To make representation of Iran in the American public sphere even a little bit closer to being balanced, one would have to point out things that are excluded from or marginalized in or distorted by the dominant discourse in the corporate media.
Hamid Dabashi criticized Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran as one of the clearest examples of "cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran" ("Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire," Al-Ahram 797, 1-7 June 2006, <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm>). What Nafisi's discourse and others like it seek to achieve, among other things, is "systematically and unfailingly denigrating an entire culture of revolutionary resistance to a history of savage colonialism" and "doing so by blatantly advancing the presumed cultural foregrounding of a predatory empire," promoting "a visceral hatred of everything Iranian" (Dabashi, 1-7 June 2006). When they do so, they sometimes make things up totally, as was the case with Iraq's WMD for instance, but, more often than not, they "take that element of truth and package it in a manner that serves the belligerent empire best: in the disguise of a legitimate critic of localised tyranny facilitating the operation of a far more insidious global domination -- effectively perpetuating (indeed aggravating) the domestic terror they purport to expose" (Dabashi, 1-7 June 2006).
Reading only what Doug and others like him say about Iran here (which is not unlike reading the Black Book of Communism, Jung Chang & Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story, and so on), I might have acquired "a visceral hatred of everything Iranian" had I not known the difference that the Iranian Revolution made in people's health, education, and so on, the culture of resistance that is alive and kicking in Iran, far more so than in much of the West, and so on.
Now, Doug has more than once interviewed Dabashi, but by way of advertising he had only this to say: "I'm just editing an interview with Hamid Dabashi in which he recalls Iranians' fondness for Germans in the run-up to WW II, because the Germans made a lot of anti-British noises" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070409/007225.html>).
Well, that's not the most attractive advertising for Dabashi's work! (Dabashi communicates his profound love of Iran, its culture, its history, and so on, not just his sharp criticism of the Iranian government, in his books and articles, especially in his latest: Iran: A People Interrupted.) Thankfully, Doug doesn't do on his radio show what he does here, but it's unfortunately possible that more people read what Doug says on the Net than listen to his show.
On 4/27/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> gays are killed
> the law is barbaric and archaic when it is
> enforced, and people --mainly women -- are stoned for
> adultery or slowly strangled. In Iran, you or I would
> suffer one of these fates or something similar on a
> dozen grounds.
About the story of executions of homosexuals, by now quite a few people have challenged its veracity, from Scott Long of Human Rights Watch to Kourosh Shemirani of Qiam (<http://outfm.org/images/stories/2007/03/070312_100001outfm-dst.mp3> and <http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Roshan-Shemirani15.htm>). As for stoning, the government has issued a moratorium on that.
It's interesting that you, as well as Doug, etc., appear to think that you, me, or others here would face stoning and the like if we get to Iran. I have a number of friends who live in or often visit Iran, who are on the secular left like LBO-talk subscribers. They seem to be none the worse for that, and they encourage me to visit their country, too. Iran is not what it used to be, both for better (it's freer now) and worse (most of its power elite are more neoliberal than before).
On 4/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 27, 2007, at 2:18 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > But you have no problem with people who admire America, such as Noam
> > Chomsky, despite what its government does in the world as well as at
> > home, nor do I hear you going on about how guilty, ashamed,
> > embarrassed, etc. you feel living here. You seem to take America in
> > stride, while you can't say the same about Iran. You have a problem
> > of blindness that comes from nationalism, it seems to me.
>
> The more you write about Iran, the more I think that you realize on
> some level that you've backed yourself into a corner, but since
> you're incapable of admitting that, you keep saying more ludicrous
> things every day.
>
> I've said many times that I admire Noam Chomsky a great deal, but
> there are important things I disagree with him on. His fundamental
> patriotism is one of them. (Another is his belief in the power of
> mere truth-telling.) But his work at documenting the nature of U.S.
> imperialism is an enormous contribution.
>
> I don't think I should be personally ashamed or embarrassed for
> living in the U.S. There are a lot of awful things about American
> society, and I spend a lot of my life writing and talking about them.
> I do what I can to improve things, which isn't very much. But I don't
> see why I should hang my head in shame. I was born here and just
> about everyone I know and love lives here. My work depends on
> continuing to live here. And what would it accomplish for me to
> relocate to a farmhouse in Fiesole, as lovely as it would be drive
> along the via Antonio Gramsci to go home? If I wanted to get personal
> about this, I could point out that you *chose* to live here; I'm here
> by accident of birth. But personalizing politics like that would be
> stupid and unproductive.
I never hear you criticize the US government and America in a way that you do the Iranian government and Iran. You prefer the former to the latter, and that shows in the way you describe them (or rather your visceral hatred of Iran gets across in what you say here), and you go one step farther and suggest that's what everyone else should think and feel also. But why should we?
When the government of Iran does wrong things, we are not responsible for them -- we don't live there, we don't pay taxes to it, we don't benefit from its public investment, social services, etc.; in contrast, when the government of the USA does wrong things (including things against the Iranians), which are always on far larger scales than whatever the Iranian government has ever done, we are responsible for it to the extent that we live here, we pay taxes to it, we benefit from its public investment, social services, etc., and while US politics has become a lot more repressive since 9/11, it is far from being dictatorship at least toward citizens like you and legal residents like me. That's not personalizing -- that's recognizing where we actually live and what our political responsibility is in the international division of labor. The Iranians, who face more costs when they protest against the government, seem to me to be doing incomparably more of that in their country than the Americans are doing here. We should hold up our end of the bargain. All thinking Iranian activists, from liberal to leftist, agree that US intervention diminishes political space for their activity, for their government sometimes goes beyond being vigilant against it and (like other governments in similar situations) goes paranoid, thinking that inside every dissenter lurks an American agent. For both ourselves and for democratic dialectic between the government and its critics in Iran, we should be focusing on what we are actually responsible for. -- Yoshie