I'm Japanese by citizenship, American by residence, a denizen of global cafe society by education. And the sole executor of the symbolic estate of Michel Foucault. :->
On 6/26/07, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Meanwhile back in the jungle..."
>
> Yeah, if any of us are ever "stranded in the jungle trying to get a date"
> with the New York Dolls, say in El Salvador, we can "pretty much
> appreciate" the fact that the US is a pretty good place to live,
> especially when you see mass graves killed by our hirelings with
> our guns.
>
> "Meanwhile back in the states..."
>
> We are so very lucky that we were born in one of those countries that
> specializes in hiring others to do our slaughtering of the the dirt poor for
> us, so we ourselves will not have to suffer too much inconvenience.
Iran is one of the few countries whose leadership include people who were once tortured by the clients of Washington.* That is an asset for the Iranians, in so far as their leadership cherish independence more than those of many others, but it is also a cause of "the paranoid style in Iranian politics."
Ervand Abrahamian used this remark by Ali Khamenei as the epigram for Chapter 5 of Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 111, <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6c6006wp/>) -- "The Paranoid Style in Iranian Politics":
We are not, like Allende [and Mosaddeq], liberals willing
to be snuffed out by the CIA.
Hojjat al-Islam Ali Khamenei, Ettelac at, 5 March 1981
The republic that Iran's Islamic Revolution founded has survived, unlike the new societies that Allende, Mossadeq, the Sandinistas, and others sought to establish, but at a cost of Thermidor, Iran's Islamic Stalinism,** if you will, in the early period of post-revolutionary history. The Islamic Republic's emphasis on the use of public recantation (especially videotaped "interviews") as propaganda, says Abrahamian in Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (University of California Press, 1999), bore "striking and eerie resemblance to recantations produced elsewhere -- especially in Maoist China during the 1949-54 'brainwashing' campaign and the 1965-71 Cultural Revolution; in Stalinist Russia and Eastern Europe, first during the 1935-39 Moscow trials and later in 1951-54 during the so-called Slansky trials" (p. 5).
Iran has had more room for political democracy than China or the Soviet Union, and it has evolved since Thermidor (despite the fact that paranoia erupts from time to time), although there is always a chance that Washington manages to succeed in giving Iran a Yugoslav treatment, Iran being as multi-ethnic as former Yugoslavia.
* <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/middleeast/28iran.html> <http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/27/news/tehran.php> Ex-official explains Iran's wariness By Michael Slackman The New York Times MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 2006
TEHRAN A former high-ranking Iranian official wants Americans to see his cracked thumbnails. They were torn out, he said, after Washington's friend Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi put him in prison in the 1970s.
His point is instantly clear: Look at what happened when we had close ties to the United States.
"I was a medical student," said the man, Ali Muhammad Besharati, a former interior minister and deputy foreign minister. "But they put me in prison because I opposed American dominance in Iran."
In the ongoing conflict over Iran's nuclear program, there are disputes over enrichment of uranium, discussions of heavy water reactors, and accusations over the government's intentions. But to listen to Besharati is to hear the fight described as Tehran's frontline effort to block American influence in the region and to never again allow Washington to have an upper hand in Iran.
That attitude is obvious among Iran's current leaders, who see this not just as a battle over nuclear weapons but a fight for survival against a far more powerful enemy that has lumped them into an "axis of evil" and allocated millions of dollars to oust the government, according to political analysts and Western diplomats here.
Besharati, too, echoed the idea that giving in on the nuclear front would not solve Iran's problems with Washington, but only aggravate them.
"I would like you to write this down," he said, speaking through an interpreter. "If we backed down on the nuclear issue, the U.S. would have found fault with our medical doctors researching stem cells." He smiled, sat back and let his point settle.
"What they would like to see us do is plant corn, make tomato paste, and bottle mineral water," he added. "They do not want to see us get high-tech."
His comments, made during a 90-minute interview in his office, seem to reflect both a calculated political posture and a sincere hostility toward, and fear of, Washington.
