Since the Iranian authorities are so wonderfully efficient and super speedy at vote counting — so much so that they could announce the full results of tens of millions of votes in less than two hours after the closing of polling stations, then surely they could have just taken one more, day and counted all the votes one more time, just to make sure; with different campaigns’ representatives present, etc., no?

Yeah, I know. That’s just an insane idea! Better to just attack peaceful demonstrators in the streets, shoot and kill people and precipitate a huge and uncontrollable crisis of legitimacy.

Here’s another good one. The Press TV’s(Iran) man was being grilled by a BBC anchorman about the report of irregularities (in more than 50 cities) that the Interior Ministry had just released, and the Press TV man was adamant that these were not ‘irregularities’ but rather, in the language of the ministry, ’statistical miscalculations.’ Interesting choice of words. For, you see, vote counting falls within the realm of arithmetic, and mostly one function of it only: you know, adding up (the votes). Statistics, on the other hand, fall within the realm of predictions (of trends). So, they are actually saying that the announced results were basically predictions they made, and very optimistically wishful ones at that, of how the voters in different localities could have, would have, or might have voted!

* * *

Getting back to reality, the situation on the streets of Iran has moved far beyond bean counting, and increasingly more radical slogans are being raised on the streets. This has got the system seriously worried, hence their extreme crackdown.

The larger political questions are enormous. Most essentially, how clear is the strategic vision here and how portentous can this spontaneously erupted movement be? Let us not lose sight of the fact that the people took to the streets as a result of an unexpected insult of an ‘outcome’ of a sham election they willingly participated in. That makes for a highly contradictory movement. These contradictions cannot last long without some serious consequences. The more radical and more clear-sighted of the Iranian working classes have harbored very few illusions regarding this system’s capability for being reformed in any meaningful way.

So, the spark for the movement came from a politically ambiguous place; but the insult was great enough to spark a big reaction. And when people who have been enduring a harsh dictatorship finally take to the streets, there are a whole lot of stored-up-in-pressure-cooker grievances that will come pouring out. Hence, the dynamic situation.

As I have said before, here were the people in their millions willing to play along with the fantasy that the system could be reformed, ever so slightly, all of it within the theocratic setup. All they were asking for was that the government take its own propaganda seriously and respect the “Republic” part of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and additionally give them some slack on the “Islamic” part. They were even willing to use the system’s own tools (the fraudulent voting procedures), with all their faults, in order to very politely request some minor changes. No radical demands at all. Quite conservative, in fact.

And when even that was not only withheld, but an actual electoral coup was organized and carried out in broad daylight in order to forever block any idea of the possibility of ANY change, or any talk of change . . . well, the people had to see things clearly since there was no other way of seeing things.

And still, in case it was unclear, came the final nail in the head from Khamenei, in the now-infamous address in his first post-elections Friday prayer sermon, where he defended the election results as absolutely fair, claiming that the ‘nation’ had a perfect electoral system which, he claimed in no uncertain terms, “it is absolutely impossible to cheat.”

[As mentioned above, The Interior Ministry did later admit to "some irregularities," to the tune of three million votes.]

Khamenei did a lot in that address: by putting a stamp of absolute approval on the electoral coup, he practically changed the ruling system. But also, he reminded the “nation”, in case they had forgotten, that he himself was in fact the absolute ruler, the final arbiter of all matters personal and political, and that was that. His speech, mannerism and general rhetorical posture were replete with indications that Ahmadinejad is actually nothing but his puppet. And, of course, Khamenei also cleared the way for the brutal crackdown by the shock troopers and all the other “legal” means at the disposal of the Iranian state’s machinery of oppression.

That made things boldly and doubly unambiguous, which helped people to see the ball, not just in their court, but coming fast at them, only a few feet away now, and it was a canon ball or a bomb, not a ball. As a result, the more radical voices are coming out and raising sharper slogans.

Most significantly, the Iranian people have not been shaken or intimidated too much by the vicious and cowardly attacks by the state’s machinery of oppression: a methodical intimidation machine with knife wielding thugs to disrupt peaceful mass demonstrations and create chaos and mayhem (the first round of deaths were mostly by knife wounds), with snipers shooting at people in the streets below, with black uniformed, stick wielding motorcycle gangs running at people, with government goons ransacking university student dorms, killing scores and taking countless students to secret prisons, with government-provided ambulances delivering the dead and the injured to unknown locations.

