Thoughts on Iran

Today bloggers the world over are joining together to show solidarity with the Iranian people, the Iranian people who wanted change to come through the election and who were brave enough to stand up and declare their disgust when their voices were not heard.

I am not one for violence but I am definitely one who is very fond of the spoken and written word and for freedom of ideas and I am very alarmed when a people are silenced. I think though in this case the people are silencing themselves, they have to consider how far they are willing to go to get the freedom they want and the direction in which that freedom will take them.

I think that now they are consolidating and biding their time. I do not feel that this is at all like China where the young often seem to be quite okay with their lot on life ...or so it appears to me anyway. Modern China [not rural] China is mostly prosperous and there is great pride in the history and culture. Iran on the other hand has big problems...the revolution and previous tyranny under the Shah was not so very long ago and the intellectuals and the women especially seem to me to have more at stake than their more modern Chinese counterparts.

What occurred to me the most about this whole business is that with the new wave of communication technology I do not know if any cultures which allow....for want of a better word....their people to have free access to mobile phones etc....I do not see how they will be able to get away with this kind of thing in future. The crackdowns and violence I mean.

If the tyrannical acts can be tweeted out to the rest of the world as they happen so that the world can see these atrocities, what will these governments do? Will they ban mobile phones on the street and can they do that? Or in demonstrations? It is something to think about. Can a culture that is so modern in technology allow itself to go backward? Would the people allow that?

These are just some of my thoughts on this blogging action day and I am so pleased to have the freedom to be able to do this. My thoughts and prayers are with the opressed people of the world who are not so free to do so, especially our Iranian brothers and sisters who had a taste of what it meant to have a voice, or the possibility of a voice, and had that taken away from them.

Thanks to my son cjwriter for the above badge, it is available on flickr for anyone who would like to use it, he has also written a post for Bloggers Unite For a Free Iran.