That's a really large proportion, considering that none of the pages has been fully translated into Persian and that Iran's population is merely 66 million out of the total world population of 6.6 billion.
What are the Iranians who come to MR/MRZine reading? Noam Chomsky's criticism of American imperialism? John Bellamy Foster's thoughts on Marxism and nature? Samir Amin's world systems perspective? Economic analysis of capitalism by the founders of Monthly Review? Albert Einstein's personal statement on socialism (which is a perennial favorite among first-time visitors who come to our Web site through Google)? Many criticisms of politics in the Middle East, including Iran?
No.
The most popular article for Iranian visitors to MR/MRZine, read by a majority of them, is "Iran's Quiet Revolution," by Deborah Campbell, with photography by Alfred Yaghobzadeh: <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/campbell101106.html>. Some of what Campbell says is probably new to many Western readers, and Yaghobzadeh's photographs capture aspects of everyday life in Iran that seldom appear in the Western media. But neither the content of Campbell's observations nor Yaghobzadeh's photographs can be a revelation to Iranians. They must be familiar to them.
That very familiarity, I submit, is what makes this article attractive to Iranian readers.
Iran in the article is a country that is recognizable to them as their own, with its many contradictions, economic and cultural, and, even as Campbell takes note of the experience of Iran's dissidents, neither text nor photographs make Iran out to be a living hell unlike any other country, whose people either suffer or rebel against oppression by irrational fanatics, which is an impression one gets from much of the Western media, be they commercial or non-profit. All Iranians portrayed in this article, officials as well as common people, some liberals on both cultural and economic matters, others culturally conservative and economically populist, come across as ordinary human beings.
The writer's and photographer's love of the Iranian people is also well communicated in the article, which ends on this note:
Iran is a land of contradictions, and it's hard to imagine
any country in the world where a Westerner would enjoy
a more gracious welcome. To be in a shared taxi in any
part of Iran is to have your sleeve plucked by someone
who says, as an opening gambit, "I would die for you"
(a standard greeting in the poetics of Farsi etiquette).
And then: "Come to my home." In my six-month journey
from the mountains of Kurdistan in the northwest to the
bazaars of Kerman in the east to the oil regions on the
border with Iraq, it is impossible to catalogue how many
meals and accommodations were offered by strangers of
a half-hour's acquaintance.
And as often as I attempted to interview them, they turned
the tables: What do they know of us in the West? Do they
think we are all terrorists?
What could I tell them in return?
What do they know of us in the West? Iranians ask this question, probably because they know that what the Western media typically do is to prepare the Western public for what the US-led multinational empire will do to a Third World country, in this case their own. Are leftists offering the public images, visual or verbal, that counter what the rulers of the empire would like all of us to think and feel, portraits in which ordinary Iranians can recognize their own country? -- Yoshie