Most of the ‘reformist’ ‘leaders’ are absent, silenced, cowed, or else cutting deals behind the scenes, yet people are moving on their own. Which is a good development. People en masse have to come to see that the ‘reformists’ are actually part of their problems, if we are to have some fundamental changes in the long term.

More increasingly, there are people raising the slogan of “Death to Khamenei,” indicating the emergence of more radical segments of the population — as opposed to “Death to the dictator,” which Mousavi supporters voice, maintaining their ambiguity toward the ‘Dear Leader’ Khamenei, at least for now. And, as a result, we have seen reports — from the streets of Iran, as well as from demonstrations abroad in London and Paris, for example — of Mousavi’s people trying to put a leash (preferably a heavy lid) on any alternative, more radical opposition voices.

Meanwhile, more militant labor unions, having struggled for their most basic rights for the entirety of the life of the Islamic “Republic”, were quick to come out in support of the people’s movement and in defense of people’s rights, even though most of them had boycotted the elections. These unionists, throughout the years, have consistently and correctly characterized any participation in sham elections as legitimizing the system. But, as true radicals throughout history have done, they understand deeply the necessity of solidarity and they are standing with the people, supporting their demands for fairness, and in absolute and unambiguous opposition to the criminal state violence.

The Iranian people’s movement is also creating its own publications in abundance. We have already seen how an entire generation has turned into street journalists using the electronic means at their disposal. But, traditional platforms for political news and analysis such as newspapers (in hard copy and cyber forms) are also spreading fast. One of the more inspiring ones is Khiaban (The Street), which has already had (I think) five issues published and distributed, both online and hard copies on the streets. It has a definite left wing approach, with connections to the labor, the students and the women’s movements.

Another innovative publication is dedicated to identifying (and spreading news of the identities of) the plainclothes undercover thugs who have been attacking the people. These thugs have been knifing people, using chains and brass knuckles, separating individuals from the demonstrations, taking them to back alleys and doing their business, in the most cowardly fashion. And now people are coming up with their own defense.

But, if this is to remain a mass movement, the immediate task is to respond to the state oppressive crackdown in creative ways that further the political struggle by changing the dynamic of the unfolding events. I think a general, nationwide strike is the most appropriate tactic now. Since the security forces are occupying the streets in huge numbers, by simply refusing to come out at all, by staying home, by not going to work, to classes, by making the streets look ghost-like, by bringing the country to a virtual halt and preventing business-as-usual to get back on track, such a move can be a most effective psychological, as well as a political, tactical victory.

But, of course, going by the increasing number of lines of demarcation emerging, on the one hand between the secularists and the system’s supporters, and on the other between the two factions of the ruling elite and their respective followers among the people, it will be anybody’s guess what the next move will be.

But one thing is for sure, the Islamic Republic of Iran, in its current militaristic-repressive formation and at this historical moment, has very little if any legitimacy for an absolute majority of the Iranian people. That is a fact now and will not change. And that is thanks to the daring move made by a people who took to the streets, even though they were misled and delusional about the possibilities for real change within the existing system. Just goes to show how quickly political dynamics can change as soon as the people rise up and enter the political arena. They had had it up to their ears with oppression, with arbitrary intrusions of the state and their murderous ways, and they decided to pave their own way out of that hell.

On June 26, people around the world will be standing in solidarity with the Iranian people’s movement for justice. Please join them and show your brotherly and sisterly love.

In 1906, as a result of that national surge demanding true legitimacy from the rulers, Iran established the first parliament on the Asian continent, and forced an absolutist monarchy into accepting constitutional rule by a parliament chosen by the people.

That parliamentary system, by 1920, had been overthrown by Reza Shah, and an absolutist dictatorship was reestablished, which in turn was overturned by the people by the close of 1940s, and by 1951 the people had regained their relative sovereignty. In 1953, that too was overthrown by a coup carried out by the CIA against our popularly elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mossadegh, and the second phase of the Pahlavi dictatorship ensued, which lasted until 1978.

Ever since the establishment of theocracy in 1979, we have witnessed repeated occurrences of mass uprisings in Iran. The last major wave was in 1999, led by university students, and was swiftly crushed by the government (at the time headed by a ‘reformist’, Mohammad Khatami).

