Foreign reporters visiting Iran are usually in an echo chamber.
They visit Tehran and a few other big cities. Live in best parts of those towns and hang out with people who are educated and pro western and quite exposed to other cultures.
Iranian middle class (and specially the younger generation which are the majority) are pro western, quite progressive and modern.
But they don't represent the whole population of Iran.
Unfortunately this echo chamber sometimes even blinds ourselves as well.
The answer I'd like for you to read is not the one with 4.7k upvotes. It's the one below it with just 62.
The most popular answer implies, very nicely and agreeably, that all cultures are equal, and that any problems are the result of poor governance and or some faceless structure/entity. The one right below it states that, while it's true that environment plays a large role in oppression, fundamentally it is the people who perpetuate such an environment.
It is very comfortable to rest at one extreme or the other (as the OP's article goes to show). I, for one, think it is better to follow what the man who wrote the 62-upvote post says, despite the mental discomfort it causes:
"A lot of work has to be done to cleanse one's mind from years of propaganda and brain washing against the "Western World, Israel, and India". But it's not going to happen by pretending that everything is okay."
Very true. I'll add that journalists, including foreign ones, are an endangered species in Iran. Reporting fluffy, sugary news like this story is much safer than doing any real journalism about the dozens of real issues facing the country.
Thomas Erdbrink's recent video reports for the NYT which carefully skirt any sensitive issues and avoids any hints of criticism is another example. Not that I blame him or any other journalists! Just like Jason Rezaian, Thomas has a Persian wife and I understand that his first thought is for his own and his family's safety.
It just means that as a consumer you have to be intelligent and discerning so as to not mistake the type and manner of reporting done in Iran with that done inside a free Western style liberal democracy.
I only have limited experience of Iran - travelled in a campervan from Turkish border to the Pakistani border with wife and daughter in 2010 for 6 weeks. Obviously our interactions were with English speaking (to some extent) Iranians (actually Kurds, Arabs or Persians, I don't think we met anyone who said they were "Iranian" ;-) ), so those were more outward looking to have learned English in the first place. Those who disproved of us would have kept clear.
But we found from all walks of life, from people in the cities, villages people were friendly, aware of the issues, had a sense of progressive thinking. I wouldn't say "pro western" as such on the whole, the higher middle / upper classes yes, but that is true for all countries. But definitely not anti-western and definitely a desire to live without western interference.
One question we were asked over and over again, "why do the west governments not like Iran", "we they say we are evil"..... it was hard to sum up politely "well your country stopped doing as it waws told for the "interests" of foreign governments and unfortunately for you, your country sits atop vast quantities of natural resources that were wanted..."
I would not be surprised, emil. I am an American who spent a couple grand to visit Iran for two weeks. I am a wannabe Arabist (so it is fun to guess all shit on the walls) and even more wannabe Farsist (because it sounds hilarious, and more importantly because no one can keep it straight for me which side of the divide likes the word Persian in Persian, and Farsi, which is the A-rab name that stuck for the region). I went on to study Farsi in official courses abroad. I like to think I tried heard than the average douche touristo-journalist, but hard to tell.
In any event, as an American, I had a minder, as this is required for US toursits (you cannot simply walk around by yourself, you get caught by the police and it is a hassle). A cool dude, very educated finishing his doctorate work in German lit, and decided to pick up English and wing the tourism to have spending money. Unlike the kids in this article, he is like them in sentiment and style but from Nothern Iran (think Beverly Hills for the SV folks and Americans here), but he showed me the struggle their for kids like him was awful.
But there is a side of Iran that is not hipster and trendy like these dudes (I say this from the pictures, not the content of their opinions, but the opinions do it just the same for me). I will say the hipster kids are the ones I bonded with, and this is true of my time in Egypt, because their rebellion clued me into their personal politics, and that they were cynics like me. In Iran and Egypt, I saw much of the same. You as foreigner cling them to, and they to you, even though you hate the attraction. It says a lot about yourself, and them the same. These jouranlists amaze me when this goes unnoitced by them.
