Venezuela, in 2002, Pioneered the Events in Iran in 2009

Posted by Al Giordano - June 15, 2009 at 4:09 pm By Al Giordano

As millions around the world marvel at the seismic historic events underway in Iran - probably the last place most expected a civic revolution to emerge (wasn't it just a little over a year ago that a major US presidential candidate was singing "Bomb, bomb, Iran" as if it was some prehistoric subhuman place and people?) - I want to ask all our readers here for a little more of your attention than is usually required to check out a mere blog post.

I would like you to give 74 minutes to watch the online video of the documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised about the April 2002 attempted coup d'etat in Venezuela, and how an organized people and an ad hoc network of Internet organizers and journalists beat back that coup in 72 hours.

(I gave you at least 74 minutes of my time to prepare this presentation; so I'm not asking you to do anything I haven't already done.)

In April 2002, the elected president of a South American democracy had been kidnapped by military generals, while the country's corporate TV stations (it's been documented convincingly that the station owners were party to the violent coup conspiracy) broadcast the gigantic lie that President Hugo Chávez had "resigned."

Some Irish documentary filmmakers happened to be in the capital city of Caracas when all hell broke loose. They were able to film what happened in the streets. And in what could only be described as a colossal act of hubris on the part of the coup-plotters, members of the film crew were able to capture their taking of the national palace, known as Miraflores, also on film and microphone.

Back in 2002, we didn't have Twitter. We didn't have YouTube. Or Facebook. We didn't have most of the online tools that are being deployed today to break the information blockade.

Think about that.

And the international corporate media was, if it paid any attention at all to the coup and counter-coup in Venezuela, hostile to the country's democratically elected president (the New York Times went so far as to publish an editorial praising the coup; online organizers created so much pressure upon the newspaper that a few days later it had to issue an unprecedented correction and apology for such an editorial).

The battle that saved democracy in Venezuela was a battle over control of the means of communication. Abbie Hoffman wrote in 1969 that "the modern day revolutionary doesn't run to the factory, but to the TV station." Those words proved prophetic in 2002 in Caracas. And now that the Internet has supplanted so much of television and newspapers' roles in human communications, the battle over the present and future of Iran is being fought right here on the screen in front of you. It's why Twitter users are suddenly in a justifiable uproar over the website's announced 90 minutes of downtime tonight for maintenance; an hour-and-a-half that would coincide with the first working hours of tomorrow's General Strike called in Iran. For reasons that I suspect have to do with the fact that one doesn't need high-speed Internet bandwidth to post 140 character messages on Twitter, it has become "the front" of this week's global communication war.

You can see from our archives that in 2002 this little Internet publication was much smaller, less tech savvy, younger and greener in every way. And yet those Three Days that Shook the Media - and the path it opened for a resurrected authentic democracy in our hemisphere - are the most memorable 72 hours your correspondent has ever known in front of a laptop screen.

The video you are about to see - should you generously give 74 minutes of your valuable time to studying them - in fact doesn't even mention the role of the Internet and goes so far as to credit "cable TV" for breaking the information blockade about the Venezuelan coup attempt. That's understandable, because the filmmakers didn't have Internet access either (six years was so long ago technologically, before Blackberry and iPhone and wi fi had come to Caracas or to most places). But the ground level story that the filmmakers captured is nonetheless the part that all aspiring organizers, change agents, journalists and communicators absolutely must see.

It will help you to understand what is happening in Iran today... and the role you can play in keeping the lines of communication open and bright, which will decide the Green Revolution's success or failure in Iran in these historic days and nights of June 2009.

You can watch the entire documentary on Google video. But in case those 74 minutes prove to bulky for your online service provider or home computer, you can take it in parts right here.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised begins with the backstory about the 1998 elections when Venezuelans turned the page on decades of oligarchy-rule...

It goes on to tell the story of how the people of that country grew to rewrite, embrace and live their Constitution, and how television and radio media were developed to create a two-way communications street between a people and its president...

By 2002, the documentary accurately reported, Venezuela had experienced "an explosion in grassroots activity" and the organizing, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, of decentralized "Bolivarian Circles" for a more participatory democracy... which brought utter contempt from the upper classes toward a government that represented, for the first time, the poor and working majority. The footage here of a meeting by opponents of that government - their seething hatred for the poor, their anti-democratic aspirations and enthusiasm for violence - are hung out to dry for all to see in a key scene in this segment...

And so the former oligarchs plotted a violent coup d'etat. You can watch key moments of it in this next segment...

Then their elected president is kidnapped under threat from military generals of aerial bombing of the national palace, a coup all the while cheered by every commercial TV station in the country...

Meanwhile, from Washington, the Bush administration was blaming the imprisoned Chávez for the coup-plotters' violence against the people, and the brutal repression unleashed by "dictator for a day" Pedro Carmona and the coup forces against those people...

The turning point against the coup came when a small group of journalists and organizers from the Community station Catia TV (the coup forces had invaded and shut down all alternative sources of information, including theirs and including the Public Broadcasting System of Venezuela, known as Channel 8) gathered up people from the neighborhoods, marched to Channel 8 studios, broke the padlock on the gates, and overwhelmed the guards with their sheer numbers. (The re-taking of Channel 8 was led by a then 31-year-old woman named Blanca Eckhout, graduate of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, and recently appointed as Venezuela's Secretary of Communication and Information.)...

The people inspired, first, the troops of the palace guard, and, correspondingly, the rank-and-file of Venezuela's military to free their president from the island where he had been held hostage, and won back their country and their democracy, still vibrant today...

The rest is history.

It is a history that infuses the immediate history underway in Iran, and the future of many movements already born and yet to be born.

Thank you for taking 74 minutes out of your busy lives to learn a little bit about where modern-day political organizing was reborn in the twenty-first century. This is an excellent hour to remember it, and learn from it. I trust that those of you who did so found it worth your while...

Update: Twitter has heard the aforementioned outcry from its users and will now reschedule its previously poorly timed maintenance.