Iran parades its internet fears with military precision

guardian.co.uk -- Casual users of Facebook might dismiss the social network as a distraction and a time-sink, but most would acknowledge that it has a significant if limited role in the history of the Arab spring and other social movements. For the Iranian government, however, it has become another symbol of the west's "soft war" against the Islamic Republic.

Government anxieties about social networking featured in a military parade held in the central-Iranian city of Isfahan on Tuesday to mark Iran's Army Day.

In the course of the procession, military vehicles bore oversized placards labelled "instances of soft war", the first of which was headed "damages of the Facebook internet site".

It was followed by displays accusing western powers of "promoting bad hijab" (a reference to the sartorial choices of secular Iranian women), and encouraging "new addiction: shisha, cocaine, crack, and paan". (Shisha is Iranian slang for crystal meth, and crack refers to the least pure form of heroin, rather than crack-cocaine).

Iranian officials and state media have applied the spectres of soft war and "psychological warfare" broadly, and have used them to refer to American films such as 300 and even The Wrestler, which they see as casting Iran in a negative light, and to toys such as Barbie dolls.

As part of its struggle against outside influences, Iran continues to pursue a "clean" or "halal" internet, under increased government control. Sites such as Skype, Gmail, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, along with most western news outlets, are blocked. Savvy users in Iran, however, still manage to access them by using special software.

A recent Associated Press article captured the mood of the authorities when it quoted Iran's police chief, Esmail Ahmadi Moghadam, describing Google as an "instrument of espionage" and the country's deputy intelligence chief, one Ahangaran (the state doesn't like to give his first name), describing the internet as "a spy itself".

In his Nowruz message to mark the Persian new wear on 20 March, Barack Obama sounded a Churchillian warning about an "electronic curtain" descending on Iran, a barrier that, he said, "denies the world the benefit of interacting with the Iranian people".

Yet while Iran resists western tools and amusements, a closed internet is no mere eastern phenomenon: numerous western companies – including British, European, and American ones – have been accused of assisting the country's internet crackdown.