What to do when the government shoots at you?
by Diana Sweet, RawStory, January 02, 2010
An amateur video apparently taken with a cell phone has surfaced on YouTube that appears to contradict the Iranian government’s claim that its security forces didn’t shoot at protesters last Sunday during demonstrations that left at least eight people dead, including the nephew of opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
As first reported by The Los Angeles Times on Saturday, the video not only shows a gunman opening fire on demonstrators – it also gives an eye-opening look at a growing air of defiance by Iranian opposition.
A man in plain clothes is seen and heard opening fire on the crowd as another man can be heard shouting out “Dishonorable Basiji!” blaming a member of Iran’s Basij militia for firing the shots.
With shots fired, you would expect the demonstrators to flee and seek cover, but instead, they decide to fight back.
“Attack!” someone in the crowd calls out, and the crowd runs off in pursuit of the gunman as the video, less than a minute in length comes to an end.
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device capable of generating video. And, just as importantly, know how to use it and use it quickly in a practiced manner.
You know what I haven’t said on this blog so far is that my brother is involved in law enforcement, and is very very conservative (right wing).
I love him, but in some ways he can be a little Mussolini depending on the context.
So I’m familiar in some sense with the mind of the “enemy”. Heh. No I don’t think he’s my enemy. But he doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to live in the kind of society I would recognize as being conducive to what I would call “freedom” — for him freedom is the freedom from taxes and to own property.
Aaaanyway.
One of the things “they” fear is the fear of being seen and caught in ways that cannot possibly be refuted, a.k.a. “video”. Oh, my brother says that video can be made to “lie” and has brought up with examples that make his point. He also says that the average man does not understand police procedure and is correct in this — if people knew what “police procedure” entailed, they would take over the police department and to my brother “make his job impossible”.
“They” really hate the idea of the average person being able and ready to take video of anything going on at the drop of a hat.
It’s a highly effective, oppression disruptive technology. The more people know how to generate and use video, the likelihood decreases of people using mass oppressive tactics. The one thing they hate more than anything else is bad publicity.
When there’s no video, there’s all kinds of ridiculous lying about what actually happened. Testimony about what happened degenerates into everybody pushing in their favorite direction, and that obviously is not the truth, it’s advocacy. But when you have a video, it’s a whole different thing. Recall: “Don’t Taze Me, Bro,” Rodney King, Zapruder, etc etc. If there were millions of people carrying video who could aim and shoot it, the world would be transformed. A lot of arguments would end like this: “Here, look at this.”