The five nuclear powers go after Iran, that unlikeable country ruled by priests of a foreign religion that happens to be sitting on the world’s third largest lake of oil.
But it’s not Iran’s oil they’re interested in, it’s Iran’s right to develop its own nuclear technology that worries them. And it’s not Iran’s rights they want to suppress, it’s the right to nuclear technology that they want to eliminate.
They want to establish a precedent. They want to reform the NPT to turn certain aspects of nuclear-technology development into something that will be illegal for all except for themselves, and they want to intrusively verify compliance to these new rules, enforcing this verification militarily if need be.
What is at stake in the Iranian nuclear affair is our own right to the future. If we don’t stop the nuclear barons now, we never will.
But it’s not Iran’s oil they’re interested in, it’s Iran’s right to develop its own nuclear technology that worries them. And it’s not Iran’s rights they want to suppress, it’s the right to nuclear technology that they want to eliminate.
They want to establish a precedent. They want to reform the NPT to turn certain aspects of nuclear-technology development into something that will be illegal for all except for themselves, and they want to intrusively verify compliance to these new rules, enforcing this verification militarily if need be.
What is at stake in the Iranian nuclear affair is our own right to the future. If we don’t stop the nuclear barons now, we never will.
Kashan Bazaar
Act I
Forget about the thousands of years of history, forget Isfahan and Tabriz monuments, forget Khwarizmi, forget the whirling dervishes, forget Tusi, Alhazen, Biruni and Al-Farisi, forget Persian cuisine and its perfumes – and, above all, forget Omar Khayamm. Iran is today an easy-to-dislike country and it’s even fashionable to find it highly distasteful. Remembering how much of Iran’s history and culture is part of what makes our daily lives more enjoyable and rich is seen as something beneath a gentleman’s – or a lady’s – dignity. After three centuries of strict separation between religion and the State in the West, the idea of a country ruled by religious tenets smacks of fanaticism to our good citizens, even when so many if not most of us profess to observe more or less the same religious principles in our daily lives, albeit a little less strictly. Also, the abrasive style of speech of so many Iranian leaders and the support they give to like-minded groups in other countries does little to make them and the country they speak for more likeable in the eyes of Western sophisticates and their Eastern clones. Above all, our society needs external enemies, real or fictitious, to keep people busy with something else than the real cause of their troubles, and a country ruled by a religion that is not “ours” fits the job description perfectly.
Act II
The idea of separating religion and State was born simultaneously with the rise of powerful and increasingly aggressive countries in the part of the world where it first appeared, and it may arguably be considered as part of what made these countries powerful, and aggressive. These three centuries of “lay” history saw the power of those countries and their social and economic principles spread to cover almost the totality of the globe, driven by wars, invasions, massacres of whole populations. “Progress” was imposed on an unwilling world through the blood of money and the mud of free trade – it’s no wonder so much of the resistance to this smothering advance, from Brazil to Iran to China, took the form of a struggle against a “godless” foe. After three centuries, the accumulated might and wealth of these countries resulted in a virtual monopoly over the planet’s resources. When this monopoly started to be challenged by new rising powers, it was natural that the core countries of this world order would close ranks in the defense of their privileges. Russia, China, the U.S., the UK and France, who have jointly owned the world since the end of World War II, will not share the benefits of this ownership with just any newcomer who comes to their gates. As always, and as they did in their time, it will take a storming of their castle to make them part with their riches. The forms that this storming will take are being decided right now, while the castle owners plot their resistance to it.
