Today, leftists in the West (including those who still call themselves socialists, communists, anarchists, or what have you) are mostly just social liberals, and they generally support social liberal parties of the multinational empire, such as the Democratic Party of the USA and the Socialist Party of France. That's what they offer to the rest of the world. What they support is worse for people in the Middle East (as well as others in the South) than the Islamic government of Iran and such mass Islamist parties and movements as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, etc.
Then, look at the secular parties on the left in the South, such as the PT of Brazil and the CPI(M) of India, or FMLN of El Salvador and FSLN of Nicaragua. They are, all in all, not superior to the aforementioned mass Islamist parties and movements, and some are worse than them. Taking lands from farmers to give them to multinationals and shooting them when they resist, as was done by the Left Front government in West Bengal, is going a lot further than what Iran's government has done in pursuit of economic liberalization, and El Salvador's* and Nicaragua's** policies on abortion, which FMLN and FSLN have supported, are worse than Iran's (permitted if it is to save the life of the woman***), the latter of which is in line with much of Latin America's and the Middle East's.
The only exceptions that I can think of are Cuba and Venezuela (though Venezuela's abortion policy is the same as Iran's, allowed only to save the life of the woman****), but there is no sign that the Iranians want to live like the Cubans.
* In El Salvador, "Abortion is a serious felony here for everyone involved, including the woman who has the abortion. Some young women are now serving prison sentences, a few as long as 30 years. . . . There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus -- the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. Like the woman I was waiting to meet" (Jack Hitt, "Pro-Life Nation," 9 April 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html?>).
** "Nicaraguan President Enrique Bolanos has signed into law a ban on all abortions, even in cases when a woman's life is judged to be at risk. . . . The former Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was a defender of Nicaragua's limited abortion rights and a critic of the Catholic church when he led a left-wing Nicaraguan government in the 1980s. He has since been reconciled with the church and has become a strident opponent of abortion" ("Nicaragua Brings in Abortion Ban," 18 November 2006, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6161396.stm>).
*** "Abortion Policy," <http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/abortion/doc/iran.doc>.
**** "Abortion Policy," <http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/abortion/doc/venezuela.doc>.
On 5/5/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [WS:] While I agree with the above, you seem to go
> much further than mere debunking of the US propaganda.
> You seem to be suggesting that Iranian nationalism
> (and Third World nationalism in general) is somehow
> preferable to the US nationalism (aka "imperialism")
> or Israeli nationalism (aka "zionism").
In Iran, it is liberal reformists who are nationalist and left Islamists like Ahmadinejad who are internationalist (Iranian rightists in exile are even worse than both, being Persian supremacists). Islam checks nationalism. As internationalism on the secular left has fallen into disuse in practice if not altogether in rhetoric (social liberalism is essentially a provincial affair, predicated upon the defense of the standards of living in the North even at the expense of peoples in the South, and such "internationalism" as it gives rise to is at best Amnesty Internationalism, signing online petitions here and there, a merely symbolic gesture), I rather think that Islam is the only remaining form of practical internationalism that is still in operation in the parts of the world where that is the dominant ideology.
The same goes for Judaism and Christianity, though to a lesser extent than Islam (because most of the adherents of Islam live in the South or among the oppressed in the North, such as Blacks in the USA and newer immigrants in Europe and the USA, whereas Judaism and Christianity have deep roots in the North). Judith Butler cites Hanna Arendt:
[L]et me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel
with a prominent political personality who was defending
the -- in my opinion disastrous -- non-separation of
religion and state in Israel. What [she] said – I am not
sure of the exact words any more -- ran something like
this: 'You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course,
do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.'
I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked,
I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered:
the greatness of this people was once that it believed in
God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and
love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this
people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that?
("'I Merely Belong to Them,'" LRB 29.9, 10 May 2007, <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n09/butl02_.html>)
Quite right.
At this point, it is the religious who are internationalists, whether they are on the left, right, and center, and social liberals, former socialists and social democrats for whom the only S word worthy of their real passion is "secularism" rather than socialism or social democracy, are nationalists of the worst kind. The social liberal governments supported by social liberals in the North kill people and destroy houses, factories, and infrastructure in the South; Islamists such as Hizballah and the Iranian government do what they can to rebuild what the social liberals of the North have and will continue to ruin. -- Yoshie