Iran: Neda’s Martyrdom
By far the most powerful and disturbing image to have come so far from Iran is the footage of a young woman lying on the ground, shot in the chest and staring into the sky as blood suddenly starts gushing from her mouth and eyes as she dies. Soon after this video was posted, we learned that this woman’s name was Neda and she was just standing beside her father watching the situation when a sharp-shooter put a bullet directly into her heart. I can hardly imagine the horror she must have felt in that final moment, let alone the absolute agony of her father.
Very little is known about the situation, so one can only guess as to the intentions of the scum who pulled the trigger. This young woman was clearly not a threat, and the shot came from far away so there can be no doubt that it wasn’t self-defence. One could imagine that the sharp-shooters were encouraged to shoot innocent bystanders as a way to further frighten the people and get them to go home—by sending the message “just being outside puts you at risk” that will certainly have the effect of keeping thousands inside who might have otherwise gone out. But why shoot an innocent woman? Say what you will about social equality, but Muslims are far more inclined to be outraged over the death of a female than of a male (as am I). By beating up or killing women you greatly risk inflaming things even further. The fact that this was caught on tape, that millions of people have seen it, and that thousands of Iranians already know her name and are celebrating her as a martyr, is the last thing Khamenei could have wanted.
My speculation is that the sharp-shooter himself wasn’t thinking at all about the consequences—that he was just a sadist who got off on the cold-blooded murder of a woman. But the motives of the shooter himself are not nearly as important as the motives of Khamenei in allowing this tragedy to take place at all, and the consequences it will ultimately have. His motives were probably religious. He probably really believes that he is divinely inspired and that any challenge to his authority is a challenge to Allah. Therefore he couldn’t do the practical thing and spare his country all this unnecessary trauma by allowing a new election—he had to stand firm and declare all dissidents to be enemies of the state and therefore enemies of Islam. If his only motivation was to stay in power, he could have done so peacefully, but that would have required compromise. And for a man like Khamenei, compromise is not an option.
As for the consequences, those remain to be seen. What began as a series of peaceful protests will certainly take a more violent turn as the rage continues to grow. Many more will stay home out of fear, and the only ones who remain on the streets will be those willing to fight and die. The innocents who have died thus far will be their rallying cry and we’ll see many more martyrs before this is all over. And when the violence finally subsides, whether the Ayatollah remains in power or not, Iran will have become a fundamentally different country, and this a fundamentally different world.
Corey wrote in the comments to my last Iran entry that I may have been exaggerating the idea of the new media revolution, and he made a good point that we’re only able to witness this because Iran is for the most part a modern country with a modern technological infrastructure. If something similar were to happen in Africa or any third-world nation we wouldn’t be getting tweets and pictures and videos directly from the people, so it might not work as a prototype for other revolutions. Furthermore, other brutal dictators are surely already working on figuring out how to completely stop the flow of information should the need arise. Personally, I think that whatever obstacles these dictators put in place, the people will find a way around it. I think media has advanced to the point where it really can’t be stopped, where the only way to truly block the dissemination of information would be to cut power across the entire country, which would almost certainly backfire even worse.
No, I still believe that we’re witnessing something extraordinary in terms of the impact of new media on world events. Gone are the days that a government can attack its own people and not be held accountable for it. If you’re killing innocent women, the world will know about it.
The protests may very well be crushed, and Neda’s death may appear to have been in vain. I’d like to think that if she hasn’t become a martyr for this particular revolution, she may at least be a symbolic martyr for an even greater, worldwide revolution that is just beginning.
Just the fact that I’ve felt such strong emotion over this woman today when yesterday I didn’t even know she existed speaks volumes about the interconnected world we’re living in. What would the effect have been if we’d seen images like this during the Iraq invasion? It’s important to confront people with the true horror of these situations so that we will hopefully stop repeating them in the future.
i agree with you that we are witnessing something extraordinary, and that clever people will always find a way around government-imposed sanctions. that’s what makes computers so scary in the first place, the fact that they can always be hacked, that there are so many ways to get around something if you know how to manipulate the technology. and hooray for that. fuck government ideals.
as for neda, yes, its very sad. and while at first when i read this i was shocked to think that we had switched places, that you are now led too much by your emotions about this and that i am being led too much by my head. i thought that your reaction to neda’s death was over the top and had more to do with the place that you give females in your mind and the pedestal you raise them on, and that of course you would take something like this almost as a personal attack. i still remember how scary you got emotionally after watching that whore getting beaten to death on the sopranos. that showed me just how much this kind of thing effects you emotionally. which i thought at first reading was unfairly influencing you away from rational thought on the issue.
however now, after rethinking it, i think i am thinking too much and not feeling enough about it all. i dont know tho. i used to get really worked up about these kind of things, get really passionate, but with this one i’ve noticed that i dont really feel anything, i’m just observing it with cold rationality. which i do think is important, but if you dont feel anything about it and lose the human emotional side to it, then what the fuck is it for in the first place?
so while i dont share your grieving for neda and her (what i can only consider is unwanted) martydom, i am still always against violence, especially this kind of awful, random violence that’s only meant to promote fear and terror. its the worst kind. trying to scare people into submission, not working towards any goal other than keeping control. i hate that, i really hate that. and i can only hope that people around the world who are seeing her death are having reactions closer to yours, because when people feel something that is when they act. sadly, fear is one of the strongest emotions. but if the fact that she died on camera can aid to their cause and gets people interested and involved, then so much the better.