So, throughout the twentieth century, we as a nation did not stop grappling with the hugely complex social problem of legitimacy of the state, as different dictatorships arose and established themselves as newer, more effective machineries of oppression, and as we struggled against them. That fight continues today.

When reality happens in equally painful and delightful leaps, such as we are witnessing now, and as it speeds right past rigid minds standing by with gaping mouths, mouthing knee-jerk, reflexive thoughts not considered at all, we salute reality!

And hope we can keep up.

* * *

One left-seeming analysis being presented about the election results in Iran is the ‘class analysis,’ epitomized by a few articles that have appeared in recent days (no names necessary, since that makes things personal, and I’m trying to keep it political here). I even heard the ‘class analysis’ (sic.) used on the BBC! The BBC’s approach was actually not too different from those presented by some on the US left.

Real class analysis looks for and explains historical and materialist trends in a society (‘materialist’ meaning here, containing real social substance); all else is superficial journalism.

Not taking into account Iran’s complex social history at all — and amazingly enough not even considering the very context of a theocratic setup as relevant, superficial journalism’s entire argument is constructed on a presupposition never examined: that Iran is just another regular country, with a generally democratic-looking system, with its own peculiar way of holding elections, which we must respect, run as best as they can (of course, they have problems, but who doesn’t?); but, all in all, there’s regular opportunity for people to express their choices, just like in the US (and God knows America has deep problems of its own with democracy). So, no matter how disappointed the losers in the Iranian elections, they simply ‘should bite the bullet,’ and move on.

At least eight people (some reports from inside Iran claim 32) have indeed taken bullets. These are peaceful, unarmed demonstrators shot dead (and there are video clips to prove this, thanks to the resourcefulness of our people) by sharp shooters from windows overlooking streets where peaceful demonstrations were being attacked by plain-clothes government vigilantes breaking up massive spontaneous, again, peaceful demonstrations expressing outrage at an excessively oppressive machine that had just stolen their votes in broad daylight.

Why the need for attacking peaceful demonstrations if the elections were truly won cleanly? Why the need to arrest and detain hundreds of people, of political leaders and intellectuals of the reformist camp? Why the need to disrupt communications?

But, I am digressing.

Along with the ‘bite the bullet’ attitude, some analysis must be presented, of course, since we are writing a political piece. So, let’s see what it is. It is claimed that, first of all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got exactly the same proportion of votes as he did in the 2005 election when he beat Hashemi Rafsanjani. But, since that’s the only historical reference looked up by lazy journalism, all the social changes that have happened between then and now lose their significance in the accounts of superficial observers.

A crucial thing missed here is that back in 2005, there too were loud claims of vote rigging against Ahmadinejad, who had been greatly helped by the Revolutionary Guards’ and the Basijs’ disciplined mobilization for vote getting. Those complaints died out eventually. But, from right after the 2005 elections, it became clear to Iran observers that major political maneuvering had begun between, on the one hand, the elite siding with the powerful Hashemi Rafsanjani and, on the other, those siding with the conservatives aligned with Khamenei, whose front man is Ahmadinejad. In this year’s elections, Hashemi Rafsanjani lent his political weight to the reformists who, just like the Democrats in the US, are the only ones with realistic, if not the best, chances of inspiring large participation in the elections.

It was for these very reasons that the reformist factions knew very well that major vote rigging would be tried again. If it could be done twice in the US, it sure as hell could be done twice in Iran. And for these very reasons, for months before the election day the reformists had studied well the procedures in place, looking for flaws, had found plenty, and had proposed remedies aplenty, all of which had been turned down. So, going into the ring, they knew they were stepping into a fixed match.

Ahmadinejad’s camp, sure enough, was prepared, both for the ballot-casting day and for the lead-up. They used the first-ever live TV debates between presidential candidates in Iran the same way a sensationalist lawyer would in some courtroom scene in a TV series. Picture a closing presented in a case looking bleakly headed south; lawyer strikes out by throwing a complete and utter Hail Mary pass: espousing the most astonishing stories, filled with accusations and innuendoes, muddying the water to the nth degree, making it all sound like he really didn’t want to say any of this, but was forced to reveal the truth, no matter how rude, for justice must be served. Amen!

