Doug wrote:
> All listmembers are welcome to vote. Polls close
> Thursday, 4 PM New York time.
I went with the last option, "it's none of my business".
I think there is a rational core to much of what Yoshie writes which is getting muddled by the fact that people would rather condemn her for her publicly stated sympathy for Islam (and, since such disclaimers seem to be necessary, I am very far from her on this question).
Yoshie quite correctly points out that a powerless and marginalized left in Europe and the United States, completely incapable of substantially altering conditions in their own countries, engage in empty moral posturing whenever they demand that one take the "correct" position regarding the Iranian state. "Condemnation" of the crimes of the Iranian state basically amounts to an impotent profession of leftist faith.
We saw this most clearly in the case of the war against Yugoslavia (also called the "Kosovo intervention"), where some Western leftists and liberals essentially played the role of offering the moral justification for murdering Serbs.
Dennis Redmond isn't subjected to half the hostility and denunciation on this list that Yoshie is subjected to, despite the fact that his support for the humanitarian imperialists in Brussels is far worse, from a communist perspective, than Yoshie's sympathies for Islam.
The issue here isn't Islam, or Ahmadinejad, or Iran. It is about the necessity of communists to recognize the truth spoken by Karl Liebknecht that the main enemy is at home. That should not proclude analysis of the Iranian state and Iranian capital, but such analysis should be conducted from the perspective of the critique of political economy and the state, and not from a perspective of moralist hand-wringing.
Yoshie has been steadfast in criticizing the warmed over updates of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion known as "Walt-Mearsheimer", something I haven't seen from the leftists and liberals who talk about the crimes of the Iranian state. Is it because they are so desperate to believe in the essential goodness of American foreign policy and the state that they are determined to believe the lie of Israeli remote control?
But then, I find Yoshie's support for E.P. Thompson's notions of moral economy extremely sympatico, since it corresponds to much of my own perspective.
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com