I think my friend's point about what Iran's mullahs and religious revolutionaries were reading in the sixties had less to do with working in concert/alliance with secular revolutionaries at the time. it had more to do with being ideologically impacted by left discourses which they found useful for analyzing the phenomena that they were confronting. fanon's analysis of colonialism, for example, can be easily employed, and so can Gramsci's concepts of revolutionary strategy, which have been remarkably influential amongst a great deal of right-wing intellectuals over the course of the past generation. His concept of establishing cultural counter- hegemonies, for example, was very well studied by the religious right in the US. This is the kind of logic my colleague was getting at.
On May 12, 2006, at 1:35 PM, Sean Johnson Andrews wrote:
>
>> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>
>>> Fidel, you ought to have that talk
>>> with Ahmadinejad ASAP and bring the man to senses!
>>
>> Is there any evidence that Ahmadinejad has socialist/
>> internationalist leanings?
>>
>> Doug
>
> Better question: is there any evidence that Fidel is an lbo-talk
> subscriber?
>
> Joel Schalit: (On Doug's question)
>
> A
>> former classmate of mine in grad school was a student of the
>> Iranian revolution, spoke Farsi fluently, and was of the opinion
>> that first generation Iran revolutionaries were very well schooled
>> in Gramsci, Fanon and Marcuse.
>
> I don't know as much about the history here (gleaned mostly from a
> few articles and Iranian movies [cf: Milani's "Two Women"] about
> the period and the keen graphic novel "Persepolis"), but my
> understanding was that, though there were certainly Marxist roots
> to the various revolutionary movements at the time, the religious
> movement that became dominant basically hijacked that revolution
> and, in the end, most of the leftists were killed, imprisoned,
> exiled or "re-educated". If the mullahs took on this
> interpretation, it was because it was popular, not because of a
> leftist allegiance. In any case, it doesn't seem like evidence of
> a contemporary ideological alignment. On the other hand, I seem to
> recall that Ahmadinejad has been in close contact with Chavez (or
> vice versa). If so, this is probably a strategic alliance based on
> a mutual enemy rather than a deep ideological or theoretical alliance.
>
> -s ___________________________________
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>