On Oct 15, 2007, at 12:01 PM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> It's important to get this right: I don't 'defend' the Iranian
> leadership.
> I support the Iranian left and its working class. I do, however,
> think that
> efforts to be clear about the sources and extent of its obvious
> shortcomings
> are valuable. The Islamic Republic is "a vile dictatorship", the
> Bollinger
> neocons* will scream, and in reply, we should that that it is not a
> dictatorship, but that it is highly authoritarian; they will say
> that the
> source of Iran's tyranny is Islam, and we should reply that its
> source is in
> fact a class bloc that consolidated power and defeated the Left
> shortly
> after the revolution (and that the last thing the neocons wanted
> was for the
> Left to succeed in that struggle); they will say that Iran is
> plotting the
> murder of the Jews, repressing women, (and they might even get
> round to
> mentioning what some refer to as an anti-gay purge), and our
> response should
> be to clearly separate fact from fiction, for example allowing that
> women
> are repressed but also that they have fought for and won some unique
> victories etc. This is what I mean by a propaganda struggle. It
> isn't
> designed to effect US policy, which alone it can't. It is designed to
> neutralise the propaganda raised in its defense: the main effect of
> propaganda is to confuse and frighten people, and by clarifying and
> unfrightening people, we stand a better chance of effectively
> mobilising
> antiwar sentiment.
I've got no problem with this. But I still think you could get further with the American public by saying it's not our business, and look what happened the last time the U.S. military tried to "export democracy."