… written on 18 June 2009…

I have just received a friend’s message on Facebook asking me to change my picture to green to show my support for the Iranian people. “Great,” I thought. “That’s the least I can do.” But then I asked myself, “Why?” Green is not the colour of the people of Iran, green is the colour of Mousawi. Why should I promote Mousawi on my profile?

In that moment, I understood that how the world is reacting to what is going on in Iran is yet another showcase of our society’s biggest failure: ignorance. We are continuously forgetting to ask questions and through this, crippling our awareness and our ability to have our own critical opinion.

A few weeks ago, there was a scandal in Austria because students in a high-school asked why Jews boarded the trains to Auschwitz. The kids were punished and labelled as anti-Semitic. They will never again dare to ask questions. I have witnessed a similar aversion towards questions at Vienna University. I attended a course taught by a professor who tried to motivate students to be more involved and more critical. This only resulted in students, who are used to passively memorise what has been served to them, starting a “riot” against the professor.

The broadcast media is playing a huge role in this, and the media is setting its own agenda. Following CNN, for example, you quickly get a very simplified, black and white picture of what is going on in Iran – of a whole country rising up in opposition against the “bad” anti-Semitic Ahmadinejad, of a whole country for the “good” reformer Mousawi. These are high-intensity, emotional reports. Suddenly you will find yourself hating a regime in a far away country and supporting the people on the streets. Without having a real clue WHY?

Watching CNN, you see again how easy it is for the media to construct a reality of their choice (it is again on us to ask “why” this very choice). The viewers are fed this reality in such a way that they are not given space to develop their own critical awareness. And it proved again with Iran: Not only are we not posing the right questions. We are not posing any questions at all.

And it is so easy to start with WHY’s: Why is Ahmadinejad “bad”? Why should Mousawi be good? Why do I believe that the elections were fraudulent? Why should I become involved? You can then continue with WHAT’s: What are those protests really about? What do Iranian people actually want? What is actually going on behind the curtains? And what role does the rest of the world play?

And once you get more informed, new important questions will rise:

What about the country’s history?

Iranians have a history of protesting and starting revolutions.  Those past protests and revolutions were often manipulated by the “west”,  ending in numerous changes in their regimes. Unfortunately, most of the time, the changes were for the worse, not bringing the wanted freedom and well-being to the population. The current regime has also come to power through the revolution of 1979.

Who are the stakeholders?

When you try to understand modern Iranian history, the political changes, regimes and power-struggles, you will get dizzy for the complexity and sad for the tragedy of this country’s history. The most tragic part in Iranian modern history is the fact that most of the upheavals were instrumented by the western world, lead by Great Britain and USA. It shocks to see how the destiny of a country of that size and that cultural history can be manipulated through a series of tragic events. So you cannot but wonder if anyone has their fingers in current protests again – and why.

Do you always believe the media?

We are witnessing yet another media-phenomenon. The Iranian government has restricted reporting, so the media had started a hunt for “gossip” and amateur reports.

The emergence of new technology, including mobile phone cameras and internet sites such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook, has made our society addicted to any “forbidden” or “intimate” material. CNN made a special topic out of this, turning reporting from Iran into a mixture of a quest for Holy Grail and Big Brother. This ended in viewers happy to witness a hunt for forbidden and unreachable content and forgetting to question what they are seeing and hearing.

And ironically, just between the forbidden pictures from Iran, there was a report about an opening of a Banksy exhibition in the Bristol Museum. This graffiti artist owes a huge part of his fame to the fact that what he did was forbidden and he managed to stay anonymous.

What is democracy?

One of the issues discussed on CNN was if Arab people are jealous of Iranian people’s will to stand up for their rights. If we remember that only recently, USA was governed by a man whom 78% of US citizens did not approve of, then the question should have been if the US people are jealous and why haven’t they protested to push their will through? Millions of people around the world have protested against the USA’s planned attack on Iraq. In a truly democratic world, wouldn’t that have changed USA’s plans?

We are also forgetting the problems with Florida votes which lead to last Bush’s last victory. Why didn’t we get this involved back then?

Furthermore, it seems that we are only hearing the louder side, Mousawi’s followers in Teheran. But only because they are louder and more visible, are they really a majority?

And finally, let us not forget that the choice Iranian people have had in this election was far from democratic. Both candidates come from the same regime. Which leads us to the next question:

Is any change good change?

Since 1979 revolution, Iran is governed by the religious leaders. The current man in power is not Ahmadinejad, it is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Both Ahmadinejad and Mousawi are “his people”. And although Mousawi is called a “reformer”, his reforms are minimal and will not change the repressive regime in this country (as he himself stated on his website). Women will stay discriminated against, marriage age will stay 13, and people will get stoned.  Meaning that the actual protests in support of Mousawi are not about the real change of the sysrem, they are about fair counting of the votes.  Which, it has to be admitted, is a start.

It will be interesting to watch how this episode about the Iranian elections will end. I don’t like the fact that this is happening so shortly after (for the first time in the history) Israel has been not so fully supported by the USA.  Hopefully it will, just like all other stories hyped up by the media, simply get exchanged for a newer hype. But what will be left is a huge task for us not to stay ignorant, and for the Iranian people to bring true change to their country.

And once they have this vision, I will immediately change all my pictures into whatever colour they ask me to.

….and today, three days later, I must add: every dead person is one dead person too much…..