Basij as Mercenaries

According to a report posted at the Guardian, (scroll down to 3:32PM on the blog), the baton wielding Basij who have been wantonly bashing heads for several days now in Iran, are well paid mercenaries.

3.32pm:
Newspaper Roozonline has an interview (in Persian) with one of the young plainclothes militiamen who have been beating protesters.

UPDATE: Robert says the man is paid 2m rial per day, which would be about £1220 for ten days of work. A hefty fee, even by UK standards. A reader writes: "You can imagine what that kind of money means to a villager from Khorasan".

The Guardian's Robert Tait sends this synopsis:

The man, who has come from a small town in the eastern province of Khorasan and has never been in Tehran before, says he is being paid 2m rial (£122) to assault protestors with a heavy wooden stave. He says the money is the main incentive as it will enable him to get married and may even enable him to afford more than one wife. Leadership of the volunteers has been provided by a man known only as "Hajji", who has instructed his men to "beat the counter-revolutionaries so hard that they won't be able to stand up". The volunteers, most of them from far-flung provinces such as Khuzestan, Arak and Mazandaran, are being kept in hostel accommodation, reportedly in east Tehran. Other volunteers, he says, have been brought from Lebanon, where the Iranian regime has strong allies in the Hezbollah movement. They are said to be more highly-paid than their Iranian counterparts and are put up in hotels. The last piece of information seems to confirm the suspicion of many Iranians that foreign security personnel are being used to suppress the demonstrators. For all his talk of the legal process, this interview provides a key insight into where Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, believes the true source of his legitimacy rests.

How Our Communication Has Changed

The Internet allows the receiver of information to also be the producer of information. We have the power, like never before. How shall we use it?

Dispatch from a province far from Tehran | 16 June 2009

Two Iranian soldiers kiss before they go to battle (Iran-Iraq war).

I feel compelled to immediately post this "dispatch from the field".

I was born in 1984, amid a devastating war that had laid waste and destruction to my country. I was born between two subsequent nights of bombing raids. I was born into rationing, despair and hardship. I was born when young lives perished at the fronts. My father later told me that when I was born 1984 sounded so much like the 1984 predicted by Orwell. But my birth had turned over the glum outlook for my parents and 1984 had become a sign of hope, a hope for a future to come, or as my father put it, “a better future for my child to live.”

My parents were not alone in this. During the baby boom of 1983 to 1986, millions of us came into this world, mouths to feed and miracles to be cherished. There and then a new generation was born, a generation who would bear witness to the legacy of generations of their parents, a legacy that was mainly composed of one thing, “the Islamic Republic.”

In later years, in our schools, on TV, in books and newspapers they told us that before our time lived a tyrant who held a firm grip on our country, and that the defiant and valiant nation of Iran had risen up and overthrown him to establish three things, “Esteghlal, Azadi, Jomhouri Eslami.”

Independence.

Freedom.

Islamic Republic.

We were fascinated by the epic tales of young students, some as young as thirteen who during the war had sacrificed themselves for the greater good of the society. We were made to believe that we were living in Utopia, but the delusion only lasted a few years. Before long, that once naïve and innocent generation of 1984 had grown to be the young men and women of Iran, the so called third generation of the revolution.

Faced with harsh realities of life we quickly came to realize that our world was far from the Utopia painted for us. It was more like a Dystopia where we had to fight for every single right, every single freedom.You have denied us so much.

Out of this dark age one day emerged a man with qualities of a hero who would lead this generation out of this Dystopia and into that promised paradise. His name was Mohammad Khatami. Yet it turned out that he was neither the hero everyone expected him to be, nor did he have the capacity or desire to lead them out. To be fair things started crawling toward progress and modernization; there was a smaller degree of social rights and freedom, but it did not come at the pace that this restless third generation wanted.

Thus a hero fell, and four years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started.

By the end of the four years, we were desperate for change. Hope materialized in the shape of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who happened to be the prime minister that now long gone 1984. But the totalitarians ruling the Dystopia swooped in and crushed that last bit of hope.

In Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” Galileo’s students condemn him at the end of the court proceedings with these words: “Pity the nation that doesn’t have a hero.”

“Pity the nation that needs a hero,” he responds wisely.

My generation is tired of being disillusioned. We refuse to accept the status quo and we have risen up in defiance. I am not sure how long it will take for the totalitarians to crush our resistance. For now though, we’re holding up just fine. We’re holding up fine even though our brothers at Basij and the police are murdering their dear fellow Iranians. We’re holding up even though you bash us with clubs and batons and try to suffocate us with your tear gas.

