Internet & Democracy Blog

Hamid Tehrani over at Global Voices reports today that Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the former vice president and well known blogger whose gaunt appearance in his show trial has spread virally across the Internet as proof that he has been tortured, is now being forced to blog from prison. Hamid summarizes the post:

“He says that the interrogation continues but he has very friendly relation with interrogator and protesters in prison know that there was no significant fraud in Iran’s presidential election.”

Yeah, right.

Clearly, his captors haven’t gotten the memo that the show trials, forced confessions and now blogging at gunpoint just aren’t working like they used to. As Laura Secor writes in this week’s New Yorker:

“Show trials have been staged before, most notably in Moscow in the nineteen-thirties. Typically, such rituals purge élites and scare the populace. They are the prelude to submission. Iran’s show trials, so far, have failed to accrue this fearsome power. In part, this is because the accused are connected to a mass movement: Iranians whose democratic aspirations have evolved organically within the culture of the Islamic Republic. It is one thing to persuade citizens that a narrow band of apparatchiks are enemies of the state. It is quite another to claim that a political agenda with broad support—for popular sovereignty, human rights, due process, freedom of speech—has been covertly planted by foreigners.”

Secor highlights later how the Iranians, and indeed those from around the world, have taken to the Internet to mock the entire show trial process and the ridiculous confessions that their interrogators have made up for them, kicked off by satarist Ebrahim Nabavi’s stripped pajama confession that he has met with the CIA, imported green velvet and cavorted with the likes of Angelina Jolie. As Secor concludes, “…the spectacle that was meant to produce compliance and terror instead has stoked fury and derision.”