[lbo-talk] A Question from Iran: "What Do They Know of Us in the West?"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

I have mentioned that many Iranian readers come to MR/MRZine.
According to Alexa today, 11% of all visitors to MR/MRZine are from
Iran (at
<http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=monthlyreview.org&url=monthlyreview.org/>).
 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