On Aug 17, 2006, at 1:12 PM, Eric Beck wrote:
> I'm always fascinated by the artful ways in which certain western
> leftists are able to excise the religious content of the resistance
> groups they favor, as if the latter's reactionary-theocratic
> politics is just an undesirable superstructure easily erased from
> an exemplary anti-imperialist base. Which is to say, such leftists
> never fail to encourage subaltern populations to live under
> theocratic regimes they would never accept themselves.
That's true of a lot of the left's reaction to the Iranian revolution in 1979 (both the Iranian and Western left) - Val Moghadam's 1987 article in New Left Review goes into this in detail. The point with Hezbollah, though, is that they're not Khomeini, and they're not about to take over the Lebanese state. At least according to people who live in Lebanon.
Doug