Selective solidary of the left on Iran

[democratic]

http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=461_0_3_0_C

What is going on in Iran doesn’t lend itself to the kind of analytical prism through which progressives made sense of Central America during the high tide of our solidarity activism, the Reagan years. In Central America, military juntas and death squads, in concert with feudal elites and corporate oligarchs, were running the show with the active support of the United States. In a nutshell, a bloodbath of imperial domination, rapacious exploitation, scorched earth terror, and mass murder—in which the United States was complicit from top to bottom.


We should not allow Washington’s rhetoric to have a silencing effect on us. To do so, in effect, is to let Bush and Wolfowitz do our thinking for us. Rather than accept the Bush administration’s pronouncements at face value, why not unmask them for the opportunistic propaganda they are? Why not point out that despite its rhetoric, the administration couldn’t care less about democracy and human rights? Whatever the rhetoric about supporting the student movement, the reality is, as Brecher puts it, that the administration sees Iran as “a critical source of oil and a powerful country that currently threatens—but could support—both U.S. and Israeli interests.” “Encouraging the student revolt,” he points out, “is done in the interest of Washington’s agenda, which can not be accurately described as seeking freedom, independence, and self-determination for the people of Iran.”

Regime hard-liners “legitimate their suppression of the students,” Brecher points out, “as necessary to guard against ‘foreign forces.’” Indeed, the mullahs denounced the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Shirin Ebadi as “the result of the cultural hegemony of Western civilization,” a tool “intended to serve the interests of colonialism and the decadent world.” This kind of talk can throw off the ideological compasses of many progressives.

In contrast, for the students, feminists, human rights activists and dissidents agitating for pluralism and democracy in Iran today, opposition to U.S. imperialism is not the central issue. “The student movement’s principal demand,” as Brecher notes, is “to eliminate the power of the self-perpetuating theocratic elite over the Iranian government.”

A simple stance of “hands off Iran” is not what those struggling for change in Iran need from progressives around the world. Of course we should be steadfast in opposing any U.S. military intervention in Iran—that’s the easy part. But it’s not the end of the discussion. As Ziba Mir-Hosseini of the University of London puts it, Iran is in “a state at war with itself.” Progressives everywhere should take sides in that war and actively support the forces of democracy, feminism, pluralism, human rights and freedom of expression.

[BlackFrancis]

1. not a bad peice..

It's wrong about a few things, remembering Mossadegh is not "right-wing" dialogue. Using Mossadegh's name is a rather risky thing to do and will buy you suspicion from the hardline clergy which really doesn't want to remember a truly parliamentary Iran. Anti-imperialism is absolutely not dead on the Iranian left. It's only dead in the more "free-market" sort of Iranian version of an American republicans lexicon.