Why banning foreign films could hasten the Iranian theocracy's demise

Having received a comprehensive – if unexpected – election victory back in July, Iran’s new president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has endured a torrid introduction to his new job. Having promised to improve the lot of Iran’s poor, and campaigning on a platform of economic revival, Ahmadinejad has struggled in his first few months to make any headway on his pledges. The Financial Times reports that, despite high oil prices, this resource-rich country is failing to provide for its large population. The Tehran stock market has dropped 20% since the election, while private business is grinding to a halt, wary of the direction that the country is going in.

Meanwhile, on the world stage, Ahmadinejad has fallen increasingly foul of the international community. The country’s desire for nuclear energy – which, it is suspected, is a front for a secretive plan to build nuclear weapons – is causing huge consternation at the United Nations. While the US prepares to bring Iran to the UN Security Council, the EU trio of countries – France, the UK and Germany – who had fought so hard to negotiate with Tehran, is quietly giving its approval for sanctions. Tony Blair has warned Iran that “life could become a lot more difficult” if it continues it’s truculent refusal to cooperate. While it smacks of typical Western hypocrisy to deride Iran’s nuclear ambitions whilst turning a blind eye to Israel’s stockpiles in the Negev desert, it is foolish for the regime to ignore the threats. Any sanctions would certainly plunge the country into further trouble, and could well spark off civil unrest.

So how has Ahmadinejad responded to these problems? By doing the old fashioned thing, and blaming somebody else. In the last week he has announced that foreign films will be banned from Iran. The Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, which Ahmadinejad heads, specifically targeted films that “promote secular, feminist, liberal or nihilist ideas”, and ones that feature “violence, narcotics consumption and propaganda for the world oppression”, by which it presumably means the US. While such sentiments would most likely warm the hearts of the American Family Association, they would perhaps be less enthused by the president also outlined his vision of a “Koranic Society”. Presumably, by this opaque phrase, he means that the limited liberal reforms attained under the previous ruler, Mohamad Khatami, are shortly to come to an end.

This week, Ahmadinejad has also turned up the heat on Israel once again. He appeared at an event called ‘World Without Zionism’ call for the Jewish state to be "wiped off the map". He also warned “any country which acknowledges the Zionist regime”; such nations would, he claimed, be “confronted with the wrath of the Islamic umma and will forever be disgraced.” These latter comments were directed mainly at Pakistan, which has recently opened small-scale negotiations with Israel, which many hope could lead to diplomatic representation and ultimately recognition between the two countries. As far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, any such move would be result in “the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world”.

The ‘World Without Zionism’ conference was a sequel to a similar event last year, which was entitled ‘A World Without America’. One wonders just how the Iranian regime would prop itself up without these two nemeses to blame all their problems on. Unfortunately for Ahmadinejad, it is unlikely to work for much longer. While Goebbels may have said that “if you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”, the Iranian population has now had nearly three decades of excuses. The hard-won reforms of the previous eight years are unlikely to be given up easily. In this report from the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton-Ash describes the young citizens of Tehran “talking on their cell phones or flirting in the parks, the girls' hijabs a diaphanous pink or green, pushed well back to reveal some alluring curls of hair, while their rolled-up jeans deliberately show bare ankles above smart, pointed leather shoes”. In such a young country, he hears of “this generation's hedonism; of wild parties behind the high walls of apartment buildings in prosperous north Tehran, with Western pop music, alcohol, drugs, and sexual play.”

Will the increased conservatism that Ahmadinejad brings hasten the demise of the theocracy? The proliferation on the Internet of Persian-language blogs – run by Iranians both in the country and those in the increasingly broad diaspora – indicate that there is a huge willingness to change, to confront and remould the country. Time will tell.

Smoking ban shot down?

Predictably, the government can't decide if it wants to ban smoking in the UK or not. On Tuesday, it announced amidst a blaze of self-congratulatory publicity that it was going ahead with the ban. Under the scheme proposed by Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, smoking would be banned completely in businesses that sell food. Sealed 'smoking rooms' would be allowed in some pubs, while private members clubs would be exempt from any such regulations.

Yet these proposals have been derailed already. An argument in the Cabinet, cheifly between Hewitt and her predecessor (and current Defence Secretary) John Reid, means that whatever is eventually put into the Bill is likely to be a diulted version of what was discussed yesterday. Inevitably, the Tories have labelled the government's position a 'shambles' (whatever that word means), while Labour have breezily replied that the whole thing is a minor matter and is hardly an important part of Tony Blair's election manifesto for reform.

