Iran: Whose Side Are We Really On?
Growing revolt should topple some easy assumptions here.
Protester in Tehran.
The uprising changes everything.
That's what you will hear these days across the spectrum of the Iranian diaspora, from exiled intellectuals, trade unionists, student activists, Marxists, and liberals. The uprising changes everything, and not just inside Iran. No matter what happens next, the uprising will cause convulsions in contested fields of struggle from Afghanistan to Palestine.
Already, the spectacle of angry masses thronging the streets of Iranians cities is holding out the promise of a great awakening in "progressive" politics from Berlin to Seattle. In Canada, what was once unspeakable is now unavoidably central to any serious discussion of the Iranian cause and what it demands of us.
Mehdi Kouhestaninejad, a senior Canadian Labour Congress officer who has spent more than a decade waging a tireless and often lonely struggle to forge effective links between Canadian and Iranian trade unions, says he can't remember the last time he was so filled with hope.
"In the West, the Left sees only the Ahmadinejad propaganda -- death to the U.S., death to imperialism. It claims it is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, but the people in Iran know that this is baloney," Kouhestaninejad told me. "We have to challenge our attitudes. We have to recognize that there is no connection between the Left in the West and the Left in Iran."
For years, Kouhestaninejad and his CLC colleagues have tried to change all that, but they've been up against a politics that divides the world into two camps, with American-Israeli imperialists on one side and a "resistance" of plucky Islamists on the other. It's politics that divides the world's workers against themselves, and absurdly situates Ahmadinejad in the same camp where the western "Left" pitches its tent.
Canadian Labour Congress sent appeal
In Canada, the result has been a kind of stupefaction that has rendered the Left practically useless to the life-and-death struggles that have been underway in Iran for years, and which have now reached a crisis.
Only last month, the CLC was trying to rouse its affiliates to an urgent appeal from an international labour coalition representing 170 million workers, calling for a global day of protest in solidarity with Iran's persecuted trade unionists. There were protests planned from Wellington, New Zealand to Lagos, Nigeria, but in the days before Iran erupted, there was still no sign of any Canadian response.
Then, suddenly, more than a million protesters were marching in the streets of Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan and other cities. Even as the Iranian theocracy responded with tear gas, bullets, and mass arrests, Kouhestaninejad, 44, could still see cause for hope. "Finally, everyone is beginning to wake up to Ahmadinejad and his phony slogans of anti-imperialism," Kouhestaninejad told me.
But history turns on a dime. Iran's brave trade unionists, student leaders, and pro-democracy activists are now facing their darkest hour since 1981. Back then, the good guys lost.
That was when Khomeinist reactionaries seized the helm of the 1979 revolution, turned on the country's republican forces, and carried out mass executions of secularists, socialists, feminists, and liberals. Back then, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's deranged, ruthless and antisemitic president, was one of ayatollahs' most loyal and enthusiastic torturers.
An invitation to lend support
Now, Iran's military-clerical caste is facing its most serious challenge ever, and one of the few cards left in Ahmadinejad's hand is the free pass he gets from "anti-imperialists" outside Iran.
It's what has made Kouhestaninejad's work such a desperate, uphill battle. It's also isolated the younger generation of Iranian-Canadian activists who have sprung into action in direct support of Iran's pro-democracy movement. It's kept their activism mainly confined to the Iranian-Canadian community, and reduced the mobilization to a mainly ethnic phenomenon.
It's all a bit of a mystery to Mohsen Amiri, a 28-year-old engineering science student at Simon Fraser University. Amiri was a key organizer of one of the first Canadian rallies, a June 14 event at Canada Place on the Vancouver waterfront. Amiri has been pulling together friends to attend rallies ever since, but he says many of his non-Iranian fellow students, even the ones he most expected to show up, have simply stayed away.
"All of them are fans of Ahmadinejad," Amiri said. "I think they are confused."
The confusion is especially pronounced in the case of students recently arrived from Arab countries, North Africa and Asia. "They like Ahmadinejad, and I can understand that, because in these countries the government wants somebody to blame for their situation. So they say, 'I don’t like the U.S. and I don't like Israel.' And so they become fans of Ahmadinejad."
