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Last Updated: Jun 25, 2009 - 11:09:29 AM |
The bloody scenes in Tehran, with at least 19 protestors killed so far
in clashes with government forces, may seem like a repeat in miniature
of the violence there more than 30 years ago. The glaring difference is
that the protestors who toppled a corrupt, oppressive regime in 1979
have become the corrupt, oppressive regime in 2009.
With the 1979 Iranian revolution so close in the rearview mirror, the
mistakes of Western observers then bear remembering today, as the seeds
of something momentous may be again at hand. In the late seventies,
some intellectuals, enamored with the idea of revolution in general and
the anti-Western outlook of the Iranian revolutionaries in particular,
projected their political values on the shah’s deposers. When, instead
of embracing the ideology of Harvard Square or Telegraph Avenue, the
revolutionaries exported terror, exhibited a toxic anti-Semitism,
persecuted homosexuals, and pursued nuclear weapons, many of these
intellectuals emerged with egg on their faces. As a circumspect Mother
Jones editor Adam Hochschild candidly admitted after Iranian reality
had dashed Western dreams: “The Left is always better at seeing what
leads to revolutions than at seeing what may follow them.” Though
criticisms of the shah of Iran for human-rights abuses and other crimes
seemed on the mark, Hochschild conceded in 1980 that his magazine had
been “embarrassingly nearsighted about [the shah’s] successors.”
A year earlier, Mother Jones had been much more buoyant about the
Iranian revolution’s prospects. “What kind of state might result if
Khomeini or his followers take power?,” Eqbal Ahmad asked in the
magazine’s April 1979 issue. “As someone who has talked with him at
length, I believe that, when Khomeini speaks of an Islamic state for
Iran, it is a Shi’ite scholar’s way of saying that he wants a good
state in Iran. His concept of a good state includes democratic reforms,
freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of
huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government.” Ahmad ridiculed
the view that “reactionary Muslim mullahs motivated by their hostility
to modernization and reforms” led the revolution. “Left alone,” he
speculated, “Iran without the Shah would probably evolve into a country
that looked like Spain or Portugal without Franco or Salazar.” Even by
the magazine’s postdated publication date, the prediction appeared
ridiculous.
Sounding like the ideological tourists who visited Iran’s Soviet
neighbors several generations earlier, Kai Bird opined in the March 31,
1979 issue of The Nation that “there is every reason to believe that
the still unpublished [Iranian] Constitution will include all the
elements of a liberal democratic system.” The future Pulitzer Prize
winner exuberantly noted how merchants hawked Lenin and Marx on the
streets. He imagined decentralized workers’ collectives, rather than
the state, controlling Iran’s oil industry. In the April 21, 1979
issue, Bird described the economic views of Iranian oil workers as not
very different from those of the average Nation reader. He wrote, “The
worker komitehs want to participate in [oil policy] decisions—and if
they persevere, there will be little room left for the fellows from
Exxon.” In an unsigned editorial in the March 24, 1979 issue,
anticipating its special correspondent’s report, The Nation excused
“the revolutionary insistence on summary justice” by maintaining that
it “may have staved off a far bloodier round of private vengeance.”
After all, “less than forty former Pahlevi officials have been
executed, and with only one possible exception, each was prominently
associated with the worst excesses of state power in the Shah’s era.”
But just a few months after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumph, events
forced Bird to concede that the Islamic Revolution had been a
“disappointment.”
“One thing must be clear,” warned postmodern philosopher Michel
Foucault in the fall of 1978. “By ‘Islamic government,’ nobody in Iran
means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of
supervision or control.” An atheist homosexual, Foucault nevertheless
found himself seduced by an Islamic revolution that targeted people
like himself once it had consolidated power. Writing for the French and
Italian press, the celebrity intellectual made two trips to Iran in the
fall of 1978 to compile material for his firsthand dispatches.
Prophetic in seeing Islam as a “powder keg” of political force,
Foucault was horribly remiss in his uncritical assessment of Islamism.
>From his conversations in Iran, and in Paris with exiles such as the
Ayatollah Khomeini, Foucault was not, unlike other Western
intellectuals, deluded into believing that the shah’s overthrow would
result in a secular government familiar to Westerners. Rather, he
believed that an Islamic theocracy might consist of equal rights for
men and women, a socialist redistribution of oil profits, and a
responsive democracy, among other things.
Writing in Le Nouvel Observateur in October 1978, Foucault outlined the
principles that he believed would undergird any emergent Islamic state
in Iran: “Islam values work; no one can be deprived of the fruits of
his labor; what must belong to all (water, the subsoil) shall not be
appropriated by anyone. With respect to liberties, they will be
respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others;
minorities will be protected and free to live as they please on the
condition that they do not injure the majority; between men and women
there will not be inequality with respect to rights, but difference,
since there is a natural difference. With respect to politics,
decisions should be made by the majority, the leaders should be
responsible to the people, and each person, as it is laid out in the
Quran, should be able to stand up and hold accountable he who governs.”
The devotion to socialism, pluralism, democracy, and disarmament that
Foucault, Bird, and others imagined in their Persian proxies turned out
to be remarkable delusions. Rather than looking at Iran and describing
the ugliness they saw, prominent intellectuals instead looked in the
mirror, reported the beauty they saw there, and called it Iran.
Their blindness offers a cautionary lesson for today. As a new
generation of Iranians rebel against yesterday’s revolutionaries,
conservatives appalled by the anti-Americanism of the Iranian old guard
risk projecting their political values upon today’s revolutionaries.
This is Iran, after all, and even the opposition candidate despises
Israel, aggressively pushes for a nuclear Iran, and has heretofore
shown little interest during his long political career in transitioning
from government by ayatollahs and mullahs to government by the people.
President Obama, who undermines his credibility by vacillating between
remaining strategically outside of the fray and inserting himself in it
by telling Iranians that the whole world is watching, nevertheless
seems to understand the danger of getting Western hopes up too high:
“Although there is amazing ferment taking place in Iran, the difference
in actual policies between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their
actual policies may not be as great as advertised,” the president
explained on CNBC last week. “I think it’s important to understand that
either way, we are going to be dealing with a regime in Iran that is
hostile to the U.S.”
Source:Ocnus.net 2009
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