[lbo-talk] Iran before Ahmadinejad (was capital punishment in Iran)

wrobert at uci.edu wrobert at uci.edu
Sat May 5 20:56:59 PDT 2007


To return to what I was saying briefly, I had two main points 1. That Carrol's claim about the left was factually wrong, and 2. That the sort of policy that he was implicitly advocating hasn't terribly effective (if anything quite the opposite.) When one looks at some of the disastrous mistakes of the CPUSA and other solidarity organizations have made because of an insistence on a sort of blind loyalty, I think it makes a strong argument for a critical rather than uncritical solidarity. I brought up Said as a model of such a solidarity, but one could fine many other examples such as Luxemburg, the Vinceramos Brigade, etc. I have a certain amount of sympathy for Yoshie's attempt to take an ally position for Iran, and many of the comments against that implicitly operate from a logic that Iran is not a complex and frequently problematic society that has seen a great deal of shifts since the eighties and has a strong and robust civil society. But I am troubled by the suppression of the existence of a far less appealing side of the society, particularly in the state apparatuses.

I think it is possible to recognize that and to recognize that the regime, warts and all, has infinitely more legitimacy than anything created in Washington. robert wood



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