> The problem is that many of us, irreligious leftists, in America do
> not have any particular place to go and work with our fellow believers
> every Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, unlike religious leftists...
[...]
I agreed with much of what you wrote in your reply, except for the following:
> The record of the Iranian Revolution on political executions,
> imprisonment, and so on should be evaluated by the same standard we
> employ in evaluating other revolutions, bourgeois nationalist,
> populist, or socialist.
I don't evaluate repression against the left by the same standard as repression aimed at the right. I respond viscerally to repression of classes, parties, and movements of the kind which I and most others on the list would have supported in the various situations you describe. Isn't it likely you would also have been occupying a political space on the Iranian left which would have made you a possible target of repression?
Even today, notwithstanding its anti-imperialist and populist credentials, I don't think the favour you bestow on the current regime is reciprocated; If you were in Iran, despite your support for the Ahmadinejad government, I think there's little doubt you would still be viewed with suspicion as part of the secular "liberal" professoriate, the editor of a Marxist periodical, and belonging to a tradition which the regime once found necessary to bloodily repress, and would do so again under similar circumstances. As under Stalin, you could only expect to be fully integrated by repudiating the political principles with which you're currently identified - which some leftists in that period were prepared to do, but on behalf of a "socialist" or "workers'" state, which Iran is not. Acceptance by the regime may not matter to you, but it should, IMO, enter into your calculation of how warranted is your largely uncritical support for it.