>I think Doug in the past has made a lot of fuss about the ability to
>hold two or more ideas in mind at one time. Can he really be so obtuse
>as not to recognize that Yoshie and others really do have that capacity
>also?
At my blog, whenever I had good words to say about Yoshie, sometimes folks would pipe up to complain about her views on Iran. Being too busy with my bourgeois concerns about US politics, I didn't bother to find out what her views were. Now, I've just read through half of the posts Yoshie's made on the topic since Jan 07, 2006 and through 7/11/2--6. It was in July when things blew out re: Iran. (Initially, YOshie posted about students revolting against Ahmadinejad)
Doug mentioned something about how this has gone on a long time. I'll say! And worse, it largely started with both commenting on hos FOX beat the war drums over Iran, basically both in agreement about the issue.
In late Jan 2006, Yoshie argued in favor of Ahmadinejad's populism, economic policies, and what she perceived as his "passive revolution" (a la Gramsci) against clerics. [2] He was also making the right friends (Moscow, Cuba, Venezuala) and enemies ("neoliberal "reformists" and clerical gerontocrats") [6, 7]
In defense of her position, she pointed out that US leftists had failed in Iraq. [4] There was nothing we could do about Iraq, but there was still time to do something about Iran. She encouraged leftists to follow her lead on the Iran issue. [12]
Moreover, she insisted that she had been right about many other things when it came to third world left movements, so we really ought to pay more attention. She was the one who, unlike most leftists in the US, was NOT behind the curve. [8] She had been at the forefront re: Chavez, most leftists weren't. Indeed, on many issues, Yoshie has been right and the rest of us have come around to her position. [8] When leftists finally did pay attention to Chavez, he didn't need our help. We shouldn't let the same happen with Iran. Hence, her decision to relentlessly support of Iran. [6, 7] She also argued that, because he was putting neo-liberals AND clerics on the defensive, he was in a better position to bring up changes favorable to leftists than others. [7]
She favorably compared Ahmadinejad with Chavez several times. She praised his populism and challenged Doug, claiming that his economic policies were advanced and should be suported. She criticized the Persian Prince for his holocaust denial (holocaust envy, she pegged it) and acknowledged the lack of human rights for women, gays, etc, though careful to point out that this isn't surprising and sho'nuf there were worse countries, etc. [2, 3, 10 -- see esp. 10 where she asserts her bottom line]
But what I got from reading the last couple of years of exchanges on this topic was that the kicker came during the thread labeled, "Street Fight Days" (SFD). The SFD thread spun off from a depressed and morose Yoshie posting several times about how US leftists were failures, constantly behind the curve when it comes to keeping up with populist leftist movements. Yoshie invited us to remember her as the one on LBO who was beating the drum in support of Iran and she predicted that we, as on every other issue, would follow her -- but alas too late. [8, 11]
Eventually, probing from Jim Devine, Marvin, and Carrol meant that Yoshie acknowledged that leftist probably couldn't do much to aid Iran, either. [9, 13]
She reiterated her position on gays, women, etc [14] saying that those struggles should be taken up in the context of working class demands *in* Iran. She poo pooed candlelight vigils by US leftists in supports of Iranian gays, etc.
If you take a look at the Street Fighting Days thread, what set off a lot of this was an attack on Doug has somehow uniquely representative of the failure of the left in Iraq. Shall we talk about attacking persons? Logical fallacy? Yoshie isn't incapable of mischaracterizing others' positions, either. And it is often why these discussions spin out of control. BOTH sides are doing it. And, what also set it off was the haughty attitude: US leftist this and that, which all amounted to what a bunch of horrible failures we all were. We can't get anything right, always behind the curve, never up enough on third world populism, blah blah. Not surprisingly, hackles were raised. And it kept going on like that ever since. There was a thread recently, a lot of handwringing about what losers US leftists are, never doing anything, never enough activisms, a bunch of lazy asses, etc. etc. Not surprisingly, they, too, were seen as haughty and writing as if they sat by the Right Hand of Karl Marx, himself.
To be fair, I agree that Doug ought to just ignore Yoshie's chum -- because that's what often goes on is baiting and taunting. But let's see it work on both side, hmmm?
