Industrial Workers of the World

Antony Loewenstein and The Blogging Revolution by Giovanni Torre 2009-04-03

Antony Loewenstein's latest book - The Blogging Revolution - documents his travels through Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, China and Cuba and his meetings with independent journalists and writers. He recently spoke to Indymedia.

http://perth.indymedia.org/?action=newswire&parentview=143243

Four years ago Antony Loewenstein began work on My Israel Question, a scathing critique of the occupation of Palestine. For a nice Jewish boy from Melbourne, it was a bold move. “Most of the vitriol around my work on Israel/Palestine comes from Jews, sadly, who simply refuse to accept their homeland is a rogue state that commits horrible wars crimes in the occupied territories.

Receiving hate mail, which continues almost weekly, and death threats is not something I enjoy, rest assured, but speak to any person, Jewish or otherwise, who writes critically about the Middle East and they’ll tell similar stories.” Involvement in the tempestuous Israel/Palestine debate and frustration with the “narrow perspective” offered by the Western media after 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq spurred Loewenstein into writing his latest book, The Blogging Revolution.

“It was as if only Western journalists had to validate the views of citizens in far-away lands for them to be published. Why, for example, aren’t we hearing more Iraqi voices? Or Iranians? What do they think? In every country I visited - Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China - I wanted to give readers the opportunity to hear and feel the perspectives of citizens in countries the West routinely demonises as ‘enemies’.”

Witnessing China’s frenzied and gargantuan preparations for the Olympics, including $33billion spent on “security” for the games, Loewenstein also saw an anti-authoritarian tide swelling online. Defying conventional wisdom, he claims awarding London the 2012 Olympics is arguably just as problematic as Beijing. “You can make a very strong case that Britain’s record on human rights, on uses and abuses of British power around the world, over the last 50 years has actually been worse than China,” he says.

Loewenstein urges the Western media takes notice of “what Chinese people themselves are saying”. While there’s certainly no freedom of the press in China, there “is a great deal of debate that goes on that was simply impossible before the web”. “Talking about corruption, talking about different systems of government… the controversy around the baby milk formula, criticism of the government for allowing this to happen… Around the Szechuan earthquake, bloggers mobilised people to protest in the streets against dodgy builders,” he said. “Sometimes these things are being said anonymously and there is still a sense of knowing what the boundaries you can not cross are. If you came out and said the one party state should end you would be jailed.”

While some sections of the mainstream western media are prepared to condemn China’s human rights abuses at home and in Tibet, an army of western companies have marched blissfully through the ruins of the bamboo curtain to feed at the trough. Loewenstein sees not only hypocrisy, but also a danger western corporations will learn more from the Chinese dictatorship than the other way around.

“The regime said to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others; ‘you can come in here, as long as you do x, y and z – which generally entailed censoring websites, banning websites, blocking certain keywords… It’s disturbing that the way companies like that operate in non-western countries is rarely, if ever, discussed in our media.”

With the vast majority of its 70 million people under the age of 30, Iran has the most robust online community in the Middle East, with about 100,000 bloggers and independent online reporters writing about one of the most complex and paradoxical states on Earth. “You can’t say anything critical about the Supreme Leader, however, you can criticise President Ahmedinejad. T

here are lines you can’t cross and trying to understand what they are is a learning practice. Generally speaking in the last three years there has been a crackdown on human rights workers and the press, and it’s more difficult to have robust debates than it was before Ahmedinejad’s election, but I was amazed at the level of really interesting discussions going on online.”

“I fear there will be an attack on Iran… I’m not defending the Iranian government, the human rights abuses in Iran are outrageous and growing, but there is a lot more debate in Iran about issues such as nuclear power and human rights than we appreciate here in the west and, if there was a strike on Iran, many people would rally around the government.”

Anger remains over the US support for Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran in the 1980s and has been exacerbated by the ongoing and bloody occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There is profound scepticism and outright anger towards the US even talking about democracy… The Bush administration has set back the chances of democracy in the Middle East… In every country I went to, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, most people I spoke to would rather have no meddling from the west.”

In many of the countries Loewenstein visited, independent blogs are the only source of information beyond the sterilised propaganda produced by the state-run or state-endorsed media. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are special cases. Extremely cosy with the west, they seem beyond criticism despite their horrendous record on human rights, and despite the fact 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudi. “Saudi Arabia is not even a one-party state, it’s a one-family state.

Compared to Saudi Arabia, Iran seems like a Chomskian utopia. Women can’t work, they can’t drive – you walk down the streets of a major city and women are like black shadows. The House of Saud are a bunch of thugs who can do pretty much whatever they like because they have oil – it really is as base as that… The relationship between Saudia Arabia and the US seems untouchable.”

