Looney Tunes

Over the months, I have learned to restrain my disdain for Kayhan and try to enjoy their version of dim investigative comedy. I hope that in the future we can keep Kayhan and its talents under new management, and of course as an officially Onionesque outlet, so everyone can enjoy their great writing.

This week started with Kayhan’s claim, citing – I believe – alterinfo.net and lepost.fr, echoed by Hugo “Cebolla” Chavez of the overseas, that Haiti’s earthquake was the work of none other than the Great Satan and its Haarp program. Their reasoning for using such a dreadful “weapon” in Haiti: The American-Zionist desire to deploy its navy into the Caribbean with the ultimate goal of occupying Cuba and Venezuela. Apparently this weapon is the source of Europe’s cold weather this year also, which is designed to thwart the efforts of those who oppose global warming. From their text I cannot tell whether Kayhan is speaking of the opposition to the “notion” of global warming, or to the warming itself, but does it really matter?

Yesterday the Central Bank of Iran announced that the deadline for turning in and replacing “altered” bills has been lifted. Iranians can now go to any bank any day and have these bad bills replaced. But Kayhan seems to be upset about this announcement.

“Writing slogans on banknotes is one of the guidelines that soft-war and velvet revolution theorists recommend to their foot soldiers” writes Kayhan, pointing to one such theorist, a Mr. Robert Helvey. This is followed by some of Helvey’s arguments, namely that writing slogans on banknotes involves less risk for the writer. He got that right.

To Kayhan, bill-writings were part of instructions given to insurgents by their leaders, which were ultimately “met by the good and religious people’s strong reaction, diffusing their ploy.”

“Following this despicable act, and after people’s repeated requests, the Central Bank announced on the 10th of Dey, that bills which carry writings, stamps or any other alterations on them, will lose their validity after the 17th, and asked anyone holding these bills to exchange them at the Melli Bank branches by then. After this announcement, the theorists’ instructions, which were disseminated through Farsi language foreign media, especially Radio Farda – affiliated with the CIA – and Radio Israel, remained unfulfilled, and people fervently refused to accept these bills, and in cases where the slogans were against Islam, or the Imam, or other sanctities, the suppliers of such bills were met with people’s angry reactions.”

Kayhan took it one step further today by claiming that the Central Bank’s recent decision to lift the deadline is in alignment with the guidelines and instructions of Robert Helvey. They have asked Mr. Bahmani, head of the Central Bank, to use Iran’s intelligence apparatus to investigate and find the root cause of this decision which has clearly been dictated to the bank through foreign agents and propagated down to their foot soldiers.

Reality is simpler: When the Central Bank made its first announcement, I ran into a seventeen-year-old who was explaining to the owner of our neighborhood’s newspaper stand that they cannot just invalidate valid banknotes that sit in people’s pockets. What would happen to those that are written on after the deadline? But I guess this is all too complicated for Kayhan.

So far, everyone I’ve seen, good, bad, or religious, glows with delight upon seeing one of these things. Helvey or not Helvey, people need to be fuming over something to engage in such behavior. Otherwise a theory is just a theory.

For making it possible to write here, I would now like to thank Donald Davies of NPL, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation, and Leonard Kleinrock of MIT for the development of packet-switched networks, the ARPANET and the X.25 protocols, as well as Robert E. Kahn and Vinton Cerf for their involvement, and Mike Lesk of the AT&T Bell Laboratories for System V UUCP, Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, and Brian E. Redman and finally Ian Lance Taylor.