But the debate does touch on how the government likes to view itself. It is supremely wary of the 'nanny state' tag that many will be all too ready to apply, should this ban go ahead. Chiefly among them are the tabloids, who hypocritically use this as a threat over the government to quasi-veto any proposal they disagree with, whilst championing the dangers of (as they put it) the "24-hour drinking culture" that, according to them, Labour is threatening to unleash. Despite their hypocrisy, the tabloids do have a point. Labour's insistence on the need for a smoking ban on health grounds nestles uneasily beside the desire for relaxed pub licensing laws. It's another example of a government that bases it's ad-hoc policies on a quixotic attempt to assuage public opinion. The curious thing is that, in this case as in so many others, they have ended up taking both sides simultaneously, pleasing nobody and angering many.

Top 100 Public Intellectuals: The Results

Through September and October, the UK's Prospect magazine - in conjuction with the US journal Foreign Policy- conducted a poll to find the world's top public intellectual. The only criteria were that the individual be alive and currently active in his or her discipline. The longlist of 100 generated some controversy, containing only ten women and - bar a handful of individuals - dominated by thinkers based in the West.

The results were announced the other day. The top twenty are:

1. Noam Chomsky

2. Umberto Eco

3 Richard Dawkins

4 Václav Havel

5 Christopher Hitchens

6 Paul Krugman

7 Jürgen Habermas

8 Amartya Sen

9 Jared Diamond

10 Salman Rushdie

11 Naomi Klein

12 Shirin Ebadi

13 Hernando De Soto

14 Bjørn Lomborg

15 Abdolkarim Soroush

16 Thomas Friedman

17 Pope Benedict XVI

18 Eric Hobsbawm

19 Paul Wolfowitz

20 Camille Paglia


A full list is printed here.


The list is fairly predictable in some ways; it's unsurprising to see Chomsky at the top, and in fact he tallied nearly double that of Umberto Eco at number two. This month's edition of Prospect carries an interesting article about the pros and cons of the Boston-based linguist and political commentator. No reaction yet from Chomsky's nemesis of recent years, Christopher Hitchens, to being placed four rungs below him.

What was also faintly depressing was the paucity of women in the upper echelons of the table (and the highest placed being Naomi Klein, whose credentials as an 'intellectual' are suspect to begin with). Also the tail end of the list was made up with Asian-born or based individuals, which likely reflects the Western-centric nature of those who voted. And quite what Pope Benedict XVI has done in his first eight months in charge to scrape into the top twenty is beyond me. Still, it represents a fairly interesting snapshot of global critical thinking in the year 2005.

The fallout of an attack on Iran

In a piece in Tuesday's Guardian, the author and broadcaster Dan Pleisch discusses the possibility of a US / UK / Israeli (pick from two out of those three) attack on Iran.

In many ways, the possibility seems remote. Despite the arduous and ultimately futile attempts of the 'European Three' to reach an agreement to contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, and US threats about Security Council sanctions, in a world of natural disasters and impending avian flu Iran is still far from the public's eye. There is nothing like the painstaking effort to create a plausible, if completely false, case for invasion that led up to the Iraq war during the latter part of 2002.

However, as Pleisch's article suggests, perhaps a full invasion wouldn't be necessary. A long-distance offensive from the underused navy and air force could cripple Iran's main cities quickly, decisively and with little threat to American or Israeli soldiers. The thinking goes that such a strike would fatally weaken the theocratic regime, sparking uprisings amongst the Sunni and Azeri minorities and effetively hastening the collapse of the mullah-run state.

Haven't we heard similar stories to this before? The 1991 Gulf War culminated in a US-encouraged uprising by the persecuted Shia, which Saddam Hussein crushed mercilessly while US marines - having been informed that their paymasters at the Pentagon had switched their strategy - gazed on impassively. Quite how the White House believes that another Middle East state is likely to trust American powerful is a disturbing question. There seems to be no conceivable plan to deal with a post-airstrike retaliation which, despite the relative inadequacy of Iran's weaponry, would doubtless threaten millions in Israel. And that doesn't even begin to consider the effect an attack on Iran would have throughout the wider region.

Still, a strike remains a depressing possibility. UN ambassador John Bolton ominously warned this week that, should it fail to deal with Iran, the Security Council would "damage [it's] relevance". All too close to Bush's warnings of the United Nations "irrelevance" in the rush to war during early 2003. Speaking of Bush, the president recently proclaimed that "democracies do not go to war". As a man who is not known for his grasp of world affairs - he once proclaimed that the US and Japan had enjoyed "a century and a half of peace" - even this statement is beyond the pale.

