent frantic crackdowns on online fun of any kind - new millenium censoring technologies buddied up with old school headknocking drove Iran's Online Posse into nigh unsustainable levels of overtime hours, new detention facilities and a cyber crackdown on tools that undermine the regime.
This is significant. For the price of a single bunker buster (your choice - nuclear, neutronic or conventional) tens of 1000's of laptop computers with Wi Fi and filter busters could be passed out to combat a regime whose nation is fully crunk with smart, tech saavy young people and perhaps spur the most awesome of all regime changes - from the inside out. In "Children of Jihad" Jared Cohen points out in his Persian pilgrimage that kids in Iran are sick of preachers ruining their nation, their future and their lives:

"The biggest problem in Iran right now is that young people there can tell you
exactly what kind of society they don't want, they can tell you exactly what
kind of society they do want.

These young Iranians cannot tell you for the life of them who they want to lead them. They cannot find a single leader to gravitate around and so without a leader to mobilize them, they are not going to go to this. That's part of it. They are also terrified as a legacy of the student riots and what happened in 1999 but also a lot of them have lost confidence in the reform movement.

So if they go to the streets and risk getting arrested or detained, who in the government are they actually trying to influence? They don't feel like they have an advocate in the establishment right now. Now, I believe that the next leader of Iran is going to come from this youth generation."

Unlimited access to the internet in their own nation would certainly (regime) change that! Unbridle'd internet capitalistic chicanery unleashed with blogs, essays and easy made faux ID's could launch the next generation's future Iranian leadership cadre into political movements with real time communications, rallies and press that the 'authorities' might not be able to counter with traditional despotic control methodology.

Sweet.

1 comment:

  1. I've always wondered what happened to the reform movement that seemed so promising several years back. It's good to read that there's still hope it could be revived.

    There was an interesting article in Wired a couple months back about China's futile attempts to reign in the Internet. I hope Iranian youth are equally enterprising in finding the holes in their government's unholy fire walls.

    ReplyDelete

Hey Y'all! Freedom of Speech is precious! Make it count!