The Truth is Out There
Following our reports HERE about the plight of SOAS (ex-)student Hossein Derakshan the plot around his imprisonment now thickens even more. Now Newsweek is accusing him being a spy behind the current Iran trials aimed at arresting many of the opposition figures. I quote:
A central figure in what is supposed to be a vast international conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian regime has been officially invisible until now. The information he provided has been key to the confabulations presented in the Stalinesque show-trials in Tehran. An American scholar, a British embassy employee, a prominent economist, and leading members of former Iranian governments have been given long jail sentences. A young French researcher now languishes under house arrest in her country’s Tehran embassy, and Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari passed four grueling months, mostly in solitary confinement, before finally he was released. All because of their alleged roles in the surreal narrative presented by the regime. Yet the key witness is described by the lead prosecutor only as “this arrested spy, whose name we do not mention out of security considerations.”
Credibility problems are the more likely reason. In truth, we know who this guy is, and he’s not the kind of character that even the hallucinatory conspiracy theorists of Tehran should want to build a case around. The regime’s description of the so-called spy’s travels, contacts, and opinions make it unmistakably clear that he’s the mercurial, maddening Hossein Derakhshan, a.k.a. Hoder, a.k.a. The Blogfather. He is the man who started the Persian-language explosion on the Web in the earlier part of this decade that led directly to the blogging, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube phenomenon that helped bring huge protests into Iran’s streets last June and get the protesters’ message to the outside world. Yet without Derakhshan—or at least without what he’s alleged to have said and what he previously posted on the Web—the Iranian regime, even by its own lights, would not have much of a story to tell (full article HERE).
So given the amount of mis/dis-information going around today with Iran and this, I am somehow slowly reminded of Agent Mulder / Scully and the X-Files (if not the X-factor): “The Truth is Out There.” Or perhaps a quote by Baudrillard would describe this better:”the discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.”
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