Sinking their teeth back in

The tiny country of Nicaragua has once again pricked its overseer neighbour far to the north, and the emanations thundering from Washington are ominous. Veteran Cold Warriors are loading up their bombastic 1980s vocabularies and issuing threats and denunciations down towards the Central American isthmus. According to US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, the country is heading towards a “corrupt… creeping coup”. Roger Noriega, President Bush’s former Latin American envoy, foresees the country “reach[ing] depths such as those of Cuba”. Otto Reich, a Reagan-era policy consultant on Central America, pulled out his trump card and excoriated the Communist threat, warning portentously of withdrawal of US aid and foreign investment.

What has provoked such sour-faced admonitions? Nothing less than the political resurrection of Daniel Ortega, one-time Nicaraguan president and long-time leader of the Sandinista party that caused such trouble for Washington in the 1980s.Long though washed-up, Ortega has manoeuvred himself into position as potentially the country’s next president. At a time when the USA’s influence in the region is waning, with several South American countries rejecting the US-prescribed neoliberal programs and shifting to the left, the re-emergence of Ortega – and the reaction it has recently sparked - is a reminder of the dark days of American meddling in the Western hemisphere.

It is grimly appropriate that the US should once again try to address affairs in what is often condescendingly referred to as it’s ‘back yard’. Since the turn of the century, and the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe doctrine - which sought to keep the European powers of Spain and Britain from interfering in Latin America - Washington has often treated the countries below the Rio Grande as little more than de facto territories. Between the American-Spanish war and the Great Depression alone, the US sent troops into the territory of its southern neighbours some 32 times. In the post-war period, it has preferred covert operations and the use and abuse of aid and development funds to wield control. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and Panama in 1989 are just a handful of incidents where the US has surreptitiously overthrown sovereign regimes, usually in the protection of its own “interests” – which usually mean the foreign assets owned by American companies. These instances were usually camouflaged by invoking the threat of some insidious menace – with Communism being the frequent scapegoat. Such was the case in Nicaragua, which in 1980 saw the overthrow of the corrupt Somoza dynasty by the Ortega-led Sandinista movement. The Reagan administration, in the grips of an anti-Communist fervour having labelled the USSR as the ‘evil empire’, believed that the Sandinistas represented a Communist threat that would – in the oft-quoted ‘domino effect’ – quickly subsume neighbouring countries and soon reach all the way up to the American border. The administration quickly began orchestrating a resistance group, financing ‘contras’, or counterrevolutionaries, in Honduras and Costa Rica. This, coupled with the financial strangulation of Nicaragua’s economy, put enormous pressure on the inchoate Sandinista government. Despite huge development in the country’s infrastructure, particularly in literacy levels and health care, the population began to tire of the permanent warfare served up on their doorsteps at the behest of the United States, and in 1990 Ortega’s party lost power in a closely-fought election

The Sandinistas, while remaining the largest political party in the country, have since remained in opposition. Indeed, Ortega himself seemed until very recently to be a washed up relic, losing in 1996 and then being annihilated in the 2001 election, his power base seeming to ebb away entirely. A sexual abuse case made against him by his stepdaughter, from which he was acquitted, further tarnished his reputation.

However, earlier this year he made an unusual pact with former president Arnoldo Aleman – a pact referred to as ‘corrupt’ by Robert Zoellick – whereby the Sandinistas joined with Aleman’s Liberal party. What makes this unusual is that Aleman is technically a prisoner, indicted in 2003 for a string of corruption charges, although ill health means that he is serving his sentence on his own private ranch. Seizing the opportunity that this coalition provided, Ortega has been stumping like its 1989, deriding Bush as the 21st century Reagan, denouncing US ‘imperialism’ and generally doing his best to whip up anti-American sentiment amongst the Nicaraguan population.

All this would naturally be of some concern to the US, if it were having much of an effect. But the truth is that Nicaraguans are unlikely to return Ortega to the presidency any time soon. Along with Aleman, he is a figure synonymous with corruption and cronyism. His anti-American campaign is short on detail and long on boorish rhetoric that is effective in whipping crowds into a frenzy, but less effective at the ballot box. Right now the Sandinista – Liberal pact is running third in the polls for the November 2006 election. Ortega is also at odds with the general trend in the region, where neighbouring countries are aligning themselves with the US. While South America’s left-leaning movements, symbolised by Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, are changing the dynamics of international relations in the hemisphere, many Central American countries see their future prosperity as inimitably tied to Washington. Hence, the recent passing of the Central American Free Trade Act, or CAFTA, which binds Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama and the Dominican Republic into a NAFTA-style free trade market.

