My introduction to the power of Twitter was the Israeli rape of Gaza a few months ago. I was asked by a long-time blogger friend (who has risen to lofty heights on most of the Twitter rating charts) to help retweet on-the-ground news coming from the war zone. The adrenaline rush was incredible. Addiction. Yes. Physical, emotional, mental. It took me a couple of days (or in Twitter parlance, "daze") to see and accept it for what it was. But for this, like all addictions, recognition of the sickness is not resolution. I know that total abstinence is the only solution to addiction of any sort, and I'm still not ready for that. The negative consequences do not yet outpace the goodies, if you understand that.
One reason I got immediately hooked was that it seemed like a cut and dried fight between good and evil. Palestinian good; Isreali bad. On the third day of the Gaza genocide, I was lucky that some clear thinking broke through enough that I could see that Hamas was far from squeaky clean in the conflict. Yes, Zionist Israel sucks big time, but Hamas continued to provoke and, I steadfastly maintain, was at least partially responsible for many of the civilian deaths in the Strip. You can delete me from your ideological blogroll for that, but there it is. I just can't support any violence perpetrated for political tactics and strategies.
At any rate, I learned some lessons about flash mobs and disinfo from the experience. Toward the end of the Gaza invasion, I concentrated on verifiable news and the plight of civilians, rather than taking sides. It didn't seem there were a lot of good guys balancing the bad guys. And a lot of the tweets from the ground were, in a word, shit.
Although I wish it wasn't true, I can't really shake the fact that I'm a white American male. I'm subject to schadenfreude just like the next guy, especially if there's blood, and running crowds, and tear gas flying, and riot sticks. Brings back memories of the Boston and Cambridge Commons in the sixties, I guess. At the very base, riots are a spectator sport, whether you're part of the melée or reporting the blow-by-blow from the grandstand. Sad, but true.
It wasn't that I didn't see this Iran thingy coming. When the water broke on Friday, I had almost finished reading Obama: The Postmodern Coup - Making of a Manchurian Candidate by Webster Tarpley. In it, the author documents the connection between Obama and Zbiggy Brzezinski (starting in about 1983) and explains the latter's involvement with sectors of the US "intelligence community" and geopolitical obsession with Russia and China.
Admittedly, Tarpley's book is terribly written, especially considering the fact that he was a Rhodes scholar. It seems a sort of slap-dash paste-up of articles, blog entries, pamphlets, and napkin notes. But there's enough history and corroborating evidence to substantiate a strong suspicion that there was Brzezinski/CIA involvement in last Friday's Iranian presidential election. In fact, given our history, how could there not be? This, for example, is a very interesting and timely report from almost exactly two years ago, "The CIA’s Iranian Plan?" from Information Clearing House. (I strongly recommend this report.)
Now the confession. When Iran broke, I watched some of the Twitter traffic and jumped into the breach. Suckered. Mousavi good, Ahmadenijad bad. Election stolen, just like USA 2000! No doubt about it! Green Revolution!! D'Oh! That self-righteous, "plain as the nose on your face", up-the-underdog rush of flashmob adrenaline. I was off and running (my, and everybody else's, mouth off). Power to the people!
Then it started to occur to me: who the hell is this Mousavi and where did he come from? Is he any better than Ahmadi? What's really going on here? Some stuff didn't add up.
My first clue was when one of Mousavi's self-proclaimed mouthpieces (@Stop_Ahmadi) started to push for a DOS attack against Ayatollah Khamanei's website. Hmmm. An attack on free speech, I thought. What about principle? What about democracy? Does this dude just want an alternative dictatorship? Who does Mousavi work for? What does he stand for?
To the point: Brzezinski's fingerprints are all over this one. As I write, Russia and China, Zbiggy's bêtes noires, have congratulated Ahmadenijad on his victory, while the BBC, MI6's propaganda mouthpiece, has painted their website in the sickly green of Mousavi's attempted coup. It cannot be any more obvious. Geopolitics 101.
The environs of Teheran, Qom, yes, all of Iran, are dangerous places right now. Although I join the courageous Iranians in their cries for freedom and worry about their safety, I fear they are being cynically used and led in a direction which will result in only one dictatorship substituted for another, mere pawns in the game of superpower meta-manipulation.
I need to end this with an apology. At the beginning of the flash mob on Friday, I may have contributed to the movement toward violence, by tweeting anything "Mousavi". Some of what I retweeted may well have been disinfo. I should know instinctively that anyone in TwitIran Square may be a provocateur.
I'm sorry. I'm still tweeting Iran, but I'm trying to be a bit more cautious. Lives are at stake.
Be at and about peace, please.