And we saw how they conducted the actual ‘elections’. (For those interested in facts: even Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, the most senior cleric in Iran, a huge, lifelong fan of theocracy, came out in defense of the opposition, stating that nobody in their right mind would believe the announced results.)

To get back to the class analysis thing . . . For the ‘class’ part of the analysis, it is stated that Ahmadinejad’s constituency, beyond the ideological armed forces of Revolutionary Guards and the Basijis, consists of the working class, the peasantry and the poor; in short, the way more numerous classes. In other words, in this highly simplistic picture, ALL the Iranian working classes, all the peasants, and all the poor were unanimously behind Ahmadinejad.

This is a very improbable claim. Its TV version was backed by repeated loops of reportage by CNN- and BBC-type news agencies, right before the elections, when their film crews were sent to a few rural spots that had benefited from the Ahmadinejad government’s handouts, where enthusiasm was displayed for him. These scenes from a handful of villages, in a country whose rural population adds up to about 33% of 70 million people, are definitely not representative of the larger picture of rural Iran.

The real rural Iran is beset by desperation, more than anything else, and most likely can’t be bothered with any such niceties as ‘elections’ (Iran’s rural population has historically been very deeply apolitical). Due to government mismanagement, consistent over the thirty years of this regime’s existence, farming infrastructure has been deteriorating steadily, leading to a huge migration from the country to the city. In the past 30-year period, the urban-to-rural ratios have exactly reversed.

During the same period, the population of Iran has grown very rapidly also; it literally doubled from 35 million to 70 million. Yet, another factor: all these demographic transformations were occurring in a country whose government relies on the sale of oil as a main source of revenue (more than 50% of its income. I’ll explain why this is important, below).

Add another historical-transformational trend: with the rise of theocracy by 1979, and considering that the mullahs are tightly allied with the merchant (bazaari) classes, the overall stewardship of the national economy was transferred from the hands of the industrial to that of the commercial bourgeoisie. Consequently, commerce, buying and selling, instead of production, has become the more significant economic activity.

Except for military (and related) industries, of course. There, successive governments have consistently invested well. But, just about all other branches of industrial capital, mostly private, have not had an easy time of developing; definitely not nearly as rapidly as the population growth coupled with rural-urban migration would require, in order to maintain a stable employment level and to have some, even if modest, economic growth rate.

Remember that oil, as an industry, is not labor intensive at all; it is highly capital intensive. So, though it brings in the dough for the state, as an industry it doesn’t employ a significant workforce. (In any event, most oil workers in Iran enjoy a very healthy tradition of leftist thinking and have proven their progressive mettle in many historical battles. You can bet they are not deluded on a mass scale.)

The socio-historical trends mentioned above (the doubling of the population, plus the mass migration from rural to urban areas, plus a much lowered rate of development of labor-employing industries) all add up to a huge number of buyers and sellers of lots of things, haggling constantly, hustling endlessly and, much more importantly, this has led to endemically excessive rates of part-employment and underemployment, creating a situation in which millions of people must weave at least two, three (at times more) jobs, just to keep their head above water, just to make a living. All of which becomes much more painful under hellish inflation rates, which shot up rapidly during Ahmadinejad’s rule.

Now add to that already socially heady mix the insults thrown in by a highly intrusive dictatorship that claims to hold power and authority over your most private acts even, and what you get is a lot of very hard working people who can get really pissed off very easily, and very quickly. Do you see where this is going?

Now, let’s bring it back to the elections. The situation in Iran has changed dramatically in the four years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency. The world in general has changed dramatically in four years. The economic situation in Iran has gotten far worse, not only because of Ahmadinejad’s mismanagement (which has no doubt had its effects), but also intensified by all the above-mentioned trends, plus the effects of the sanctions, and all of these within a worldwide depression of the last two years.

But, and this is important, the economic deterioration during Ahmadinejad’s first term occurred in a time of very high oil income for the government, making it more difficult to explain away the economic troubles as general results of the world depression. In the four years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency, Iranian state income was nearly twice as much (in oil revenues) as it was during Khatami’s eight years.