The House of Saud is essentially the Taliban with Rolls Royces. Even the smallest freedom is a dangerous ray of light in a nation so long in the shadow cast by tyranny. “What the internet has done, particularly for women, has given them a voice about certain things. One popular anonymous blogger in Saudi Arabia writes about her life, about her relationship with her husband – it’s not really political at all – explaining what life is like, the ups and the downs… she talks about buying lingerie for her husband and other things that can seem mundane but they are actually revolutionary and empowering in a place like Saudi Arabia.”

Many authoritarian states supported the development of the internet, seeing only the potential economic benefit of the web and not the potential for spreading dissent and are now “trying to put the genie back in the bottle”. Cuba is very a different story, with development hampered by the US embargo and the Castro administration. “I met IT students in Havana who are studying the internet but can’t actually get access to the internet. They are given access to an intranet which is a number of website deemed acceptable by the state. Those people, not surprisingly, are pissed off.”

Only two to three per cent of the population has internet access but “the Castro regime realises unless it changes relatively quickly it’s threatened by the fact you can’t block progress anymore”. Travelling through the unfree world can be difficult, even dangerous, for anyone, particularly a freelance journalist determined to give a voice to ordinary people. “There’s an element of danger just speaking with a foreign journalist… People often wanted to use pseudonyms, often didn’t want to be recorded… (The book) gives people a chance to be heard with their own voices… So much of the western media go to one of these countries and the story is all about the voice of the officials.”

Asia Minor remains a puzzle as complex and vast as it is dangerous. Loewenstein considers its future with some optimism tempered by a great deal of fear. While turmoil and bloodshed continues in Iraq, Afghanistan creeps almost inexorably towards the edge of an abyss. Gaza remains a defiant Hamas outpost, surrounded by walls of Israeli steel. An uneasy peace hangs over southern Lebanon and Egypt simmers below a surface kept calm by the regime’s iron fist.

“Egypt is the second highest recipient of American aid after Israel, between three to four billion dollars a year, most of which goes on suppressing their own citizens. There is growing anger towards the regime in Egypt. (President) Mubarak is getting old and his son Gemal is being groomed for the leadership. I am sure the West would love him to take over because open and free elections in much of the Middle East would probably bring into power Islamists who are anti-US and anti-Israel. This is the west’s worst nightmare. Therefore the chance of there being any real democracy in the Middle East for the foreseeable future if virtually non-existent; the west won’t allow it.

If for some reason the Saudi monarchy is overthrown in a revolution by an anti-US group, that sort of thing would probably spark a US invasion because they’ll want to keep control of the oil reserves.” Throughout the countries Loewenstein visited, he detected a push for more freedoms accompanied by a rejection of the neo-liberal cultural consensus. His conclusion would shock Francis Fukuyama.

“Most people in the Middle East don’t want a western capitalist utopia. On one level I am massively optimistic about democracy in the Middle East and not because of America. The influence of America, unfortunately, has been a malign one, their approach is a pragmatic one based on energy resources and strategic positioning… It’s hard to see that changing.”

Loewenstein sees the end of United States reign as an unchallenged ‘hyper-power’ as the only thing that will change the American approach to the Middle East. “America is a superpower and will be for the foreseeable future. If McCain and Palin won that would have just accelerated a hundred-fold the decline of American power. Obama will only arrest the decline slightly. America is on a trajectory now. It is actually going broke.

I don’t see China and India as benign super-powers but the way they view the Middle East is different.” The role of independent and sometimes clandestine journalists in repressive regimes is absolutely critical at this volatile stage in history. “In these countries bloggers are reporting news and information that the state-supported media won’t touch.” But will the bloggers put pressure on the print media to defy authorities more?

“In Egypt police were arresting and raping men in prison cells, filming it and releasing it to intimidate people. That footage is being used by blogs to generate outrage and pressure the regime to do something about it. Torture still exists but in the past few years the regime has been compelled to at least publicly try and address it. Years earlier, everyone knew police torture happened but the state-run media wouldn’t talk about it – what’s changed, according to the bloggers there, is that the mainstream media has been forced to talk about it. The bloggers are pushing those issues on to the agenda.”

Loewenstein warns that as the fiercely independent writers present a stronger challenge to the dictators, the more dangerous the authoritarian governments will become. “The flipside is as the regime’s hold on power becomes more precarious, it will increase the pressure on bloggers and online journalists.” Antony Loewenstein’s book, The Blogging Revolution, has been on the shelves since September.

How the fight between Big Brother and a growing army of Winston Smiths ends in the real world remains to be seen.