So why the rumblings from Washington? The accusations of a ‘creeping coup’ may seem a little overheated, but there is some justification. The judiciary, controlled by Ortega, has been seeking to blunt the powers of current President Enrique Bolanos and have him impeached. However, with little backing within the country and amongst the region as a whole, the success of such an operation is unlikely, and indeed Bolanas and Ortega have now agreed to delay the proposed constitutional reform until after the next election. It seems more likely that the old Reagan warhorses are simply reliving the times when an American adversary was a tiny country that could be subsumed without too much fuss. With Iraq turning into an ever-more disastrous mess, and American casualties edging up to the 2000 mark with no sign of abating, this current involvement in Nicaragua is a way of projecting American hegemony without the risk of political fallout. While Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez may be unbowed – and, with his country’s huge oil reserves, the US can ill afford to provoke him too much further – Nicaragua is a far less belligerent student, and the US can strictly admonish the country with little repercussion.

A timely airing of 911 conspiracy theories

Aluminium hats were (presumably) checked at the door at the Foundry in Shoreditch on Wednesday night. In the basement a group of conspiracy wonks and curious bystanders had gathered for a viewing of ‘Loose Change’, a film that attempts to re-examine the footage of what happened on September 11th, 2001, and challenge the ‘official’ explanations given by the government.

The film was a particularly strong cocktail, maybe one part mixer to nine parts absinthe – and we’re talking the strong, Czech stuff here, complete with all the hallucinations it entails. Poring frame-by-frame over the images of the plane hitting the towers, it made a number of typical allegations – that the plane was in fact a cargo jet, or possibly a guided missile, or even a missile-toting commercial jet (quite how that would escape detection at Boston’s Logan airport was never discussed). It also relied overwhelmingly on supposed eyewitnesses – whose legitimacy was never remotely questioned - for the substantial bulk of its ‘evidence’. With unintentional hilarity, the film dragged up a quote from Osama bin Laden in which he claimed that he was a man of peace, and therefore not responsible for the attack. Well, QED. So how to explain all the other occasions when OBL, or Ayman al-Zawahri, have exalted the attacks in America, Madrid, London and countless incidents across the Middle East and Asia, whilst promising to scythe down apostates and infidels? Guess they must have been fabricated by the CIA, or the Illuminati, or whoever.

Possibly the most ludicrous assertion, though, came when the film’s narrator claimed that the telephone calls – made by terrified passengers on the hijacked plane to their loved ones – were actually, well, hoaxed. The proof? Some spurious scientific evidence about the difficulty of making phone calls from high altitude, and a demonstration of computer voice-sculpting technology which – given just a few words from an individual – is able to recreate a passable facsimile of that person’s voice capable of saying anything. So, the documentary would have, while the hijackers were slitting the throats of the crew, keeping the passengers under surveillance and commandeering these jets into skyscrapers, they were also indulging in a little subterfuge by recording the voices of certain hostages and using them to make phone calls to their relatives. What enterprising chaps!

Much is made of supposed ‘missiles’ fired from the hijacked jets before they collided with the WTC. News reporters at the scene – many of whom no doubt in fear for their lives, and hardly providing objective and rigorous analysis of what exactly was happening – describe further explosions after the two initial impacts. Claims are made that the buildings were in fact booby-trapped with explosives to ensure their eventual destruction. All of these are spurious claims in the extreme, and have been handily debunked in this excellent article from Popular Mechanics magazine, which dares to use, y’know, “science” – remember that? – to examine just about every claim made in the film.

At one point the narrator claimed that of the 19 hijackers, seven were still in fact alive. So where are they, and why couldn’t they be approached for interview? No answer was forthcoming. Why would such a claim be made? Well, of course, the great thing about conspiracy theories is that there is no inherent pressure to come up with an alternative theory. Just picking through the wreckage and highlighting relevant points, then bringing in other scraps of ‘evidence’ entirely without context or justification, is suffice. Throughout, the film never really manages to point its finger towards a particular suspect, but you can just imagine the makers sitting back in their editing suites screaming “THE GOVERNMENT!! THE JOOOOOSE!!! MOSSAD!!!” as they watch the planes fly into the twin towers on repeat.

