amazing to hear it from the insider's perspective. also interesting
that the author chides us "western liberals" for not understanding the
situation completely.
"Iran (Persian: ايران Iran_alborz.ogg [ʔiˈɾɒn] (help·info)),
officially the Islamic Republic of Iran[6] and formerly known
internationally as Persia until 1935, is a country in Central Eurasia,
[7] located on the northeastern shore of the Persian Gulf and the
southern shore of the Caspian Sea.
"The 18th largest country in the world in terms of area at 1,648,195
km², Iran has a population of over seventy million. It is a country of
special geostrategic significance due to its central location in
Eurasia.
"Iran is home to one of the world's oldest continuous major
civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to
7000 BC.[15][16][17] The first Iranian dynasty formed during the
Elamite kingdom in 2800 BC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persia
While Europe was in the dark ages Persia was rocking it. Always
wondered when the enlightened mindset of pre-Islam, and early Islam,
Persia would lift it's head again.
On Jun 25, 2009, at 11:58 PM, Keith Tilford wrote:
This was a guest post earlier in the week on Nina Power's blog (she
is a senior lecturer at Roehampton and co-translator of Alain
Badiou's On Beckett, supposing any of that matters):
why are the iranians dreaming again?*
[The following is a guest post from Ali Alizadeh, Researcher at the
Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex
University]
This piece is copyright-free. Please distrbute widely.
Iran is currently in the grip of a new and strong political
movement. While this movement proves that Ahmadinejad’s populist
techniques of deception no longer work inside Iran, it seems they
are still effective outside the country. This is mainly due to
thirty years of isolation and mutual mistrust between Iran and the
West which has turned my country into a mysterious phenomenon for
outsiders. In this piece I will try to confront some of the
mystifications and misunderstandings produced by the international
media in the last week.
In the first scenario the international media, claiming
impartiality, insisted that the reformists provide hard objective
evidence in support of their claim that the June 12 election has
been rigged. But despite their empiricist attitude, the media missed
obvious facts due to their lack of familiarity with the socio-
historical context. Although the reformists could not possibly offer
any figures or documents, because the whole show was single-handedly
run by Ahmadinejad’s ministry of interior, anyone familiar with
Iran’s recent history could easily see what was wrong with this
picture.
It was the government who reversed the conventional and logical
procedure by announcing a fictitious total figure first – in four
stages – and then fabricating figures for each polling station,
something that is still going on. This led to many absurdities:
Musavi got less votes in his hometown (Tabriz) than Ahmadinejad;
Karroubi’s total vote was less than the number of people active in
his campaign; Rezaee’s votes were reduced by a hundred thousand
between the third and fourth stages of announcement; blank votes
were totally forgotten and only hastily added to the count when
reformists pointed this out; and finally the ratio between all
candidates’ votes remained almost constant in all these four stages
of announcement (63, 33, 2 and 1 percent respectively).
Moreover, as in any other country, the increase in turnout in
Iran’s elections has always benefitted the opposition and not the
incumbent, because it is rational to assume that those who usually
don’t vote, i.e. the silent majority, only come out when they want
to change the status quo. Yet in this election Ahmadinejad, the
representative of the status quo, allegedly received 10 million
votes more than what he got in the previous election.
Finally, Ahmadinejad’s nervous reaction after his so-called victory
is the best proof for rigging: closing down SMS network and the
whole of country’s mobile phone network, arresting more than 100
leading political activists, blocking access to Musavi’s and many
other reformists’ websites and unleashing violence in the
streets...But if all this is not enough, the bodies of more than 17
people who were shot dead and immediately buried in unknown graves
should persuade all those “objective-minded” observers.
In the second scenario, gradually unfolding in the last few days,
the international media implicitly shifted its attention to the role
of internet and its social networking (twitter, facebook, youtube,
etc). This implied that millions of illiterate conservative
villagers have voted for Ahmadinejad and the political movement is
mostly limited to educated middle classes in North Tehran. While
this simplified image is more compatible with media’s comfortable
position towards Iran in the last 30 years, it is far from reality.