Act III
Part of this monopoly is over the world's energy resources. For decades they were content with ruling the oil-rich countries by proxy and keeping control by fomenting dissent among those countries and maintaining a constant state of low-intensity warfare that sometimes exploded in real short-lived shooting wars. Now, for a number of reasons, including the high cost of keeping the state of permanent conflict from blowing the lid and degenerating into a total and uncontrollable war with unpredictable results, they want direct ownership and control. They can no longer afford to have their energy needs depend on the whims of the famously hot-headed natives of those famously hot countries, and they need to dictate the terms. They need to enclose the natives in reservations over which they exercise total control. (That they may need to abandon Israel to the wolves along this process will be seen by future historians as an example of the foolishness of putting your fate in the hands of your masters, and trusting them to defend you from those they pay you to bully on their behest when their interests change.) This drive to direct control was dramatically intensified by U.S. initiative in 2001, and its first stage was concluded with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. At first this movement was met with skepticism by the other powers, but they have been falling in line ever since and now they have a united front, and are ready for the next step.
Act IV
Controlling the oil resources is not enough. Oil supply is not infinite, and controlling all of it does you no good if other alternative sources of energy are being developed while you are sitting on your wells. This is why ethanol development is being sabotaged wherever it’s not under their control, and this is why, above all, they need to establish a monopoly over what is now the second most important source of energy, nuclear power. The problem with establishing this monopoly is that nuclear power is already out there, available to anyone with access to uranium and some money to invest in development; and since uranium occurs practically everywhere and investments in energy are always a priority in any country, this means that in theory anyone can start building nuclear-power plants, and what would they do with all their oil? Not to mention that the nightmarish possibility that someone accidentally stumbles upon a viable nuclear-fusion method for energy generation, making even uranium useless, increases in direct proportion to the number of people tweaking atoms.
So the five nuclear powers need to contain the spread of nuclear technology, and the most effective way to do this is prohibiting it to be spread, and enforcing this prohibition with military force. But they can’t do this, because the right to the peaceful development of nuclear technology is enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, something they foolishly promoted when they thought oil would last forever and were worried only with the spread of military nuclear technology. So how do they go about convincing all NPT signatories to relinquish their rights to nuclear technology and make it their monopoly?
Easy: they pick the least popular kid in the block and accuse him of not playing by the rules and hiding his marbles, and then proceed to confiscate all his marbles and forbidding him to play, with full support from all the other kids. They establish their right to decide who can play and who can have marbles. They set a precedent. In no time they will be renting marbles to the same kids from whom they took them.
They go after Iran, that unlikeable country ruled by priests of a foreign religion that happens to be sitting on the world’s third largest lake of oil. But it’s not Iran’s oil they’re interested in, it’s Iran’s right to develop its own nuclear technology that worries them. And it’s not Iran’s rights they want to suppress, it’s the right to nuclear technology that they want to eliminate. They want to establish a precedent. They want to reform the NPT to turn certain aspects of nuclear-technology development into something that will be illegal for all except for themselves, and they want to intrusively verify compliance to these new rules, enforcing this verification militarily if need be. They want to make the Additional Protocol to the NPT mandatory, and for that they accuse Iran of not abiding by rules that under current NPT terms Iran is not obliged to observe, to establish their right to force Iran to sign them, under threat of a military attack. They want to establish a monopoly over the right to set terms to “non-compliant” parties and they want to be recognized as the sole arbiters of compliance.
This is why they rejected the Tehran Declaration of May 17 so vehemently, and two weeks later ordered the IAEA directors to submit to Iran the exact same terms they had rejected, but this time the terms come from them, not from two meddling upstarts who don’t know where they stand. This is why Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after his country and its partners in the Security Council refused to acknowledge the results of the Brazil-Iran-Turkey negotiation and voted for sanctions against Iran, declared in Egypt on June 30 that Russia “does not believe in sanctions” and that Russia, France and the United States hope to hold talks with Iran on the same nuclear-fuel swap deal they scorned on June 10 when they voted for new UN sanctions against Iran for not playing by their rules. They own the marbles, they decide who can play, and when, and how – and above all with whom.
A Poem
A Brazilian poet, Eduardo Alves da Costa, once wrote an homage to the Russian poet Wladimir Mayakovsky, called “On the road with Mayakovsky”, that says:
The first night
They approach
And pick a flower from our garden
And we don't say anything.
The second night,
No longer hiding, they
Stomp the flowers, kill our dog,
And we don't say anything.
