Yoshie wrote: Looking at the medium run, all I can do at this point is to put leftists on notice that they should reexamine Iran and provoke discussion about it (while entertaining Carrol Cox, John Mage, Jerry Monaco, Jean-Christophe Helary, and sundry others).  Events have to do the job of changing their minds, just as they have on the question of troop withdrawal from Iraq. ----- Carrol Cox wrote: The entertainment continues. Far better to be entertained than endless fretting over dirty hands. Of course some of the same people who whine endlessly over a humorless left get all bent out of shape over Persian Princes. <div>On 11/28/06, Doug Henwood <<a href="mailto:dhenwood@panix.com">dhenwood@panix.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Nov 28, 2006, at 11:31 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: > The entertainment continues. What exactly do you find so entertaining? That the editor of MRZine is essentially arguing that the Iranian regime was justified in killing Marxists? Doug ___________________________________ <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk</a> </blockquote></div> _What I have Learned from Yoshie_  Or why I am "entertained" As one of the one's listed as being "entertained" ("interested" would be more appropriate) I find myself in the uneasy position of defending Yoshie, whenever I try to comment on these threads.  (It is one of the reasons why I stick to the movies or Heidegger or evolution or even Chess, if Ravi inspires me.)   Yoshie has brought me to see and investigate my own assumptions about Iran and the Islamic fundamentalists, without necessarily changing my own basic view.  And yet Yoshie has educated me. Doug is right. Whenever and where ever "these people" come to power they shoot people I would rather have alive and free and active, people I might call my comrades.  But to some extent this was true of Castro's Cuba and certainly was true of Ben Bella and the FLN in Algeria.  We don't get to choose the people who resist domination and imperial aggression and until Doug, Yoshie, Ravi, and Carrol (sorry guys and gals, to put you in the same "party") can get together and start the "Next International", thus establishing another (underground) party in Iran and the whole Middle East, I am stuck defending Iran against the U.S. empire.  In the meantime Yoshie has revealed to me more about other possible ways of thinking about Islamic movements than most of the muck I have read.  Yes, I do wish that she was more "skeptical, critical" (more "Spartacist"?) about these regimes and movements.  For instance I wish that she would take her analogy to liberation theology seriously and make a consistent comparison between "left" religious inspired movements of workers and the poor in Latin America with such movements in the Middle East.  (Perhaps she has and I have missed it.)  I wish that she would (for analysis sake at least) err on the side of skepticism of all of those who seek state-power, all of those who claim initial justification through religion, and all of those who hate secular socialists as much as they hate imperial domination.  Finally, I wish that Yoshie and the rest of us in these matters would be clear of making a distinction between "is" and "ought".  It seems to me that in much of what Yoshie writes on these topics (and this is why I am "entertained" by her) she is simply describing what "is".  Hamas is a "social" organization supported by the poor, giving aid to the poor, and may not be essentially different from the FLN in Algeria, circa 1956, for instance, except that Hamas does a better job at propaganda for "social uplift" of the poor.  This I learned from thinking about what Yoshie writes.  But what we ought to try to fight for is a different question altogether.  How we ought to characterize Hamas is rolled up with what we ought to hope and fight for.  In the end, these "hopes" and "oughts" might only rate Yoshie's famous condemnation of "resolutionary socialism".  But that is why I think we must concentrate on what "we" can do or might be able to do if "we" were organized enough.  And that is to begin with limiting the violence and the ability to dominate of our own ruling class.  Essentially whether it is North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, or Brazil, my attitude is the same.  We must slash the hamstrings of the U.S. and hope that somehow the breathing space provided will allow these countries to find their own way to better circumstances.  I think Yoshie (and others) underestimate how much this has already happened.  (For instance, if our rulers could have instituted a military draft after 9/11 they would have.  They didn't and some amount of their inability to control Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time followed from a lack of "forced labor power".) What I think those who oppose Yoshie underestimate is how much the Iraqi "resistance" (I hesitate about scare quotes) has done our job for us.  They have crippled U.S. power in a way that has been violent and detrimental to the people of Iraq.  Never-the-less since we are not doing our job in a way that would make an Iraqi resistance unnecessary, we cannot blame the Iraqis for not having the exact political organizations we would like them to have.  And this too I have (somewhat ironically) learned from Yoshie.  Jerry Monaco P.S. I hope this is not too wishy-washy.  But Yoshie has the salutary effect of making my views less clear to myself.