We are half of Iran’s population
A very interesting project undertaken by the internationally and critically acclaimed Iranian film director and screenwriter Rakhshan Bani Etemad:
All four candidates of the upcoming Iranian presidential elections are invited to see a movie documenting gender discriminatory laws as well as precise demands as expressed by women activists from various organizations.
After seeing the movie, each of the candidates are asked to explain their future programs regarding these issues. Mr. Karoobi, Moussavi and Rezai took part in this project.
This documentary relate the whole event including the three presidential candidates reactions.
Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5
رخشان بنیاعتماد اولین فیلم مستند انتخاباتی را کلید زد/گزارشی تازه ار فیلمهای انتخاباتی نامزدهای انتخابات؛
ما نیمی از جمعیت ایران هستیم
Reality check
TAKE A POLL: Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, Is Obama “Old Wine in a New Bottle?”
Click picture
A day after President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Bill Moyers sits down with award-winning investigative journalist and author Jeremy Scahill to examine what are the facts on the ground and how the situation is actually developing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Make no mistake. We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.
Jeremy Scahill: “If the United States, as President Obama says, doesn’t want a permanent presence in Afghanistan, why allocate a billion dollars to build this fortress like embassy, similar to the one in Baghdad, in Islamabad, Pakistan? Another one in Peshawar. Having an increase in mercenary forces. Expanding the US military presence there.
[...] President Obama making it a point, regularly, to say, “We’re going to have Guantánamo closed by early next year.” The fact is that, at Bagram, we see an expansion. They’re spending $60 million to expand that prison. You have hundreds of people held without charges.
[...] Not to mention these regular attacks that we’re seeing inside of Pakistan that have killed upwards of 700 civilians using these robotic drones since 2006. Including 100 since Obama took power.
[...] If this was about fighting terrorism, it would be viewed as a law enforcement operation where you are going to hunt down criminals responsible for these actions and bring them in front of a court of law. This is turning into a war of occupation.
[...] We live in amidst the most radical privatization agenda in the history of our country.
[...] They said that the Taliban are using civilians as human shields. And that’s why so many civilians have been killed. Their source for that was an Air Force intelligence officer who was allowed to speak on as though it was a Pentagon press release. I think that this is sick. Where you turn war, essentially, into a videogame that can be waged by people half a world away. What this does, these drones, is they it sanitizes war. It means that we increase the number of people that don’t have to see that war is hell on the ground. And it means that wars are going to be easier in the future because it’s not as tough of a sell.
[...] Well, I think that what we have seen happen, as a result of this incredible reliance on private military contractors, is that the United States has created a new system for waging war. Where you no longer have to depend exclusively on your own citizens to sign up for the military and say, “I believe in this war, so I’m willing to sign up and risk my life for it.” You turn the entire world into your recruiting ground. You intricately link corporate profits to an escalation of warfare and make it profitable for companies to participate in your wars. In the process of doing that you undermine U.S. democratic processes. And you also violate the sovereignty of other nations, ’cause you’re making their citizens in combatants in a war to which their country is not a party. I feel that the end game of all of this could well be the disintegration of the nation state apparatus in the world. And it could be replaced by a scenario where you have corporations with their own private armies. To me, that would be a devastating development. But it’s on. It’s happening on a micro level. And I fear it will start to happen on a much bigger scale. [...]” Link to the video and transcript
Jeremy Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army , he blogs at Rebel Reports.
Soviets!
Soviet era soldiers dancing – The unedited version with the original music
h/t to Prometheus Unbound
The lonely robot
“In economics the whole idea that the free market is an efficient system is coming under serious attack. Over the past five years many of the Nobel prices for economics have been awarded for research that shows that markets do not create stability or order. What Adam Smith called the invisible hand, is invisible, because it isn’t actually there, and politicians do have a powerful role to play in controlling the markets.
And a new discipline called behavioral economics is being studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model says they do.
Their studies showed that only two groups in society actually behaved in a rational self-interested way in all experimental situations:
One is the economists themselves, the other is psychopaths.”
Excerpt from Part 2: The Lonely Robot fromThe Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, a 2007 BBC documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis.
The Trap
The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a 2007 BBC documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis.
