Not too long ago I saw a video that had been posted on Twitter. A polar bear, in a mad dash to protect its cub from an advancing orca, throws the cub onto the deck of a fishing boat, where the crew swaddle the cub in towels and otherwise provide care. Sweet, if a little fishy. The maker of the video might have gotten away with it if they hadn't gone for a close-up of the cub's face at the end. The cub looks like an abomination unto the Lord, and makes it beyond obvious that the whole thing is AI.
So, how about Iran? This past weekend that was supposed to be the story. The freedom-loving Iranians were rising up against the mullahs. The regime was about to collapse. A brave and sexy protestor was making acts of defiance in the streets of...Canada, it turned out. (About where my mother grew up, in fact.)
It's all a little late. Twelve years ago, when Obama was still in, you could have done a stage-managed revolution and mostly everyone would have gone along with it. The world has changed. Millions have seen through the Iran thing as the CIA and Mossad doing a color revolution, and would have done so even if Mike Pompeo hadn't come out and said it.
Anyway, if Reza Pahlavi wants to be king, he should storm Tehran himself. He won't earn any respect by sitting on his ass and letting foreign intelligence clear the way for him.
2 comments:
Besides the still often largely recognizable AI videos what we see even more of is no actual news about any real current event. Everything is about someone's opinion (kind of like Rashomon) depending on their circumstances. This leads to no real news about anything.
Of course this is very likely a revolution as a sponsored event arranged by the CIA and Mossad. That comes as no surprise since Israel convinced Trump to bomb Iran several months ago, have been surreptiously infiltrating the country for years, and have been attempting to convince Trump to order further bombings, one of his favorite activities. Obama's been lauded for his always calm demeanor no matter who was being attacked by the US. The participants of the current rebellion are called 'royalists' - people who believe that the solution to the brutal regime of the Islamic Republic is to put Prince Reza Pahlavi on the throne. It's difficult not to be reminded that the SAVAK as the Shah's personal secret police was notorious for its extensive surveillance, repression, and torture of political dissidents.
We're certainly not averse to Iranians having freedom of choice about who rules the country but the last time that happened Mossadeq was deposed and it was the CIA who trained SAVAK. It would be nice to not have a dictator or a theocracy but it would be even better to have something stable to replace either of them.
Claims that we're living in a sci-fi dystopia are tossed around too often to have much weight. Still, when you put together the ugly and fake videos that get big followings anyway, the postliterate state of much of the population, and news that if it gets out at all is released where no one is likely to notice it...Well, it could be Ray Bradbury's sequel to Fahrenheit 451.
Whatever legitimate antiregime movements there are in Iran, they're currently tainted by association with American and Israeli meddlers. Israel theoretically wants to replace the ayatollahs with a more pliable government. In practice they might just settle for overthrowing the current government and letting chaos reign. Which wouldn't be a great long-term strategy, but they seem to believe that the US will always be willing and able to settle things on their behalf. The Pahlavi dynasty was an artificial monarchy imposed from without. Not only had most Iranians not chosen it, they had no cultural reason to accept it. Which is where the foreign-trained SAVAK and their brutal methods came in.
The Iranian Revolution was a response to the real sense that their country was being used as a pawn by other countries. That kind of helplessness and resentment would probably crop up again if a foreign-sponsored coup brought Tehran down. It doesn't seem like it would be a particularly constructive move for them or us.
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