[1] At 04:56 PM 12/7/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>This must be the first time in Fox's history when the network reported
>a larger number of demonstrators than in wire dispatches. :-> In any
>case, good to know that students have chosen a correct slogan: "Our
>struggle is twofold: Fighting against internal oppression and external
>foreign threats." -- Yoshie
At 11:49 AM 12/11/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: <http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/11/africa/ME_GEN_Iran_Anti_president_Protest.php> Iranian students disrupt Pres. Ahmadinejad's speech, burning his picture
[2] In many ways, Ahmadinejad is an ideal candidate to pull off a passive revolution (cf. Antonio Gramsci) against clerics.
Practicing economic populism and a passive revolution against clerics at home, and pursuing nuclear sovereignty, supporting Palestinians, cementing friendship with the socialist axis of good (Havana, Caracas, and La Paz), and retaining support of Moscow and Beijing -- such are the many tasks of the President of Iran. He has NO business playing to the Holocaust-denying gallery (as Martin and WKD suggest that he is).
[3] Whatever real grievances Iran's ethnic, religious, sexual, and other
>minority communities have will be magnified thousands of times, and
>where real grievances are not enough, imagined ones will be invented
>to augment them. That's where identity politics -- especially
>diaspora identity politics -- becomes the most useful to imperialists.
>The best known example of this is Washington's use of Hmongs in Viet
>Nam and Miskitos in Nicaragua. In that sort of campaign, some
>leftists (e.g., Ward Churchill) and many liberals are known to
>volunteer enthusiastically.
>
>Ahmadinejad can't prevent that from happening -- and no one can -- but
>he ought to make efforts not to give any ammunition to imperialists
>and, where possible, try to do counter-hegemonic diaspora identity
>politics. He needs to learn from Fidel's and Chavez's attempts to
>reach out to Black communities in the United States.
[4] At 07:52 PM 5/19/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: The people of Iraq were abandoned by Western leftists two years ago -- streets of America were quiet even as the Abu Ghraib scandal exploded and Sunnis and Shiites held a joint uprising <http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9384ee3ba6fe3e8d4535443108da081a>.
Because of our desertion and dereliction, Iraq is now on the way to becoming an Afghanistan, an irreversible course.
[5] At 05:58 PM 5/20/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Here is an excellent profile of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Iason Athanasiadis, "Ahmadinejad: A Study in Obstinacy" (Asia Times, 19 May 2006, <http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE19Ak02.html>). It shows he is the right man at the right time for the Muslim world as well as his country, and he's winning the right friends and making the right enemies (namely both neoliberal "reformists" and clerical gerontocrats) at home. -- Yoshie
[6] At 02:48 AM 5/21/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: <...> Chavez doesn't need US leftists' support now: his national and Latin American support is rock-solid, and Washington is too busy with the Middle East, what with campaigns for dual regime changes in Iran and Palestine -- to make a major move against Venezuela at this moment.
Most US leftists seem to me to be always a couple of years behind the revolutionary solidarity schedule: they embraced Chavez too late to give him support when he could have used it (2002, the year of the anti-Chavez coup and lockout); they committed to US withdrawal too late to prevent the death of modern Iraq. I fear that, by the time when they manage to pay attention to Iran and its leader, they will have already missed the train again.
[7] At 11:22 PM 5/21/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 5/21/06, Seth Ackerman <sethackerman1 at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>To *you* it doesn't seem enlightened. I
>>don't think I'm presuming too much when I say that you probably take
>>that view in part because you're promoting a political strategy for the
>>left to ally with religious Muslims, to view Mahmoud Ahmedinijad as "our
>>man in Iran," etc.
I was being ironic by saying "our man in Iran." Most US leftists won't pay attention to what Ahmadinejad and his supporters are doing in Iran until it's too late, just as in the case of Chavez and his supporters in Venezuela.
It must be also said that you don't understand my view of Ahmadinejad. I believe that he is more likely to help secularize Iran than neo-liberal "reformists" have, because (1) neo-liberal "reformism" would create economic conditions for the growth of religious reaction and (2) his political, economic, and social programs have and will put him in conflict with not only neo-liberal "reformists" but clerical gerontocrats as well. He may not survive that conflict, to be sure, but his is a more promising approach than his competitors.
