Budapest 1956
Arch Puddington
The United States today is fighting an adversary at least as menacing as the one it confronted during the cold war, and bearing some of the same traits. Like the Soviet Union, al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its imitators are in the thrall of a totalizing ideology, are implacably hostile to liberal democracy, and are determined to overthrow and replace it wherever they can. As in the cold war, too, Americas conduct in countering this adversary has occasioned fierce debate here at home, pitting hawks against doves and so-called realists against neoconservatives, along with many other lines of political division.
Of course, the differences between the cold war and the current struggle are enormous. The Soviet Union was a superpower with a continental empire at its disposal and a huge arsenal of intercontinental missiles tipped with nuclear weapons to deter the U.S. from action. With notable exceptions like Iran, our adversaries today are not even countries but shadowy and constantly evolving sub-national groups, some of them autonomous cells, that neither hold state power nor, for the time being, have access to sophisticated weaponry.
Still, even with the marked contrast between the two conflicts in mind, it is useful to look back at cold-war America for lessons, whether heartening or cautionary, about the foreign-policy challenges we face today. Among the twists and turns of that earlier conflict, the Hungarian revolution of 1956an event that occurred exactly 50 years agosheds its own special light on our present situation. The appearance of a new and well-researched book by the historian Charles Gati aids in reassessing this highly controversial and still-pertinent chapter of the past.1
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Like the other countries of Eastern Europe, Hungary fell under Soviet control after World War II. Throughout the period leading up to the October 1956 revolution, its rulers, hand-picked by Moscow, proved especially brutal in implementing the Kremlins decrees. No institution of public or private life was left untouched. Independent trade unions were destroyed, the economy was reorganized to benefit the USSR, private property was seized, and peasants were displaced from their lands. Democratic politicians were shot or jailed or forced into exile, and large numbers of ordinary citizens were similarly imprisoned or executed on spurious political charges. Priests, too, were executed or jailed. Newspapers were transformed into instruments of propaganda, Hungarian national culture was suppressed, and education was turned into a transmission belt for indoctrination.
By the mid-1950s, the ground had been thoroughly prepared for an anti-Communist revolt. As it happened, this was a moment when the Kremlin itself appeared to be rethinking its relationship with its subjects, and moving in the direction of a thaw. In 1955, two years after Joseph Stalins death, the USSR withdrew its troops from adjacent Austria, allowing it to become a neutral power. Many Hungarians began to speculate that they too might soon enjoy a similar status. Expectations were further raised by news of Nikita Khrushchevs secret speech to the Soviet Communist partys 20th Congress in February 1956, in which he denounced Stalins tyrannical rule.
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On October 23, almost spontaneously, the Hungarian revolution erupted. Initially, the rebels voiced rather modest demands, centering on reform of the prevailing Communist order. But then the security police opened fire on crowds surging toward the parliament, killing hundreds and radicalizing the rest. A full-scale program of democracy and independence, including demands for multiparty electionsand Hungary’s removal from the Warsaw Pact, became a national rallying cry.
Moscow’s response was at first hesitant. The Soviet politburo, with Khrushchev presiding and a collection of Stalin’s other henchmen—some of the 20th century’s worst butchers—taking part, was hardly unmindful of the seething discontent in the “people’s democracies.” On October 30, it approved a declaration holding open the possibility of increased sovereignty for the countries of Eastern Europe and a withdrawal, if requested, of Soviet troops.
But the limits of discussion inside the Soviet hierarchy were narrowly circumscribed, and its uncertainty over how to deal with the mounting resistance proved intensely volatile. Just a day later, on October 31, the politburo, now invoking orthodox Communist ideas, changed course and voted for decisive action. Failure to intervene, Khrushchev himself argued, would show weakness and “give a great boost to the . . . imperialists.” Only one member of the ruling body objected, noting that in light of the previous day’s declaration, a decision to invade would be interpreted as itself a sign of weakness. But the majority dismissed this argument: a reversal was not a reversal, ran its Orwellian formulation, if the politburo so decided.
On November 4, Soviet tanks entered Budapest. After several days of fierce fighting, Soviet control was restored. In the battle, several thousand Hungarians were killed; many more thousands were deported to the Soviet Union. The revolution’s leadership—including Imre Nagy, who had previously served as prime minister but had been expelled from the Communist party for liberalizing tendencies, only to become prime minister again during the upheaval—was seized by the Soviet military, placed on trial, and, in the case of Nagy and a few others, executed.
