Ah, James, you are such a gentleman. But surrealists are no match for me, not to mention they are excruciatingly boring. :->
> Yoshie wrote:
>
> "Today, wherever leftists in the West look at in the Middle East, there
> is no viable political force they can support, for viable political
> forces are either Islamists..."
>
> And
>
> "In the age of Islamism, I predict that there will be a wider and wider gulf
> between those who
> live in the OECD nations and those who live in the Middle East."
>
> I appreciate that this is how things appear on the surface, but I am not so
> sure that is how they really are.
>
> It seems to me that the apparent strength of Islamism is a bit of an
> illusion. This is the ideology that has rushed to fill the vacuum left by
> the disintegration of secular nationalism. But it has not penetrated deeply
> into the masses* . The strategic direction of Al Qaida - towards terror, and
> for direct engagement with the US - was a reaction to the failure of
> Islamists to secure a mass base in Algeria in the nineties.
Al Qaeda, Salafists in Algeria, etc. are merely wreckers. Their resort to terrorism of their sort, bombing the World Trade Center, tourists, etc. proves they indeed have no mass base.
In contrast, Islamists in Iran are modernizers and state-builders, and HIzballah, Hamas, Moktada al-Sadr, etc. undeniably have mass bases and are capable of employing mass actions, social services, and so on, as well as armed struggle. They are the Marxist-Leninists of international Islam, better Marxist-Leninists than self-identified ones, most of whom are just intellectuals in the West, today. :->
> people in the Middle East are pretty similar in their aspirations
> to people in Western Europe and the US - at least as far as they aspire to
> self-betterment, the consumer life-style, even a more liberal culture (that
> is definitely one area where the Iranian government is at odds with the
> aspirations of its citizens).
The Islamists in Iran have always championed self-betterment, and younger generations of them, not just reformists but also "conservatives," favor consumption and liberal culture. Iran's "new conservatives," for instance, are said to want to make their country "Islamic Japan":
<blockquote>After Speaker of the Majles Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri lost the 1997 presidential race to Khatami and the conservatives went on to lose their parliamentary majority in 2000, a subgroup of middle-aged conservatives began to argue for revising the conservatives' political message. Many on the old right clung to revolutionary tenets denouncing the West and preaching selflessness, with a particular stress on "martyrdom" as the sacrifice of one's life -- literal and figurative -- for the sake of Islam. These slogans clashed with the reformists' focus on opening Iran to the outside world and leaving behind the heroism of revolutionary martyrs in favor of a society in which Islam would not impose self-abnegation and self-denial. The new conservatives saw that the rhetoric of self-sacrifice had become meaningless to the generation born after the revolution -- over half of Iran's total population. In their newspapers, they began to question the old guard's puritanism and obsession with lamentation and, instead, to borrow themes from the reformists to better compete in the electoral arena.[3] Progressively, expressions of the conservatives' message sounded less and less like the dolorous exhortations of the old guard. Their widely publicized slogan in the 2004 parliamentary campaign -- "a free, developed and joyful Iran" (Iran-e azad, abad vashad) -- had no specifically Islamic component. Instead, the conservatives spoke of economic wellbeing (refah-e eqtesadi) and the transformation of Iran into a kind of "Islamic Japan." While the traditional conservatives had mentioned economic justice, they had normally rejected rhetoric of economic development and material progress in deference to Khomeini's saying that "economics are for the beasts." (arhad Khosrokhavar, "The New Conservatives Take a Turn," Middle East Report 233, Winter 2004. <http://www.merip.org/mer/mer233/khosrokhavar.html>)</blockquote>
It is the conservative-dominated parliament, not the previous reformist-dominated one, that passed a law to liberalize abortion laws (Frances Harrison, "Iran Liberalises Laws on Abortion," 12 April 2005, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4436445.stm>), the law negated by the Guardian Council.
Generational change will eventually arrive at the posts of the Guardian Council, the Assembly of Experts, and even the Leader. It's up to younger Iranians to decide whether they want to see gradual cultural and political change through elections and other institutional means, or they want to hold mass actions to press for quick change. It seems to me that many young liberal Iranians who are most at odds with the Islamic government are often indeed consumerist and therefore apolitical, much like many of their Western peers whose lifestyles they envy, so the latter option may not be in the cards in the near future.
> Islamism is a paper tiger. It only looks strong because the alternatives,
> Arab nationalism and Western imperialism are so weak.
There are Islamisms, and there are Islamisms. Some have no staying power; others have staying power. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>