Part 1: F*k You Buddy
Part 2: The Lonely Robot
Part 3: “We Will Force You To Be Free”
An excerpt from Part 1:
[...] “In 1979 Mrs. Thatcher has come to power in Britain. What she promised to create is a society based on the dream of individual freedom. People would be liberated from the arrogant elites and the State bureaucrats (…)*. But Mrs. Thatcher new she would have to find a new way of managing and controlling (…) in a complex society in order to avoid chaos. And to do this, just like the psychiatrists in America, she would turn to systems based on the objective power of numbers. But underlying the new mathematical models would yet again be the very dark and suspicious vision of human beings that the cold war strategists had assumed. This vision will now penetrate to the very heart of the British state.
Thatcher government began in the early ages by selling off many of the state owned interests. But it soon became clear that in the modern world there were large areas of the State which would have to remain under government control. Mrs. Thatcher was determined to free them too from the old forms of management.
To do this she would bring in a system no longer run by ideas of public duty, instead public servants would be encouraged by incentives to follow their self-interests.
It was all in keeping with the idea of the inventors of Public Choice: James Buchanan.
He believed that those politicians and bureaucrats who preached the idea of public duty that were the most dangerous, what he called the zealots. They have to be got rid of them.
Buchanan: […] If our success depends on the goodness of politicians and bureaucrats, then we are in real problem.
It was a dark and pessimistic vision of human motivation, but it was about to become the bases for a new system for managing the British state.
[…]
In 1988 Mrs. Thatcher announced the complete reform of the way the national health service was run. The fundamental (…) was to overthrow the power of the medical establishment and replace it with a new efficient system of management. To do this Mrs. Thacher turned to a man who had been one of the nuclear strategist of Rand Corporation at the height of the Cold War. (Alain Enthoven)
[…] Enthoven developed a technique he called system analysis. It was a technique of management that he believed could be applied to any type of human organization. Its aim was to get rid of all the emotional and subjective values that confused and corrupted the system, and replace them by rational, objective methods, mathematically defined targets and incentives.
Enthoven had first tried to apply this system back in the 1960’s when he was still in the military. The secretary of defense Robert McNamara asked him to help transform the way Pentagon was run. Enthoven began to get rid of the idea that Patriotism should be the guiding force of America’s defense and replacing it with a rational system based on numbers.
[…]
What replaced patriotism and notions of duty, were mathematically measurable outcomes.
But McNamara’s experiments had ended in disaster when he had tried to run the Vietnam war with rational mathematical way through performance targets and incentive. The most infamous example has been the body count. It has been designed as a rational measure of whether America was winning the war, but in fact troupes simply made it up, even shot civilians to perform (…)* targets. […]
(…)*= inaudible
The Century of The Self
I had bookmarked this 2002 BBC documentary long time ago, then forgot all about it.
After a discussion on democracy which occurred after an earlier post, I was listening to a podcast where this movie was mentioned again. Finally I watched an hour of The Century of The Self and I am heading to see the rest of it. It is so thought provoking that I had to share and recommend it right away. Here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and part 4. You can read about all episodes through links on this BBC page.
A key figure of this first video is Edward Bernays – Freud’s nephew – and the profession he invented in the 1920s: Public Relations.
Bernays was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. He was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
Bernays was an adviser to the tobacco industry, big business, General Motors, U.S. Presidents and the CIA. He was also an inspiration to Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister.
A few excerpts from Part 1:
“Following that (Roosevelt’s) election, business people start to get together and start to carry on discussions, primarily in private, and they start to talk to each other about the need to sort of carry on ideological warfare against the New Deal, and to reassert the connectedness between the idea of democracy on the one hand and privately owned business on the other. And so under the umbrella of an organization which still exists, which is called “National Association of Manufacturers” and whose membership include all of the major corporations of the United-States, a campaign is launched explicitly designed to create emotional attachments between the public and big business. It’s Bernays’ techniques used in a grand scale, I mean totally.[...]
The campaign set up to show dramatically that it was business, not politicians who had created modern America.”
“He (Bernays) was about to help create a vision of the utopia that free market capitalism would build America if it was unleashed. In 1939 New York hosted the World’s Fair. Edward Bernays was a central adviser, he insisted that the theme be the link between democracy and American business. […]
The World’s Fair was an extraordinary success and captured America’s imagination. The vision it portrayed was of a new form of democracy in which business responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. But it was not a form of democracy that depended on treating people as active citizens as Roosevelt did, but as passive consumers because this, Bernays believed, is the key to control in a mass democracy. [...]