Diplomatically and politically, the fallout was mixed. The Kremlin found itself on the defensive at the United Nations, and suffered a further hemorrhaging of support from leftist circles in Western Europe. Khrushchev, who had won international praise for his de-Stalinization initiatives, became known for a time as the “Butcher of Budapest.” But, for Moscow, such public-relations setbacks were more than offset by the salutary impact of the invasion on the Soviet position in Eastern Europe. The action sent an unambiguous signal that the USSR would employ all necessary means to protect “socialism.”
And that message was heeded for a long time. In 1968, the Kremlin was tested again in Czechoslovakia. But after it put down the “Prague Spring,” once more using tanks and once more shedding blood, no significant popular movement for freedom emerged in any East European country until the rise of Solidarity, the Polish trade-union movement, in the 1980’s. By then, however, the decrepit Soviet Union was losing the will to preserve its empire, and in another decade its entire position in Eastern Europe would collapse like a house of cards.
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For the United States, as Charles Gati shows in Failed Illusions, the defeat of the Hungarian revolution was a humiliating setback. Since the inception of the cold war, American political leaders had expressed a rhetorical commitment to the doctrines of rollback and liberation, by which was meant the elimination of Soviet control over Eastern Europe. Indeed, the two major political parties regularly competed to get in front of each other on this issue: the Democratic party platform in 1956, an election year, excoriated the Eisenhower administration for its “heartless record of broken promises to the unfortunate victims of Communism.”
But, Gati observes, while the fundamental building blocks of American cold-war policy—the Marshall Plan, the establishment of the NATO alliance, the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine—had indeed succeeded in preventing a Soviet push beyond the borders of Eastern Europe, there was no evidence of progress in bringing freedom to the satellites. Policymakers had developed a long list of potential schemes, most of which involved psychological warfare projects to undermine Communist stability, Almost all, however, were impractical and quickly forgotten. By 1953, when Eisenhower assumed the presidency, it had become clear, though seldom acknowledged, that the instruments available to facilitate the liberation of Eastern Europe were quite limited. Given the danger of conflict with a nuclear-armed USSR, any form of direct intervention inside the Soviet orbit was too risky to contemplate seriously.
Hence, when the Hungarian revolution erupted, the United States possessed virtually no capacity to influence events on the ground. The CIA had few agents or sources of information inside the country and lacked Hungarian speakers among its ranks. Some of the analyses it produced, Gati writes, showed a complete lack of familiarity with internal developments, for instance naming the Catholic Church and the peasantry as critical forces when both had been thoroughly beaten down by Communist oppression and would play no role whatsoever in the uprising.
With little ability to see, the U.S. was ill-positioned to act. Aside from expressions of sympathy for the freedom fighters and condemnation of the Soviets, the best the Eisenhower administration could muster was a proposal to place the Hungarian crisis before the United Nations. Preoccupied with the Suez war, which erupted while the Hungarian revolution was unfolding, Eisenhower never considered concrete steps to bolster Hungarian independence or to dissuade Khrushchev from launching an invasion.
The only weapon in the American arsenal at all capable of shaping events behind the Iron Curtain was Radio Free Europe (RFE). But Gati stresses that during the crisis this was a problematic instrument. Established in 1950 to provide an alternative to the government-controlled media of East Europes Communist regimes, RFE oscillated between news and analysis on the one hand and polemical commentaries on the other. Although a team of American managers in the stations headquarters monitored broadcast content, RFE was decidedly not an official voice of the U.S. government. Significantly, that fact was not always clear to its listeners.
The Hungarian service of RFE suffered from a weak editorial leadership and a staff that often resorted to invective and polemics when reasoned argument was called for. Gati, who gained access both to unpublished RFE internal memos and to actual program tapes, builds a strong case that its broadcasts were shrill, propagandistic, and misleading, both prior to and during the period of the revolution.
Among other things, the station conducted a relentless assault on Imre Nagy, a genuine reformer, who was treated as a stooge of Moscow. One commentator even asserted, inaccurately, that Nagy had requested Soviet intervention and thus had Cains mark on his head. Hungarian listeners were exhorted to take action against the Soviets even as RFE failed to emphasize the low probability that America would come to their aid.