Until one day
The weakest of them
Enters our house alone
Robs us the moon and
Knowing our fear,
Robs us the voice of our throats.
And because we said nothing,
We no longer can say anything.
What is at stake in the Iranian nuclear affair is our own right to the future. If we don’t stop the nuclear barons now, we never will.
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Fears for two women facing execution for adultery and 'enmity against God'
06.07.2010 21:24
progressive people in the world must oppose to Barbaric islamic law,
which is against basic human rights.
Not only women, Trade union activist and any left group member are arrested on the weekly basis, every month there is a fear that few of Political prisoners could be hanged .
Those of you that think enemy of my enemy are my friend , are just bunch middle class people whom do not have any link with class struggle in the region or in the world.
what a shame for people whom call themselves progressive , let alone anarchist .
Anti-Capitalist
e-mail:
Humanright@against-barbaric-islamic-law.com
Homepage:
http://enemy of my enemy couldn't be my friend , specially Taliban and thier relative in Tehran.
Flashback: The great divide – Iran and leftists
07.07.2010 07:09
from the archives:
The Great Divide-Iran and Leftists
by Gary Sudborough, 27 June 2009
There seems to be a great divergence of opinion among liberals and leftists about what is really happening in Iran. There are those who think Iran is in somewhat of a vacuum and is only trying to have a democratic election against theocracy and a repressive attitude to women's rights. Other leftists think because the Bush administration in the past had contemplated military action and also covert actions by the CIA against Iran that these facts, among others, argue for an attempted coup taking place, especially given the enormous number of successful and unsuccessful CIA coups which have occurred in the past 60 years. I have an excellent book entitled Killing Hope-US military and CIA interventions since World War 2 by William Blum. I would say that the only countries or continents not to have at least CIA spies in them would be places like Greenland or Antarctica that have little interest for multinational corporations because they are covered with huge ice sheets. Of course, this could change with global warming. You might be served a burger and fries by an Eskimo at the grand opening of McDonalds in Greenland.
Noam Chomsky seems to want to take a middle ground and say that no elections in the US or Iran are really democratic because in the United States only the very wealthy get to choose those candidates who are to run and in Iran it is the clerics who decide the question. He is correct, of course, but that does not solve the problem of whether the CIA and US covert actions are being used in Iran.
Norman Solomon, a leftist writer for Common Dreams and other publications, had an article titled "Full Spectrum Idiocy- the GOP and Hugo Chavez." One of the points of his article is that anyone who thinks like Hugo Chavez and suspects a CIA-instigated attempt to overthrow the Iranian government is an idiot. This is somewhat belligerent. When I wrote my article about Iran entitled: " Iran- Amnesia, Ignorance or Stupidity," and gave my reasons why I suspected CIA involvement in Iran, I at least didn't call those with differing ideas idiots, but gave them three choices, all of which are better than idiot. Hugo Chavez has already suffered one CIA -backed coup in April 2002 in which a portion of the Venezuelan military arrested him, imprisoned him on a military base and installed a Chamber of Commerce man named Pedro Carmona as President of Venezuela. Pro-Chavez supporters in the thousands stormed the Presidential Palace, removed Pedro Carmona and in a while Hugo Chavez was released from military custody, during which he said two uniformed military men from the United States took part. Is Hugo Chavez an idiot or paranoid for suspecting that CIA coups have been perpetrated or are presently taking place in other countries, having experienced one himself? I think he is being perfectly rational, especially since Ahmadinejad is a man like himself in certain respects. Both Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez are spending the profits from the sale of oil to improve the lives of the poor in their respective countries.The ruling class of the United States hate this situation. They would rather have the rich in power in other countries so that American corporations can move in, privatize the oil and all other corporations, privatize health care and any benefits like Social Security for the poor and establish sweatshops with no recognition of worker's rights, unions, safety regulations in the workplace or product quality and safety. In other words, they want what Michael Parenti calls a client state government. I call it a puppet government. As Michael Parenti has said: "There is only one thing the rich have always wanted and that is everything."