This to say, listen to this dude emil. Even Iran has hipsters. And it also has Republicans, just with cooler beards and weird congruences in politics with the American ones! I mean this as a joke, but is scary how minor the changes seem in the diverse insanity of human variation, to see in the Douglas Adams sense the universe is increasingly vast in the same shallow craziness.
Oh, and I recommend every American go there: you can see the receivng end of our foreign policy in all its splendor with the rabid terrorists!
This is also a big issue with reporting in Turkey. Sadly, humanity has yet to figure out how to keep rural types form falling into theocracy, hate, and discrimination. Insular cultures are often terrible and progress, at lead in the modern world, comes almost excursively from the bourgeois. Communism, be it Lenin/Stalin, Pol Pot, CCP, N Korea, etc all suffer from this mistake. They think the bourgeois is the problem, when in reality its the non-bourgeois who are.
Theocracies have the same problem. The Ayatollah's and Erdogan's voting base are the non-bourgeois.
How would you contrast this 'echo chamber' perspective with a more realistic one? Is there a strong conservative movement among the young which is underrepresented in this article?
Yes, the vast majority of Iranian youth are quite poor and have no real prospects for gaining employment or wealth or moving up in the world except the one presented by the theocratic regime.
For them the only prospect is to ingratiate themselves through the basij and other similar organizations so they can then gain employment with the government or with the many bonyads which overwhelmingly control the Iranian economy.
Employment with the government or bonyads is not based on merit but through a test of loyalty to the Islamic revolutionary ideas. If you can distinguish yourself through zealous service and unquestioning devotion, then you stand a chance of gaining a foothold.
By the by, the Basij were the ones on the front lines in the 2009 protests brutally suppressing the street marchers.
That's the only possible avenue of advancement for the vast majority of Iran's youth who do not come from a 'connected family' and/or do not have a wealthy family that will give them a leg up.
Agreeing with personal anecdote: the more people under 30 I met there, the more scary it was and relieving to me that I was never as stuck as they will have been their whole lives.
>Foreign reporters visiting Iran are usually in an echo chamber. They visit Tehran and a few other big cities. Live in best parts of those towns and hang out with people who are educated and pro western and quite exposed to other cultures.
That. Same with media cherry-picking some favorable tweeters from a country (usually upper middle class younger people aligning with its biases) and promoting them as "the voice of their people" or some bogus "new generation" that's about to bring change.
It's even worse in places with strategic interest, where e.g the government puts obstacles to foreign corporations to grab resources on the cheap or prevents foreign diplomatic influence in the region, in which case there are lots of media, "NGO"s and such sponsored by foreign powers (a modern-day "radio free europe" affair), and the foreign media gets their "facts" and opinions from them and pretend they reflect the country at question, its interests and what the majority of the population believes. A lot of times some opposition party is sponsored too, and played big, even if it's supported only by a small minority.
I agree that the realities of life can be very different depending on geography and economic class. As a country of 80m people, Iran is much less homogeneous than say, Iceland. But this is not as inaccurate as you would assume. Because although Tehran and the other big cities (Tabriz, Mashad, Isfahan, Shiraz, etc.) can be much different from smaller towns or villages, they are very similar to each other and together represent a good first approximation when it comes to politics. With that being said, I am an Iranian, so if you like AMA.
Oops, sorry Emil. Didn't notice your username the first time. I'm an Iranian studying abroad. I respectfully disagree with your conclusions, but the stress is on "respectfully".
But the people you read about in this article matter the most. They are the ones who can make a difference. Previous movements came from the same generation.
They visit Tehran and a few other big cities. Live in best parts of those towns and hang out with people who are educated and pro western and quite exposed to other cultures.
Iranian middle class (and specially the younger generation which are the majority) are pro western, quite progressive and modern.
But they don't represent the whole population of Iran.
Unfortunately this echo chamber sometimes even blinds ourselves as well.
Source: Iranian living in Tehran.