So, a majority of the Iranians were quite rightly very disillusioned with Ahmadinejad’s mismanagement. No amount of radical sounding rhetoric can hide these things. No wonder then that he felt compelled to hand out potatoes to the abject poor, to avert starvation. But his sacks of potatoes, or insurance for the rural poor, as welcome and necessary and popular as they are (even if they didn’t cover everybody in need), are mere Band-Aids on a shotgun wound after the horse was dead.

* * *

We come to the final element to be considered when providing a ‘class analysis’ of the Iranian political life: The most class-conscious, the most politically active of the Iranian working classes are by far the most anti-government. How do we know this? We know this because they invariably end up in jail.

It is interesting that articles claiming to be presenting a ‘class analysis’ completely ignore the significance of all the jailed labor leaders in Iran, and ignore the anti-labor posture consistently displayed by all governments in Iran’s modern history: that the current government is structurally anti-labor is well understood by those segments of Iran’s working classes not ideologically in the service of the regime.

Why else would the government bother imprisoning a mere bus driver, Mansoor Osanloo? (for his and others’ info, see here) How much of a political threat can a bus driver be? Them be shaky foundations, indeed, that tremble at the sight of organized bus drivers. Osanloo is the head of the bus drivers’ union in Tehran, and has been a political prisoner, in and out of jail (currently in) for the past five years. That’s just one example. There are lots more (and you can read about some of them (in Farsi) here and here; if you can’t read Farsi, find an Iranian friend).

The most organized of the working classes represent a significant portion of the class of people affected most deeply and painfully by a badly managed capitalist economy. This has political consequences. Vast numbers of Iranian working people have turned apathetic, and simply do not participate in the political machinations of the system. When they do participate in significant numbers, as was the case in these last elections, it is because they see a realistic chance for using the differences between the rulers for opposing the establishment candidate, and perhaps winning some concessions from this oppressive system; demands that are likely to inspire participation among the lower middle classes and the middle classes.

Incidentally, the so-called ‘middle classes’ are working classes. They are simply more likely to be the better educated, better paid part of the working classes. That’s all. The fact that the word ‘middle class’ was invented by Americans to suppress the perception of actual existence of classes in North America is something to be studied in its own place, but, as somebody said once, “A rose is a rose by any name.”

So the most fundamental distinction to bear in mind is that those segments of the working classes who do participate in the electoral process in Iran are by no means representatives of a homogenized class, and thankfully cannot automatically be assumed as representing all the working classes, all the peasants and all the poor.

Just like all other classes in Iran, the working classes are also divided in many ways: between believers (in theocracy) and secularists, between supporters of the system and opponents of the system, between the different camps of the system, and our working classes, too, contain large segments of non-participants and non-believers who occasionally like to show up and cast protest votes.

And another thing: Just because somebody is from the working class (in any country) does not mean they are universal angels, and whatever they exhale is divine. Remember that the European fascists’ most numerous support-base was among the working classes. And the American leftists should be well familiar with the phenomenon known as ‘Reagan Democrats’: i.e., white working class people who voted against their class interest.

* * *

The one crucial thing to bear in mind is that these ‘elections’ would not be called elections by anybody in the American left if those exact electoral procedures — complete with the allegiance to the Bible as the requirement to participate — were replicated in the US, overseen by a government run by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (yes, back from dead) and their amalgamated gang of the American televangelists and their social support networks and vigilantes. If you can do the mental switch and still find that you have no problem participating in such Christian evangelist-conducted ‘elections’, then go ahead and call the Iranian ‘elections’ elections. Call it a horse, for all I care.

The reality is that the situation in Iran has by now moved beyond the technicalities of the electoral procedures; the Iranian people have forced the situation into one of a crisis of legitimacy for the regime.

The Iranian people sensed a deep fracture within the ruling establishment — something that was clearly expressed in astonishing language and tone in the televised-for-the-first-time live debates between the candidates — and they have seized their chance to use the divide between their rulers to their own advantage.

The people may have taken to the streets under the excuse of the elections, and may have been encouraged by the rhetoric of the ‘reformist’ camp in favor of some breathing room in the suffocating political and cultural atmosphere imposed on them, but they have forced the debate further. They are openly, and in millions across the country, questioning the legitimacy of the establishment, represented at the moment by Ahmadinejad. The people, in short, have moved beyond Mousavi and the reformists, but are still willing to go along with the tactics formulated by reformist leaders . . . for the moment.

