<http://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/12/solidarity-forever/#comment-186752> as someone who grew up in revolutionary Iran and whose family had been dissidents and political prisoners both before and after the revolution – and as someone who considers herself on the left – i find several things in the discussion problematic (admittedly, i have not yet read Postel, so i can't comment on that):
a) first, the assumption that the courageous liberal dissidents of iran (and they are immensely courageous) represent the whole of the population of iran. they don't. and frankly i don't claim to know what the great majority of the population of iran wants either. no one does. most researchers don't leave tehran (and esp. the confines of posh, westernised, liberal northern tehran). there are no ethnographies of the provinces, no ability to conduct large scale opinion surveys and little sense of the politics of the provincial cities and towns.
researchers often pay little attention to the demands of the millions of iranians who may not care for liberalism, and who voted for ahmadinejad not because they anticipated his (horrendous) foreign policy positions, but rather because of his economic populism. the people who care about the economic situation have an agenda of reform which doesn't always (or ever) track closely with the liberal political project of brave and intelligent dissidents such as ebadi or jahanbegloo.
b) the question of solidarity and support is left unproblematised. whom am i to support? how am i to support them? whom among the dissidents are worthy of supporting? are the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) to be supported because they are dissidents and because they suffered atrociously and far more curelly than any other group? but the MEK after being violently ousted from Iran acted as henchmen for Saddam Hussein and are now willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder (US) to guarantee their return to power in Iran.
are people like Ebadi and Jahanbegloo to be supported? in what form? how do we support them? how do we deal with the dilemma of the necessity for supporting reforms to women's rights in iran, at the very exact time when women's rights has been used as the thin end of a wedge for imperial expansion policies (a familiar strategy as far back as the 18th century and maybe before then)?
what does international solidarity entail? these questions are left unanswered. i would like to see a more concrete discussion of options, rather than a (what is fast becoming vacuous) discussion of whether the Euro-American Left is progressive or not, or whether the left has given in to fascism(s of various sort) or not.
Posted by Laleh · February 12th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>