{"id":2090,"date":"2009-06-15T06:42:58","date_gmt":"2009-06-15T06:42:58","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2009-06-15T06:42:58","modified_gmt":"2009-06-15T06:42:58","slug":"the_whole_world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2090","title":{"rendered":"The Whole World Is Watching"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nI’ve spent much of the weekend trying to subtly keep up with the news from Iran on my Blackberry (I made a family commitment to keep the laptop off – a matter of unfortunate timing on my part). Patterico has a good roundup<\/a> of sources, but if you can’t follow anything else, I’d go to Twitterfall<\/a> and look at #iranelections. This is raw rumor right now, but the analysis can – and should – wait.<\/p>\n

I firmly believe that the right thing for the US and Western governments to do is to make encouraging noises about the will of the people and do, exactly, nothing. Any action in these next weeks by us as a nation will have far more unintended consequences than we can imagine.<\/b><\/p>\n

But we, as a people, can do quite a bit. If there ever was a time to let activists, media, and leaders in the Middle East know that “the whole world is watching” that time is now. Follow Twitter, read blogs, share them with your friends. Accept that much of what you read is wild rumor and try as best you can so sift through it for grains of truth.<\/b><\/p>\n

Find sites where pro-freedom (and by that I mean simply ‘pro-fair-elections’) Iranians are communicating, read them, and let them know with comments and emails that you are watching.<\/p>\n

Let’s see how 20th Century repression, in the interests of 14th century ideology, reacts to 21st century open communication tools.<\/p>\n

I don’t believe that Twitter and Youtube will bring down the repressive religious oligarchy in Iran. I’m not that much of anoptimist. But it will weaken the hold they have on the Iranian people – and in time, that may allow the Iranian people to find their own path to their own brand of freedom.<\/p>\n

And – as a side note – all of us will know a whole lot more about the Iranian state a month from now than we know today. So let’s reserve the policy suggestions until some dust has settled – please.
\n–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal suggests that governments don’t have much role in responding to the Iranian electoral crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}