A nation stands tall refusing to succumb that easily.

Yesterday among the crowds who were just back from the warzone with their wounds and anger and sadness, I spotted an old friend of mine.

“Welcome to 1984, my friend,” he said in great anguish.

I nodded in agreement; we’d come full circle.

He went on, “There we were facing the bloodthirsty riot police, hand in hand, like that ‘Brothers in Arms’ song from Dire Straits.”

It was in that moment that I realized why the French Revolutionaries added “Fraternity” to their revolutionary slogan.

“Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” indeed.

A Declaration of Peace. May it be Heard

I visited Imam Khomeini (former Naqsh-e Jahan) Square several years ago. It is one of the largest and most beautiful squares in the world. Measuring 500 x 160 meters, it was set up in the second half of the 16th century AD by the Safavid King, Shah Abbas I. The photo above shows a view looking north, of a protest in response to the announced election results of June 12, 2009. For those who may not know, this is in the exquisitely beautiful city of Esfahan. On the south side of the square is the Imam Mosque. The Ali Ghapou monumental compound is on the west and Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque is on the east.

It was March 25, 2004 when, upon leaving Tehran I wrote:

Looking down on the vastness that is Iran, I ponder what will allow it to be free and expressive of its beauty. So rich, yet so sad, physically choking on its own effluent, emotionally it is being strangled by fear. Fear pervades so many decisions made by the people of Iran that we in the west take for granted. Fear of speaking openly; fear that a satellite dish may be taken, in other words, fear of speaking, and listening.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is afraid of information. As with any totalitarian state it must impose its view through fear and intimidation. I realize that only now, as I fly away from Iran over European airspace that I feel free to openly discuss, even with myself, the large contingent of various security forces that are ever present throughout the Republic. From the fighter jets that greet you on the tarmac of Meherabad Airport to the police officers stationed at 50-meter intervals up both sides of Vali Asr Street surrounding a park during the Narooz celebration, the imposition of government security is pervasive.

Such a beautiful, beautiful country. This is one of the rarest of occasions when I feel compelled to evoke prayer. I pray, with Iranians, and all who may join, that a way to peace, through these most difficult of times, can be found.

Green Takes on a New Meaning

Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.

- Saadi

The People March

Here is What Happens to Protesters in Tehran

The streets are filled with protesters. Then the crowd is charged by police riding double on motorcycles as they swing their truncheons.

Hans Rosling on Displaying Statistics

I have embedded video from Ted.com before, including James Howard Kunstler & Barry Swartz. Today I came across another fascinating one, this time from Hans Rosling. Part way through, I was beginning to wonder, could I do this too? By the end of the video, he had explained how. You can learn more about his organization, and the software he developed at www.gapminder.org

Three hours after the video, I had configured some stats on world wide oil production since 1980 to create my own "bubble graphs". After clicking on the link then click on "gadget1" on the bottom left and watch the bubbles move. You can also reconfigure it to represent the data in a variety of ways.

All data used was obtained from the Energy Information Administration.

The Daily Me

Nicholas Kristof - The Daily Me - NYTimes.com

I came upon this article through a link from Dan Gardner's blog, Citizen Katzenjammer. How I got to this article is indicative of how news aggregators are changing journalism. The fear is that they may be responsible for much greater narrowing, rather than expanding, of our viewpoints. As Kristof points out

...the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online.

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me.

As much as I claim to be open to the ideas of others, I admit that I succumb to gatekeeping of my news. I usually cringe and quickly dismiss the writings of David Warren, (whom I perjoratively judge to be just to the right of Ghengis Khan), but will peruse for hours the postings at Energy Bulletin or Culture Change. I embrace the ideas that support my viewpoint, and quickly dismiss those that don't.

Kristof argues that this can lead to intellectual ghettoes as people are attracted to likeminded communities.

The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. One of last year’s more fascinating books was Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” He argues that Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do.

Almost half of Americans now live in counties that vote in landslides either for Democrats or for Republicans, he said. In the 1960s and 1970s, in similarly competitive national elections, only about one-third lived in landslide counties.

“The nation grows more politically segregated — and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups,” Mr. Bishop writes.

Kristof admits to being

...guilty myself of selective truth-seeking on the Web. The blog I turn to for insight into Middle East news is often Professor Juan Cole’s, because he’s smart, well-informed and sensible — in other words, I often agree with his take. I’m less likely to peruse the blog of Daniel Pipes, another Middle East expert who is smart and well-informed — but who strikes me as less sensible, partly because I often disagree with him.

Who knew that keeping an open mind could be so challenging?