How the Western Left Has Abandoned Iranian Liberals
Nick Gillespie | April 3, 2007, 9:38am
Via Arts & Letters Daily comes a sharp review of Danny Postel's recent book, Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, which indicts Western liberals and leftists for silence in the face of brutal repression by an "authentic" regime that attacks the concept of universal human rights as part of an Enlightenment, imperialist mentality.
From Rafia Zakaria's review:
[Western liberals], as Postel documents, have been silent in the face of repeated student protests in Iran, imprisonment of Iranian activists and numerous other human rights violations that should have logically attracted their support. They are so locked in the singular prism of anti-imperialism that they are unable to make peace with the idea that it is liberalism rather than radicalism that is the true fighting creed in Iran. They are even less amenable to the reality that "the denunciations of U.S. Empire in Iran today are the rhetorical dominion of the Iranian Right, not the Left". As Postel states, "it is the reactionary clergy who wield the idiom of anti-imperialism and regime hardliners [who] legitimate the suppression of Iranian students". This aversion to recognising reality in Iran has exacted a huge cost; it has delegitimised the Western left and exposed its disinterest in championing the cause of Iranian liberals and pro-democracy fighters who suffer daily at the hands of an increasingly repressive regime. Postel exposes how the insistent prioritisation of anti-imperialism over all else has produced a repugnant inversion of itself - a new form of imperialism equally blind in its U.S.-centric perspective as its ugly counterpart.
More here.
In 2002, Charles Paul Freund assayed the case of Hashem Aghajari, the Iranian dissident whose death sentence sparked massive protests (and eventually gained some measure of freedom) in Iran but little outrage in the West.
Pro Libertate | April 3, 2007, 11:28am | #
I feel for the Iranian "liberals" who are being oppressed. I hope that they can get the boot off of their heads one of these days, and I might even support some U.S./Western help with that if the timing were right (not an invasion, mind you, but "help" of some sort). The Iranian government really does suck.
I don't think most leftists are in love with Iran, for obvious reasons. While I think it might be true that they don't emphasize the liberal underground in Iran, I imagine that that omission is due to a desire to avoid more armed interventions by the U.S. I assume that the anti-war libertarians are uninterested in highlighting the plight of the oppressed for the same reason.
In a perfect world, we could remove all of the corruption and oppression and lead everyone to peace, freedom, and prosperity. Unfortunately, humanity is insane and requires extraordinary events and extraordinary people to achieve such a state. Probably the U.S. can do the most good in this regard by being an example and by using its enormous economic, political, and sometimes even military influence to improve things. . .with the understanding that the slow and gradual approach is usually the best.
One question I have is why, say, the Czech Republic so quickly moved from an oppressive, communistic regime to a liberal, capitalistic system. Why were they ready and others like Iraq don't seem to be?
As for AI, they pick on the West more because they can get more results from us. It's like people who complain that Iran, for example, can ignore international law without a lot of hue and cry, while we must adhere to the letter of the law. It's because people expect more from us, obviously. As they should, though I don't believe in giving oppressive governments as much of a pass as they've been seeming to get in recent times.
VM | April 3, 2007, 1:08pm | #
ProL:
"Still, we're putting together the reasons after the fact. "
no we're not. The middle class and a liberal tradition were already written into the culture there. Asking why some areas liberalize "easier" than others is an excellent question, but I disagree with the characterization that we're backing into the CZ example. It simply is a poor choice for comparison - using central europe is not an appropriate measure by any means!
you missed the 1848 reference - that's when huge changes took place in Europe, including the political rumblings and actions by liberal and socialist (and nationalist) thinking.
As I said, just as we can see the difference in race perceptions and relations in a nation that didn't have a civil rights movement, we could see the difference in a peoples that didn't go through with the changes of 1848.
Anyways - China - that's an excellent question:
some of it could be the nature of how the peoples organized - trade, agriculture, nomadic - what they could do with their natural resources (farm, fish, make huge sand castles).
then what is the region's history? Did a middle class develop? If not, is there a history of a dominant culture? etc.
But again, those other regions didn't have an 1848.
Dhex and Grotius can help both of us with the structures of those societies to fill our thoughts in.
*pulls armchair next to ProL and pours drink
VM | April 3, 2007, 1:33pm | #
*does trick with ice cube and twizzle straw!
cool! I thought in the spaghetti thought I threw out 1848 got missed (in my web of confusion - my writing, not your thinking or knowledge)
And I agree with this wholeheartedly:
"However, I'm not comfortable just dismissing these other cultures as not European and not capable of enlightenment."
however, it doesn't have to be, contrary to the Green Footballs types, broken down into {capable of enlightenment vs those not}
Rather - there have been developments in the region and culture. There has been economic opportunity, etc. It's not a question of if those other cultures are capable, it is a question of how it's going to happen.
Marching into the detention area, which isn't like my idea of fun, or into Iraq and expecting a WWII style of liberation to take place and voila! was incredible, and it's astonishing to think that people actually believed that.
Issues of nationalism and the notion of being a part of a "culture" might contribute to what you're noting. China's lifecycles of dynasties helped with them conquering and then falling back. The other cultures in the area worked with that, took ideas, etc.
where was this going... aw hell.
*freshens drinks. turns up the tunes.
