The Ostriches

Yesterday, I got this e-mail from someone:

From: xxxxxxxxxx
To: xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 3:45 PM
Subject: FW: Iran: Are you ready for a war with demonized Iran?

Cindy's on to the sham.

-----Original Message-----
From: Cindy Sheehan [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 2:25 PM
Subject: Iran: Are you ready for a war with demonized Iran?


I was speaking in Princeton yesterday and an Indian man asked me about what I thought about what is happening in Iran.
I really couldn't comment because I am not sure about what's going on.

An Iranian man came up to me after and said that was a good answer, because he has a lot of family back there and they are not sure what is going on.

If CNN, MSNBC and Fox have their way, we will have a war with Iran.

This is a good article by someone that I respect a lot: Paul Craig Roberts.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=93542911540&h=w5b56&u=hc4v1&ref=mf

And one from Politico

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0609/23745.html

Cindy

Here, in a nutshell, we have the perspective of many in the US who purport to be either leftist and/or anti-imperialist. I don't know what is happening in Iran, and I don't want to know. Neither of the links provided by Sheehan provide any meaningful information about the Iranians themselves or ongoing events inside Iran. Instead, they evaluate events through their own preoccupations, the mendacity of the US media, and their belief that governments opposed to the US invariably fall from power because of the machinations of the US and Israel. The possibility that there might be indigenous reasons for Iranians to reject theocratic rule doesn't seem to have occurred to them.

It is rather sad, because while Sheehan deserves great respect for recognizing that the Iraqis have been the primary victims of the invasion of Iraq, despite the loss of her son, she renders the people of Iran invisible, stripping them of any historical agency when it comes to the transformation of their society. A closer examination of the links in her message make this all too clear. One is an article from Paul Craig Roberts, saying that the protests are part of a covert US/Israeli destabilization effort, while the other one, one that states Ahmanijedad won the election, is authored by a couple of neoconservative pollsters. Again, the possibility that the protests have merit, because they challenge the infrastructure of theocratic control over most aspects of daily life in Iran, regardless of the objective outcome of the election, isn't considered.

Of course, there is also the obvious fact that the people who have most effectively discredited the election results are Ayatollah Khamenei and the other people who govern the country. Shooting, beating, killing and arresting people who protest is not consistent with an election result that has integrity. Nor is calling upon government created parmilitaries like the basiji to participate in their suppression. In Central and South American countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia, we call armed groups like this death squads, but, in Iran, their activities are apparently considered sufficiently innocuous so as to pass without any expression of concern. Despite all this, Sheehan, and others who perceive the explosion of protest in Iran like her, would have us believe that our failure to recognize that Ahmanijedad may well have won the election is because of a commonality of interest between US media, the US government and Zionists, within and without Israel.

The response of the person who forwarded Sheehan's message is even more disheartening: Cindy is on to the sham. For this person, the Iranians are merely a crowd of extras participating in a sham co-produced by the US and Israel. I feel compelled to explain all this, even though, as I implied earlier, the election result is now increasingly irrelevant, because the protests would be legitimate even if Ahmanijedad did, in fact, prevail. Iranians have every right to protest a government that imposes oppressive social controls upon women and young people, while criminalizing homosexuality, subjecting gays and lesbians to brutal punishments, if not death, and prohibiting the emergence of independent trade unions. I intend to address this particular aspect of the protests in more depth in a future post, but, for now, I will just observe that the left historically, as personified by its anarchist, communist and social democratic manifestations, has always been a secularizing force, hostile to the imposition of religious constraints upon personal conduct.

Sheehan is not the only person sticking her head in the sand on this. I have engaged in an ongoing e-mail exchange with someone who sends me, and a number of others on his list, articles related to anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism, South American social movements and the predations of the American empire. He has sent me a number of articles purporting to defend the Iranian election result, while maligning US media coverage and the pronouncements of Obama. I encouraged him to expand the scope of his submissions by sending out links to the ongoing debate between lenin and Yoshie over at Lenin's Tomb, as I did here earlier today. In other words, I didn't insist that he send out articles and links in support of the protests, but that he merely send out ones that set forth both sides of an engaged, passionate left debate. He was polite, but evasively firm. Forget about it.