As for the confusion among otherwise intelligent and literate Canadian leftists who don't have the excuse of having been tutored by authoritarian propaganda all their lives, Amiri says he can't explain it.
But the confusion is no mystery to Arash Abadpour, a 30-year-old computer science student at the University of Toronto and a keen observer of the Iranian pro-democracy movement. Abadpour's website, a key source of news for Iranian reformers, is now one of the most popular websites in Iran.
"Ahmadinejad has been very successful in selling himself as an anti-imperialist in the West," Abadpour said. "The way he opposes the U.S. and Israel, he has been able to present himself as a voice of the anti-imperialist movement."
A fat lot of good it was doing him as the uprising ended its first week, though. Thousands of ordinary Canadians were showing up at Iranian-led demonstrations and candle-light vigils across the country.
Rallying solidarity in Canada
As the uprising staggered into its second week, bloodied but still alive, Kouhestaninejad remained upbeat about everything. By mid-week, Canada's labour unions were starting to show signs of life. Some unions were starting to show an interest in the long-planned Friday, June 26 international day of solidarity after all. The Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and other unions were gearing up for last-minute rallies in Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto.
Then it looked liked the old stupefaction was setting in again. The Iranian regime's propaganda line -- the pro-democracy protesters are merely disaffected upper middle-class "rioters" and the uprising is the work the CIA spies, Zionist plotters and British agents -- was starting to show up in "left-wing" circles everywhere.
After Venezuela's president and left-wing icon Hugo Chavez rushed to Ahmadinejad's side with regurgitations of the ayatollahs' claims about shadowy imperialists, the pile-on was in full swing.
James Petras, a senior member of the Canadian Dimension editorial collective, jumped to the regime's defence, dismissing reports of widespread Iranian outrage as a fabrication of the "Zionist-mass media line."
Zafar Bangash, a Khomeinist fanatic who doubles as the director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought and a spokesman for the Toronto's Stop the War Coalition, weighed in. To Bangash, Ahmadinejad's woes were all the fault of "the Muslim-hating West" and its agents in the mansions of North Tehran.
On Canada's west coast, the Mobilization Against War and Occupation issued a statement sneering at the "crocodile tears" being shed for the Iranian protesters and declared: "Iran's elections and disputes are an internal matter."
Tool of US imperialists?
Kouhestaninejad soon found himself back to fending off the persistent complaint that has so confounded efforts to build bridges between Iran's unions, feminists and student activists and their estranged Canadian counterparts: he was just playing into the hands of the American imperialists.
Then he had to field questions from "progressive" journalists about American and Israeli spies behind Iran's young activists. "I tell them, 'they are not puppets of any agency, don't insult their intelligence.' You should see the attacks I'm getting now from the anti-imperialists in Toronto," he said.
The rot runs deep.
It's commonplace on the Left to pretend that the rot is confined to marginal pseudo-left groupuscules, and that it's no big deal that a Left-Islamist alliance has captured the key posts in Canada's "anti-war" movement. But if you keep your eye on what Kouhestaninejad calls the broken connections between the Left in the West and the Left in Iran, you'll notice that it matters.
In March, following shocking reports that Afghan president Hamid Karzai had approved a "rape law" to appease Afghanistan's Shia minority, anti-imperialist groups claimed a stunning propaganda coup. Their argument went like this: It just goes to show, Canada's role in Afghanistan has nothing to do with protecting women's rights, it's just like the Taliban days, we're just propping up these horrible government, and it's all just a U.S.-run military occupation. Troops out.
That soon became the received wisdom.
But if Canadians had been paying attention to what the Left in Iran has been saying they would have known that it was all rubbish.
Where the rape law was written
The Afghan "rape law" was written in Tehran. It drew directly from the "Law Supporting the Family," which stalled in the Iranian parliament in 2008 following an open revolt led by Iranian women. The law was brought to Afghanistan by its Afghan proxy, the hated Afghan cleric Mohammed Asif Mosehni. In Kabul, Mosehni does Tehran's dirty work from his own opulent mosque, with his own madrassa, television station and radio station. He even runs an Afghan version of Iran's "morality police" to harass and terrorize Afghanistan's Shia minority.
"So long as we don't change the regime in Tehran, we will continue to have terrible problems, and not just in Iran," Kouhestaninejad said. "We will have problems in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. The regime has its fingers in everything. For as long as the regime is there, we will have these problems, and they will not go away."
