A year ago today, the bare brutality of the Islamic Republic of Iran towards Iranians was clearly displayed before the world. Through the use of cell-phone cameras, brave Iranians captured the malignancy of their government, and through the use of the Internet and social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, they distributed the images to the world.
This acted as a pivot-point in the perception in the west, propagated by years of one-dimensional, shallow reporting, of Iranians as relatively poor, uneducated, anti-American/Western, radical and fundamentalist Islamicists. Videos like this one show that it is not the people of Iran that have these characteristics; it is their leaders and government.
The often misused and mis-interpreted phrase, “Twitter Revolution” is precisely this shift in perception and awareness of Iranians. Twitter was basically one of the main conduits through which the videos and images such as the one below, which aired on BBC after originally being posted online, came out of Iran.
Watching this makes it clear, at least to me, that the people of Iran will not forget, and neither will the world.