Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party government was unmistakably a dictatorship. Not so with the Iranian government. It's a Third-World democracy. To say that a democratically elected government is monstrous is by extension to suggest that the people who elected them are either monstrous themselves or monstrously stupid, perhaps "the illiterate and ignorant" who bought "dangerous propaganda," as Lee Bollinger believes, or to insinuate that it is actually a dictatorship albeit disguised by a show of elections, which also supports Bollinger's contention that Iran's run by "a petty and cruel dictator," if not regarding Ahmadinejad personally but regarding Iran's government generally.
Dabashi says that there exists in Iran "a very complicated division of power in various official and unofficial, elected and unelected, democratic and despotic, centers of gravity," about which Bollinger knows nothing. Quite so. What Dabashi fails to say, though, is that having "a very complicated division of power in various official and unofficial, elected and unelected, democratic and despotic, centers of gravity" is not at all monstrous. It is a normal form of government, from the North to the South, though the precise division of power varies from one country to another.
On 10/13/07, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> Ah, well. I respect Yoshie's commitment and wide-ranging
> knowledge and have little doubt she'd be at that demo.
>
> But it's been clear to me for some time that a large part of Yoshie's
> frustration with the Western left is because she sets impossible tasks for
> it: in this case, to "not allow" the US to go to war (would it had the power
> to do so!) by "educating Americans" (with what resources?) "to
> counter what Washington is already doing".
If it's really the case that we'll have no impact whatsoever no matter what we say or do, then we might as well shut up and just watch the Iranian, Russian, and other governments handle the problem that is clearly beyond us. Is that what you believe?
On 10/13/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 13, 2007, at 2:15 PM, uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
>
> > 130 iranian energy companies will be privatized in 7 years.
> > Deputy director of the National Iranian Oil Company says oil
> > privatization
> > in Iran can serve as a model for other regional countries.
> > http://www.presstv.ir/Detail.aspx?id=26143§ionid=351020103
>
> Oh, that's beautiful. And Chevron and Total were at the meeting!
> Populist and anti-imperialist indeed.
I wrote a little over a year ago: "In reality, the economically disenfranchised in Iran face struggles on two fronts: to defend Iran's sovereignty against Western imperialism (first economic sanctions and then war and 'regime change') and to fight for an economy that serves their needs, rather than the interests of what Tariq Ali called the mullah-bazaari nexus" ("What Do the Iranians Want?" <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/furuhashi130706.html>). If we can take the pressure of Western imperialism off Iran, then Iranians can focus on the domestic front alone. As it is, though, our failure is forcing them to fight on two fronts at the same time. -- Yoshie