And so long as the Left in Canada pretends that this is just somebody else's business, the rot will not go away. It's done enough damage already.
It is our business.
Defending a dictatorship
It was only a few weeks ago that NDP MP Olivia Chow, Toronto Star columnist Linda McQuaig and CBC pundit Heather Mallick were all rushing to the defence of the renegade British MP George Galloway, the Iranian regime's most brazen and slobbering apologist in the English-speaking world. They happily parroted Galloway's false claim that Ottawa wouldn't let him keep his "anti-war" speaking engagements in Canada for fear of what he might say about Canada's role in Afghanistan. McQuaig went so far as to praise Galloway for possessing "the mental toughness of Noam Chomsky and the showmanship of Mick Jagger."
As soon as Tehran's streets began filling with masses of protesters two weeks ago, Galloway declared himself against the Iranian uprising and for the regime's ruling Guardian Council. Galloway issued his verdict from the platform of his own long-running, regular program on Press TV, the regime's English-language propaganda network.
It is not that Galloway has changed. Iran is the same totalitarian state he and his supporters were defending last year and the year before that. Neither did Iran’s farcical June 12 election change anything.
Tehran's ayatollahs still run a blood-stained, belligerent and authoritarian theocracy where all non-Islamist political parties are banned, semi-literate clerics choose who can run for office and who cannot, and independent trade unions are banned. The clerics control the news media, foreign policy, and the army. Their morality police roam the streets arresting women if they look too "western" and their Basiji militiamen roam the campuses looking for pamphleteers to beat up. None of that has changed.
A revolt gaining traction
What's changed is that the long campaign for Iranian democracy, for workers' rights, and for the hundreds of union leaders, journalists and human rights activists in Iranian prisons, has at last started to gain some global traction. What's changed is that the tireless efforts of Kouhestaninejad and his colleagues at the CLC, the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Transport Workers Federation and Educational International are starting to pay off.
"We are in good shape," Kouhestaninejad told me last Thursday. "We are in very good shape."
But mainly, what has changed is this business about Ahmadinejad's free pass, and the cynical, stupid politics that allow him to have it. What's changed is that the leaders of the uprising are demanding the regime's isolation, and they mean it. What's changed is that now, anyone who excuses or accommodates the regime's propagandists, agents and apologists in Canada’s trade unions, social-justice networks, anti-racism campaigns or student organizations, is an enemy of the Iranian uprising.
The uprising changes everything.
Related Tyee stories:
- Thousands gather in silence to hear cries from Iran
- 'We Are Iran'
Blogging, where the act can be a 'cyber crime'. - Why US Can't Buy Dissent in Iran
Flood of dollars only taints regime's opponents.
![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
ME2
29-06-2009
I guess we'll have to just wait and see.
Not being a lover of American foreign policy, I have to admit I was impressed by Ahmadinejad's railing against the US' meddling in Mideastern and Iranian politics on behalf of itself and Israel. Adding currency to this view was their well documented support of the corrupt Shah in return for access to oil. Since Ahmadinejad's gov't was born out of a people's revolution, it was safe to assume, I've thought, it represented the people and the Left.
Over the years, however, we've been made fully aware of Ayatollah Khomeini's tyrannical maintainance of Sharia law, but however odious that situation, I've always thought that was something Muslims had to sort out for themselves.
But then, since throughout time Right-wingers have always allied with theocracies, it makes sense that that the revolution may have succeeded only in replacing a corrupt secular Right-wing gov't with a differently corrupt religious but still Right-wing one. As Glavin notes, perhaps we have been totally misled in thinking the Iranian gov't is Leftist instead of just being anti-US and anti-Israel.
I've read a bit about the past history of various Islamic states, and it has been a surprise for me to learn that in the past they have had strong Socialist policies, Iran included, based upon the teachings of Islam, which stress concern for one's neighbour.
So to what, I've wondered, do we ascribe this relatively recent arising to power of these virulently anti-people, pro-"God" and completely politicised Ayatollas. My guess is that meddling in the affairs of these states by Western nations intent upon securing commercial interests has deliberately aided greatly in their predominance.
