Antony Loewenstein

The following book review of The Blogging Revolution, in Adelaide’s Independent Weekly, was published by Kate Lockett on August 29:

Did you know that Iran has around one million bloggers, that Farsi is in the top five languages used on the internet or that 20 per cent of Saudi Arabians are now online? Australian journalist and blogger Antony Loewenstein explains that blogging is not the sole domain of pornographers or Hollywood gossips and that a previously voiceless Saudi Arabian female can now, by blogging, explain the realities of her life and culture with readers in Sydney. He argues that bloggers are being referred to increasingly by journalists and the curious alike to find out what is really happening in hot spots around the globe because it is a legitimate form of “stand alone journalism, almost completely self-sufficient and able to reach readers directly without any unnecessary filters”.

Loewenstein travels to Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Cuba and China to meet bloggers who are often risking their lives in order to share their views on their country’s rulers and their opinions on Western democracy, the US in particular. He is at pains to point out that he’s not calling for regime change in the countries he visited, nor an increase in US involvement, but for the right of all citizens to access, distribute and discuss information without persecution. He notes with interest that in homes where men and women go to great lengths to socialise away from the eyes of the authorities, the last thing they wanted to discuss was politics: “It was time to escape the daily need to assume a public role, to be what society, and especially families, expected.”

He meets a variety of journalists, writers, bloggers and partygoers and allows the reader to learn more about life in what we tend to view as repressed or backward countries. As one Iranian journo puts it, “Western media agencies only want to know about nuclear problems and al-Qaeda”. Loewenstein’s intelligence and humanity shine through and have made this reader, at least, keen to investigate blogs that discuss things other than Lindsay Lohan’s new girlfriend.

My following essay appears in today’s Weekend Australian newspaper:

The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock’n'roll than political revolution, writes Antony Loewenstein

Early last month, some Iranian members of parliament voted to debate a draft bill that aimed to “toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society” by adding to the list of offences punishable by execution crimes such as “establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy”.

Nikahang, a Canadian-based Iranian online cartoonist and blogger, was defiant: “Only people who disturb people’s mental security could support such a thing.”

During a visit to the Islamic Republic in 2007 to research the blogging community, I found this attitude was common. With a population of 70million, most of them under 30, Iran is home to one of the Middle East’s largest online communities, which is thriving despite onerous censorship and risk of imprisonment.

The more than 100,000 active Iranian bloggers, writing mainly in Farsi, include hardline Islamists battling with reformists over religious dress, anti-Semitism, the war in Iraq and dating rituals.

The rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it seems, has only emboldened activists of all political persuasions.

I spent a day with the country’s former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a regular blogger. This chubby man, a frequent giggler, chastised me when I asked why it was impossible to criticise Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly, just as Westerners routinely slam elected politicians. “One of the misunderstandings is that you try and compare the institutions of countries, which are not similar to each other,” he instructed.

I quickly discovered that in a country such as Iran, the divide between conservative and moderate is far narrower than generally presumed. Iranian reformers are Islamists in less fundamentalist garb and most citizens appear to want an Islamic nation with a modern face.

Across the world, young generations are challenging tired state media by writing online about politics, sex, drugs, relationships, religion, popular culture and especially Angelina Jolie. From Egyptian activists opposed to female circumcision to outspoken, pro-Western women in Cuba, people are being empowered by new technology to create spaces away from the prying eyes of meddling authorities.

The rise of the online community means the relationship between the state and its people is shifting radically. Individuality is emerging in societies that routinely shun such behaviour and repressive regimes are not pleased.

A recent University of Washington report reveals that 64 people have been arrested for blogging since 2003. Iran, China and Egypt are the main offenders.

In the West, blogging has become an essential part of the media, with millions of internet users cataloguing their daily lives. The US-based Co-operative Congressional Election Study has found that although political blogging is popular, only a minority of web users regularly engage with political bloggers. The study’s report confirms that readers “tend to visit blogs that share their viewpoint”.

The need for alternative sources of information, voices not processed through a Western journalist’s filter, became pronounced after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC. I shared the frustration of many with the mainstream media’s lack of insight into nations deemed Western enemies or allies.

Blogs offered a window into mainly middle-class segments of societies rarely examined in the West. What does a Saudi Arabian male think about his country’s adherence to Wahhabism? How does the average China web user cope with multinational-assisted filtering? What is Cuba’s likely future after Fidel Castro?

These are just a few of the issues that blogs have helped to elucidate.

