On 7/7/06, Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> What Pourzal does in his article is not to deny the police's power to
> violate the freedom of assembly in Iran but to criticize exaggeration
> of police action, based on bloggers' accounts, for exaggeration
> diminishes credibility, and to ask whether friends of the West aren't
> using worse repression than the Iranian state employs without getting
> as much criticism. Valid points if you ask me.
>
> The letter fails to address Pourzal's the main question: "What is the
> Iranian public seeing in Ahmadinejad that it doesn't see in us?"
> That's a question reformists in Iran, as well as most liberals and
> leftists in the Iranian diaspora or the West in general, don't want to
> ask, let alone attempt to answer.
That's it... That's what make me nervous.
Ahmadinejad himself is... 'Westernized'... philosophically and
culturally, to a greater degree than the mullah at his mosque of
worship, and I believe secular government is his goal.
Ahmadinejad ran on an economic platform, not a religious one, but I
doubt that a secular government is his conscious goal.
What I would like to see is to have the clerics, formally or
informally, deprived of veto power over the legislative and executive
branches. After all, the legislative and executive branches are
directly elected by the people, unlike the Supreme Leader. Such
democratization may still not bring about an American-style government
based upon the separation of church and state or a Euro-Turkish style
government based on the concept of "laïcité," if a majority in Iran
remain religious and wish to exercise democracy to put their religion
into public life. And yet, democratization would be a step in the
right direction.
How might such democratization happen? Voting for neoliberal
reformist clerics? Or voting for a faction that may serve to sharpen
class conflict in Iran? Iranians have chosen the latter, though
probably without realizing that.
If Ahmadinejad's faction reconciles itself to Khamenei/Rafsanjani's
domestic and foreign policy vision, however, and if the
disenfranchised fail to push his faction to defy that vision subtly or
not so subtly, Iran may become a religious mirror image of Egypt --
the worst of both worlds!
That uncertainty makes Iran interesting to watch, at least from my perspective.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
