The best way to understand the Islamic Republic of Iran is to see it not as "theocracy" but as "Jacobinism with Islamic Characteristics."
The power elite of Iran don't care about Islam as such (Islam, after all, is diverse, and some varieties of it, as conceived by Nader Hashemi, Mohsen Kadivar, Ahmad Sadri, and the like, are perfectly compatible with liberal democracy). What they care about is their revolution and their republic and their ideology (in which Islam does play a part but an increasingly smaller one). As IRGC General Mohammad Ali Jafari reportedly said:
حفظ نظام جمهوری اسلامی ایران از ادای نماز واجبتر است
They love their politico-economic order much more than prayers.
Unlike the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, whose legitimating ideology came from outside (Western Europe) and was instilled from above (the Marxist-Leninist Party), though, their ideology is one that has organically grown out of Iranian history, which is what is going for them.
My back-of-the-napkin calculation, however, says that about 20% of the Iranian population, largely of economically upper strata, are liberals who are tired of this politico-economic order and its legitimating ideology. Give Iran a couple of decades in which its social dialectic can unfold without foreign intervention, and liberals are likely to grow more numerous in the country as it undergoes its capitalist development; and liberals inside Iran might eventually transform the country in a way that liberals outside it would like, through passive revolution (much as the AKP has done in Turkey, which too was once ruled by men of the Jacobin mentalité).
Meanwhile, the duty of Iranian patriots, even liberals in exile, is not to let imperialists bomb Iran.
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6 comments:
"My back-of-the-napkin calculation, however, says that about 20% of the Iranian population, largely of economically upper strata, are liberals who are tired of this politico-economic order and its legitimating ideology."
Incorrect calculations!
People of the lower economic strata are teh ones who have been BITCHING about the revolution, and who have been, almost singing in unison, on every taxi or bus you get on in Tehran (where people enjoy the freedom of anonymity and becoming unidentifiable to the state ears) that: "at least if shah drove the Cadillac, we had the peykan to ride."
You are also mistaken to think what is happening under Ahmadinejad's regime is or resembles any thing "revolutionary" like! If anything, the rich like him because he is facilitating their access to astronomic loans in the name of economic development--which translates to import business, or real estate! What ahmadinejad's regime is doing, in effect, is to turn its back on the "revolution". You want to get a sense of how SIMILAR ahmadinejad's era is turning to Pahlavi's time? Take a look at the state-funded supported cinema; the surge of film-farsi, cheap comedies, empty of any social criticism and full of consumerism full of fluff and glitter, spending, materialism.
You think Ahmadinejad's the revolutionary guardian? Listen to his boyfriend Mashaye who states Iran is friends of Israeli population, who attends art galleries of Iran's cinema whore, Hedye tehrani and spends money on her with the same filthy flirtatiousness as did many of shah's relatives--white true artists and journalists, the REVOLUTIONARY ones are in jail!
I suggest you blow your nose in that napkin, and start calculating with "chortkeh" ;)
Happy new year!
If you ask people of lower classes, in most countries (perhaps except in those where the mass media are extremely powerful), you would get much the same grievances, in some cases lighter than in Iran, in other cases heavier than in Iran. That's what capitalism is all about. But that doesn't mean that lower classes in Iran who have economic grievances are ready to join hands with the types of people most commonly found in the Green Wave. It is not impossible to create a front joining the economically oppressed lower classes and the upper classes who have social, cultural, and political grievances. However, to do so, you need a program of social change that incorporates lower-class needs and desires and a leadership and an organization that want to mobilize lower classes and are capable of doing so. That is what is clearly missing in Iran today.
"that doesn't mean that lower classes in Iran who have economic grievances are ready to join hands with the types of people most commonly found in the Green Wave."
Now I need to ask you to please elaborate this a bit further.
what are the "types" of people in the Green?!
You are assuming they are all bourgeois upper class?
You are assuming they are all capitalists?
And why don't you even answer my questions directly and venture off into some hyperbolic space, friend?
I remind you of my comment:
You want to get a sense of how SIMILAR ahmadinejad's era is turning to Pahlavi's time? Take a look at the state-funded supported cinema; the surge of film-farsi, cheap comedies, empty of any social criticism and full of consumerism full of fluff and glitter, spending, materialism.
Now I like you to clarify what is the green "type" you referred to.
For your information, Mousavi WAS/IS a socialist; he is just not a lying charlatan! For your information, a lot of those worms who have crawled into green grass AFTER the election do not miss a chance to remind the rest of us of what a 'revolutionary' Mousavi was when he fed and managed a population of close to 40 million war struck Iranians in need of education, medication, bread, sugar, cheese, meat, eggs, butter! It wasn't Ahmadinejad who cut the arms of "mohtakerin" and giving them death sentences because of hiding the necessities of people to sell for higher profit in black market. Those things happened during MOUSAVI's term. What has Ahmadinejad done? "Privatized" state run businesses, so they can be owned by his military buddies!
Jesus!
It's safe to say that a majority of people who have commented on the Green Wave, whether they are for or against or neutral to it, think that participants in the wave were on average richer and had more formal education than those who didn't take part in it or those who opposed it.
As for whether Mousavi is a socialist, if he is one, he doesn't say he is, nor does he act like one. Instead of invoking a socialist ideology or program, he invokes Khomeini and the (burnished memory of) early days of the revolution in terms of ideology and a program of liberal democracy (rights to free press, free assemblies, free associations, free elections, etc.) in terms of practical demands.
Neither Mousavi nor the Green Wave has come out against privatization or proposed an alternative to the direction of Iran's political economy (i.e. gradual liberalization) since the end of the Iran-Iraq War.
"It's safe to say that a majority of people who have commented on the Green Wave, whether they are for or against or neutral to it, think that participants in the wave were on average richer and had more formal education than those who didn't take part in it or those who opposed it."
Don't mean to pick at words, but do you mean globally, or commentary in Farsi? Most Anglophone commentary, especially leftist commentary, suggests that speaking about social mobilization and class in connection with the Green Movement is heresy. Let alone to actually come to any sort of conclusions about it.
Among left-wing supporters of the Green Wave, yes, there was a great deal of reluctance to come to terms with the class composition question, especially at the beginning of the wave. But this began to change over time, I think. Take Dilip Hiro, for instance. He thought that the elections were fraudulent and backed the Green Wave, but he was clear-eyed enough to see that, unlike during the Iranian Revolution, workers didn't organize strikes in support of the wave, despite being called upon to do so by quite a few Greens. Even CNN had to admit it in the end: "Experts agree that there's been no significant upheaval from Iran's industry workers or the merchants at bazaars."
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