My on-the-ground investigation of the blogging revolution and its influence on the relationship between the West and the rest took me to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. In these countries I met writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians and journalists.

The subjects we discussed included the role of companies such as Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft in helping repressive regimes censor the internet.

The results were surprising. As one blogger told me in Tehran: “Most of the people (I knoware) in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution.” I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.

Vocal activism was the exception, not the norm. Take China. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the vast majority of China’s web users — who number more than 250 million, the largest online community in the world — expressed support for Beijing managing or controlling the internet. A book editor in Shanghai explained to me that online filtering didn’t bother many Chinese, given that 99 per cent of blogs discussed food and daily life. He thought that most citizens questioned the sincerity of leaders who talked about “democracy with Chinese characteristics”. “Is China ready for free elections?” he asked sceptically.

Despite these realities, during the past decade there has been a steady increase in awareness about political rights, principally because of satellite television and the internet.

China’s leading video-sharing site, Tudou (which means couch potato), is reportedly bigger than YouTube, with more than one petabyte of daily data transfers. Tudou founder Gary Wang explains that officials phone in several times a week to demand the removal from the site of films they consider suspect. Wang is philosophical. Change is coming but it will take time. Political reform isn’t a priority for most citizens. Even though he spent years living in France and the US, Wang resents questions about “oppressive censorship” from Western reporters. “They seem to pity us,” he says.

Earlier this year, most Chinese bloggers reacted with outrage at what they perceived to be anti-Beijing coverage in the Western media of the pro-Tibet protests in Lhasa and the troubled Olympic torch relay. “For a long time now,” one of them wrote, “certain Western media, best represented by CNN and BBC, in the name of press freedom, have been unscrupulously slandering and defaming developing nations.”

I heard repeatedly during my visit to China, usually after a tirade against foreign journalists who rarely travel beyond Beijing, that satisfaction with the Communist Party regime is strong and growing. This doesn’t mean the Chinese endorse authoritarian methods. Rather, it means incremental change and battles against corruption are considered preferable to Western-style capitalism.

A separate global Pew Research Centre study conducted this year found 86 per cent of Chinese were happy with their country’s direction, double the 2002 figure. In comparison, only 23 per cent of Americans surveyed thought their nation was heading the right way.

Blogger Mica Yushu told me in Shanghai that most of her middle-class friends didn’t crave political change. “We use the internet mostly for entertainment, sharing information, earning money or other fun,” she said. The sight of darkened internet cafes across the country was something to behold, with thousands of users gaming, watching downloaded films and soft-core pornography, blogging and instant messaging. Politics seemed the furthest thing from these monitored minds.

China’s economic boom has mostly silenced the internal critics and agitators who do speak up pay a high price for challenging Beijing’s unelected clique.

Online culture is thriving in almost every country I visited. The exception is Cuba, although the elevation of Raul Castro to the presidency is slowly leading to economic and social perestroika, despite some politically tinged websites being blocked.

Most bloggers prefer to protest privately, anonymously or not at all. The fight against repression takes many forms, from drinking contraband vodka in Tehran to appropriating American hip-hop culture in Havana. The price of protesting in Egypt, one of the highest annual recipients of US aid, is likely to be imprisonment and torture.

Despite their relatively small numbers and the penalties they attract, dissenting bloggers are playing havoc with the established order. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Elijah Zarwan, “bloggers have succeeded in doing something that years of standing on the street corner and shouting ‘No to torture’ or ‘No to the interior ministry’ has never managed to accomplish”: putting these issues on the public agenda.

The small size of online communities in Syria and Saudi Arabia has not stopped bloggers from challenging authoritarian rule.

Neither country employs harsh online filtering, but users learn quickly there are lines that cannot be crossed.

Saudi Arabian actor Mohammad al-Qass explains that in a fundamentalist nation such as his, internal reform — for women’s rights and broader legal and social rights — needs space to develop. “Fifty years ago, Saudi Bedouins were riding around on camels. Now they’re using mobile phones and the best technology,” Qass says. “It will take time for society to catch up with this technology.”

Meanwhile, for the first time a more nuanced view of the West is being offered via the web, and it allows a woman in Damascus the freedom to admire Brad Pitt as well as pray five times a day at the local mosque. Cross-cultural pollination is occurring, no matter what the religiously pious may think about it.

