On 6/27/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 27, 2007, at 12:36 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Why accept the terms of debate set by the bellicose
>
> That's hegemony for you, eh? But in some sense you're doing that too.
> You want to prove that the Iranian state is wise and virtuous in
> order to argue against sanctions. I say the Iranian regime can suck
> out loud and sanctions are still an outrage. I say Iran is entitled
> to develop nuclear weapons, too, as much as I dislike theocracies
> that jail and shoot the likes of most members of this list.
"Suck" is not even a criticism. :-0
You must have come down with a severe case of anti-intellectualism if you think that scholarly works by the likes of Ervand Abrahamian, Arzoo Osanloo, and so on (none of whom says everything that the Iranian state does is "wise and virtuous," nor have I) are "provocations" that are too provocative to read. (Not that reading them necessarily changes your mind, as Hamid Dabashi, Valentine M. Moghadam, Saadia Toor, Kourosh Shemirani, etc. have hardly changed the way you represent Iran.)
In any event, if a person tells me that X is a theocracy that jails and shoots most liberals and leftists and does nothing but oppress its people and yet that it is "an outrage" to sanction such a republic of fear and moreover that the said theocracy, whose behavior is entirely irrational (which is the impression left in the mind of the public by the way many liberals and leftists, as well as the corporate media, portray Iran), is "entitled to develop nuclear weapons" (which Iran's government doesn't say it wants, nor do most Iranians), I have to conclude the person is really out of his mind. Most thinking people wouldn't entrust nuclear weapons to the irrational.
I fail to understand how misrepresenting Iran as a republic of fear ruled by irrational rulers benefits the Iranians.
On 6/26/07, Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > of how. It is my belief that, to offer anyone more than symbolic
> > solidarity, we have to have a base of power ourselves. As Bricmont
> > says, we have to take this question into account: "how many divisions
> > will you send into battle?"
>
> Here here, but this points to a bigger problem: the us left has no
> divisions. Beyond that, they don't -want- any. To get any involves doing
> various unsavory things like talking to or allying with various folks far
> removed from our own ideological values. Or building compromised
> institutions nontheless able to maintain bank accounts and membership rolls
> in the six figures for continuous years. Moving individuals, to say nothing
> of the masses, happens by bits and increments rather than transformative
> leaps, and so most leftists today prefer the art of critique and rhetoric,
> which involves no responsibilities and little effort. The left doesn't want
> a base and if it accidentally got one the majority on this list would be out
> to undercut it, and they no doubt could find many valid points of criticism,
> but at the end of the day, such purism can't even play a support role to
> base-building.
On 6/27/07, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> Everyone clamours about Iran because BushCo have made it the topic du
> jour and Doug Ireland and others post endlessly about it on the net.
Anti-intellectualism, i.e. an inability to think beyond "sucks," is one problem of Americans today, which is organically linked to "purism" in the case of self-identified leftists (for purists everything "sucks") as well as a Pavlovian response to cues given by the US power elite.
Beyond that, there is a problem of an implicit social theory that informs many leftists' thinking.
Many on the Left who write about Iran, whether they are Iranian or Western, abstract "Iran" from its regional and global contexts. For them, the primary contradiction is the conflict between "the Iranian regime" on one hand and labor, women's rights, and other activists on the other hand, and activists who represent particular sectoral interests are then equated with "the Iranian people" (if writers are liberal) or "the Iranian working class" (if writers are Marxist). But social contradictions in Iran, which is not on the eve of revolution, cannot be represented in such a simplistic scheme; sectoral interests are not the same as class or national interests; and it is dangerous not to keep in mind that, Iran being in the empire's crosshairs, the primary contradiction at the political level today is between the Iranian people's right to exist and the empire's attempt to deny it, and all secondary contradictions within Iran, between Iran and its neighbors, and so forth are shaped by it and in turn shape it.
> India gets a free pass because there is a wishy-washy sentimentality
> about India among Western leftists. Though India, as it is currently
> evolving, is a much more serious threat (particularly in an
> ideological sense) since it is re-validating the neo-lib model (with
> attendant Reaganite clichés), coupled with a dangerous naiveté about
> markets, capitalism, corporatism, consumption, etc, the lessons of
Western liberals' response to India may be rooted in worse things than wishy-washy sentimentality. It may very well be just frank admiration for economic growth. At one time in history, social democrats held up Sweden as the model. Then, after the waning of social democracy as well as socialism, they looked East and found Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and so forth and held them up as the model for the South if not the North. Then, deflation grounded Japan, and the Asian financial crisis hit the "Asian tigers." Now they point to China and India as the new models* for the South. Why can't Russia do what China and India are doing, they say. But why would the Russians want to live like the Chinese, let alone the Indians? With each phase of capitalist development, people are asked to lower their expectations.
* A brutal model of development can provoke an organized response, however, a glimpse of which is seen in the wire dispatch below. Most (all?) newspapers, predictably, regard this as less newsworthy than gas stations burned in Iran by unorganized protesters in response to higher gas prices and rationing.
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SP216874.htm> Maoists blow up India rail station as strike bites 27 Jun 2007 06:59:56 GMT Source: Reuters By Bappa Majumdar
KOLKATA, India, June 27 (Reuters) - Maoist insurgents blew up a railway station and disrupted public transport across several Indian states on Wednesday, on the second day of a strike that highlighted their growing strength and national coordination.
The insurgents used powerful explosives to blow up Biramdih railway station in a pre-dawn attack in the eastern state of West Bengal, disrupting links with many parts of east and south India, officials said.
"Dozens of Maoist rebels tied up all the railway employees and just blew the station and torched whatever was left of it before melting into darkness," said Mahabir Pyne, a local resident.
Maoists called the two-day strike in their strongholds of east and central India to protest against special economic zones (SEZs), low-tax enclaves created to boost industrial growth that have sparked protests from farmers who will lose their land.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, rebels called out employees of a coffee extracting plant from work near the port city of Vishakhapatnam, an SEZ location, and blew it up.
Authorities in many mineral-rich regions of south, east and central India suspended public transport. Shops were shut in rural areas and mining operations in the eastern state of Jharkhand and the central state of Chhattisgarh were suspended.
On Tuesday, a goods train engine was blown up and another set ablaze in Jharkhand. Rebels also set ablaze five trucks transporting minerals in the state.
MAOISTS HOOK ON TO ECONOMIC ANGER
Security analysts said the rebels have cleverly hooked onto an issue -- the seizure of land for SEZs -- that has angered many poor Indians.
In March, at least 14 villagers were killed in police clashes with protesters in West Bengal, where the state government planned to set up a chemical hub on farmers' lands. It galvanised popular opposition to SEZs across India.
At the same time the insurgents, who say they are fighting for rights of poor peasants and landless labourers, showed their growing punch in India's economically important mining regions.
"This is the first-ever coordinated lethal action by the Maoists over a very wide area," said Ajai Sahni of the New Delhi-based Institute of Conflict Management.
"It shows their dramatic shift of strategy from isolated hit-and-run attacks to a systematic and planned terrorist act."
"This (SEZ) issue has been given to them on a platter and many foreign investors we spoke to recently said they were told by the governments in India that the Maoist issue won't be a problem," Sahni added.
Thousands of people in India have been killed since the Maoists began their insurgency in the late 1960s.
(Additional reporting by a Reuters reporter in Hyderabad) -- Yoshie