As millions around the world marvel at the seismic historic events underway in Iran - probably the last place most expected a civic revolution to emerge (wasn't it just a little over a year ago that a major US presidential candidate was singing "Bomb, bomb, Iran" as if it was some prehistoric subhuman place and people?) - I want to ask all our readers here for a little more of your attention than is usually required to check out a mere blog post.
I would like you to give 74 minutes to watch the online video of the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised about the April 2002 attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela, and how an organized people and an ad hoc network of Internet organizers and journalists beat back that coup in 72 hours.
(I gave you at least 74 minutes of my time to prepare this presentation; so I'm not asking you to do anything I haven't already done.)
In April 2002, the elected president of a South American democracy had been kidnapped by military generals, while the country's corporate TV stations (it's been documented convincingly that the station owners were party to the violent coup conspiracy) broadcast the gigantic lie that President Hugo Chávez had "resigned."
Some Irish documentary filmmakers happened to be in the capital city of Caracas when all hell broke loose. They were able to film what happened in the streets. And in what could only be described as a colossal act of hubris on the part of the coup-plotters, members of the film crew were able to capture their taking of the national palace, known as Miraflores, also on film and microphone.
Back in 2002, we didn't have Twitter. We didn't have YouTube. Or Facebook. We didn't have most of the online tools that are being deployed today to break the information blockade.
Think about that.
And the international corporate media was, if it paid any attention at all to the coup and counter-coup in Venezuela, hostile to the country's democratically elected president (the New York Times went so far as to publish an editorial praising the coup; online organizers created so much pressure upon the newspaper that a few days later it had to issue an unprecedented correction and apology for such an editorial).
The battle that saved democracy in Venezuela was a battle over control of the means of communication. Abbie Hoffman wrote in 1969 that "the modern day revolutionary doesn't run to the factory, but to the TV station." Those words proved prophetic in 2002 in Caracas. And now that the Internet has supplanted so much of television and newspapers' roles in human communications, the battle over the present and future of Iran is being fought right here on the screen in front of you. It's why Twitter users are suddenly in a justifiable uproar over the website's announced 90 minutes of downtime tonight for maintenance; an hour-and-a-half that would coincide with the first working hours of tomorrow's General Strike called in Iran. For reasons that I suspect have to do with the fact that one doesn't need high-speed Internet bandwidth to post 140 character messages on Twitter, it has become "the front" of this week's global communication war.
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