Pot and Kettle

The events in Iran, or should we say Persia, bring home most painfully the ironies of the United States’ posturing about individual freedom, honest elections, and the wickedness and absurdity of state abuse and oppression of the people.

In the streets of Teheran and elsewhere, people who have known no other regime than that of the mullahs are rising up to reject and repudiate a presidential election managed by the forces of theocracy, who control media and academia to a stultifying degree. They risk imprisonment and death as they defy a state obsessed with its own security from perceived outside enemies - or even as they just try to go about their lives. Sounds a bit like the US, doesn’t it?

With no sense of irony, President Obama speaks against the fraud and repression of the regime in Iran, with his in-house network, ABC, his rigged press conference questions, and the squelching of any investigation of the vote-fraud cadre that did so much to put him into the White House.

The Internet started as a wonderful conduit for communication from and with those speaking for freedom in Iran, but as the regime there and that in China lead in online repression, it is all too painfully clear that those in power in countries such as Australia and the US would like to follow the same path.

Then again, the sheeple of the US are hardly standing up to abuses the way the young people in Teheran are. They seem to greet jack-booted violence and treatment out of Kafka as something beneficial, and limit their denunciation of abusive and corrupt leaders to the realm of potty humor.

In the United States, if not Persia, truly the people might be said to get the government they deserve.

Horatius