And viewing the success of past alliances with theists in Western nations, and the contemporary example in the US with Fundamentalists of both Catholic and Protestant faiths, the template is easy to copy - just add money.
For good political reasons oil has been called "The Devil's Excrement"
Fiat lux
29-06-2009
Having lived under and
Having lived under and survived all the sick ideological systems burped up by the 20th century, the most important thing I've learned was: Never trust any politician, no matter what flag they're waving.
I've known some really decent people who went into politics to change things, but it changed them into opportunists.
Real democracy never existed and probably never will. What we now have is nothing more than a bad joke, with the strings pulled from behind the scenes by some of the biggest criminals in history, wearing fancy business suits and admired as VIPs.
Ed Deak.
G West
29-06-2009
So let me get this straight
Terry Glavin can excuse the behavior and the record of Hamid Karzai and his warlord allies in Afghanistan by simply claiming that he's in the pocket of Iranian clerics?
My reading of the Afghan situation is that things aren't getting better there either. IN fact, the latest stirrings I've heard from our erstwhile allies there is that they're more or less prepared to give the Afghan Taliban a lot more power in the run up to the Presidential elections.
Clinging to power by fair means or foul isn't something unique to Iran.
I don't much like Ahmadinejad and his band of thugs in Tehran either, but knowing what he is and who he represents doesn't blind me to the true nature of the thugs we're working with in Afghanistan.
Somehow it seems to have blinded you.
For all the lives we've lost in that bloody dance, the Taliban are far stronger now than they were in 2005, and they are active in more areas.
Some success story.
spartikus
29-06-2009
Who cares what James Petras thinks?
Terry Glavin is engaging in classic nutpicking. Why, for example, did he choose Petras's article in Canadian Dimension over other more favourable articles as representitive?
Alas, that would disrupt the narrative. Thus Marxist dinosaur James Petras IS the Canadian Labour movement.
Name
29-06-2009
Glavin's parallel universe...
I used to think Glavin had to be an intelligent fellow, or else why would he be a Tyee columnist. So I keep trying to wade through the hissing and spitting in the hope of discovering some original insights. But I have to admit I'm confounded.
Who is this stupid, blind, misguided Canadian Left that he keeps railing about? Who are these people? Is it Olivia Chow, Heather Mallick and Linda McQuaig and if so, where did they actually defend Ahmedinejad or the mullahs? Did I and all the other millions who consider ourselves left-leaning Canadians unknowingly become party to this great travesty by appointing Khomeinist fanatic Zafar Bangash as national spokesman for the Canadian Left? How is it that none of the lefties I know actually go around saying the things that Glavin's loves to hold up as proof of The Canadian Left's depth of ignorance (and his superior intelligence)? Why do we never read these leftist morons actually making all the outrageous misassumptions in person? Is he privy to the inner rantings of some private club of elite union fools, some secret journal of daft leftie punditry that's only accessible to Glavin and the daft ones?
Sorry, but I've come to wonder if his sole reference point for "The Canadian Left" might not actually be an annoying brother-in-law or some idiot who rubs him the wrong way at the office.
If someone's made statements or claims that Glavin finds dumb and offensive, fundamental principles of good journalism require that he cite a specific source and stick to addressing that individual specifically, instead of issuing entirely unsupported attacks against a great swath of innocent Canadians. His tilting at straw dogs and sterotypes is no less foolish, no more grounded in reality, than tilting at windmills.
Vancouver Liz
29-06-2009
Silly me ...
I didn't even know the "Left" was supporting the theocratic regime in Iran. That sure is bad politics -- my enemy's enemy isn't always your enemy too!
It brings to mind the confused support of Uncle Joe Stalin in the 1950s.
The "Left" -- and I assume Terry means the organized left -- have a lot to learn about basic human rights!
I have always counted myself a person of the left, but we certainly part ways here.
Yammer
29-06-2009
Left supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran
This is not a Canadian writer, being a member of the Respect Party of the UK, but it was published locally, and I think it may stand for a certain viewpoint among the left, whatever that really means:
http://www.straight.com/article-236244/yvonne-ridley-selfserving-west-has-no-right-throw-stones-irans-elections?#
spartikus
29-06-2009
I'm sure you could find lots of viewpoints
and I think it may stand for a certain viewpoint among the left
I'm sure it does, but does it stand for a pervasive viewpoint - that's the matter at hand, and it's one that is completely unsupported.