But this struggle between the two views of human being as if there were rational or irrational was about to be dramatically affected by events in Europe. [...]“
The director, Adam Curtis is also the author of The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear – 2004 and The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom - 2007.
Sir, wait your turn!
The previous Iranian presidential election coincided with my discovery of the internet. I already used a PC for most of my work but not much the internet. Reading local publications and watching movies were enough for my spare time. The net seemed a messy place; I didn’t know where to start. The slow and erratic dial up connection didn’t make it any easier.
The 2005 election was one of my motives to go through the internet to figure out what was going on. There were many sites related to the elections, and I started to discover young Iranian bloggers who had made of Iran the third most blogging nation of that time.
Today, with the presidential elections in two weeks, the Iranian net is full of articles and posts by bloggers from all side of the spectrum discussing or sharing their evaluation of the candidates.
To have a taste of what is going on check Pedestrian (who doesn’t want a first lady), Naj and Shahrzad who has translated the opinion of each candidate’s supporters. You can also browse doxdo (a feed reader of English blogs by Iranians). There is more activity in blogs written in Persian. I have just translated what a facetuous Mandana has to say:
Sir, Wait your turn!
When I read the news that while applicants were kept behind the door Mr. Karoubi was allowed in to register for the presidential elections, and others were able to enter and register only after he was done, this came to my mind:
Isn’t there supposed to be an order to register to the presidential election? I mean they show up, they line up, and then register when it’s their turn, right? Or one can also register by appointment? Can anyone have an appointment? Are these pretentious big heads who are going to run our country serious on such an elementary issue as respecting others? I mean will they wait like everyone else for their turn or use the privilege card to shortcut?
I will only vote for the one who waits his turn like all others, even if it is Ahmadi-Nejad 
I am a little disheartened. I think Obama’s election has disheartened me with the whole idea of democracy. If in the most powerful and democratic country of the world, a candidate can campaign telling one thing and do the opposite, what could we expect in our country besieged by all sides, and with so many problems?
Anyway, I will vote and I will do so for the fate and the faith of/in the Iranian youth.
Other places to look:
The Foreign Policy Factor in Iran’s Presidential Race by Farideh Farhi
Just Foreign Policy
Informed Comment: Global Affairs
Shadowed Forest of World Politics
Tehran bureau
and mir-hossein moussavi is looking like the iranian obama
Smarter Iran Policy
I can almost see the author of the following article debate with a neo-con minded adversary. It could sound like the Darfur debate. Rationality, awareness of history, fair evaluation of existing data on one side and on the other: erratic arguments, changing facts and figures, emotionality if not bullying to conceal some hidden agenda.
William deB. Wills starts from the beginning: “Should Washington “do” anything at all about Iran? What are the explanations for Washington’s hostile attitude toward Iran? What drives Iran? Policy conflicts and Options for Washington …
The article is Smarter Iran Policy Begins With New Attitude – from Antiwar.com. The author concludes that despite shortcomings on both sides, there is ground for practical, tolerable compromise.
“Skill, patience, consistency, logic, and understanding go a long way toward the design of an effective foreign policy. These attributes – perhaps obvious but frequently in short supply among foreign policy decision-makers – build a much firmer policy foundation than rude and emotional outbursts, erratic challenges, public bullying, contemptuous disdain, or efforts to isolate and demonize. With a new administration in place, now is the time to ask if U.S. policy can shift from viewing Iran as an “ultra-nationalistic, theologically conservative, politically radical Shi’ite” state to designing a foreign policy based on skill, patience, consistency, logic, and understanding...” read more
William deB. Wills is a political methodologist, futurist, a Foreign Policy in Focus contributor and an American political scientist specializing in the future of the global political system.
His blogs:
Shadowed Forest of World Politics, Thoughts on how to find a moral foreign policy path through the shadowed forest of world politics.
Historical & Literary Lessons Political lessons from histories and historical fiction
Picture found at Bribes iraniennes
The Lancet survey
Red and white flags, representing Iraqi and American deaths, sit in the grass quad of The Valley Library on the Corvallis, Oregon campus of Oregon State University. As part of the traveling Iraq Body Count exhibit (not related to the Iraq Body Count project) the flags aim to “raise awareness of the human cost of the Iraq War.” The exhibit uses The Lancet as its primary source.