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Subjecting the various strands of American policy especially broadcastingto critical scrutiny, Gati hands up a strong indictment. His main charge is that, toward Hungary as toward Eastern Europe more generally, the United States committed the cardinal sin of any foreign policy: willing the ends but not providing the means to accomplish them. Enunciating radical goals like rollback while doing nothing to implement them, the U.S., Gati suggests, shared responsibility with Moscow for the revolutions tragic fate.
This is a considerable overreach. Gati ofers scant evidence that had the U.S. possessed better intelligence or conducted itself differentlyby broadcasting more prudent dispatches, for example, or by making it utterly clear that we would not intervenethe course of events would have been much different.
A more relevant issue, but one that Gati unfortunately does not develop, is what lessons the United States drew from the Hungarian experience for the subsequent conduct of the cold war. In this realm, one of the revolutions healthier consequences was to close the gap between rhetoric and reality when American policymakers spoke about Eastern Europe. The words liberation and rollback were in effect banished from the political lexicon.
True, on some occasions the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction. Many officials viewing East European developments began to suffer from the affliction that came to be called the Hungary Syndromethe conviction that even modest support for democratic stirrings in the Soviet bloc risked provoking a military response. But while the United States suffered through a period of hesitancy and self-doubt in the wake of the Hungarian uprising, it never abandoned the goal of contributing to the eventual liberation of Eastern Europe.
Even during the Nixon-Kissinger era of détente, when Washington was striving to patch over its differences with Moscow, we declined to recognize the incorporation of the Baltic states into the USSRa small gesture in the overall scheme of things but one that importantly signaled the enduring nature of American goals. Beyond such symbols, and beyond the enormous military aspect of containment throughout the remainder of the cold war, the United States also never gave up on more forward efforts to foster freedom. The changes that were instituted at RFE after the Hungarian revolution made the station a more credible and therefore more powerful voice of opposition to Communism. Much later, in the Reagan era, the establishment of a new, quasi-government organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, enabled the U.S. to channel millions of dollars in assistance to the opposition in Poland and other Soviet-bloc countries.
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Despite setbacks like Hungaryand far worse debacles to come in Southeast Asiathe United States ultimately prevailed in the cold war because it came to recognize early on that it was in it for the long haul. To a certain extent, Gati is right: some of the mistakes he highlights were the result of professed goals on which America could not readily deliver. But once Washington rid itself of illusions about the duration of the struggle, politicians of both parties were able to concentrate on containing the Soviets and, where opportunities presented themselves, expanding freedoms reach.
Learning from its mistakesand, over five decades, there were certainly manyAmerica ultimately emerged victorious by, first, retaining a firm and unquestioning faith in the superiority of its democratic values and, second, by meeting its challenges with fortitude and patience. The same two sets of qualities are needed if we are ever to declare mission accomplished in the conflict with the committed and merciless set of adversaries we are confronting today. The great question is whether these qualities still persist to the same degree within American political culture, and in as many hearts, as they did a half-century ago.
Arch Puddington is director of research at Freedom House and the author, most recently, of Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor.
1 Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt. Stanford, 280 pp., $24.95.
The End of the World As They Know It
What do Christian millenarians, jihadists, Ivy League professors, and baby-boomers have in common? They’re all hot for the apocalypse.
T he week of September 11 (two weeks ago, not five years), I noticed a poster up at Frankies, my sweet neighborhood trattoria in Brooklyn: It advertised a talk on 9/11 by Daniel Pinchbeck—the former downtown literary impresario who has become a Gen-X Carlos Castaneda and New Age impresario. My breakfast pal nodded at the poster and said, “The guy is selling his apocalypse thing hard.”
“Apocalypse thing?” I knew of Pinchbeck’s psychedelic enthusiasms, but I’d somehow missed his new book about the imminent epochal meltdown. In 2012, he interprets ancient Mayan prophecies to mean “our current socioeconomic system will suffer a drastic and irrevocable collapse” the year after next, and that in 2012, life as we know it will pretty much end. “We have to fix this situation right fucking now,” he said recently, “or there’s going to be nuclear wars and mass death … There’s not going to be a United States in five years, okay?”
The same day at lunch in Times Square, another friend happened to mention that he was thinking of buying a second country house—in Nova Scotia, as “a climate-change end-days hedge.” He smirked, but he was not joking.
