> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Well yeah, but isn't there anything inspiring, or at least
>> encouraging,
>> about the demos?
>
> This is what is annoying me about the left's response to what's going
> on in Iran. It's like the people of Iran rebel and would-be supporters
> in the west can only think to trot out--pun intended--the old
> questions and their stock answers: imperialism blah blah, corporate
> media lies blah blah, hypocrisy blah. The only thing that no one is
> talking about is the people of Iran and what they want, where they are
> going, who they are, etc.. Foucault obviously clung too long to the
> last Iranian revolution, but at least he asked the right question:
> "What are the Iranians dreaming about?"
i think folks are asking about this -- and the people objecting just don't like the answers.
some iranians wants reconciliation with the west; some want to keep on chanting death to america, some want something in between. some want the u.s. to come save them from their theocracy, which would have been the dream of the student radicals 1998-2001. the u.s. war against Iraq dashed their hopes, which is partly why a lot of them refused to vote in 2005. they gave up. they saw no hope of any change without the intervention of the west. we became assholes in the eyes of iranians who'd formerly dreamed of rescue. (speaking of which, the last indie newspaper was shut down in Iran because they depicted Imadickinajar as a black donkey facing off agaisnt white steed (the west) on a chess board. The black donkey was meant as a criticism of Imadickinajar, whereas the white steed was indicative of the positive feeligns the independent newspaper had toward the u.s., Britain, etc.)
This is what people on this list do not want to hear. That sort of thing. They want an uprising to be lead by people who are opposed to the u.s./the west. I suspect you, yourself, would not want to hear about student protestors who want to invoke the state, a secular state, to protect them against the vagaries of theocratic, petty tyrants.
I mean, i have no problem asking, "what do they want?" but what the real problem is is that the question is always being answered through the fantasy of what people want the iranian people to do for them. it's a fantasy of being outside ideology: you can be so if you can just wrap yourself in "what the people want" -- as if such a thing is transparent -- as if such a thing can be represented outside ideology.
i mean2, one of the things that has repulsed me in a visceral way re this conversation is that no one will just say: this is my fantasy, this is what i wish the iranian people were doing for me and my dreams.
it's never about them, ever, not even in your musings, or mine, or Azedeh Moevan's or Dabashi's. i am more on your side than other folks here, at least in terms of this debate, so I sort of hate broaching the topic. meh. it's on my mind at any rate. partly because of a great post by angela several years back where she took people to task for using "the people" as a shield for what was really at stake in the debate: warring positions of, as you noted to carrol, this, that, and the other views on social change, the role of intellectuals, yadda yadda.