On Jun 21, 2009, at 1:20 PM, Lenin's Tomb wrote:
> Given that he compared Mousavi to Martin Luther King jr, it is surely
> obvious that Dabashi is far too excited about this guy. Mousavi's
> Rafsanjani family backers would surely be extremely displeased to
> hear of
> any covert socialist agenda on his part. True, he was in his early
> years on
> the left of the Islamic Republican Party, favoured redistribution of
> wealth
> and nationalisation of key enterprises, and so on. Even then,
> however, he
> was instrumental to the government's purging of the left from all
> governmental institutions. He went even further than most of his
> allies in
> attacking the Tudeh, eg, and finally contributed a great deal to
> achieving
> its ban. And he is now a supporter of privatization and of austerity
> measures to counter inflation. He wants to substantially revise
> Article 44
> of the 1979 constitution to allow further privatization to happen,
> and has
> said he thinks the private sector has to play a much greater role in
> the
> direction of the economy. The idea that he is a socialist is frankly
> silly.
I forwarded these comments to Hamid, who writes:
> thanks doug for the interview--my assessment of M's economics is
> based on what he has done, not on what he might do--if he is elected
> and he becomes a neoliberal i will write against him (but i just
> read that he and his wife have been arrested)--i am fully aware of
> his past regarding the tudeh and the university and have repeatedly
> pointed out to them as "nasty skeletons in his closet"--as for MLK
> comparison, this is based on my reading of this event as a civil
> rights movement, and not as the sort of jerk-off revolutions that
> your responder seems to enjoy and has prompted him to think me
> silly--i might indeed be silly in my assessment, but not delusional
> like he/she is--