And she is different from Cro-Magnon man
She’s different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs
And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan
Half superstar, half victim
She’s a victor-star, conceptually new
And she is different from the Dodo
And from the Kankabono
She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She’s everybody’s sister
She’s a symbolic of our failure
She’s the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on TV
Wow. Thank you so much for making that connection to “Watching TV” which is just about the most appropriate possible song for this situation. I can’t believe that hadn’t even occurred to me yet. Kudos.
And you’re absolutely right that my reaction to this is inflamed by my idealization of women. As you pointed out, I even get horribly upset when fictional women die fictional deaths in fictional TV shows. The fact that this was real just makes it extra horrifying. But it is important because I’m not the only person in the world who is more disturbed by a young woman’s death than by the death of a man or even an OLDER woman. The fact that Neda has already become an international symbol and a rallying cry for the movement just goes to show you that there’s something in the human psyche that responds more emotionally to a woman’s death. I don’t know if that’s fair or if it’s right but that seems to be the way it is.
I think that your sentiments here speak volumes. You’re emotionally detached but still understand that the most important thing is for people to be just the opposite–that the more emotionally INVESTED people are in these kinds of situations the more of an impact they have. And this kind of violence is indeed the worst kind, purely to promote fear and terror for the purpose of control. If we don’t get upset and outraged by this kind of thing, then what the fuck are we supposed to be outraged by?
It’s sad but to a certain degree we’ve all been desensitized to this kind of thing. In spite of being deeply disturbed by that image yesterday, and as many times as it popped into my head and got me upset thinking about it, I was still able to go about my normal routine and enjoy simple pleasures. As moved as I was I still don’t feel like I was moved enough. Shouldn’t we feel powerful emotions over this kind of thing? It’s our emotional response that made us hate war and oppression in the first place.
How ironic is it that we finally reach a point in human history where the true horrors of war and oppression can finally be broadcast around the world as they happen, but our culture has already made us so desensitized to violence that it barely affects us anyway?
“Did we do anything after this?”
“I have a feeling we did.”
We were watching TV…
well fuck knows i agree with you about the desensitized thing, but really, what are we supposed to do? it would be glorious if this video effected everyone as much as it did you, and the world came to a stop in an outrage over something so horrible. but that will only happen on a random alien world in star trek so that their aberration of violence can spark the episode’s storyline to show us all how desensitized we really are. but in our world, it will piss a few people off, maybe even enough to get them to write a letter to a congressman or to make a crappy sign and go stand out on a street corner, but for the most part no one will give a shit any more than they’ll give a shit about a busload of kids falling off a bridge. its the news of the world, its always coming in, there’s always some new tragedy, how many thousands of people have died since i started writing this entry? died without a camera in their face. which is of course what sets her death apart and gives it far more of a chance to have an impact, but at the same time, just watching tv and movies and watching fake people die constantly chips away at you until reality just blurs into the screen, and if its on the screen its on the screen and you’ve seen thousands of people, real or not, die on screen before.
Tears burn my eyes
What does it mean?
This tender TV
This tearjerking scene
Beamed into my home
You don’t have to be a Jew
To disapprove of murder
Moslem or Christian, Mullah or Pope
Preachers or poet, who was it wrote
Give any one species too much rope
And they’ll fuck it up
but maybe, and hopefully, that’s just my american jaded side talking, maybe around the world other people arent as desensitized as we are yet. but i doubt it.
if only everyone had the time to sit down and really think about it and consider it, then maybe there’d be a chance. but the modern day world just doesnt allow for it to happen, there’s just not enough time to care, not when you’ve got a job to get to, work to do, sleep to get, food to buy, fun to have, sitting around and thinking about this dying girl half a world away is only going to fuck all that up. so most people can recognize its horrible, but what can they do about it? this is the exact same mindset that keeps the entire world from progressing as fast as they could, that keeps people eating meat, buying products made in sweat shops, turning a blind eye to all manners of horror in the world. ahh that sucks, but what can i do about it? well there’s a lot, if you’d let yourself feel something for a little bit about it you god damned fucking inhuman robots. but, that’s what society makes us into. sad, but true.
if only everyone listened to roger, he has a way to make it all so clear….
She had shiny hair
She had perfect breasts
She had almond eyes
She had yellow thighs
She was the daughter of an engineer
So get out your pistols
Get out your stones
Get out your knives
Cut them to the bone
They are the lackeys of the grocer’s machine
They built the dark satanic mills
That manufacture hell on earth
They bought the front row seats on Calvary
They are irrelevant to me
And I grieve for my sister