I have discovered a very interesting thing about Venezuela. The CIA is still organizing coups against Hugo Chavez. The Cato Institute, a right wing think tank in the United States, recently paid an anti-Chavez student organizer a half a million dollars to stir up trouble against Chavez. It is called the Milton Friedman Award, but let's get real. This is nothing more than a bribe to help overthrow a democratically elected government. The student's name is Yon Goicoechea. I couldn't get a break in remembering this name by having him called Juan Gonzalez or some other easy name. If I had accepted money from a foreign government, let us say the Soviet Union when it was in existence, to overthrow the government of the United States, I would be classed as a traitor and either executed or would be spending a lot of time behind bars, probably in solitary confinement. However, Yon Goicoechea is now in Mexico from certain reports and probably spending his half an million dollars and enjoying himself immensely. Is Hugo Chavez an idiot for thinking that perhaps Iranian students, like Venezuelan students in Venezuela, are being paid money by US institutions to foment revolution in Iran? I think not and believe the real idiot to be Norman Solomon.
Another very prominent leftist in the United States is Michael Moore. He is a man who has done great work with movies like Roger and Me, Fahrenheit 9-11, and Sicko, with a new movie coming out in October on all the thefts and frauds committed by the banks and financial institutions of the United States that have contributed to the present world-wide depression. I give him enormous credit for at least keeping track of the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan and posting on his web site the news of the latest US drone strikes that have killed numerous civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. However, he is another who sees the situation in Iran in isolation and thinks it is all about democracy. Michael Moore has long been a union man and I believe it was his father or another relative who was involved in the famous sit down strike at General Motors in the 1930s. I, too, have long held a passionate affinity for unions. Some of the earliest books I read were about the IWW in the United States and their heroes like Joe Hill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood. I am just speculating here, but I think one of the things which swayed Michael's opinion on Iran was that the bus drivers union came out in support of the protesters and threatened a strike. The real tragedy here is that unions in other countries have often been infiltrated by the CIA.
In Latin America there was an organization called The American Institute for Free Labor Development. It was ostensibly run by the AFL-CIO, but was funded almost exclusively by the Agency for International Development and was an instrument of the CIA. One of its missions was to teach the unions in Latin America to be virulently anti-communist and to help with strikes any coups that the CIA was organizing in Latin America. Consequently, it is a big mistake to think that unions are always on the moral, just and democratic side of an issue.
One of the greatest problems that I perceive confuses many Americans, including many leftists, is a separation in their brain between domestic and foreign events. Most Americans realize the effects of capitalism at home. After all, in just the last 30 years there have been the scandals of the sub prime mortgage swindle by the banks, the Enron debacle where some people in California actually lost their lives due to planned blackouts, the accounting crimes of Arthur Andersen and others, which caused stocks to be greatly overvalued and led to a stock market crash and finally to the great savings and loan theft, which cost every American family approximately 5,000 dollars to remedy. They, also, realize that a great deal of their tax money is going to the very rich people who robbed them in the first place. The amazing thing is that these same Americans often believe that their foreign policy is motivated by humanitarian and democratic concerns, instead of the greed and avarice they experience at home. They point to the humanitarian aid given to other countries. Incidentally, much of this so-called humanitarian aid is actually money to build the roads and ports so that American corporations can make even more profit by not having to pay for these expenses. What American aid there is in terms of food, medicine and other things which are truly humanitarian is very miserly, especially since the demise of the Soviet Union, when there was obviously a competition between the countries. Now, US humanitarian aid is near the bottom in terms of that aid given by the other industrialized countries. Americans, also, point to the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe. That was obviously meant to prevent all the countries of western Europe from going communist because most of the resistance movements against German fascism in those countries were lead by communists. Finally, there is the American fascination with the "good war." I am speaking of World War 2, when American forces actually did fight on the right side against German and Japanese fascism. They relate that to other wars and think the United States is always correct when it decides to intervene in other countries.