And the funny thing is it's all so besides the point. Whether the June 26 rally attracts 1000 "labour-members" or 100,000 - it won't affect events in Iran one whit. Indeed, almost every credible observer advocates that the West keeps a low profile so as not to give the Iranian authorities the excuse of "foreign meddling" to crack down even harder.
This is an Iranian story and Iranians will tell it. No matter how much Terry Glavin feels otherwise, it's simply not about us.
anarcho
29-06-2009
More Glavin Slanders
Which leftists are against the movement in Iran? Certainly not these:
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/
http://www.marxist.ca/
http://www.socialist.ca/En/SW2009/SocialistWorker507/04-Iran.htm
http://www.socialistvoice.ca/
http://mollymew.blogspot.com/
anarcho
29-06-2009
The Iranian Left in Exile
For anyone interested in what the Iranian left has to say, I recommend the following:
http://maryamnamazie.blogspot.com/
http://socialist-blogs-news.blogspot.com/
The Workers Communist Party of Iran has branches, or at least members in Canada.
doggone
29-06-2009
Since Thetyee is also ignoring this story
Check this out:
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/english/news/art0021.html
Fidel seems to be quite well informed. Can't wait for his take on Iran.
Just me
29-06-2009
It IS about us
1) Generally, it is gratifying to see that when "they" (Chinese at Tienanmen, resisting Iranians today) take to the street our MSM see it as heroic (which it is). What happens when we take to the streets is another story. Then it is the "Riot at the Hyatt," etc. and, as in Iran, they call for law and order.
2) Iran today IS about us (the West, not so much the paltry Left in the West) because the West (CIA) installed the Shah in the first place to halt a popular political shift to the left. A half century later, and a generation after the Shah's ouster, that still justifies the paranoia of Iran's ruling clerics, just as Western meddling in the USSR after the Russian Revolution (including Germany's invasion at the outset of WW2) justified Stalin and the 50-year trade embargo of Cuba justifies the Castros.
This is what we get for being the cops of the world. Too bad it is ordinary Iranians (and Russians and Cubans - and Hondurans most recently) who pay for it with their lives.
Canadian so-called Leftists sympathetic to Ahmadinejad and the mullahs might remember what Emma Goldman said: “If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution.” Dance? Iranian women would be making progress if they even could go out in public.
What kind of patsy allows for fascism just because it comes cloaked in the rhetoric of anti-Zionism and/or anti-imperialism? I guess the kind of patsy Glavin has identified here. Shame on the apologists. Let's get real about Iran.
anarcho
29-06-2009
Who are thee leftists?
Once again who are these leftists who support the Mullafkers? Let us not have nameless accusations. Name them, please. I just gave a list of the main groups of the far left - anarchists and 3 varieties of Trotskyists and they plainly support the movement in the streets.
anarcho
29-06-2009
And the CPC too is on side
The Communist Party also supports the people's movement against the Mullahs See
http://www.peoplesvoice.ca/Pv01ju09.html#10_REPRESSION_AND_LIES_WILL_NOT_STOP
RickW
29-06-2009
The Concensus Among Current Global Governments...
...today is to retain the status quo. They are generally against anything other than incremental changes. Why this is, is certainly fertile grounds for speculation.
My suspicion however, is that most existing governments today fear their subjects much more than they fear some external enemy. Therefore, they do not want some "foreign" affair to be giving people at home any dangerous notions. So the situation in Iran is given the "pablum" treatment from western governments, as is the recent coup in Honduras.
straightshooter
29-06-2009
Your hypocrisy is overwhelming.
You support the Iranian uprising against the mullahs, but look the other way, indeed support Israel as it imprisons, occupies, murders en masse, humiliates and disposesses the native Palestininian/Canaanites. I can also assure you that like their elders, young Iranians stand shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians in their just struggle against Israel. Iran has also accepted the 2002 Arab League's Beirut Summit Inititative which calls for full diplomatic relations with Israel if it complies with international law and binding Security Council resolutions by withdrawing from all Palestinian and other Arab lands it invaded after launching the June 1967 war and has occupied since.