The revolution will not be televised. It will be Tweeted, Blogged, and YouTubed.

Posted June 20, 2009

Iran has crossed into promising and dangerous ground – that moment when political mobilization creates the possibility that chaos will give birth to progress or collapse in repression. Politics becomes a real and serious struggle as history either leaps forward or falls back based on the cumulative impact of thousands of people who cannot know what is going on or how it will end. In Iran, the mullahs have no illusions about the power of a popular uprising. They are the only Islamic oil dictators who understand insurgencies because it's how they got their jobs.

Events in Iran owe more to YouTube than to Twitter. Phone videos of crowds in different towns, of Basij brutality, and of the range of ages, incomes, and genders that make up the demonstrations all paint a compelling picture. A video of a young woman dying of gunshot wounds in the streets will be viewed a million times today and nobody who watches it will feel more charitably towards the Iranian government afterward. A poem read over the eerie sound of dozens people singing prayers into the black Tehran night is stunning even if you know no Farsi. Watch and listen to it below.

This does not, of course, mean that the folks with the white hats will win. Freedom fighters got crushed in Tienanmen two decades ago and in Burma recently. It helps perhaps that the Iranian revolution now has a definable color: green (the color of Hamas, Hezbollah, and all things Islamic). Orange in Ukraine, Rose in Georgia, and even Cedar in Lebanon or Velvet in Czechoslovakia suggest that branding one's revolution helps. (The overthrow of Saddam has been called the purple revolution because of the inked fingers at election time. It may have been purple, but it was no revolution. To their eternal shame, Iraqis played a trivial role in the overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Iranians are taking huge risks and their movement will have major repercussions. It helps that a huge portion of the population has internet access that the government cannot block. Using VPN, proxy servers, and services designed to circumvent censors, thousands of Iranians have broadcast recent events in real time. Twitter streams on Friday peaked at over 200,000 tweets per hour (perhaps !% of all tweets contain new information, videos, or photos — but that's still huge). John Perry Barlow predicted a decade ago that the Internet regards censorship as damage and simply routes around it. So, it turns out, do citizens who wish to be free of oppressive governments.

Iranians have pioneered new street tactics. They organize at pro-government rallies, because it is a good time to build support. When demonstrations were made illegal, some people took to their cars, jamming streets and shutting down cities. As the above You-Tube demonstrates, people singing from their homes into the urban night is eerie, inspiring, and really hard to shut down.

Iran is a great country and an important one — something few places can claim. The US is also great and important, but we are the last country that should try to insert itself here. The people who criticize Obama for not being more outspoken on behalf of Iranian insurgents have forgotten history — unlike most Iranians. They forget that the CIA overthrew the left-leaning government of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 after the threatened to nationalize US oil companies. Having restored the Shah, the CIA, led by Norman Schwarzkopf's father, helped set up the Savak — the despised Iranian secret police. By the time the ayatollahs overthrew the Peacock throne three decades ago, nearly a third of all Iranian men were Savak agents or informers. Obama has remained supportive but determined to not let the US become an issue in an insurgency that is and needs to be Iranian.

Tonight and in the coming nights, send your hopes and prayers to the people of Iran. There is a good chance that they will need it.