October 16th, 2010 | admin
Here is part of a report from inside the meeting:
While I didn’t know if I would have the opportunity to ask any questions or raise any issues at the meeting, I was hoping that I would be one among many that would challenge Ahmadinejad over Iran’s human rights violations.
Unfortunately, after over one hour of speeches from other activists in the room, I found myself feeling disappointed and dismayed. One after another, the guests at the dinner delivered prepared statements, posing no questions or challenges to the Iranian delegation. Mostly, people expressed outrage over U.S. foreign policy. They lauded Ahmadinejad as a hero for standing up to the bullying of the United States government and likened the meeting to Malcolm X’s encounters in Africa with revolutionaries fighting against colonialism. Many apologized for decades of dire U.S. policy towards Iran, while calling for self-determination for Iran and confidence in Ahmadinejad.
Speech after speech failed to address any calls for solidarity with the brave young men and women in Iran who took to the streets and demanded their rights in the face of government suppression. Iran has upwards of 500 political prisoners and the highest rate of capital punishment in the world. In the last year government critical newspapers have been shut down and countless journalists imprisoned. An estimated 44 people were killed in street protests in the last year.
I recognize that many in the room were not there to excuse the Iranian government’s brutality, but their silence was striking. A fundamental role we have as American peace and social justice activists is to oppose our government’s threats towards Iran, while building solidarity with the Iranian people. Activists calling for solidarity at the dinner acted as though we stood in a town hall with our Iranian counter parts; however the fact is we stood in a room with the Iranian state, not its people.
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From the conference “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left” organized by the The Platypus Affiliated Society in November of last year.
Danny Postel: The central question, which I will approach indirectly, is whether the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a tragedy for the Left.
In the conventional narrative of the Iranian Left the answer to our question has long been, “Yes.” The 1979 Revolution was a failure insofar as it was hijacked by one faction of a broader coalition that included the Iranian revolutionary Left. The faction in question was the Islamist or Khomeinite faction, which, once it gained control, proceeded to decimate, destroy, murder, imprison, and drive into exile its erstwhile comrades. There is a lot of truth to this leftist narrative, but it is only part of the story. It is largely self-exculpatory and elides the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation. An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.
As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.
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From New Politics:
A Debate about Iran and the Left
Tom Harrison August 27, 2009
The Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s “Q&A on Iran” has elicited an extremely critical response from Edward Herman and David Peterson, posted on MRzine. To summarize, Herman and Peterson accuse the Campaign of aiding and abetting (unwittingly, they allow) U.S. imperialism and its aggressive designs on Iran. They reject, for the most part, allegations of election fraud by the Ahmadinejad regime and dismiss the idea of solidarity with the Iranian pro-democracy movement. Their position appears to be that the U.S. left should extend active solidarity only to oppositional currents in countries within the U.S. sphere of influence.
The authors of the Q&A — Stephen Shalom, Thomas Harrison, Joanne Landy and Jesse Lemisch — have answered their charges point by point, reasserted our opposition to any kind of intervention, including sanctions, against Iran by the U.S. and Israel, and argued for the critical importance of defending, strenuously, all genuinely democratic, independent people’s movements wherever they arise, regardless of whether the governments they oppose are targets of U.S. destabilization. And we insist that the post-election protests in Iran are just such a movement – spontaneous, autonomous, progressive and in no way a tool of Washington.
Our answer to Herman and Peterson’s initial attack provoked a second response from them, and a second reply from us, on the Campaign’s website.
Under the heading, “Iran: The Election and Beyond,” click on “Related Materials, Announcements and Links“.
Our response is the first item on the list.
Within that document is a link to our first reply to Herman and Peterson, which was posted on Znet.
From Louis Proyect
Apparently the new editorial position [of Monthly Review] has driven one board member to resign, as reported by Doug Henwood on his own mailing list:
I’ve just been informed (by someone who wants to remain anonymous) that Barbara Epstein resigned from the board of MR because of the nonsense that Yoshie has been posting to MRZine about Iran. When she made her complaints known to the board, they made it clear that they supported Yoshie’s work, so Epstein felt that she had no choice but to quit. She’s not interested in campaigning against what she still regards as a venerable institution, but she feels that Yoshie’s position on Iran has so discredited the organization that she couldn’t abide a formal association anymore.
Though I’m just the messenger on this, I completely agree with Epstein. Defending a regime that has jailed and killed thousands of socialists and Marxists is a disgraceful thing for a socialist/Marxist publication to do.
continue reading at Louis Proyekt…
From The University of Chicago Press:
In 1978, as the protests against the Shah of Iran reached their zenith, philosopher Michel Foucault was working as a special correspondent for Corriere della Sera and le Nouvel Observateur. During his little-known stint as a journalist, Foucault traveled to Iran, met with leaders like Ayatollah Khomeini, and wrote a series of articles on the revolution. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution is the first book-length analysis of these essays on Iran, the majority of which have never before appeared in English. Accompanying the analysis are annotated translations of the Iran writings in their entirety and the at times blistering responses from such contemporaneous critics as Middle East scholar Maxime Rodinson as well as comments on the revolution by feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
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from the essay:
“There are other dictatorships in the world. But only in Iran are the fantasy-worlds of antisemitism and religious mission linked with technological megalomania and the physics of mass destruction.
“The specific danger presented by the Iranian nuclear option stems from the unique ideological atmosphere surrounding it – a mixture of Holocaust denial and weapons-grade uranium, of death-wish and missile research, of Shiite messianism and plutonium.
“We are dealing here with a phantasmagoric parallel universe in which the reality principle is constantly ignored: a universe from which the laws of reason have been excluded and all mental energy is harnessed for the cause of antisemitism.”
read the essay here
