The repression against student activists in Iran follows hard of the healls of the Islamic state's clamp down on trade unionists and workers movements. Many placards called for the freeing from prison of the bus worker's leader Mansour Ossanlou and the baker's union activist Mahmoud Salehi.
The Islamic regime has been able to use to the threat of attack by the US and allies, including Britain to legitemise itself and justify the intensifing repression against workers, women's groups, queers and cultural minorities. The demonstrators today were overwhelmingly Iranian leftist exiles, many of whom expressed their disappointment with hostile attitudes of the British left, which has for the most part adopted an attitude of supporting or at least not criticising the Iranian states's repressive actions out of some kinda simplistic anti-US stance instead of supporting Iranian activists in their struggle against the dual threats of US militarism and theocratic - capitalist oppression.
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Be Careful
25.12.2007 16:27
Unfortunately the public at large seems to have bought into the whole idea of liberal interventionism--the idea that we should wage war on countries to save their oppressed citizens from their evil rulers. The first step in any media campaign to prepare for war is to demonize the regime concerned. Once the country at large has it fixed in its mind that the regime is evil it is a relatively easy matter to sell the war--we saw this with Iraq, where nobody ever seriously thought Iraq was a threat to the West or the region.
While there is this confusion, that we can help people by waging wars in the minds of the citizens of the imperium we have to be very careful about criticizing regimes when the empire is drumming up a war against them. That is just the plain reality of the situation. Campaigns like this one play into the war mongers hands. Such campaigns must demonise the regime in order to get any traction with the public. Until the war mongers have safely been put in their boxes you simply become useful idiots.
Once war is clearly off the agenda we can go back to taxing Iran on its domestic human rights record. However the best way of addressing that is to take away the existential threat to the regime. No countries have good human rights records while they are at war. Fact. And it is every bit as true of liberal democracies as anywhere else--just look at the Allies' atrocious record in WW2.
Chris Dornan
To stop the wars on other countries make war on your own rulers
26.12.2007 09:52
To slag off those Iranian who would oppose oppression as 'useful idiots' for the US and it's allies, displays an absolute lack of common sympathy or solidarity with these people's situation. Many have seen their friends disappeared and murdered, many are under threat of deportation to Iran as soon as the relations between the murderous regime in London and the murderous regime in Tehran gets back on a more 'normal basis'.
By Chris's logic the Kronstad revolt, the Hungarian workers rebellion of 1956 or the Prague Spring of 1968 deserved to be crushed as the participants were merely 'usefull idiots' serving the interests of Western nations that sought the demise of Russian Bolshevik rule. An alternative way to look at this, might be to view people as their own protagonists acting independently of the interests of the capitalist states and to recognise and support their bravery in doing so.
It is ridiculous for people who claim to speak for the 'peace movement' to adopt a position that condems torture when carried out by the USA, but chooses silence when torture is carried out by the Islamic Regime of Iran.
Progressive people everywhere need to reject the false choices between the evils of 'liberal interventionism' and supporting 'anti-imperialist' dictatorships that crush their own peoples. We need to make a common cause with people everywhere in opposition to militarism and to economic and environmental exploitation.
Anything less means we end up supporting the current international capitalist system, whereby the evil of the rulers of the West are used to legitimate the evils perpetrated by the Islamic regime, and the evils of the Islamic regime are used to justify the West's vicious attempts to dominate the planet and it's resources.
There really has to be a better way.
Solidarity Is strength
red rosa