[lbo-talk] Street-fighting Days

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/22/06, Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote to Doug:
> > > >Give yourself  several years, and see where you stand on Ahmadinejad
> > > >(supposing that he will survive the present and future conflicts in
> > > >those intervening years).  You, like many other US leftists, didn't
> > > >immediately think highly of Chavez, argue for the US withdrawal from
> > > >Iraq, etc., but eventually you've come to argue for the positions that
> > > >I have held all along.
>
> Doug Henwood answered:
> > > Didn't think highly of Chavez? I had his planning minister on the
> > > radio in 2002 for a very sympathetic interview - is that early enough
> > > for you?
>
> On 5/22/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yes, you did so in June 2002, after the anti-Chavez coup (four years
> > after Chavez got elected).  Let's not wait till a coup against
> > Ahmadinejad or something like that happens.
> >
> > By now, we have enough to go on to make a preliminary judgment about
> > what the Ahmadinejad administration is up to, having seen what it was
> > able to carry out, what it attempted but got blocked by what Tariq Ali
> > calls the "mullah–bazaari nexus," what it is planning on doing, and so
> > on.
>
> I think that there's good cause to wait (though there's no reason to
> avoid studying the issue at length and no reason to jump to "fuck
> Ahmadinejad" sloganeering).

I'm afraid that most US leftists won't even study what's happening in
and to Iran in time, though they ought to be studying it and
clarifying it to the general public.  They must do so objectively,
without defending the indefensible (e.g., flirtations with Holocaust
revisionism).

In any event, though, the collective power of US leftists being what
it is, it's possible that what they will do or won't do doesn't matter
one way another.

In the end, the Ahmadinejad administration will probably have to
survive on its own with little US leftist interest in it, just as the
Chavez administration had to.

I'll do what I can with Iranian exiles on the left and usual suspects
like die-hard Christian pacifists -- e.g., Fellowship of
Reconciliation, whose Fact-Finding and Friendship Delegations to Iran
just came back to the States:
<http://www.forusa.org/programs/iran/>.

-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>