The recent political history of Iran does not confirm this image.
For example, Khatami’s victory in 1997, despite his absolute lack
of any economic promises and his focus instead on liberal civic
demands, was made possible by the polarization of society into
people and state. Khatami could win only by embracing people from
all different classes and groups, villagers and urban people alike.
There is no doubt that new media and technologies have been playing
an important role in the movement, but it seems that the cause and
the effect are being reversed in the picture painted by the media.
First of all, it is the existence of a strong political
determination, combined with people becoming deprived of basic means
of communication, which has led the movement to creatively test
every other channel and method. Musavi’s paper was shut down on the
night of election, his frequent request to talk to people on the
state TV has been rejected, his official website is often blocked
and his physical contact with his supporters has been kept minimum
by keeping him in house arrest (with the exception of his appearance
on the over a million march on June 15).
Second, due to the heavy pressure on foreign journalists inside
Iran, these technological tools have come to play a significant role
in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside
world. However, the creative self-organization of the movement is
using a manifold of methods and channels, many of them simple and
traditional, depending on their availability: shouting ‘death to
dictator’ from rooftops, calling landlines, at the end of one rally
chanting the time and place of the next one, and by jeopardizing
oneself by physically standing on streets and distributing news to
every passing car. The appearance of the movement which is being
sold by the media to the western gaze – the cyber-fantasy of the
western societies which has already labelled our movement a twitter
revolution, seems to have completely missed the reality of those
bodies which are shot dead, injured or ready to be endangered by non-
virtual bullets.
What is more surprising in the midst of this media frenzy is the
blindness of the western left to the political dynamism and energy
of our movement. The causes of this blindness oscillate between the
misgivings about Islam (or the Islamophobia of hyper-secular left)
and the confusion made by Ahmadinjead’s fake anti-imperialist
rhetoric (his alliance with Chavez perhaps, who after all was the
first to congratulate him). It needs to be emphasized that
Ahmadinejad’s economic policies are to the right of the IMF:
cutting subsidies in a radical way, more privatization than any
other post-79 government (by selling the country to the
Revolutionary Guards) and an inflation and unemployment rate which
have brought the low-income sections of the society to their knees.
It is in this regard that Musavi’s politics needs to be understood
in contradistinction from both Ahmadinejad and also the other
reformist candidate, i.e. Karroubi.
While Karroubi went for the liberal option of differentiating people
into identity groups with different demands (women, students,
intellectuals, ethnicities, religious minorities, etc), Musavi
emphasized the universal demands of ‘people’ who wanted to be
heard and counted as political subjects. This subjectivity,
emphasized by Musavi during his campaign and fully incarnated in the
rallies of the past few days, is constituted by political intuition,
creativity and recollection of the ‘79 revolution (no wonder that
people so quickly reached an unexpected maturity, best manifested in
the abstention from violence in their silent demonstrations).
Musavi’s ‘people’ is also easily, but strongly, distinguished
from Ahmadinejad’s anonymous masses dependent on state charity.
Musavi’s people, as the collective appearing in the rallies, is
made of religious women covered in chador walking hand in hand with
westernized young women who are usually prosecuted for their
appearance; veterans of war in wheelchairs next to young boys for
whom the Iran-Iraq war is only an anecdote; and working class who
have sacrificed their daily salary to participate in the rally next
to the middle classes. This story is not limited to Tehran. Shiraz
(two confirmed dead), Isfahan (one confirmed dead), Tabriz, Oroomiye
are also part of this movement and other cities are joining with a
predictable delay (as it was the case in 79 revolution).
History will prove who the real participants of this movement are
but once again we are faced with a new, non-classical and unfamiliar
radical politics. Will the Western left get it right this time?
* The title is a reference to Michel Foucault’s 1978 writing on
Iran’s revolution: “What are the Iranians dreaming about?”
--
www.metastableequilibrium.blogspot.com
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