Forget Guns – I’ll Take A Cell Phone – by Donald Kaul

For those who may have missed this, as I did...

<Don Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent (Des Moines Register) who, by his own account, is right more than he's wrong.>

<snip>

The Internet is a lot like the dreaded kudzu vine. Once introduced into a venue it doesn’t merely grow, it explodes. It goes anywhere it wants, does anything it wants and generally takes over.

There are some bad things about this---it eats up newspapers like rabbits eat up vegetable gardens, for example---but there are good things too.

For one, it has made the police state, that staple of twentieth century governance, obsolescent. Not obsolete, mind you---there are still a lot of them around---but their job is much harder now and, in the long run, impossible.

We see it working its magic in Iran right now. Ten years ago the government would have stolen the election and immediately put a lockdown on information coming out of country. Some people would have protested and gotten beaten up, hardly anyone would have noticed and the world would have yawned. A three-day story, tops.

Instead we now have great numbers of people spilling into the streets to protest the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, energized by the information fed to them through the Internet. And the world has noticed.

The police and the government’s paramilitary thugs beat the protestors, shoot them, arrest them, but still they come. The government has banned foreign journalists from the streets. People with cameras are arrested and abused. Still the photos and stories of the government’s brutality keep streaming out to the rest of the world.

It’s enough to make a ruling despot long for the days when the Soviet Union could silence critics by confiscating all the mimeograph machines in Moscow.

The government has tried to stem the Internet tide but to little avail. Hundreds of photos of the protests have appeared on YouTube and thousands of messages from protesters have made their way to the outside world through text messaging, Twitter and all the other technologies I know nothing about.

Will it be enough to topple the government or at least to win new elections? Probably not. A police state still has formidable weapons at its command and the Iranian government seems quite willing to use them.

But its aura of invincibility has been breached, its moral authority fractured. It’s become obvious that it’s just another corrupt gang of thugs willing to do whatever it takes to hang on to power and damn the consequences.

The situation gives lie to the claim of the National Rifle Association and its fellow-travelers that the first thing “the Communists” do when they take over a country is to confiscate the guns.

Not true. The first thing insurgents do when they gain control is take over the radio and television stations. Then they close the newspapers. Guns are dangerous yes, but not nearly as dangerous as ideas.

<snip>

More: http://www.minutemanmedia.org/BB%20KAUL%2070109.htm

True dat...

:shrug:

many years. Thanks for posting this. I love his writing.

The situation gives lie to the claim of the National Rifle Association and its fellow-travelers that the first thing “the Communists” do when they take over a country is to confiscate the guns.

Not true. The first thing insurgents do when they gain control is take over the radio and television stations. Then they close the newspapers. Guns are dangerous yes, but not nearly as dangerous as ideas.

Actually, without the guns, they wouldn't likely be taking over any radio and television stations.

The Rwandan genocide may have been carried out with blades, but it was the men with AK-47s "riding shotgun", as it were, who enabled the murders.

And the people with guns taking over the radio and television stations aren't usually the good guys.

Nonetheless, of course, I would agree that if you are looking for a popular uprising and not a coup by a small power-hungry group, cellphones are the tool of choice. ;)


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tried to take on the British.

And BTW... just how many guns did Gandhi and his troops have when THEY tossed the British out?

:evilgrin:

if it wasnt the british but say the soviets, or communist china they were trying to win independance from, sometimes you can win a barfight with just a few words, others a look, sometimes you need the 12 gauge, it all depends on who you are up against.

:)