By CNN's Carol Costello and Bob Ruff
The power of a single image can move mountains – and governments.
In 1970, during the Vietnam War, John Filo snapped a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph that may have tipped public opinion against that war.
John Filo’s black and white image showed 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling in grief over a Kent State student gunned down by Ohio National Guardsman who had been sent to the campus to quell an anti-war demonstration.
At the time many Americans already were numbed by repeated images of their soldiers dying in Vietnam, but the sight one of their sons or daughters gunned down at home was too much to take.
During World War II, Joseph Rosenthal also won a Pulitzer Prize for snapping a photograph of Marines raising the American flag after winning the battle of Iwo Jima. The photo helped raise badly needed war bonds and boosted the morale of a war weary nation. They even turned the photo into a statue at the Arlington National Cemetery.
But it doesn’t always work out that way.
When a single man literally stood up to a column of Chinese tanks in in 1989 to protest the killings at Tiananmen Square, it seemed as though the entire world rose as one to condemn the Communists’ brutal crack down on the student democracy movement.
But twenty years later tight Communist control of that country remains in place.
So what do we make of Neda, the Iranian student who was in the middle of a demonstration to protest the Iranian presidential election, and who died before the world’s eyes thanks to a camera phone which captured the gruesome moments?
For Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, a best-selling book about the erosion of women’s rights in Iran, “Neda being silenced is now becoming the voice of all those other Iranian women and men who over the past thirty years have been fighting for their freedoms.”
For Peter Daou, a Democratic consultant who wrote about Neda in the Huffington Post, it’s not quite that simple. He told CNN’s Carol Costello, “whether it becomes an iconic moment, whether a still shot out of that is the photograph that everyone sees...years to come , it’s really hard to say, but it certainly congealed the movement further, and...really refocused and reenergized people.”
Will Neda go down in history as a martyr as influential as the victims of Kent State? Or will her impact of her death on the Iranian rulers be as futile as the defiant protester who challenged the Chinese tanks?