[lbo-talk] "Islamofascism Awareness Week" (was Marjane Satrapi: Revolutionary Spirit)

[Michael Smith]

I haven't really been following this thread. However, now 
I see Yoshie is being threatened with the supreme penalty.
Since I am, I suppose, one of the "sad fellow travelers" of 
hers that Doug mentioned, I started prowling back through 
it to see what terrible thing she's done this time. As usual, 
I took away the impression that she's taking a lot more personal
insults than she's handing out, and in general, her tone is 
much more temperate and on-topic that her detractors'. 

More specifically, I was struck by the following: 
  
> > On 10/23/07, andie nachgeborenen
> > <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > So, I take, Yoshie, that your answer is that
> > instead
> > > of imposing bourgeois wealth and liberties on the
> > > unwilling masses in typical imperialist fashion,
> > we
> > > can let the clerics impose Sharia law, stuff the
> > women
> > > into chadors, authorize honor killings of raped
> > women
> > > who disgrace their male relatives, beat
> > clean-shaven
> > > men, hang the queers and stone the adulterers, and
> > > build a bomb.

The striking thing, to me, is the syntactic frame:
"instead of imposing... we can let...." 

This raises a lot of questions. Who are the "we" 
intended? The honorable members of lbo-talk? But 
of course that "we" can neither impose nor allow 
anything. We can only decide what we think is true 
or false about the Islamic Republic, and what we 
think is useful or useless, constructive or 
pernicious, interesting or tedious, to say about 
it. 

The language of allowing and imposing, however, suggests 
-- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- that the "we" 
Andie has in mind is that mighty granfalloon the United 
States. (This way of speaking about the nation always 
reminds me of the way Yankees fans, even the ones who 
are not George Steinbrenner, talk about the team.) 

If this is in fact what Andie has in mind, then it 
would in fact seem that a choice is being offered 
between, on the one hand, some kind of "imposition" 
by "us" -- and what can that mean, in the world of 
international politics, except an imposition by force? 
-- of a different political and social order on Iran; 
and on the other hand, a kind of complicity (because 
we have "let" it happen) in the things done by the 
existing government that we don't approve of.

Surely these aren't the only two choices? But anyway,  
Yoshie's comment on this passage of Andie's: 

> >   If you posted what you wrote to
> > www.freerepublic.com or
> > www.littlegreenfootballs.com, it wouldn't be out of
> > place there -- far
> > from it, it would no doubt receive many cheers from
> > right-wingers who
> > have too much time on their hands.
> >  

Now Andie seems to have taken this as a comment on Andie's 
politics generally -- as if Yoshie were saying that his entire
oeuvre would be at home on LGF or FR. But this seems to me a 
misreading of her observation. "What you wrote" in context 
is most reasonably taken as a reference to the passage she 
quoted -- the "impose" vs. "let" choice as Andie articulated 
it. 

And if so, unfortunately, I think she has a point. No doubt 
Andie is, as he says, a committed anti-interventionist. But 
whether fired by indignation and rhetorical zeal, or just 
because aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, he has let slip 
an expression which certainly appears to put the question 
of intervention very much on the table -- and frame the 
question, moreover, in a way rather more favorable to it 
than not.