Besharati, 57, works from an office in the Strategic Studies Center, an office tower in the north of Tehran that serves as the influential think tank to many of Iran's policy makers, including the Expediency Council, which technically arbitrates disputes between the elected and appointed levels of government.
At the moment he is not a member of the inner circle of power, though he has a personal relationship with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and as interior minister he appointed the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a governor.
But his thinking reflects the spirit of a leadership that has given no indication it is willing to halt enrichment or slow its nuclear march. In the imprecise language of Iran's political divisions, Besharati would be considered a moderate-conservative.
Asked whether Iran is afraid that greater economic, political and social integration with the West might dilute the country's Islamic identity, he turned the question around.
"Can the West be more flexible and accept us as we are?" he asked.
He was born in Jahrem, near Shiraz, and was an Islamic political activist. The shah imprisoned him for five years, and it was the feared Savak secret police that tore out his fingernails, he said. After the revolution, he won important positions in government, serving in Parliament, for a decade as the No. 2 person in Foreign Affairs Ministry and as interior minister from 1993 to 1997. He was in charge of the election process the years that Mohammad Khatami, the reform-minded cleric, surprised the conservative leadership and won a landslide victory as president.
In many ways he is the model of an Iranian official. He dressed in a sharp charcoal suit, wore a white collarless shirt buttoned to the top, and sported a scruffy beard. He travels with an armed security guard and speaks the language of what might be called peaceful-defiance, placing all blame for U.S.-Iranian problems on the White House while insisting Tehran wants nothing more than to live in peaceful harmony with the world. He does not answer when asked why for nearly two decades Iran kept its nuclear program a secret, in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
"Let me tell you a story," he said. "In one of the story books Iranians have a fairy tale. A hawk is talking to a chicken in the farm yard. The hawk says to the chicken 'you are not very loyal. They feed you but when they want to catch you, you run away.'"
Besharati paused for effect. "The chicken said, 'If you saw what was going on in the kitchen and the frying pan, you would not just hop from branch to branch, but fly away.'"
He smiled, rose from his chair and pulled three hardcover books off a bookshelf. He said they were memoirs of relatives of the former shah. "The shah of Iran never drank water without permission of American," he said he read in one of the books.
He opened one book, and its text was marked up, important passages circled. "What was the result of all our confidence in the U.S.?" he asked forcefully, "Our agriculture was demolished, our educational system was destroyed."
True or not, balanced or biased, he was rolling, passionate and animated as he stated his understanding of Iran's history and its relationship with the United States. He grabbed for another book and started paraphrasing: "All the interrogators in the secret police were trained in the United States and Israel." Pause. "Five of my fingernails were peeled out in interrogation."
Besharati recounted every American slight against Iran in modern times from the shooting down of the Iranian passenger liner that killed more than 200 civilians, to Reagan administration officials calling for pulling the regime out by the roots. All of this, he seemed to be saying, was why Iran would not give in to America's demands on something as consequential as the nuclear program.
Is that because Iran wants weapons? Weapons capability? Officially no. But the depth of fear and anxiety expressed over America's intentions toward Tehran seem to make the case for nuclear weapons, or a weapons program, as a deterrent.
"Although our economic system may not be strong," he said, "our minds and our memories are."
<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/28/world/28iran.190.gif> Hasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press Ali Muhammad Besharati, leaning back, a former interior minister and deputy foreign minister, with Intelligence Minister Ali Younesi last year.
** Oddly, few make use of the terms Islamic Stalinism and Islamo-Stalinism, Islamic Maoism and Islamo-Maoism, despite similarities between Iran, the Soviet Union, and China during certain periods of their respective histories, though references have been made to Iran's Cultural Revolution occasionally. Ideologues prefer to say Islamo-fascism, clerical fascism, etc., though the Islamic Republic of Iran has never resembled Germany, Italy, or Japan under fascism. -- Yoshie