On the subway home, I read the essay in the new Vanity Fair by the historian Niall Ferguson arguing that Europe and America in 2006 look disconcertingly like the Roman Empire of about 406—that is, the beginning of the end. That night, I began The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s new novel set in a transcendently bleak, apparently post-nuclear-war-ravaged America of the near future. And a day or so later watched the online trailer for Mel Gibson’s December movie, Apocalypto, set in the fifteenth-century twilight of, yes, the Mayan civilization.
So: Five years after Islamic apocalyptists turned the World Trade Center to fire and dust, we chatter more than ever about the clash of civilizations, fight a war prompted by our panic over (nonexistent) nuclear and biological weapons, hear it coolly asserted this past summer that World War III has begun, and wonder if an avian-flu pandemic poses more of a personal risk than climate change. In other words, apocalypse is on our minds. Apocalypse is … hot.
Millions of people—Christian millenarians, jihadists, psychedelicized Burning Men—are straight-out wishful about The End. Of course, we have the loons with us always; their sulfurous scent if not the scale of the present fanaticism is familiar from the last third of the last century—the Weathermen and Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians. But there seem to be more of them now by orders of magnitude (60-odd million “Left Behind” novels have been sold), and they’re out of the closet, networked, reaffirming their fantasies, proselytizing. Some thousands of Muslims are working seriously to provoke the blessed Armageddon. And the Christian Rapturists’ support of a militant Israel isn’t driven mainly by principled devotion to an outpost of Western democracy but by their fervent wish to see crazy biblical fantasies realized ASAP—that is, the persecution of the Jews by the Antichrist and the Battle of Armageddon.
When apocalypse preoccupations leach into less-fantastical thought and conversation, it becomes still more disconcerting. Even among people sincerely fearful of climate change or a nuclearized Iran enacting a “second Holocaust” by attacking Israel, one sometimes detects a frisson of smug or hysterical pleasure.
As in the excited anticipatory chatter about Iran’s putative plans to fire a nuke on the 22nd of last month—in order to provoke apocalypse and pave the way for the return of the Shiite messiah, a miracle in which President Ahmadinejad apparently believes. Princeton’s Bernard Lewis, at 90 still the preeminent historian of Islam, published a piece in The Wall Street Journal to spread this false alarm.
And as in Charles Krauthammer’s column the other day: He explained how a U.S. military attack on Iran would double the price of oil, ruin the global economy, redouble hatred for America, and incite terrorism worldwide—but that we had to go for it anyway because of “the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days.” In other words: Ratchet up the risk of Armageddon sooner in order to prevent a possible Armageddon later.
I worry that such fast-and-loose talk, so ubiquitous and in so many flavors, might in the aggregate be greasing the skids, making the unthinkable too thinkable, turning us all a little Dr. Strangelovian, actually increasing the chance—by a little? A lot? Lord knows—that doomsday prophecies will become self-fulfilling. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.
Declinism is the least-troubling species of end-days forecast, but still, it’s apocalypse lite. These forecasts are grandly gloomy, commonly depicted as a replay of the disintegration of Rome that ushered in the Dark Ages. “As Rome passed away,” Pat Buchanan writes in his new anti-immigration best seller, State of Emergency, “so the West is passing away.”
Not so long ago, it was only right-wingers and old crackpots making decline-and-fall-of-Rome claims about America. But Niall Ferguson is a young superstar Harvard professor, and he argues that we—undisciplined, overstretched, unable to pay our bills or enforce our imperial claims, giving ourselves over to decadent spectacle (NASCAR, pornography), and overwhelmed by immigrants—do indeed look very ancient Roman. He suggests, in fact, that Gibbon’s definitive vision—the “most awful scene in the history of mankind”—is about to be topped.
Jared Diamond made his name back in the fat and happy nineties with Guns, Germs, and Steel, explaining why the West ruled. His second best seller was last year’s Collapse, about how irrational religion and environmental recklessness destroyed previous societies and how America looks to be on the same suicidal path. Meanwhile, the unambiguous trend lines of everyday economic life—China’s rise, the dying-off of Detroit and old media—become the reinforcing background beat that makes the new declinism feel instinctively plausible.
There is something of the appeal of pornography here: sensational, shocking, simultaneously appalling and riveting, brutally frank and fantastically stylized. As with porn, it was mainly a fringe taste that has lately gone mainstream. And as with real porn, too, apocalypse porn comes hard-core (Krauthammer) and soft (Diamond), in fiction ranging from the hideous (The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion) to the absurd (the “Left Behind” series) to the merely dopey (The Day After Tomorrow).
