Echoes of 2007: When Iran’s Problems Seemed Merely Censorship
Let’s take a step back to May 2007. The internet was a different beast, and the “Blogfather” of Iran, Hossein Derakhshan, took to the pages of The Guardian to deliver a sharp, contrarian rebuke to the Western human rights narrative. At the time, the prevailing story in the West was that Tehran had launched a systematic crusade to lock up bloggers simply for typing their thoughts. Derakhshan argued that this wasn’t just an exaggeration – it was a fabrication born of bias.
His exhibit A was the case of Arash Sigarchi. While Western watchdogs and NGOs had turned Sigarchi into a poster child for oppressed free speech, claiming he was jailed for his blog, Derakhshan pointed out the inconvenient details that had been scrubbed from the headlines. Sigarchi wasn’t just a hobbyist blogger; he was on the payroll of Radio Farda, the US government-funded broadcaster that had been explicitly outlawed in Iran. In Derakhshan’s view, Sigarchi was prosecuted for working with a hostile foreign entity, not for the few dozen hits on his personal weblog. The fact that an appellate court had significantly reduced his sentence was, to Derakhshan, proof that the system wasn’t the blind crushing machine the West described.
The op-ed was essentially a plea for nuance in an era of drum-beating for regime change. Derakhshan contended that organizations like Reporters Without Borders (RSF) were operating with a blind spot, relying heavily on exiled dissidents who, understandably, held deep personal grudges against the Islamic Republic. How could the reporting be objective, he asked, when the primary sources were individuals who had fled political persecution decades prior? He admitted that Iran filtered websites – just like US allies in the Gulf -but insisted that the existence of 700,000 Persian blogs proved the state wasn’t terrified of the medium itself. He drew a sharp parallel to the West’s own compromised morals, noting that while the US ran Guantánamo Bay, it had little standing to lecture a revolutionary state feeling threatened by superpowers.
Looking back at that plea for context now feels like viewing a different universe. Eighteen years later, the days of debating the nuances of blog censorship or the bias of NGOs seem almost quaint. Today, we aren’t looking at legalistic disputes over foreign funding or internet filters; we are witnessing a country tearing itself apart at the seams, with internal conflict and state violence reaching levels that look less like law enforcement and more like a civil war.