[8] On 5/21/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> > some people who are
>really no friends of the
>>values that have characterized the Western left.
Give yourself several years, and see where you stand on Ahmadinejad (supposing that he will survive the present and future conflicts in those intervening years). You, like many other US leftists, didn't immediately think highly of Chavez, argue for the US withdrawal from Iraq, etc., but eventually you've come to argue for the positions that I have held all along.
[9] At 10:24 AM 5/22/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 5/22/06, Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>I think that there's good cause to wait (though there's no reason to
>>avoid studying the issue at length and no reason to jump to "fuck
>>Ahmadinejad" sloganeering).
I'm afraid that most US leftists won't even study what's happening in and to Iran in time, though they ought to be studying it and clarifying it to the general public. They must do so objectively, without defending the indefensible (e.g., flirtations with Holocaust revisionism).
In any event, though, the collective power of US leftists being what it is, it's possible that what they will do or won't do doesn't matter one way another.
In the end, the Ahmadinejad administration will probably have to survive on its own with little US leftist interest in it, just as the Chavez administration had to.
I'll do what I can with Iranian exiles on the left and usual suspects like die-hard Christian pacifists -- e.g., Fellowship of Reconciliation, whose Fact-Finding and Friendship Delegations to Iran just came back to the States: <http://www.forusa.org/programs/iran/>.
[10] At 04:50 PM 5/22/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 5/22/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>>I think I'll stick with Chavez.
Really? You aren't thinking about Iran and Ahmadinejad as Chavez does, for sure. Well, you can afford not to think like Chavez, since you aren't running any country.
My bottom line on Iran: criticize what you need to criticize on civil liberties, anti-Semitic rhetoric, etc., but recognize its populist aspects.
[11] At 03:49 AM 5/29/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 5/28/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>>[another perspective on Yoshie's Persian Chavez - so what were the
>>jokes about his "personal hygiene"?]
>>
>>New York Times - May 28, 2006
>>Iran Chief Eclipses Power of Clerics
>>
>>By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
>>Published: May 28, 2006 ... (Doug)
>><snip>
If my working-class Persian Prince pulls off a passive revolution in a fashion that Antonio Gramsci discussed the term, you first heard it from me here: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060501/037481.html>. </snip> (Yoshie)
[12] At 08:15 AM 6/26/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 6/26/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>> >> What am I going to do about it? Same thing that you are, no?
>> >
>> > You mean nothing?
>>
>>I'll follow your lead then.
I said, more than a month ago, that Iraq was a goner, that there's nothing we could do about it in the near future, and that we should focus on Iran and Palestine instead, as a near- to medium-term project (for the next ten years or so) for education.
AND
At 09:26 AM 6/27/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 6/27/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>>Why not emphasize
>>something with some actual promise, like living wage legislation or
>>national health insurance?
I said clearly that we ought to focus on Iran and Palestine, Latin America, and Russia and China (in that order) in _foreign policy_ (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060515/038266.html>). In domestic policy, focus on universal health care.
[13] At 08:49 AM 6/27/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 6/26/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
>>You're being unfair and not understanding why people seem to have what you
>>characterize as an uncaring attitude bordering on hypocrisy.
Indifference and impotence are two facts of life on the American left. The main problem is not so much those facts themselves as American liberals' and leftists' refusal to admit to them, the refusal that results in their pronouncements about "what to do about Iraq" being completely divorced from reality, even more divorced from it than Republican and Democratic politicians'. When Republican and Democratic politicians say something delusional about Iraq, at least they have the power to act on their respective delusions (and make others suffer from them). Not so with us.
[14] At 12:54 PM 6/29/2006, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>On 6/29/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
By and large, I don't think that writing sensational stories, holding vigils, etc. in the West would help women, gay men and lesbians, religious and ethnic minorities, etc. in Iran or other countries. Their rights can be better advanced within the context of advancing all working people's social and economic rights within a given country in the developing world. The defeat of "reformists" in the last election in Iran is a good example. They lost not because Iranians hated more personal liberties but because they implemented economic neoliberalism (as well as because they didn't make progress on political liberties). That's why I think Venezuela should be the model for Iran and other countries that have natural resources, though progress on women's rights in Venezuela, too, is slower than I would like.
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