Last night I did a post stealing Antony Loewenstein's view (and Mohammad of Vancouver's) that it is naive to believe that the U.S. had no hand in the Tehran uprising, especially given the use that neocons are now making of it to try and pave the way for bombing Iran. While I'm agnostic on the question (it's my position on all matters I haven't felt for myself), I recognize the skepticism as healthy; and later that night my friend Peter Voskamp, an editor/musician who grew up partly in Houston and can tell you about the funny connections between the Bay of Pigs and Dallas and Watergate, a post I keep meaning to do, and who got my wife going about Jack Ruby last year (what was that mobster doing in the police station, she asks anyone), offered this antidote to credulity:
While I disdain fascist crackdowns and thuggery as much as the next
enlightened member of the free world, I found myself very much on the
sidelines during the post-election events in Iran. I simply didn't
trust it. Not that the people in the streets weren't real, or their
passion fabricated… I just wonder who was behind the marketing
campaign. I've got a new theory term that I'm loosely applying to all sorts of situations: political movement ala Malcolm McClaren.You
remember the British impresario McClaren who "discovered" the Sex
Pistols and unleashed them and "punk rock" onto the world?Well,
he manufactured the Sex Pistols, and much of their seemingly heartfelt
rebellion was shtick. But they inspired the real thing.
The Clash, for example, were the real thing– true jihadists.Perhaps a few Mclaren-esque rainmakers were strategically poised to get things going in Iran.
I
get annoyed about all the double standards in the reporting, which you
have written about. Iranians killed: shock, horror! Three hundred
children slaughtered in Gaza…"well, it's complicated. They started
it!"
Loewenstein, on cowbell:
Necessary skepticism about foreign resistance suggests both the power of the US….and weakness of indigenous uprisings.
