Iran's "blogfather" was punished for blogging

I read this article on CNN this afternoon and found it very shocking.

In summary, a Canadian-Iranian person who was nicknamed Iran's "blogfather" was arrested and sentenced for almost 20 years in prison because the Iranian government found him "making propaganda against the government."

This reminds me of a news I read in high school. It was about a Harvard graduate, a highly educated woman from the Middle East who got assassinated by her government because the government claimed that she promoted revolutionary ideas and thus disgraced the Islamic system. Of course, from the government-owned newspaper they claimed that she was simply unlucky to be hit by a car.

This also reminds me of my experience in China a few years ago. I went to China with a group of Purdue students. I had no problem accessing Facebook when i first arrived in Beijing. But one day, when I wanted to see my Facebook page, I found out that the site was completely blocked. When I went back to Taiwan a week after, I realized that Facebook was shut down in China because the Chinese government found someone criticizing the government and uploading pictures that the government did not want its people to see.

Perhaps because I was born and raised in a country where people have the absolute freedom of speech, I found these kind of news astonishing and ridiculous. For many of us, the freedom of speech is the basic human right, and we all take it for granted. However, only when we read news like these could we realize that things may work very differently at other corners of the world.

I'm not here to judge which kind of government system is better than the other, I just suddenly realized that we should be thankful for things we have. If the U.S. government was like the Iranian government, I guess all my classmates and I would be in prison already.