It is a marked contrast to lenin, Richard Seymour, who has allowed Yoshie to post several articles and numerous comments that defend the regime on his site. He recognizes that it is essential for people on the left to participate in an open, vigourous discussion. Eli, over at Left I on the News, has also been silent, while posting articles complaining about the hypocrisy of US media and the President in regard to their responses to the Iranian protests. He quite properly pilliories them for their refusal to apply the same standards to the brutalities of US and Israeli actions nearby. He does not, however, take it one step further, as As'ad Abukhalil, the Angry Arab, has done, and address what is happening inside Iran as well. Abukhalil combines a curiosity about the protests from a Middle Eastern perspective with a sharpness of political interpretation that puts the rest of us to shame. Unlike others here in the US, he is aware that waiting for the Iranian protesters to just go away is no substitute for urgently required sociological and political analysis.

Iran: lenin nails it

An excerpt:

The key here is universality: these protesters are no different from those who have been beaten or killed in Genoa, in London, in LA, in Athens, and everywhere that the state is challenged by a democratic movement and responds in this way.

Lenin's Tomb has been an excellent site for left debate about ongoing events in Iran, with numerous posts over the last week. By and large, the dialogue has been passionate and informative. To get the full flavor of the discussion, it is essential to read through the comments.

How to Help Iran

An insightful post that challenges us to respect the Iranians as people with independent, subjective voices even as we interpret events through our own ideological lens.

Ride the Tiger

I will be the first to admit that I'm not especially knowledgeable about Iran. Outside media coverage of the country has been limited since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Combine that with the demonization of the country's political leadership within the US since the hostage crisis, and the impediments to reliable information become even more severe. Even otherwise responsible journalists like Robert Dreyfuss find themselves recycling tired, embarrassing stereotypes about the populace when they are impertinent enough to support Ahmanijedad. Anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism become evidence of a virtual fascist movement.

My political perspective has been shaped by two touchstones. First, Tariq Ali published one of the most incisive critiques of the Islamic regime in his chapters related to Iran in The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Based upon his encounters with exiles, he describes life within Iran as one of a stifling conformity, with women and young people especially estranged from the remorseless constraints of fundamentalist life. But, as with any inflexible social system, it is not uniformly enforced, as the powerful were able to buy their way out of marriages, morals charges and military service (a matter of urgency during the Iran-Iraq War). If this society could be summarized in one sentence, it would be this: Do as we say, not as we do.

Second, as someone who came of age in the period leading to the 1979 revolution, and encountered the history of US involvement in Iran, I have always been insistent that the Iranians should decide their destiny in the absence of American intervention. As readers of this blog know, I am generally negative about the policies of the Obama administration, but, on this one, Obama has gotten it right. Through past actions, and present day threats, the US government has figuratively cut out its tongue when it comes to making statements about Iran. A country that refuses to disavow the possibility of launching airstrikes against an imaginary nuclear weapons program, airstrikes that could even involve nuclear weapons, while imposing economic sanctions, has nothing to say about what is transpiring there. At most, it can say this: the future of Iran is something to be decided by Iranians, hopefully in the most non-violent way possible.

On the left, there is a vibrant, creative debate about how to respond to the protests. Some believe that Ahmanijedad did win the election, and that Mousavi and his patron, Rafsanjani, represent a neoliberal alternative that will retain the oppressive state apparatus while impoverishing workers even more:

In the history of social revolutions, it often happened that leftists helped to bring about social revolution (socialist or nationalist), and then, after the overthrow of the ancient regime, a faction of revolutionaries (usually centrists) liquidated left-wing and right-wing revolutionaries as well as defenders of the ancient regime.

That's what happened in Iran, too. The revolution did in its leftists, as well as rightists. But, over all, the Iranian Revolution has done more good than bad for a majority of Iranians, making Iran the best country -- the most democratic! -- in the Middle East today.

