``Antiwar activists and progressive intellectuals in the west should know, and be prepared to say extemporaneously in public debate, what the likes of Shirin Ebadi , Akbar Ganji, Emadeddin Baghi ,Abdollah Momeni , and Ramin Jahanbegloo think.....what they think about the human rights situation in Iran, the nature of the Islamic Republic, and what members of global civil society can do to support them....''
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I want to revisit this thread that was titled `Why the left should take the Iran issue back from the neocons'. For some reason the thread wondered off into who was saying what and why, without ever getting down to the more substantive issues. I don't know who Postel is and I don't care. He's a fucking idiot, if not a CIA think-tank stooge. Whatever else he is, his grasp of US history is lousy or worse revisionist, reactionary, and imperialistic.
I picked this particular quote which Dwayne used, because it sounds so reasonable. What makes it odious in my mind is the weight of history. I have certainly heard shit like this before.
(I am going on a rant here. Most of the list must know all these things, but I feel like they need to be said. Too much goes unsaid these days, so excuse the indulgence and bandwidth.)
First of all I don't know who any of these Iranian names are, and I don't care. In fact, I don't care what Iran does or doesn't do or how its society works or doesn't work. But gathering from stories I've heard of a recent visit by a very good friend, Iran works just fine. Indeed, my friend and his mother (an aging globe trotter to the many interesting and exotic places) they were treated very well. The people they met were more than happy to talk about their country, its good points and bad, its problems and their own. He said the people he met were eager to show that Iran was not how it is depicted on western tv.
Of course I wish the Iranians all the best, however they want to define it. What I know as the best way to support them as a people and culture and just about everybody else's struggles on the planet is to cripple the US government, shackle it, wound it, and harass it, specifically so it can't torment, manipulate, dominate, bully, and wage war on the rest of the world. I am sick of this crap. I see this as my duty to my country and its people, and my fate.
Here is a very interesting little quote from a later thread, called [Fwd for quotation if you want]:.
I``If somebody wants to call me a cold-war liberal, that's illiterate, but I won't be surprised...''
So what is a cold war liberal? They were just about everybody shaping US foreign policy from the Truman administration on through Nixon. They were great propagandists for Democracy, Freedom, Justice and the American Way. They designed the early policy of Containment which amounted to a thirty year long series of wars on the borders of Soviet and Sino-Soviet client states and in the Third World or the periphery. Their main propaganda line was that the US and the West were the only beacons of freedom and prosperity. Beyond us there was no life worth living at all. Their promise was if one of these states conducted a vicious, repressive, and dirty war on its own progressives, leftists and communists, we in the US would give them all the military and economic aid they needed and look the other way as these dictatorships of a comprador elite violated very tenet of human rights, civil rights, and good governance. Millions died in these ugly and destructive little wars. Vietnam was probably the largest, but it was only one example.
So in effect, a cold war liberal is an Imperialist. They provided the political justifications or the ideology for the vast expansion of US post-war power, influence and manipulations of just about every region in the world. The firmware of imperialism can be dug out of various economic ties, aid, trade, and other campaigns managed by the the US and coordinated through the Bretton Woods system. While the Bretton Woods agreement was originally designed for the re-construction of Europe, once that was concluded, the IMF and other agencies morphed into an extension of US imperial policies and became absorbed in various economic manipulations to support friends and punish so-called enemies of the West.
Almost all these latter activities were rarely in the news and went on completely unnoticed by most of the US public. Instead, these machinations were deliberately recast as US foreign aid to help economic development. Meanwhile of course the CIA and NSA were up to their necks in covert and overt manipulations of foreign governments and their political economies, through whatever means necessary: boycotts, block-aids, egregious loan payment schemes, counter-insurgency forces, both covert and overt, and on and on.
A careful re-reading of Cuban history would illustrate much of how these imperial policies worked---as well as how they could be defeated. What's interesting to me is that Cuban revolution didn't start off as an enemy of the US, until Castro nationalized the sugar cane plantations. If you follow these developments in the late Eisenhower administration and early Kennedy years you will find that the Cuban government had to take control of its own economy or it would starve to death, period. Cuba at that point was in effect an economic colonial holding of the US. It's too sources of income sugar and tourism were wholly owned by US companies.
But the most important part of this history lesson is that the US always cast its political rhetoric to justify its foreign activatives as a defence against tyranny and poverty. In other words a complete lie. And, it was mostly the Democrat liberal establishment who designed both the means of US imperialism and its rhetorical cover story. In other words that's what a cold war liberal was.