The issue of online representation is central to this debate. I recently presented a paper in Budapest at the Harvard University and Google sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit. While we heard countless tales of bloggers across the world using online tools to highlight police torture and corruption, many participants wondered about the voices we weren’t hearing online: such as those of minorities, the poor and Luddites uncomfortable with technology.

US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that “communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring”. In other words, it’s only now becoming possible to come across online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.

Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. The culture of blogging is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are deliberately vague. While many want the right to be critical in the media, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.

The Blogging Revolution by Antony Loewenstein (Melbourne University Press) is published next week.

Loewenstein will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival, as well as at next month’s Brisbane Writers Festival.

Getting married in Saudi Arabia, a how-to-guide.

Of course, Saudi isn’t a “normal” country.

My speech today at the Global Voices internet censorship conference in Budapest was streamed live across the world (starts at one minute):

Webcast powered by Ustream.TV

The event was liveblogged, too.

Who is really assisting the killing of the world’s Third World population? Yes, the United Kingdom:

A controversial deal with Saudi Arabia catapulted Britain to the top of the world arms export league last year, as UK firms won a record £10bn in orders from overseas, official figures show.

The figure amounts to a third of all worldwide export orders for military equipment, ministers and arms companies reported. An essentially political, government-to-government contract - the sale of 72 Eurofighter/Typhoon aircraft, for £4.4bn, to the Saudis - accounted for Britain’s number one position, the figures make clear.

Gordon Brown’s Britain, merchant of death.

I’ve spent most of my professional life skewering the unhinged tendencies of the Right (not least debunking its support for Israeli violence). Sadly, some on the Left are equally ideological and blind to their own propaganda.

Western support for Cuba remains fairly strong on the Left, despite the vast evidence that Fidel Castro ran a police state for half a century. His brother, Raul, sadly continues to intimidate dissidents. Many of these people, despite the rantings of die-hard Castro supporters, are not on the US payroll, simply asking for true democratic reform.

An article in this week’s Green Left Weekly is a classic case of unthinking Cuban propaganda masquerading as analysis. The writer, Sydney academic Tim Anderson, claims - and has done so for years against anybody who mouths any criticisms of the Cuban regime, including my good self - that my forthcoming book, on the internet in repressive regimes, is really a front for a US-funded campaign to destabilise Washington’s enemies:

Australian journalist Anthony [sic] Loewenstein paid a brief visit to Cuba and announced that Cuban dissident Oscar Espinosa Chepe had been jailed for simply “opposing the Castro regime”. In fact, Espinosa Chepe had done this for many years, on various internet sites.

What led to his arrest and conviction in 2003 was taking several thousand US dollars from US government programs authorised under the Helms Burton Act, designed to overthrow the Cuban constitution.

Loewenstein has a blogger project (and pending book) almost identical to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “internet freedom” campaign against Cuba. The US Government specifically funds RSF for anti-Cuban campaigns through the “Centre for a Free Cuba” and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED says it “works with a number of groups that support the work of independent journalists and other media within Cuba … to foster free press and promote an independent civil society in Cuba”. However the NED has been linked to the US-backed 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela and the 2004 coup in Haiti.

While the RSF targets 15 countries in its “internet freedom” campaign, Loewenstein is preparing a book on six of these: Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. The US Government has current economic sanctions (for different reasons) against Cuba, Iran and Syria, and maintained sanctions against China for 50 years.

If one is looking at threats against “independent journalists”, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) those countries with the highest numbers of journalists killed are: Iraq, Algeria, Russia, Colombia and the Philippines — three of these being US allies.

Let me try and understand the logic here (without laughing too hard.) Reporters Without Borders runs some campaigns against designated US enemies (though also bravely defends oppressed journalists the world over.) I visited many countries on an RSF list and therefore, by definition, my work is suspect and really an attempt to undermine the nations and individuals standing up to American aggression. The anti-intellectualism and ignorance of the case is startling (and is based on not even reading my book, which isn’t out until September). I visited the countries I did because internet repression is pervasive in their societies, dissent is changing as a result and US involvement is often problematic.

I’ve been accused in the past of taking money from the US to fund my overseas travels last year (and yes, the CIA wires money to me weekly). There is a strain of the Left that argues only public solidarity with US “enemies” is appropriate to show a unified front to the world.

The problem is, for me as a human being and journalist, many of the nations in my book commit gross human rights abuses and remaining silent is neither moral nor legitimate. One either believes in human rights or you don’t. You either support the rights of individuals to live in freedom, read a free press and meet without fear or favour or you don’t. It’s possible to do all this and still slam US foreign policy, the crazy US embargo against Cuba and campaign strongly (as my new book does consistently) against foreign meddling in non-Western nations.

