Through a Veil of Egg

After I wrote the last post, I started reading We are Iran: The Persian Blogs, a book celebrating and chronicling the use of Weblogs to circumvent restrictions on self-expression in Iran.

The number of blogs in Farsi (or Persian) is far out of proportion to the number of Farsi speakers in the world, especially in comparison to other languages like French. According to Iranian blogger My Other Fellow, more people are writing blogs in Farsi than in any language except English. OK, the Iranian blogs are tied with those in French for second. But when you think that Farsi has a lot fewer speakers than French, this is really remarkable and amounts to about 23 million Farsi blogs.

This movement, and Iranian bloggers have consciously and intentionally established a cyber movement, provokes the ire of leaders of the Islamic Republic regularly. Bloggers are arrested. Blog hosting sites are blocked or shut down. We are Iran presents translations of posts from a wide range of blogs, both political and personal. The leaders of the Persian blogging movement are acutely aware that the personal is political (like feminists have been saying) in the context of their country’s recent history and they celebrate all efforts at self-expression.

As I continue to read the book I know I’ll have more thoughts about this movement and the use of new communication technologies to bring about social change, but for now, I’m thinking about Chapter two, “Revolution, War and Dissent.” This chapter reminded me (as if I had forgotten) of the checkered history of the United States in supporting democracy in the world, which seems particularly relevant to the questions I posed in the last post about who’s in charge of promoting the value of democracy here in the United States.

Of course, it was not news to me that the face of democracy the United States turns toward the world has egg on it. In the case of Iran, the CIA sponsored a coup d’etat that removed Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 to allow the return of the Pahlavi family to dynastic rule in the country.

Around the same time, and after years of either surreptitiously or openly controlling the governments of Caribbean nations, the United States removed an elected government in Guatemala.

In the mid-1950s the U.S. government led Hungarians to believe that it would support their efforts to break free of Soviet occupation, and then didn’t.

Twenty years later, the United States helped bring Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile to replace a popularly elected, but socialist, president Salvador Allende.

In the 1970s and 1980s the United States first made and then brought down Manuel Noriega in Panama. (I arrived at the consulate in Leningrad one day in December 1989 to find the Marine guards dressed in camouflage. They were on alert because U.S. forces had invaded Panama.)

Not to mention supporting Saddam Hussein when it was convenient and denouncing his human rights record and invading Iraq when it was not.

The list is too long to include all U.S. actions based on realpolitik rather than democratic ideals

How do we make sense of the government programs to promote democracy abroad, both the peaceful and the military, when the United States has such a checkered history of supporting local self-determination, including democratically elected, democratically inclined leadership, around the world?

How do U.S. political leaders decide when it’s more expedient to have a friendly dictator in place and when it would really be better to support democratic processes? Am I some kind of naïve dupe to volunteer my efforts in Armenia (or anywhere else)?

I fielded a lot of questions from Armenians who couldn’t believe that people would do anything if they didn’t personally benefit. For the sake of full disclosure, I received a grant of $1200 from my employer to help pay for airfare to Armenia via Paris (about $1600) and my friend Ellie put me up for three weeks at her home. YCAP gave me lunch, transportation and the services of an interpreter. I went in the hole to talk to young people in Armenia about the ideal role of the media in democracy and to suggest how they could participate in mass communication in a democratic way.

I understand why they wondered what my motives were for doing this. Armenia receives a disproportionate share of the U.S. foreign assistance budget. The Armenian community in the United States is large and influential, but if Armenia were located farther from Iran, Iraq and the Middle Eastern oil fields in general, I imagine it wouldn’t seem so important to build a big embassy in Yerevan or make such an effort to cultivate this small, land-locked, oil-less country. Armenians correctly suspect that U.S. assistance comes with expectations attached.

In this world of realpolitik, however, a lot of people maintain their ideals and believe that the world will simply be a better place if Armenians (and the rest of us) can build healthy, participative democratic governments. I am the face of democracy. Ellie is the face of democracy. Perhaps you are the face of democracy too.

Those of us who continue to cultivate democracy, however we do that, can’t always rely on the official institutions of the United States to support us or be our mouthpiece, but we have to keep at it. Ultimately, it is up to us individually to conduct civic education by our own example. It is up to us to remember that without attentive citizens, there is no democracy.

It is up to us to learn about and remember Mossadegh and to be willing to stand up for democratic movements and constitutions around the world, including here at home. Especially here at home. We need to be brave like Iranian bloggers. And we need to make decisions about when to speak and when our interests may actually be served by silence. (More on this last topic is to come in later posts.)