And now, with McCarthy’s The Road, something else again. I resisted. A nameless father wandering across a dead, denuded, anarchic America with his son, hiding from roving packs of monstrous killers? Not my usual cups of tea.
But the novel is awesome, a kind of reality-based Beckett, moving and unbelievably believable in its portrayal of horror and dread and hopelessness in the next Dark Age … with an announced first printing of 250,000, a gigantic number for any work of literary fiction, let alone one that barely has a plot. McCarthy is a high-end brand name, but The Road will be a best seller propelled by an end-times Zeitgeist that has smart people as well as fools and freaks in its thrall. As fine a book as it is, I still felt a little ashamed to enjoy its grisly what-if jolts; the pornographic aspect is there.
From a commercial point of view, The Road’s lack of any detailed backstory will be a boon: Because we never learn anything about the precipitating cataclysm, every reader can fill in the blank—nuclear war, meteor collision, attacks by extraterrestrials, or Gog and Magog. It accommodates an apocalypse of your choice.
Even the young people will find things to like in The Road. There are zombies, more or less—lots of cannibals, anyway, and “bloodcults.” “We’re not survivors,” the hero’s late wife said before she died. “We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” (The booming zombie genre is, of course, a pulpy subcategory of apocalypse porn.) And The Road also has marauding “roadagents” and a small army of slaveholders with spears made of repurposed auto parts—Mad Max touches.
It was in those movies, as a lone ranger in post-nuclear-apocalypse Australia, that Mel Gibson became a star. Then he won an Oscar for glorifying a Scot leading his people to a kind of Armageddon, then became the Evangelicals’ favorite movie star with The Passion of the Christ. And now the very eagerly awaited Apocalypto. “The parallels,” his co-writer told Time, “between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what’s happening to our own civilization are eerie.” Mel himself goes further: “The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys.” Mel Gibson, meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—runty, Bush-bashing, anti-Semitic, 50-year-old fundamentalist religious mystics with an abiding visionary interest in apocalypse.
Apocalypticism is one of those realms where the ideological spectrum bends into a circle and the extremes meet. The nuttiest Islamists and Christians agree that the present hell in the Middle East is a hopeful sign of the end-times, that an Antichrist will temporarily take control of the world. Muslims expect him to be a Western Jew; in many Christian versions, he comes to power through the European Union—although on his “Bring It On: End Times” Web page, Pat Robertson says Islam itself is an “antichrist system.”
For both sects as well as the New Age psychedeloids, apocalypse still has its original meaning—revelation, the appearance of God following destruction. The subtitle of Pinchbeck’s book is The Return of Quetzalcoatl, referring to the Mesoamerican Über-god. After the awful existential reboot in 2012, people will develop psychic superpowers to solve global warming and achieve communistic bliss. Not all people, alas, because just as the Rapture is strictly for Christians, and Allah will know his own exclusively, Pinchbeck apparently believes that only people like him—“those who have reached a kind of supramental consciousness,” according to a Rolling Stone profile—will achieve paradise. Speaking of 2012: That’s also the target year, according to the influential Saudi theologian Sheik Safar Al-Hawali, for Allah’s “day of wrath,” meaning the destruction of Israel and the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem. Which could jibe with the timeline on the Christian-porn-mongering site ApocalypseSoon .org, which envisions Israel nuking Syria in order that Isaiah 17:1 (“Behold, Damascus is taken away”) be fulfilled.
Let’s not freak out just yet. Apocalypticism has ebbed and flowed for thousands of years, and the present uptick is the third during my lifetime. Among my most vivid childhood memories are LBJ’s mushroom-cloud campaign ad, a post-nuclear Twilight Zone episode, and my mother’s (scary) paperback copy of On the Beach.
The next brief spike in apocalyptic shivers and dystopian fevers came twenty years later, coinciding with our last right-wing president: the nuclear-freeze movement, The Day After on TV,the post-apocalypse novel Riddley Walker (written in a prescient text-message-ese), Blade Runner, Mad Max.
And now, another twenty years later, here we are again—but this time, it seems, more widespread and cross-cultural, both more reasonable (climate change, nuclear proliferation) and more insane (religious prophecy), more unnerving.