Others believe that the protests can create an opportunity for the Iranian working class to rediscover its voice and obtain the right to independently organize:

. . . Reza Fiyouzat makes what seems to be to be a far more compelling point, though: "The most class-conscious, the most politically active of the Iranian working classes, are by far the most anti-government. How do we know this? We know this because they invariably end up in jail." Well, quite.

The issue of class is important here, not because the workers are angels with whom we may not ever differ, but because their organised power is necessary to make even these democratic demands effective. Even if the protesters were all middle class, I would want them to win. Truth be told, I would want them to win even more than they bargained for - to win so comprehensively that they gave a shot in the arm to the working class and facilitated their rapid self-organisation outside of the Islamic Labour Council approved unions. Never mind a general strike: what is urgently needed is the reappearance of the shoras. And we have seen the riots spread chaotically to working class areas of Isfahan (see also), where the protesters drove out the police, and the southern city of Yazd. The protests have spread to workers districts in southern Tehran. Reports of working class turnout are appearing, albeit infrequently, in some of the English-language press.

As you might have guessed, I find this latter perspective more compelling, but the first one is not without credibility. For example, the protests that brought down the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR resulted in nearly incomprehensible immiseration for most people, as the old apparat, with the willing help of foreign investors, spirited away the resources of many of these countries while interior ministries and intelligence services suppressed any dissent. Furthermore, ethnic violence exploded throughout the Caucasus, with the countries of this region ruled by gangsters. We should not blithely dismiss similar outcomes in Iran if the Mousavi/Rafsanjani faction prevails.

Even so, is it possible to avoid such traumas by holding fast to a repressive social system imposed by a discredited elite? To ask the question is, as the saying goes, to answer it. It is also important to note that the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the USSR occurred as neoliberalism was in the ascendancy, while it is now in decline, making it plausible to suggest that an Iranian revolution could carve out the path advocated by Ali, a rejection of the fundamentalisms of both American neoliberalism and extremist Islam. Indeed, American policymakers and journalists seem to vaguely sense this troubling possibility. Unlike with the anti-communist revolutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, support for the protesters is not uniform and unequivocal. And, then, there are the geopolitical fears, what if the people of Saudi Arabia and Egypt get the same idea?

Finally, as an anarchist, it is hard for me to oppose a movement directed against religious forms of social control. One of the central tenets of anarchism is a condemnation of the feudal powers assumed by religion over everyday life. As someone told the Angry Arab:

. . . I am glad that you are defending neither Ahmadinejad nor Mousavi. It is frustrating that everyone I talk to from Pakistan to Egypt loves Ahmadinejad and is shocked to hear that many Iranians think he is ineffective and embarrassing. Meanwhile every Westerner seems to think that Mousavi is a great reformist or revolutionary, and some kind of saintly figure beloved by all. He's an opportunist crook. That being said, I support the students and protesters in Iran, even the ones chanting Mousavi's name. I believe they are putting their lives on the line to fight for greater freedom, accountability, and democracy within the Islamic Republic, and they have to couch that in the language of Islam and presidential politics in order to avoid even greater repression than that which they already face. A friend who is in Iran right now confirms: "half the kids throwing rocks at the police didn't even vote." To me, that means that they are not fighting for a Mousavi presidency, but for more freedom, which they must hide under a green Mousavi banner in order to have legitimacy in the eyes of the state."

Even in the absence of immediate economic concerns, workers can find this just as objectionable as purportedly more secular intellectuals. The challenge is, of course, for workers to participate with such effectiveness so as to economically empower themselves as well:

Strike in Iran Khodro:

We declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran.

Autoworker, Fellow Laborers (Laborer Friends): What we witness today, is an insult to the intelligence of the people, and disregard for their votes, the trampling of the principles of the Constitution by the government. It is our duty to join this people's movement.

We the workers of Iran Khodro, Thursday 28/3/88 in each working shift will stop working for half an hour to protest the suppression of students, workers, women, and the Constitution and declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. The morning and afternoon shifts from 10 to 10:30. The night shift from 3 to 3:30.

Laborers of IranKhodor

If they can strike against the Ayatollah Khamanei, one hopes that they can also strike, if it becomes necessary, against those that replace him if the protests blossom into a successful revolutionary movement.