Following this treat of a film, the sparse crowd were sentenced to a half-hour haranguing by celebrity ex-Secret Service whistleblower, David Shayler, who actually has a new book to promote, hence his appearance in a dingy pub basement on a breezy Wednesday evening. Shayler rambled for a while about his life and times at MI5, his fight for ‘justice’ and to clear his name, how MI5 could have prevented the 1994 Israeli embassy bombing, what he knew about British plans to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi, and various other related themes which had little or nothing to do with the film just seen. For anyone familiar with the scribblings of Shayler there was nothing particularly new or noteworthy. While he was once a courageous and vital man, who threw a much-needed spotlight on the shady workings of our undercover governmental operations, he has nowadays become a self-parodying pusher of crackpot theories and ungrounded accusations. Towards the end he threw a few choice bones for conspiracy-junkies, cryptically hinting that the attacks in London last July were in fact government operations. Quite how he, as a disgraced former member of the Service, would ever have access to such information, is another matter. He claimed that special ‘operations’ planned for both September 11th 2001, and July 7th 2005, were indicative of Secret Service complicity. Rather ludicrous, yet one fearful member of the audience demanded to know how and when he could find out such information in order to protect himself from future harm.

Overall the evening was a timely reminder of the creeping fog of complete idiocy that disasters – even ones as heavily filmed as 9/11 – inevitably attract. The conspiracy hacks haven’t really sunk their teeth into the London attacks yet, but a leaflet handed out at the door - and Shayler’s baseless claims – offered a few pointers. No matter the scale of the event, there’s always a few DSS-regulars ready to sit up all night in their parent’s basement writing nonsense that, thanks to the internet, will always get an audience. God bless ‘em… ‘cause nobody else will.

Political satire exhumed in the scribblings of Norman Johnson

Three weeks into the Guardian’s re-design, and they seem to have got found themselves a reason for humour-seeking people to read the Comment section on Saturdays. Norman Johnson writes on Saturday in a new op-ed column entitled ‘Free Radical’. As he himself explained in his first column, his guiding mission is to expose the “caliphate of the Left” for what he sees as its “support of Islamo-Fascism”. He clearly (and self-avowedly) has designs on the portly mantle left by David Aaronovitch’s switch to the Times; yet in his first three columns Johnson has merely wallowed in his own solipsistic self-importance, firstly wrangling over the ethics of taking a job at the Guardian in the first place, anticipating the bile that his appointment would provoke and then taking full credit for apparently being proved right:

“I predicted that my arrival on these pages would burst the levees, releasing a torrent of spuming bile from correspondents convinced their territory had been made safe from the incursions of any Saddam-averse trespasser who might presume to advertise the attractions of universal human rights. I must be psychic. Within three days there was bile enough to pollute an entire letters page with the kind of cheap abuse, which, had it been aimed at, say, a fundamentalist Welsh lesbian, instead of a "pompous middle-aged, middle-class white male from north London" would qualify as actionable hate speech.”

The torrent of vitriol described above, we’ll have to take Johnson’s word for; the only letters printed in the Guardian were somewhat milquetoast pops with all the deadly aim of a toddler throwing food from his high chair.

Then suddenly the penny drops: he's being "humourous"! Ah, such brilliant wit. According to the blog Harry’s Place, Norman was genuinely dismayed by the reaction to his first column, particularly the view – held initially by myself – that the whole deal was in fact a spoof, or if not, a particularly clever satire. The typical Guardian-baiters on Harry’s Place were initially (perhaps ironically) convinced that the former was true, some even entertaining the notion that it was part of an elaborate ruse on the part of Guardian comment-section editor Seamus Milne to wind up his online bete noires. The latter view, that Johnson’s column is an attempt at satire, is one that I find myself loathe to release; after all, what other conclusion can be made by the following (from his most recent column) on Labour party conference heckler Walter Wolfgang:

Our anti-war heckler, on the other hand, emerged as a celebrity spokesman for free speech. Free speech, that is, if you're natty, liberal minded Walter (the Fascist-surviving Islamofascist sympathiser), and not some barefoot Iraqi nonentity living under Saddam's lash.

In a column that seems to be directing itself as a “humorous” one (it will take a great effort to see those quotation marks removed), supposedly cutting comments such as these come across as petty and quite simply desperate. Whether this is an attempt by the newspaper to balance out the tone of its predominantly anti-war comment on Iraq, to lighten up the weekend with a regular ‘funnies’ op-ed piece, or simply to provoke bloggers and letter-writers into further action, remains to be seen.