I don’t think our mood is only a consequence of 9/11 (and the grim Middle East), or climate-change science, or Christians’ displaced fear of science and social change. It’s also a function of the baby-boomers’ becoming elderly. For half a century, they have dominated the culture, and now, as they enter the glide path to death, I think their generational solipsism unconsciously extrapolates approaching personal doom: When I go, everything goes with me, my end will be the end. It’s the pre-apocalyptic converse of the postapocalyptic weariness of the hero in The Road: “Some part of him always wished it to be over.”
Have a nice day.
Censorship, Scepticism and Conspiracy Theories
By Cameron Abadi in Tehran
Information in Iran is largely controlled by the state, leading many Iranians to discount all media, no matter where it comes from. Wacky conspiracy theories and a healthy skepticism are the result.
REUTERS
It’s not always easy to get straightforward information in Iran.
As August came to a close, Reza Hashemi, the manager of an apartment building in northern Tehran, received an upsetting letter from the police. The note contained an ultimatum: Remove the satellite receivers from the roof, or we’ll remove them for you. For a few days, Hashimi assumed it was an empty threat. A law against satellite dishes had been on the books in Iran since the mid-1990s, but it had mostly gone un-enforced — even if it was an open secret that many Iranians used the technology to receive “un-Islamic” television shows from abroad. Then the police came knocking at a neighboring building.
“They came with an empty truck; when they left it was full of satellite dishes,” Hashemi said as he went door-to-door in his building, breaking the bad news to his tenants. “At other buildings, they came with hammers and destroyed them right there.” At least on one occasion, the police didn’t even bother with tools. Last week, an Iranian wire service distributed a photo of a police officer casually dropping a dish off the ledge of a skyscraper rooftop.
Satellite dishes have not been the only target. A law passed by the Iranian parliament this past spring bars Iranians from appearing on foreign-produced broadcasts. Jamming of unapproved radio signals and Internet sites is common practice.
Dismissing professional journalism
In all, the Iranian government seems intent on defending itself against foreign efforts to break its monopoly on broadcast journalism within the country. Some of these efforts from overseas are, indeed, unabashed. Earlier this week, President Bush delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, a portion of which amounted to an expression of his administration’s hope for regime change in Tehran addressed directly to “the people of Iran.” Meanwhile, earlier this year, the US Congress committed $50 million dollars to the development of a new Farsi-language satellite television channel. It will join the myriad of private broadcasts hostile to the Iraian regime that are produced by Iranian immigrants in California.
The Iranian people, for their part, seem largely indifferent to the battle between domestic and international news media for their hearts and minds. Indeed, when considering the issues of the day, Iranians display remarkable self-sufficiency. Many Iranians will consult a diversity of media outlets foreign and domestic, but ultimately dismiss professional journalism altogether. Instead they devise their own idiosyncratic analyses of current events, drawing on a long Iranian tradition of conspiracy theorizing. “Iranians,” says Professor Abbas Milani, Director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University in California, “have developed their own special language for dealing with the world.”
The prevalent cynicism with which Iranians approach the news media is largely a product of the country’s distorted media landscape, where journalism is ubiquitous, but objective news reporting is rare. “We don’t have a free market,” a journalist from a conservative Iranian wire service admitted to SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The government sets the tone.”
The government’s control on the news media is nothing new. According to Vasij Naderi, professor of law in Tehran, “Iran has experienced only two short periods in its history when the press has been able to function relatively unfettered: the years between the end of World War II and the coup against Mohammed Mossadeq (in 1953) and the months after the election of President Khatami in the late 1990s.”
Unabashed partisanship
But, even the reformist transition of the late 1990s never managed to wrest domestic television from the hands of the state. Without a satellite dish, television viewers in Iran have access to six stations, all of which are staffed at the discretion of the Islamic government. Unsurprisingly, broadcasts are exceedingly pious. In one “Dr. Phil”-type segment, a cleric warned about the evils of abortion and praised a young boy who had memorized the Koran. The reports are also unabashedly partisan. UN resolution 1701 is routinely described as a Hezbollah victory rather than a cease-fire, while Israel is exclusively referred to as the “Zionist regime.”
State television’s coverage of the nuclear conflict is painted in equally bold strokes. Iran’s nuclear program is presented, whenever possible, as a symbol of scientific, not military, progress. At the stage-managed evet in February celebrating Iran’s successful enrichment of uranium, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech before a backdrop depicting a flock of doves, after which a group of interpretive dancers performed a ballet about the beauty of enriched uranium. Meanwhile, Israel and America are depicted as dangerous war-mongerers.
