Iran Renewed, Day 3.

Some more technology-and-politics in Iran stuff. First, a great short made awhile back:

Now, it has to be said: Twitter has rocked the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad like three the hard way. As Manzi put it:

There is a constant arms race between authoritarian governments and the engineering talent of the free world. The Iranian authorities seem to have been adept at mostly shutting down 20th-century technologies such as cell phones; to some extent, even late-20th-century technologies, such as Internet sites. Apparently, they hadn’t thought of Twitter. This has turned out to be an incredible weapon for the protesters. I guess Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can just consider it to be a big bouquet from all of his fans in Silicon Valley. It’s a good day to be part of the technology industry.

Whether it be updates from Iranians on the streets of Tehran, or sympathetic Westerners posting proxy addresses so Iranians can access the internet, it appears that Twitter has become essential to maintaining communication with/between the protestors. There’s also this burgeoning movement to crash Iranian government sites with some DDOSage. Godspeed to them on that, I suppose.

Next, if you have a few minutes, I highly recommend popping on over to Pic Fog and watching this live stream of Twitpic-ing for “iranelection”. WARNING: some graphic images of blood and violence. But don’t let that deter you: it’s a bizarre-o stream of photos that range from the inspiring to the angering. I challenge someone to look at the collection of images and remain neutral. My favorite?

A beautiful woman who proudly wears green while showing her face to photographers (note the young man behind her covering his face). She’s suffered for her stances. This kind of defiance is much more difficult to quash.

- Other technology: Mir Hussein Moussavi’s using Facebook to stay in touch with supporters, giving updates, and posting some more photos. The number of protestors and supporters is staggering:

It’s not all peaceful, however. Here, some Basiji thug fires upon the crowd. The Basiji, for those who don’t know, are the storm-troopers of the mullahs. They’re citizen enforcers of the extreme-Shia values of the Ayatollah.

It puts the courage of these protesters into perspective.

And now, some good analysis.

- Hitchens gets his Sneering Indignation on, refusing to call the vote-rigging an election. I’ll try to do the same.

- Joshua Tucker, who had some great analysis of Twitter and Web 2.0’s place in revolutions and political change, isn’t optimistic that the Iranians can effect real change. Bottom line? He thinks that the mullahs have learned their lessons from the failed repressions of former Soviet states.

However, over the past three days, it has become apparent that Tehran is not turning into Kiev. While there are numerous important differences between Iran and the post-communist colored-revolution countries (Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and possibly Kyrgyzstan)–with the most notable being that ultimate executive power in Iran lies with the Supreme Leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is not popularly elected–it does seem to me that the Iranian authorities may have learned a number of specific lessons from their less fortunate post-communist counterparts.

I’d argue that the ham-handed tactics of the mullahs and Ahmadinejad’s thugs prove that they aren’t as competent as Tucker alleges, but his thoughts are worth reading.

- Michael Totten has a great post up with thoughts. He also includes a passage from Kapuscinski’s Shah of Shahs reflecting on when a populace learns to stand up to the government. Allow me to heartily blurb as well?

But this time everything turns out differently. The policeman shouts, but the man doesn’t run. He just stands there, looking at the policeman. It’s a cautious look, still tinged with fear, but at the same time tough and insolent. So that’s the way it is! The man on the edge of the crowd is looking insolently at uniformed authority. He doesn’t budge. He glances around and sees and sees the same look on other faces. Like his, their faces are watchful, still a bit fearful, but already firm and unrelenting. Nobody runs though the policeman has gone on shouting; at last he stops. There is a moment of silence.

We don’t know whether the policeman and the man on the edge of the crowd already realize what has happened. The man has stopped being afraid – and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts. Until now, whenever these two men approached each other, a third figure instantly intervened between them. That third figure was fear. Fear was the policeman’s ally and the man in the crowd’s foe. Fear interposed its rules and decided everything.

Now the two men find themselves alone, facing each other, and fear has disappeared into thin air. Until now their relationship was charged with emotion, a mixture of aggression, scorn, rage, terror. But now that fear has retreated, this perverse, hateful union has suddnely broken up; something has been extinguished. The two men have now grown mutually indifferent, useless to each other; they can now go their own ways.

Accordingly, the policeman turns around and begins to walk heavily back toward his post, while the man on the edge of the crowd stands there looking at his vanishing enemy.

I read that, and in my mind I see the black-eyed woman above.

As always, stay informed with Andrew Sullivan (who deserves some form of a Web Pulitzer for his work) and the National Iranian American Council’s liveblogging.

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And as a rant-aside: this piece in Politico about the “hunks of Washington” (Peter Orszag and Chuck Todd? Gawd.) is everything I hate about our nation’s capital. People half-a-world away are dying for freedom in one of the decade’s biggest stories, and the incestuous world of DC deems it fit to put out some caddy gossip about some bureaucratic power pimps. Washington is a festering, sucking, wound on our nation, and the sooner its made irrelevant, the better.