It is one thing to work tirelessly to remind -- and most of the time it's in fact reminding people of stuff that everything conspires to help them forget -- people of the facts of US imperialism. It is one thing to try to persuade Iranian exiles of the Islamic republic that they need to raise their voices against a military attack on Iran, quite another to demand of them that they sing the praises of the Islamic republic.
But really, rather than trying to be the arbiter of who is a good and who, a bad, Iranian, wouldn't it be more effective, in the circumstances, to work tirelessly to extract commitments from those in the US presidential race to swear off yet another war, and to work at lobbying congress against such a war?
May make you feel dirty, but no more than your demand that Iranian left exiles cover themselves in the dirt of singing the praises of the Islamic republic, and likely to be more effective if the goal is to prevent such a war. But then, it does often appear that your goal is not so much to prevent a war as to seek to protect the Islamic republic -- and that, in my view, is an illegitimate goal: it is primarily for Iranians to decide, rightly or wrongly, whether they want to keep the Islamic republic; the rest of us can only seek to defend that right of Iranians to do so, including the rights of Iranians who desire an Islamic republic but not this one, against attempts of the Islamic republic to prevent them from exercising such a right.
On 06/10/2007, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's a long shot, to be sure. But if left-wing Jews, left-wing
> Japanese, etc. thought that their respective causes were hopeless
> anyway and therefore a waste of time, they wouldn't be doing the kind
> of political activism they do, seeking to change US policy toward
> Israel/Palestine, writing history books and holding public forums to
> reveal the facts of Japanese imperialism, etc.
>
> As far as Iranian leftists are concerned, they don't even need to
> discuss the overall history and present state of the Islamic Republic
> if they feel ambivalent about them. They can begin by speaking up
> about their families and friends who still live in Iran, reminding
> Americans that human beings with complicated lives and hopes for a
> better future live there (unlike the infamous cartoon in the Columbus
> Dispatch would have us believe).
> --
> Yoshie