One-Liner: Critical thinking on Iran
June 21, 2009 by William K. Wolfrum
Is it conspiratorial or skeptical to wonder how Iran protesters had protest signs in English so quickly? Between that and Twitter, it’s like they’ve done a whole version of the conflict with subtitles.
–WKW
I think it’s just that they speak English as well as they speak Farsi. I could be wrong, but it seems like every other country in the world speaks either English or French as well as they speak their native languages.
My guess is that — as is also evidenced by their embrace of Twitter — the protesters knew that their best (only?) chance of succeeding was to garner international attention, & English is as close to a universal language as there is. English signs help communicate their message to the US news audience, & as Michael noted, will be readable/understandable by many in non-English-speaking nations as well.
Now, as to the degree that the Tweets & English signs are presenting a skewed version of what’s going on — only history will (hopefully) reveal that.
Not only is English the natural language of international affairs, but the English speaking nations of the world are always willing to help overthrow the government of an oil-rich country they used to control.
So the English signs are very savvy. Writing them in Hebrew, for example, would have been very dumb.