Boston Progressives Should Support the Iranian Uprising
As is our custom at Open Media Boston when events occur on the global stage that have a direct impact on our fair metropolis, it seems important to signal our strong support for the popular democratic uprising sweeping Iran since the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The movement that has crystallized around opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi clearly has less and less to do with the man himself, and more and more to do with overthrowing the repressive theocratic regime that has held sway for most of the last 30 years in that country. As a publication that regularly defends human rights and human liberty at home and abroad, we feel that defense of the hundreds of thousands of Iranians that have taken to the streets on those very grounds is a duty and a privilege.
However, we've noticed that Boston progressives - like Americans in general thus far - have been fairly slow to offer aid and comfort to the burgeoning Iranian grassroots liberation movement. In this, we are hardly alone. The Obama administration and center-left Democratic leadership - correctly fearful that any public moves to help the uprising will tar the Iranian activists as mere tools of Western imperialism - has been unusually cautious in its pronouncements on the growing ferment. The American right-wing - which has howled for war against the Iranian theocrats for decades - doesn't quite seem to know how to deal with the democratic rebellion.
And the American left wing nationwide has been far too slow to respond in my estimation - although things seem to be starting to get in gear now. And I think that is problematic for some very important reasons.
You see the American left, myself included, has a great deal of mistrust of similar uprisings in a number of countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This is because a good deal of credible evidence has been put forward by numerous journalists and scholars that many of these uprisings were bankrolled and stage-managed by European and American intelligence agencies working at the beck-and-call of various multinational corporations - ever eager to gain control of dwindling natural resources at bargain-basement prices.
Based on this evidence, an analysis has taken hold in sectors of the American and European left that says that most of the former Eastern European countries, and more recently former Soviet satellites like the Ukraine and Georgia, have had their governments destabilized and replaced by what amount to "astroturf" movements - that is, fake grassroots (get it?) movements that are paid and strategically deployed at critical political moments to back opposition parties funded by the U.S., the UK, France and/or Germany. Once these parties are in control, they promptly hand over the countries economy to the multinationals primarily based in Europe and America. It's often highly questionable whether the new bosses have any more respect for human rights or democracy than their inconveniently independent predecessors. In places like Georgia, it's virtually certain that they do not.
This has led to the adoption of a general attitude on the part of many progressives that they should never back a political movement in another country - no matter how grassroots and democratic it appears ... if a Western government backs it too.
However this position is flawed in a number of ways. Most glaringly, it takes a profoundly anti-democratic view of popular movements. In assuming that hundreds of thousands of people can be easily stampeded by agents of Western governments and corporations, the proponents of this view are taking a conspiratorial "big man" view of politics. They are saying that all of the people we see in the streets of the many countries where Western agents have no doubt been operating - are not independent actors. That they are all dupes and toadies. That they don't really want freedom and democracy. Such a view is not grounded in material reality, and therefore cannot really be said to represent a traditional left-wing position. But it is a seductive one, and that's what gives it such power.
It's absolutely fair to say that lots of Western - and especially American - money gets thrown around in these situations, and that Western governments and corporations are often able to take advantage of movements that bring regime change. But what are we really saying? That powerful institutions have a powerful affect on global politics? Of course they do. That capitalists are really good at manipulating crisis situations to their advantage? Of course they are. That corporations and capitalist governments work hand-in-glove in the interest of national and global elites? So what else is new?
Yet even given these rather obvious facts is it not also true that there are strong grassroots elements in such movements - often progressive - that are seizing the moment of a political crisis to push for a better situation for themselves and their countrypeople?
Yes. I think that is true as well. So what is the best thing for American progressives to do in such a crisis? I'd say that we should back the most progressive sectors of rising democratic movements to the best of our ability.
And so it is with the Iranian movement. Already I have seen at least one nominally left local activist put forward the argument that Ahmadinejad absolutely has majority popular support and that the left should back him. He's anti-imperialist, an enemy of Israel, and believes in keeping control of Iran's resources and state support of poor Iranians. Further this person says that to fail to do so is to be used by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies - Israel in this case standing in for European governments that usually feature prominently in similar critiques. And that the only people backing Mousavi are highly educated, well-off elites that want to expand capitalist influence in Iran and resell all its resources off to the highest bidder.
Well I don't buy it. Ahmadinejad is no friend of the left - regardless of what certain Latin American governments seem to think. And there's no way I can agree with an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" argument about his regime. I would say that everything we've seen over the last week - the early outrage of Mousavi supporters, the fitful chaotic rise of a major street movement to overturn the contested election, the global web-based activism in support of the movement from major league non-aligned hacktivists like Pirate Bay in Sweden (who never met a government or corporation they didn't try to flip off) - has convinced me that the Iranian uprising is the real deal.
There's actually one key piece of information that was especially important in helping me shake off my indecision earlier this week - the U.S. media, exemplified by that mouthpiece of American policy CNN, was very slow to cover the crisis in Iran.
In situations like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, CNN and the rest of the U.S. national press corps was all over the story 24-7 from beginning to end. It all seemed carefully orchestrated from the highest reaches of the American government. And the full extent of American governmental and corporate involvement in these events became public knowledge very soon after their denouement. This time it's not quite playing that way - even though I'm crystal clear that there must be numerous operatives from every global power player crawling all over Iran by this time. That doesn't faze me a bit.
What really threw me over the edge into full support for the Iranian movement - and inspired me to write this editorial - came from an Iranian socialist contemporary of mine named Reza Fiyouzat. He wrote a brilliant piece for Iranian.com a few weeks ago called "Human Rights: Ba-Humbug?" that does an extremely sharp job of dissecting the anti-solidaristic trend in the Western left that I am merely touching upon here.
Here are his opening paragraphs:
"In oppositional politics, there are different ways of arriving at 'what is to be done', both practically and theoretically. In the U.S., one frequently practiced method is to watch the mouths of the imperialists and their ideologues and wait for them to say something or make some declaration, and then say the exact opposite and call that an anti-imperialist position; analysis is then retrofitted to justify the position.
The other way is to start from principles, observe the changes in reality, study the history of the social forces involved in those changes, and derive your own positions and demands, based on where you stand in the course of your struggles."
His article just gets better from there, and I cannot recommend reading it and Fiyouzat'sRevolutionary Flowerpot Society blog enough for anyone who wants to hear a very very well informed left-wing analysis of the politics and history of modern Iran, and learn a great deal about the genesis of the current uprising.
Once you've done that, of course, there is still a serious need for action by American - and particularly Boston-based - progressives to start working with grassroots Iranian democracy movements here and abroad. Ironically, the nominally progressive tech community seems to be way ahead of the game in terms of offering useful solidarity to our Iranian compatriots.
However, although time is always of the essence in these world historical moments, there's still time enough to act.
We'll do our part here at Open Media Boston by covering pro-democracy protests by local Iranians - and running any decent opinion pieces on the matter that people of varying opinions on the left may submit (hint, hint).
Meanwhile, people of good conscience out there should figure out ways to give direct aid to sectors of the Iranian movement that feel deserve their support - and should certainly turn out in numbers for the aforementioned local rallies. The more people that help, the greater the possibility of some good outcome for the Iranian democratic uprising.
Many of us on the left may not be satisfied with the government that results, but even a capitalist democracy like the one we have here would be a vast improvement on the current Iranian government - and would allow room for the Iranian left to rebuild and gather strength for a chance to take the power that should have been theirs in the 1950s, and again in 1979.
And that is certainly an outcome worth fighting for.
Jason Pramas is the Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston.
