[lbo-talk] Regime Change and Paranoid Reaction

[Russell Grinker]

This should be abc. Mike is sitting in the USA which is currently whipping
up a chauvinistic campaign against Iran, ostensibly because of its nuclear
programme. Iran is attempting to assert its right to national independence
from US/western hegemony. This independence is asserted in nationalist and
religious terms and the right to have its own nuclear programme (which Mike
and many of us might no doubt find objectionable and repressive). But the
right to national self-determination surely implies that individual
countries have the right to determine their own internal practices. It's
surely for Iranians to sort these out amongst themselves? 

Mike says he's for workers freeing themselves from class rule. In the USA
here and now, that surely means distancing themselves from the
establishment's anti-Iran campaign? Is it not clear in this regard that it's
not particularly useful at the height of anti-Iran propaganda at home in the
US to *equate* the problems of Iranian nationalism with those of American
nationalism? It's not 'the same the whole world over': clearly Iran is
nowhere near the threat to world peace that the US currently represents.
Equating the two will only add fuel to the US chauvinist flames rather than
build popular defence of Iranians' (and everyone else's) right to run their
country as they see fit. Harping on about the backwardness of Iran is hardly
likely to help build a movement in the US opposing US intervention there. 

This argument is of course predicated on the notion that the USA and Iran
are not both countries of a similar status (and representing an equal
threat) on a world scale, or as some of us used to say: the World is divided
into oppressed and oppressor nations.

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Mike Ballard

MB:
It's in the interest of workers who live in the miserable State of
theocratic
Iran to free themselves from class rule.  It was so when they lived under
the
heel of the Shah and it is now when they live under the rule of the
theocrats. 
It is in the interest of workers who live in North America to free
themselves
from wage-labour and by extension, class rule.  It is in no worker's
interests
to become a nationalist cheerleader for their own or any other workers'
ruling
class.

Mike B)