Wallflowers at the Revolution

Wherein Rich, a well-ensconced liberal with the New York Times files what we might call a useful opinion piece, and a typical lament, but one sprinkled with poison droplets. Read and ponder, but be careful with the half-truths.

February 5, 2011

Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook, he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel (right), who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook, he said. This had to do with peoples dignity, peoples pride. People are not able to feed their families.

The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls cyber-utopianism. Among other mischievous facts, he reports that there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its Twitter Revolution. More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators, police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track (and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez first vilified Twitter as a conspiracy, but now has 1.2 million followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets. [Here Rich, like a good liberal covers his butt with his establishment employers, The New York Times, by taking a cheap shot at the president of Venezuela. Always beware of these establishment types, even when they sound progressive.—Eds.)

of Fox News went on a tear about how Al Jazeera English is anti-American.This is the same We report, you decide Fox News that last week broke away from Cairo just as the confrontations turned violent so that viewers could watch Rupert Murdoch promote his new tablet news product at a publicity event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

[Again, liberal foul: the Voice of America may not have been, in fact was not, more credible than regular news from Soviet sources, just polishly produced self-serving American propaganda. The very notion that VOA was set up to broadcast “truth” to the peoples behind the “Iron Curtain” is laughable on its face, yet another myth in the ample arsenal of pro-capitalist nonsense.—Eds]

memoir. The eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is to follow. As we took in last weeks fiery video from Cairo mesmerizing and yet populated by mostly anonymous extras we don’t understand and dont know  it was hard not to flash back to those glory days of Shock and Awe. Those bombardments too were spectacular to watch from a safe distance–no Iraqi faces, voices or bodies cluttered up the shots. We lulled ourselves into believing that democracy and other good things were soon to come. It took months, even years, for us to learn the hard way that in truth we really had no idea what was going on.