Any way, back to the future of US imperialism and why Postel is an imperialist whether he knows it or not. Part and parcel of imperialism is its ideological justification or its software implimentation. This implimenting tool is based on the presumption that our political economic system is a model of development, and our socio-cultural context is the only one appropriate for raising the great masses of the planet into freedom and prosperity. This is the core of liberal belief then and now. Obviously the Neoliberalism of today, is just the Imperialism of yesterday in a slightly different suit.
Everybody hates the 60s and 70s. But that period did accomplish at least one thing, and that was to inject into the US body politic the rise of a different conceptual grasp of cultures and their societies---and our relationship to them. All this was the consequence of a host of what were called Third World political movements in the US, carried on by mostly second generation immigrants from Mexico, Latin American, and Asia. The participants in these movements were acutely aware of the consequences of US imperialism, since most of them were its children, brought here to escape those consequences. They lived (and still live) in the strange boundary between here and there in language, culture, custom and socio-political attitudes. Carlos Fuentes called the Mexican and American worlds of the US southwest , Mesoamerica to signify the borderlands. I think it was great symbol because it linked land, culture, language and people, mixed together but composing a world of its own.
So, at least for me, those movements were the concrete insight into US imperialism. That's how I learned and gained insights into what the US was doing around the world well below the news radar here and beyond the usual war headlines. Later much of the rhetoric of the Third World movements was turned into liberal mush, going under the trade name of Multiculturalism.
At this point in time, it takes a considerable amount of historical back tracking to see the direct connection between the neoconservative rise to power as a reaction to the apparent loss of traditional american values, the neconservative political assaults on what some liberals and progressives defend and call multicuturalism, and the neoconservative global and imperialistic positioning of the US in its foreign wars in the Middle East and more covertly in Columbia and Venezuela.
The above noted historical context is were Postel's essay comes into play. Once again we are urged to get involved and support foreign freedom fighters for truth, justice, and the Iranian-American way. To be sure the CIA is in there somewhere and working hard to develop these sorts of Iranian contacts for imperialistic and propagandistic goals. Count on it.
The whole UN nuclear power controversy is a mere smoke screen to establish and develop critically missing economic and non-military imperialistic means to lever Iran---with the forever threat to use force if necessary (carrots and sticks). In this context, then Postel's advocacy of political engagement with any political group in Iran is tantamount to a software implimentation of imperialism, since the whole point would be to de-stabilize the internal political conditions of Iran.
just read Sean Andrews post:
``...or the background of some of the more recently minted "cold war liberals" like Postel. Aside from all the stuff about Iran in the book there's a big fat chapter on how he wants to replace the "failed and moribund Third Worldism of the Left and its inheritors" (Postal, 51) [which are, as far as I can tell, any "radical" theories like "Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and various blends thereof" that haven't been wildly embraced by the contingent of intellectuals he's interested in] with "a liberal Third Worldism" which should "proactively claim that turf as our own, advancing liberalism as a superior framework to address the problems of the Third World today--parts of it in particular" (51).
Thus I think Leninology is spot on with most of their assessment of Postel's convoluted position since the book itself is not really a call for solidarity on Iran as much as it is a call for liberals (who, unlike leftists, evidently, are concerned with "the struggle for human rights [cf: Zizek on this concept] women's rights, civil liberties, pluralism, religious tolerance, freedom of expression, and multiparty democracy" [36]) to be more proactive in their attention to global affairs. It is a strange demand overall since I'd say that liberals have pretty much been in charge of world affairs for the better part of the past two centuries...''
Right on. The last two centuries of western imperialism, always sold with the cover story on how we can best manage our little black, brown and yellow children. And it has worked so well in the past. I really have to wonder why the non-western world has rejected our well meaning and beneficent gestures of solidarity...
And then closing:
``We (liberal internationalists) have to be able to operate effectively away from the home court [of rights and international law] too. Some struggles in the world today are tailor-made for a liberal internationalist analysis--but many are not.... It is generally they [Marists & Third Worlders], and not we, who organize the forums and the demonstrations, who publish the magazines and the websites, who write the books and working papers on these issues.
This needs to change. If we fail to engage the Third World ourselves, we will be seen precisely as 'oddly tangential' to its most pressing concerns.''
Here is how I read this. Western liberalism's long and intimate history with western imperialism was temporarily critiqued and interrupted by third world progressive movements both here and abroad from the Vietnam through the end of the cold war. We liberals need to co-opt both those indigenous anti-imperialist movements and the neconservative pro-active ressurrection of the imperial project.
Frankly I don't trust western liberals or even quasi-progressives much on these matters because too many of them have not gone through the person mill of finding out for themselves just how their ideas are seen by other people from other places. They don't listen enough to realize how their ideas go over--or rather in most cases don't go over at all. And as a consequence they are easily outmaneuvered by the spokesmen and institutions of old fashioned imperialism proper, who are always eager to find latest liberal rhetoric to creat a new mask for the same old evils.
CG