The government maintains similar, if more subtle, control over the print media. A cursory glance suggests a thriving newspaper scene: Iran boasts dozens of daily papers, which, when seen spread on the sidewalks before newsstands, can give the impression of an active national debate.
None of them, though, are free from ties to the Islamic government. Aside from the subsidies that most newspapers receive from the state to help cover costs not met by advertising revenue, all newspapers are required to mind what are informally referred to as “red lines.” “Red lines” mark the minimum respect that ought be paid to the government and the Islamic Revolution, lest the Ministry of Culture revoke the paper’s license to publish.
Photo Gallery: When the World Watches Iran
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Alas, it’s not always clear where those red lines are. The popular reformist paper Sharq was shut down in early September after publishing a cartoon in which a donkey with a halo and a horse discussed the regime’s handling of the nuclear crisis. Editors argued that it was an innocuous doodle, but the government’s press-supervisory board charged the paper with religious blasphemy.
The ambiguous guidelines result in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. “The rules are kept ambiguous so that journalists learn to police themselves,” says Milani. In practice the myriad of daily newspapers all hew close to the government line. And with Iranians forbidden from appearing on foreign broadcasts, there’s no other sanctioned outlet.
Idiosyncratic conspiracy theories
“We are in a vicious circle. With these crackdowns, more Iranian intellectuals, journalists, scholars are taking refuge with outside-based media to express themselves,” says Masha’allah Shamsolva’ezin, spokesman for the Iranian Association for the Defense of Journalists. “Then they’re accused of collaboration with foreign media and arrested.”
The Iranian public responds, in turn, by approaching news reports with scepticism. It is a mechanism Iranians are accustomed to. The traditional Iranian social custom of taarof is a ritualized manner of offering something without actually meaning it. It’s typical, for example, for taxi drivers to initially refuse payment at the end of the ride, until the passenger insists on paying. Having been raised with this quotidian variety of double-speak, Iranians are used to not taking what they are told at face value.
AP
The cartoon which doomed Sharq. The donkey and the horse are discussing the Iranian regime’s handling of the nuclear crisis.
They don’t typically restrict their skepticism to the Iranian media, though. Most Iranians that tune-in to American-funded Voice of America and lower-budget LA talk shows are well aware that those broadcasts are aiming for regime change. “None of these channels are credible. They exaggerate and stretch the truth. No one would start a revolution on the basis of what they say,” says Professor Naderi. Iranians watch these programs not because they trust the broadcasts, but rather because they’re seeking a source to balance out the Iranian state media. “Even Ayatollah Khomeini used to listen to Voice of America and Radio Israel,” points out Professor Milani.
Ostensibly objective news outlets like CNN and the BBC are dismissed in the same way. “Every country is just giving its own version of world events,” says Ryan Kazemi, a student at Tehran University. “It’s clear from CNN that America wants to start a war. Really, it’s up to each person to make up his own mind.”
With no consensus on what’s to be trusted, many Iranians tend to formulate interpretations of world events that effectively oppose the official stories offered by their government and Western media outlets. But the private analyses of most Iranians come across as little more than idiosyncratic conspiracy theories in which American power plays an outsize role. Public power, in this view, is never to be trusted and intentions are never what they seem. “Iran already has 10 or 15 nuclear bombs,” reports a taxi driver; “America wants perpetual war between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries,” explains an accountant; “Ahmadinejad raises the pice of yogurt only so he can get credit for lowering it later,” reveals a hairdresser.
Milani, for one, is not surprised by the paranoia. “Conspiracy theories are the natural result when there’s no sense of social agency,” he says. “There’s no other way to make events cohere.”
Still, one Iranian journalist who preferred to remain anonymous suggested that the Iranian approach to news had advantages over the Western attitude. “Europeans are complacent,” he says. “They’ve forgotten how to think for themselves and so elites control public opinion.”
Whatever merits such an argument might have, it seems though that Iranians wouldn’t mind a respite from the need to constantly formulate their opinions and re-orient themselves in the world. The information war between the West and Iran continues unabated, but many Iranians seem just as content to tune out. Indeed, the one tenant who objected most vehemently to Hashemi’s request that his satellite dish be taken down wasn’t lamenting the loss of CNN or the Voice of America. “Please, no,” he cried. “There’s a soccer game tonight! Germany plays Ireland!”
