“We need to experience that unbearable immediacy.” (Joerg Colberg, Conscientous)

“…I was very driven with the idea that, “I’m seeing something now. Will it ever be quite like this again?” (Susan Meiselas, in Foto8)

“I still believe, because we have no choice, that the world of culture is the only space left in the world today where we can speculate and suggest new ways of understanding the world – the only place where we can dream.” (Alfredo Jaar in Foto8)

Cheers.

Clearly, one hopes that the fishermen are released without harm. But the situation rather calls into question Spanish trawlers’ aggressive fishing methods.

Micheletti repeated his insistence that there had never been a coup — just a “constitutional succession” ordered by the courts and approved by Congress.

“Coups do not allow freedom of assembly,” he wrote in a column published Tuesday in the Washington Post. “They do not guarantee freedom of the press, much less a respect for human rights. In Honduras, these freedoms remain intact and vibrant.”

Meanwhile Micheletti closed airports and borders, and baton-wielding police fired tear gas to chase thousands of demonstrators away from the embassy where Zelaya’s supporters had gathered.

- Associated Press, 22.09.09

‘We know there was a crime there,” said Inestroza, the top legal advisor for the Honduran armed forces. “In the moment that we took him out of the country, in the way that he was taken out, there is a crime. Because of the circumstances of the moment this crime occurred, there is going to be a justification and cause for acquittal that will protect us.”
…
”We fought the subversive movements here and we were the only country that did not have a fratricidal war like the others,” he said. “It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible. I personally would have retired, because my thinking, my principles, would not have allowed me to participate in that.”

- Miami Herald, 03.07.09

“Unless there is political will, we will see more coups like the one that toppled the constitutional president of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya, who has been granted refuge in Brazil’s embassy in Tegucigalpa since Monday.”

- Brazilian president Inacio Lula da Silva, speech in UN General Assembly, 24.09.09

Daido Moriyama

1. Press coverage is increasingly difficult. Foreign journalists are being harried by security forces, and some may have been expelled from the country. Their freedom of movement around Tehran is limited, and coverage outside the capital is very limited indeed.

2. State radio is reporting that seven died after basijis opened fire on a crowd surrounding barracks in Tehran. Mainstream media is repeating that number, but generally is listing only one confirmed fatality - seemingly based on this (warning, graphic) photo taken by an AP photographer. Channel 4 News has footage of basijis opening fire on the crowd. Unconfirmable reports suggest another half-dozen students may have died after basijis invaded Tehran university dorms overnight, while further reports suggest that hospitals in many major cities have received a massive influx of people injured in clashes with security forces.

3. There are suggestions that a rival, pro-Ahmadinejad demonstration is being organised for later today in the immediate vicinity of a pro-Moussavi demonstration in Vali Asr street, in Tehran. It could be a move to attempt to discredit the protesters by accusing them of fomenting violence, should clashes (as is likely) occur.

More when I have time.

More crucially, I hadn’t believed that the state would be brazen enough to steal the election - because I assumed that it would be impossible to control the ensuing unrest.

While it is hard to prove anything from my distant vantage point in London, it does seem quite probable that the voting was rigged. As Juan Cole has pointed out, it seems strange that the electoral candidates didn’t even carry their home provinces. Renard Sexton of fivethirtyeight.com has picked up on the same issue, illustrating graphically quite how at odds this year’s election results are with those from 2005.

Meanwhile I am told that the president of the Iranian election commission has himself said that the elections should be annulled - though my Farsi is non-existent and I’m unable to translate the report myself.

In any event, it seems to me that the clique centered on Khamenei overestimated the collapse of Iran’s more liberal tendency over the first half of this decade. I wrote about that decline back in 2004 for the sadly-defunct ak13.com - you can read the original version here, courtesy of Google’s cache.

While some elements of my analysis now make me cringe - I was more idealistic back then - the core of it bears repetition.

When Khatami was elected, the liberal tendency thought that he would usher in the reforms that they wanted - reforms that would have made the state more transparent, that would have loosened the stranglehold on power of the veterans of the 1979 revolution, and that would have reduced the intrusion of the state into Iranian’s private lives.

However, the conservative tendency amongst the 1979 veterans successfully blocked Khatami’s reform programme - for the power structures in Iran are more or less explicitly designed to afford that clique a veto over the rest of the system.

Twice - in 1999 and 2003 - young Iranians took to the streets to protest the stymieing of their elected representative’s mandate. Twice, Khatami distanced himself from the protests; twice they petered out. For those who were around in 1979, the memory of the carnage in the streets is still strong.