Finally, let us return to the question of why if domestic policy in the United States is determined by very wealthy capitalists, why that same greed and desire for profits and power should not also extend to foreign countries? Those who own a country also control the repressive apparatus of the state. In other words, the police, army and the national security apparatus are in the control of the capitalists. If one doubts this fact, look at the history of Europe. Weren't nearly all the wars caused by the territorial and monetary aspirations of the rich nobles and kings? Does one notice any massive demonstrations by the poor for a war which does not benefit them in the least? Consequently, if the ruling class of the United States control the armed forces would they not use that army to satisfy the same hunger for wealth and power which they exhibit at home? I believe the answer is an emphatic yes, and all those leftists who believe the United States is not involved in the least in Iran are dead wrong.
Going to very popular leftist web sites and finding myself seemingly all alone in this opinion, I was very despairing that people who understood capitalism could not understand its consequences, namely imperialism. Now, I see that Paul Craig Roberts, Phil Wilayto, James Petras and others have joined me in my opinion. Michael Parenti once called the CIA, "Capitalism's International Army," and I couldn't express the situation any better.
Gary Sudborough
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The 'unreality' of the left.
05.07.2010 12:44
"Yes its very bad that people are killed for breaking a countries law but the USA still has the death penalty to my knowledge, as do many of the countries that the USA and UK support and send free aid to (free aid paid for by us via the tax system, is usually weapons, torture devices, etc.), the death penalty is the death penalty!"
"TBH the USA using the banned chemical weapon white phosphorus on civilians and polluting the land of any country they want to acquire, with nuclear waste and other chemicals that commit genocide over generations through disease and deformities is far worse & is never in the news."
The US does still have the death penalty and just a few weeks ago allowed a man to be executed by firing squad...the man chose the method of his execution but the fact that this 'choice' is still on the US statute books belies the underlying barbarity that underpins the US.
But we need to understand that the death penalty in whatever form it takes is not just about punishing those who transgress the law. It is also used to legitimise and consolidate the states power and authority over the people it governs.
What is the difference between an execution which is carried out in a room, away from the public gaze, and an execution that takes place in a public square, while the locals are forced out into the road to 'observe'?
I'll tell you. One is state santioned punishment to uphold the law (a disgusting waste of human life), and the other is the law being used to impose power over the people and to underpin the authority of the state and the party that makes up the state (a disgusting waste of innocent human life). In Iran, they have already rejected the President and have charged him with defrauding the people by corrupting the election of 2009. The executions which have followed...are illegitimate displays of power, that the Iranian people do not accept nor consent to allow.
The death penalty, is not just the death penalty.
And what will happen if the Iranian clerics receive sufficient protection from current anti-US feeling and survive until 'the next time'? Will the 'left' be comfortable with 'surviving' a regime that carries out hangings in public, limb amputation in industrial metal presses for petty crimes, the continued execution of women for offending male sensibilities. The continued execution of those who protest in Iran and are likely to sanctioned by an entity (God) that they cannot appeal to nor plead with.
While the 'left' turns a blind eye to the needs of the Iranian people, then the 'left' is every bit as illegitimate and as belligerent as the object of its ire. The 'left' needs to understand that the approaching confrontation, is likely to leave it dead in the water, morally, ethically and ideologically.
The Iranian people need our support, our expertise, our knowledge and our concern for humanity. The coming confrontation is going to happen. In reality, the antiwar movement is not going to be able to prevent this. You either support the Iranian people so they can take control for themselves and will be well placed to avoid the baggage that will appear from US speculators (who are sure to arrive if they smell a profit) or you simply wait for the inevitable, and pointlessly charge up and down the street with placards trying to engage a British public who have nothing but scorn for you for allowing yet another war!
The Iranian people should expect to be able to relieve themselves of the religious elite, while at the same time being able to control what comes next.
Gary Sudborough
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http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/the-great-divide-iran-and-leftists-by-gary-sudborough/