The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [12]
A few months after the Iranian protests, China National Defense, an official outlet of the Chinese military, ran a similar editorial, lumping April 2010 youth protests in Moldova with those of Iran and treating both as prime examples of Internet-enabled foreign intervention. The editorial, singling out the United States as the “keenest Western power to add the internet to its diplomatic arsenal,” also linked those two protests to an ethnic uprising in China’s own Xinjiang province in July 2009, concluding that more Internet control was in order, if only “to avoid the internet becoming a new poisoned arrow for hostile forces.” Bizarrely, the irresponsible Iran-related punditry in Washington allowed leaders in Beijing to build a credible case for more Internet censorship in China. (The online blockade of the Xinjiang region only ended in early 2010.)
Media in the former Soviet Union took notice as well. “The Demonstrations in Iran Followed the Moldovan Scenario: The U.S. Got Burnt” proclaimed a headline on a Russian nationalist portal. A prime-time news program on the popular Russian TV channel NTV announced that the “Iranian protesters were enjoying the support of the U.S. State Department, which interfered in the internal activities of Twitter, a trendy Internet service.” A newspaper in Moldova reported that the U.S. government even supplied Twitter with cutting-edge anticensorship technology.
This was globalization at its worst: A simple email based on the premise that Twitter mattered in Iran, sent by an American diplomat in Washington to an American company in San Francisco, triggered a worldwide Internet panic and politicized all online activity, painting it in bright revolutionary colors and threatening to tighten online spaces and opportunities that were previously unregulated. Instead of finding ways to establish long-term relationships with Iranian bloggers and use their work to quietly push for social, cultural, and—at some distant point in the future—maybe even political change, the American foreign policy establishment went on the record and pronounced them to be more dangerous than Lenin and Che Guevara combined. As a result, many of these “dangerous revolutionaries” were jailed, many more were put under secret surveillance, and those poor Iranian activists who happened to be attending Internet trainings funded by the U.S. State Department during the election could not return home and had to apply for asylum. (At least five such individuals got trapped in Europe.) The pundits were right: Iran’s Twitter Revolution did have global repercussions. Those were, however, extremely ambiguous, and they often strengthened rather than undermined the authoritarian rule.
A Revolution in Search of Revolutionaries
Of course, American diplomats had no idea how the Iranian protests would turn out; it would be unfair to blame them for the apparent inability of the Green Movement to unseat Ahmadinejad. When the future of Iranian democracy depended on the benevolence of a Silicon Valley start-up that seemed oblivious to the geopolitical problems besetting the world, what other choice did they have but to intervene? Given what was at stake, isn’t it preposterous to quibble about angry editorials in Moldovan newspapers that may have appeared even if the State Department stayed on the sidelines?
All of this is true—as long as there is evidence to assert that the situation was, indeed, dramatic. Should it prove lacking or inconclusive, American diplomats deserve more than a mere spanking. There is absolutely no excuse for giving the air of intervening into internal affairs of either private companies or foreign governments while, in reality, Western policymakers are simply standing in the corner, daydreaming about democracy and babbling their wildest fantasies into an open mic. In most cases, such “interventions” right no wrongs; instead they usually create quite a few wrongs of their own, producing unnecessary risks for those who were naïve enough to think of the U.S. government as a serious