Selective sympathy -- sympathizing with some dissidents and opposition leaders but not with others -- that Danny Postel charges Western leftists with can be said about himself: one doesn't expect openDemocracy to run a "sympathetic profiles of, long-form interviews with" for instance, Hasan Nasrallah (who after all is an opposition leader) in Lebanon or leftists and Islamists of Egypt!
That said, I do think that Marxists and many other leftists who do not identify with political liberalism lack a coherent philosophy on civil liberties. That, I think, is a real problem, not the fact that our sympathy, like everyone else's including Postel's, is necessarily selective. And I don't say this because I think liberalism is better than Marxism in theory or practice. Far from it, I believe that liberalism is actually a check on democracy, more often in the bad sense of checking the working majority's need for economic and political democracy for the benefit of a ruling-class minority than in the good sense of protecting working-class and intellectual minorities (such as GLBT individuals and intellectuals who have unconventional views) from oppression by a majority, and structurally so. Nevertheless, it is philosophically unsatisfying to see Marxists and other leftists (often unconsciously) adopt political liberalism by default -- when it comes to civil liberties -- and apply it haphazardly, without thinking thoroughly about what we are doing.
Lastly, I heartily endorse the main practical thing to do that Scott McLemee advocates, not in the Inside Higher Ed interview but in his Crooked Timber blog entry. I merely add that such an anthology should include a wider range of thoughts in Iran beyond liberalism. Generally speaking, translation projects like that would be very welcome when it comes to other nations and languages, too (as you know, more or less one-way communication between America and the rest of the world, i.e., the rest of the world familiar with American thought but not vice versa -- is my perennial bête noir).
<http://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/12/solidarity-forever/> So how about if Harvard University Press—or some other institution with comparable visibility, clout, and depth of pockets—puts some resources into creating a website to feature translations of work by oppositional intellectuals from Iran?
Such a project can be justified on a number of fronts. For one, there is the value, at this point, of any gesture of solidarity; morale means something. That's why such an effort really ought to happen sooner than later. But most of the benefit might come over the long term—simply from making contemporary Iranian thought more available to people who don't read Persian (most of us, of course).
For what it's worth, I notice that C. Wright Mills endorses the idea. Very far-sighted of him, what with being dead for about 45 years now. The passage appears in some notes for an unfinished work he was going to call The New Left:
We must become fully comparative on a world-wide scale….
We must do so with all the technical resources at our command,
and we must do some from viewpoints that are genuinely
detached from any nationalist enclosure of mind or nationalist
celebration. We must become internationalist again.
For us, today, that means that we, personally,
must refuse to fight the cold war. That we, personally,
must attempt to get in touch with our opposite numbers
in all countries….With them we should make our own
separate piece. Then, as intellectuals, and as public men
[sigh: it was 1962 remember], we should act and work
as if this peace—and the exchange of values, ideas,
and programs of which it consists—is everybody's peace,
or surely ought to be.
No doubt they read C. Wright Mills in Tehran, too, along with John Stuart Mill. They are probably wondering if we'll take him seriously about this. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>