Shram: Repression is a common theme in Beijing, Tehran

The trouble with outsiders such as the international news media is that they love to cause trouble.

Such as telling the truth to the whole world. Or worse yet, letting the world see for itself those unfettered, unsightly truths.

That's the way it was a couple of weeks ago, on June 4 in Beijing, when China's ever-inventive, never-subtle enforcers treated the world to a performance that combined American vaudeville with Japanese kabuki and featured wide-open umbrellas used as weapons of censorship. Officials kept running in front of international television camera crews, waving open umbrellas in front of the lenses, in a comically pathetic attempt to keep the world from seeing that absolutely nothing was happening in Tiananmen Square on this day. Which was in itself news, because this was the 20th anniversary of the day when China's top brass ordered their military to massacre hundreds and perhaps thousands of fellow citizens who had been demonstrating against the repressive policies of the communist regime.

Fast-forward to this week and pan westward from Tiananmen Square to Tehran. This time, international television crews were showing the world hundreds of thousands of Iranians who were violating the Interior Ministry's orders and protesting that the announced landslide re-election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was rigged.

The protesters, mostly supporters of challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, somehow didn't believe the government had been able to count millions of paper ballots in the few hours between the times the polls closed and the landslide was declared. Nor were they spiritually moved by the fact that Iran's never-elected supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, immediately rushed out his blessed certification of Ahmadinejad's landslide. (Holy Blogojevich! That's even faster than Chicago's machine ever did the deed back in the reign of Richard-the-First Daley.)

Indeed, it was the masses that moved the Ayatollah - just a bit. Their crowd was so huge that the Guardian Council, whose 12 members are chosen by Khomenei, announced a day after the Ayatollah gave his blessing that it would review some of the ballots, after all. (I was tempted to use the term "recount," but that would stipulate that they had already been counted once.) All of the voting numbers that were recorded on all of the voting precinct forms have been kept secret; it is unclear if the Iranian people will ever get even those asserted facts from their government.

The huge protests continued and on Monday night - with the whole world still watching - violence erupted. Gunfire from pro-government paramilitary forces killed seven people, Iran's government-funded media reported. Pictures of bloody bodies in the streets flashed around the planet.

And that spurred Iran's government to take swift corrective action. It banned all international news media from covering the rallies. Iran also copied another ploy used a couple of weeks earlier by China - by using firewalls to try to prevent Internet users in their country from signing on to international news sites or plus social sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The only coverage of rallies was by Iran's government-funded media. It showed a huge peaceful rally supporting President Ahmadinejad. CNN reported that its correspondents were told that they couldn't broadcast from rallies - and if they attended individually, their safety could not be guaranteed. The correspondents took that as a threat meaning that Ahmadinejad's paramilitary pals could attack them.

But word has ways of getting out - and so do pictures in the age of the Internet and cell phone videos. Soon, CNN and other international networks began airing pictures and reports of violence at the University of Tehran and elsewhere, acknowledging that they could not always vouch for the accuracy of the pictures and reports sent by individuals.

That news ban by Tehran's ayatollahs was the panicky equivalent of those Tiananmen Square goons brandishing bumbershoots as weapons of mass censorship. One government is officially god-based; the other, officially godless. Thuggery is their common bond.

And also the flailing, failing ways their leaders try to prevent the eyes of the world from seeing ugly, embarrassing truths.

Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service. E-mail him at martin.schram@gmail.com.