A moving description of life as a woman in Saudi Arabia.

My following article appears in today’s ABC Unleashed:

The recent rigged election in Zimbabwe has highlighted the impotence of the international community. Bloggers and activists continue to emphasise the need for President Robert Mugabe to relinquish his hold on power, a position shared by Washington.

But not unlike the Burmese uprising in 2007 that saw China maintain a close relationship with the military junta, Mugabe enjoys the patronage of the Chinese regime. It is the kind of bond that increasingly defines global affairs.

Although a Chinese ship laden with weapons is headed for Zimbabwe and faces difficulties in unloading its cargo, Mugabe knows that, along with numerous other dictators, the rising superpower views its natural resources as a boon to be mutually shared.

The International Herald Tribune explained in 2005:

“While the talk is of democracy sweeping the [African] continent, some experts believe that China’s rising influence in Africa may power its blend of free-market dictatorship, particularly among African leaders already reluctant to turn over power democratically.

“‘We might see the Chinese political system appealing to a lot of states whose elites and regimes are more in line with that sort of thinking,’ said Chris Maroleng, a Zimbabwe expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. ‘It’s really a conflict of two systems, one based on regime security and the other, almost Western, which talks of human security - good governance and human rights.’”

Although China’s standards for trading are undoubtedly different to the West’s, it’s a delusion to presume that Washington, London, Australia and Europe solely engage on the basis of ensuring admirable human rights. America’s unyielding backing of Saudi Arabia – one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East - is but one example of greed coming before women’s equality.

The Independent recently reported that Chinese troops were seen on the streets of Zimbabwe in a clear sign of unity with the Mugabe regime. The paper articulated that the world should get used to this new kind of colonialism:

“As for Mr Mugabe, he marked Zimbabwean Independence Day yesterday by complaining of neo-colonialism and how Britain wants to retake control of Zimbabwe. He and other African leaders should think more carefully. There is a danger of their countries becoming a victim of a re-colonisation. But the threat is not from the West. It comes from the East.”

The inherent fear in the current debate revolves around the declining influence of America during the Bush years, something that I welcome. Although the country remains capable of shaping events far better than any other, the calamitous Iraq war proves that resistance to America’s imperial designs is growing. Countless books are being written that discount Washington’s power in the world, a premature stance. Mark Leonard, author of What Does China Think?, argues that the “China Model” is attractive because America’s policies have becoming annoyingly intrusive:

“Where American policy-makers champion the Washington Consensus, the Chinese talk about the success of gradualism and the ‘Harmonious Society’. Where the USA is bellicose, Chinese policy-makers talk about peace. Whereas American diplomats talk about regime change, their Chinese counterparts talk about respect for sovereignty and the diversity of civilizations.”

Although this is an overly simplistic explanation, a vast number of dictators find its message highly appealing. Author Ian Buruma writes that, “a dogmatic insistence on isolating dictators, such as the Burmese junta, does little to oust them, and actually diminishes America’s influence.”

Intriguingly, many Western commentators who insist on challenging China’s global rise are strong supporters of Washington-led military projection. It’s as if they wish citizens of repressive nations would look at the last eight years of American foreign policy and see nothing other than benign invasions and occupation. Recent polling in the Middle East finds public opinions towards the superpower has fallen since 2006.

This is neither an argument to ignore the plight of the Zimbabwean people nor simply calls to acquiesce in the rise of a values-free foreign policy. It is vital, however, to critically analyse our own global worldview, and improve it, before passing harsh judgement on China’s undoubted appetite for natural resources.

How else can we explain our kow-towing to Saudi King Abdullah? “The sad, awful truth,” wrote Robert Fisk in 2007, “is that we fete these people, we fawn on them, we supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores.”

Welcome to Saudi Arabia, a key US ally in the Middle East (thanks to a rare report on the country by Human Rights Watch):

The authorities essentially treat adult women like legal minors who are not entitled to authority over their lives and well-being. Saudi women are similarly denied the legal right to make even trivial decisions for their children. Women cannot open bank accounts for children, enroll them in school, obtain school files, or travel with their children without written permission from the child’s father.

Saudi women are prevented from accessing government agencies that have not established female sections unless they have a male representative. The need to establish separate office spaces for women is a disincentive to hiring female employees, and female students are often relegated to unequal facilities with unequal academic opportunities.