[lbo-talk] Countering the Politics of Fear (was Tariq Ali at UCLA today)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 10/28/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 28, 2006, at 9:20 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > But you fit into the category well and express its tendency toward the
> > politics of fear, depending on topics.  Just last month, you were
> > suggesting that liberals were about to be cleansed from higher
> > education in Iran, with a Cultural Revolution-scale upheaval soon to
> > sweep the Iranian education system: Doug Henwood, "Cleansing Iran,"
> > <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-
> > Mon-20060904/017079.html>.
>
> I didn't suggest it - I forwarded an AFP story

It struck me that your headline "Cleansing Iran" is more over the top
than AFP's more modest "Ahmadinejad Vows to Rid Schools of Liberal
Influence."  :->


> quoting your man
> Ahmadinejad as saying that it was time to rid Iran's universities of
> secular and liberal influences. Did AFP invent this?
>
> How is this the politics of fear? I'm not an Iranian professor or
> intellectual - I've got nothing to fear from this move. It's liberal
> and secular Iranians who have something to fear, but you don't seem
> to care very much about them.

Ahmadinejad's remarks are typical cultural nationalist and economic
populist fare: "A student must yell against liberal thoughts and the
liberal economy."

As you know, "liberal thoughts" and "liberal economy" outside the USA
means what we call neoliberalism.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>