David Bromwich writes in Huffingtonpost.com about the fundamental change brought about to the discourse on Iran by the special coverage of the 2009 Iranian presidential election and its aftermath. The ignorant self-righteousness of the “vicarious politics of liberation” has been challenged perhaps for the first time by the emerging message of the real people with “real faces” who strive for their own liberation, and it now takes much more effort for the hypocrite as well as the adventurist superhero wannabe to sell their rhetoric, to bomb a people on their own behalf.
excerpt:
“The faces of the people, and not “the face of the enemy.” The difference between the abstract and the individual is decisive for imagination. It is the faces that are indelible, as we saw in the streets of Tehran, whether the men and women were holding up cell phones or placards written black on green, or waving a bloodied shirt or bandage; or holding a rock, as some in Iran did, and as the members of other crowds, less kindly portrayed in the American press, have been known to do. It isn’t the face of the enemy that we see in these pictures. No, these are people much like ourselves, who don’t want to die at the hands of their government–or at the hands of ours, either, for that matter.”
Read the whole thing here.