And back then, people still believed that Khatami could prevail, which is another reason why those protests petered out without gaining traction. In 2004, though, any remaining hopes were dashed after the guardianship council banned half of the candidates in the parliamentary elections, cementing conservative control over the legislature and ensuring that Khatami’s reforms could never pass into law.

The sense of disillusion was palpable. Turnout in the 2004 parliamentary elections was 60%, down from the 80% who voted in the presidential elections in 1997 and the 67% who voted in 2001. Only about 48% voted in the 2005 presidential elections that put Ahmadinejad in power.

But Khamenei misjudged the mood this year. While many Iranians may merely have grumbled under a conservative technocrat, they rankled under the presidency of a strident, bumbling ideologue, and were resolved to unseat him at the first opportunity. Hence the febrile atmosphere in the days leading up to the election - and the determination of the protesters now to make their voices heard.

And the protests this year are different to the ones of 1999 and 2003. n The movement is much broader than in those years, when it was largely made up of Teherani students - this time around, all segments of society are taking part, and reports suggest that there are protests in major cities across the country.

More importantly, Moussavi has embraced the movement - as have other opposition figures - rather than leaving it to twist in the wind.

Where things go from here remains unclear. The government can avert a major crisis by annulling the election - but at the cost of Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy, if not that of Ali Khamenei. Or it can repress the protesters brutally - maintaining power, but at the cost of the legitimacy of Iran’s entire political system.

On 5 June, clashes between armed policemen and protesters just outside the town of Bagua left at least 30 dead. The Interior Ministry claims 24 policemen died and 9 protesters; the protesters claim up to 200 of their number may be missing. Aprodeh, a local human rights organisation, has compiled a list of 61 protesters who remain unaccounted for. A further 189 were injured, and 133 were arrested, the NGO says.

The Interior Ministry’s response was to produce a commercial characterising the protesters as blood-thirsty, savage brutes intent on holding Peru back. The president, Alan Garcia, has insinuated that the protesters were controlled by Bolivia and Venezuela.

As Peruvian economist Pedro Francke has pointed out, the real reason for the political dispute was that the indigenous populations had in mind different models for the development of their ancestral lands than did the government. And there is strength in his argument that the development of oil and gas reserves in the Amazon is not likely to benefit all Peruvians - but rather only those with close ties to the government.

For more details on the current political situation, read this article in the Economist.

For footage of the conflict itself, watch the videos below - be warned though: it’s far from pretty.

(H/T PhotoVideoBlogger and Peruanista)

The company is emblematic on several levels. As a business, it contributed disproportionately to the school of thought known as scientific management. As a family of brands, it captured some of the best - in the Cadillac - and the worst - in the Hummer - imagery of America’s industrial prowess. And on a grander scale, it epitomised the economic model that the Western world adopted to drag itself out of the hardships that followed the second World War - mass consumption of mass-produced goods.

The intent was noble. And the consumer economy supported some of the massive technological advances from which we have all benefited - and which we often take for granted.

But the mass-consumption model has certain limits, and it is perhaps fitting that it is in the car industry that we have first reached its limit-point.

It’s worth harking back to the late 1930s, when the model had coalesced into something broadly coherent. The motor car, the thinking went, would go hand in hand with a new, rational form of urban planning; would provide people with the freedom of rapid, autonomous mobility. The manufacture of the motor car would provide jobs. And if the high initial outlay were a problem, the manufacturer would provide the purchaser with a financing package.

Many of these ideas are neatly summarised in this picture postcard of GM’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World Fair in New York.

But, of course, after a point we all had cars - or at least, enough to go around. So we were gently persuaded that the car was symbolic of success, that the newer, the faster, the more red and go-faster-striped our cars, the more successful we were. After all, a man with a shiny new car was a man with money. So we bought more and more cars, we traded up every other year using cheap financing, we kept the factories of GM and all the other car manufacturers working.

And by the by, we wrecked the communal spaces of our cities, cemented our dependence on autocratic and unstable regimes in oil-exporting countries, and did untold damage to the environment.

Then the cheap credit dried up and we stopped buying so many cars.

So where are we now? The car clearly isn’t going to go away. But we are more aware than ever before of the unsustainability of the model - of the damage we have wrought to our environment and to our finances. And in that there exists the possibility that we might move to a more sustainable model - one in which cars and other goods continue to be made, to be sure, but perhaps not in quite the volume or as cheaply as we have become accustomed to expecting.

Of course, whether we seize the opportunity to retool our economies to a more sustainable footing depends entirely on politics. And given recent efforts to prop up the world’s car industry, it doesn’t seem to be a nettle we are willing to grasp.

Perhaps the collapse of GM will help convince us that change is possible.