Posted on 06/14/2009 3:48:59 PM PDT by lewisglad
Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message. Here's the Twitter from a Moussavi supporter:
ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and shout in protest #IranElection
That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.
It's increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks. That's why they didn't see what those of us surgically attached to modems could spot a mile away: something was happening in Iran. If Drum is right, the mullahs believed their own propaganda about victory until reality hit them so hard so fast, they miscalculated badly and over-reached.
The key force behind this is the next generation, the Millennials, who elected Obama in America and may oust Ahmadinejad in Iran. They want freedom; they are sick of lies; they enjoy life and know hope.
Maybe that's what we're hearing on the rooftops of Tehran: the sound of the next revolution
(Excerpt) Read more at andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com ...
It’s ironic that Andrew Sullivan is so horrified by Abu Ghraib when it has nothing on his sex life.
The mellenials want freedom? No, I think the ones here want free iPhone service and ecstasy tablets covered by Obama Healthcare.
Doesn’t Sullivan have AIDS?
What? Sullivan actual authored a post not about Trig Palin?
Horse dung, Andy. The media establishment in the U.S. was/is the propaganda arm of the Obama administration. Obama won not because the media was bypassed, but because they were complicit.
It appears to me to be just another bloodletting without any real change. There’s no indication, at least from what I can tell, that real change is coming to Iran. And just because one group of radicals is less radical than the other doesn’t mean they are peace and freedom loving people ready to join the civilized world.
>>> Maybe that’s what we’re hearing on the rooftops of Tehran: the sound of the next revolution <<<<<<
Hey Andy! That sound from the rooftops was “Allahu Akbar”!
That could pose some problems for other Andrew Sullivans in “the next revolution.”
If true, twitter wouldn't work.
Sullivan is out of it.
The cowardly collectivist idiots who voted for Obama are actually the driving force behind the brave Persians in Iran facing death against butchering Arabs because liberals hate hate in the name of love, speak rage in the name of peace, want government money to protect them from work, and believe in hope and change in the hands of overlords is the only way to be safe from totalitarianism.
In other news, Leftists have declared cold to be warm to fight discomfort.
Ahmedinejad didn’t need Twitter to rally his base among the rural poor. We’re letting New Media obsessions blind us to how their audience is limited by age, income and geography.
At least they have more guts and balls to challenge fraud and tyranny than most of us Americans "home of the brave and free" have.
Well they have more of something.
I think we’ve come to romanticize each side in absolute terms. One is “good” and one is “bad”. It doesn’t really occur to us that it could simply all be over which tyrant rules and neither is particularly positive for the future.
In the short term you are most probably right.
There won’t be an overnight break from islamic republic to free democractic republic.
But if (big if) they succesfully throw out Ahmadinejad, they won’t (at least that’s what I hope and expect) waste that momentum. They will go after Khamenei next. That’s what many protesters are already calling for.
There will be a transition period with “reformers” from the old regime ala Musavi, Rafsanjani and Khatami. You are right that these aren’t the wonderful freedom loving persons we would prefer.
But the genie will be out of the bottle and the people will not accept another election with pre-selected candidates.
The old “reformers” will have to either make place for real leaders or change their own politics.
I know this is vague and speculative, but I want to remind that after the Shah left in early 1979 it took almost one year of transition and moderate Prime Ministers, until the Khomeinists fully took over the power.
The break won’t happen overnight, and there will be again internal powerfights, just as there were between the leftists and islamists in 1978-1980.
If the results of the events in Iran won’t satisfy the security needs of Israel or the US we will have to continue as we did before. But it still could be the moment of opportunity to erode the entire regime.
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