We will see how things unfold. Most likely, a heavy hand is just around the corner, trying on some spiked gloves. For the time being, though, hundreds of thousands of people in Iran are opting not to ‘bite the bullet’ and move on, but to make a movement and, even, take bullets. A much more courageous stand that generates a lot more inspiration!

Salute!

So, let’s put things in some context.

The presidential elections of June 12 were held within a theocratic system. In this system, in order to run for a political office, candidates must swear allegiance to the theocratic setup. From its inception, therefore, the theocracy has divided the entire population into two major political groups: khodi (literally meaning ‘of us,’ those who support the theocracy) and the gheyre-khodi (the others). This is the exact language used, and participation in the elections are reserved purely for the benefit of the khodis (those who believe in the system), who have been divided into different camps from the beginning of the theocracy. In older days, they were split between the left wing, conservative and the pragmatist camps, and more recently the opposing factions have changed some of their tactics and underlying economic policies, and are organized into the ‘conservative’ and ‘reformist’ camps. Within each camp, there are further divisions.

Within this setup, I for one can state without qualifications that ‘elections’ cannot mean anything but a contest between candidates that are absolutely acceptable to a theocratic establishment. This, in turn, means that ALL elections, to varying degrees, are stolen elections, since the participation of a huge majority of Iranians as candidates, by the theocratic Constitution, has been preempted from way in advance. The right of participation in presidential elections in Iran, for the past three decades, has been stolen and securely put aside as the privilege of a tiny minority of men only.

* * *

Now, let’s look at the circumstances of these particular 2009 ‘elections’, bearing in mind again that the election process was and has always been un-free to begin with.

First, let’s look at one particular opinion poll that is claimed to have predicted a landslide win by Ahmadinejad: the poll taken by The Center for Public Opinion.

This poll, taken between May 11 and May 20, indicates 34% support for Ahmadinejad and 14% for Mousavi; Karrubi and Rezaee receive respectively 2% and 1%. However, 27% of those polled did not know whom they supported. Of those who ‘did not know,’ more than 60%, according to their answers to other questions, were characterized by the pollsters as ‘reformist minded.’ Further, 22% of the respondents are unaccounted for (apparently 15% refused to answer any questions, but the remaining 7% is unexplained). That brings the potential split between the two leading candidates at about 45% for Ahmadinejad and about 30% for Mousavi (discounting the 22% unaccounted).

Further, as the pollsters admitted when releasing their findings, the most likely scenario was, in their view, one in which a second round would be necessary, since they couldn’t see anybody having the potential to sweep the elections in the first round.

Another major factor ignored is that the opinion poll was conducted between May 11th and 20th. In politics, a lot happens in a three-week time period. The presidential campaigns (particularly of the ‘reformists’) really took off during the last three weeks, and particularly the last ten days of the campaign period. We know how opinion polls of equivalent elections in the U.S., for example, go on daily and hourly until the very last hours of campaigning. No such follow-up data were available here, and the most telling data (those from ‘the eve’ of the elections) are totally missing. Anybody observing the elections could see how much more raucous the campaigns got as the closing of the campaign period approached.

Now, I will not go into the veracity of the kind of knowledge you can get based on an opinion poll of a mere 1,001 people (220 of whom are unaccounted for) in a country with an eligible electorate of more than fifty-five million people.

Likewise, I won’t over-generalize my own paranoia about total strangers calling to ask very directed questions (even when it happens in the U.S.). But, I can easily imagine that if I were sitting in my living room in Iran and got a phone call from a total stranger claiming to be a pollster, I’d be very unlikely to give any truthful answers that might piss off somebody listening in on my phone conversation, a very realistic fear felt by just about everybody in Iran.

So, at least in my book, all the above considerations taken together mean that the actual numbers (of supporters for Mousavi and Ahmadinejad) must have been closer than suggested by the above opinion poll, meaning much closer than the 2-to-1 outcome in favor of Ahmadinejad. In the least, I can be sure that a ‘landslide’ was not a highly probable outcome.

But, we can also look at the behavior of the functionaries of the ruling class in Iran for better indications of whether or not ‘vote rigging’ took place.

Before the June 12 elections, both Karrubi and Mousavi drafted and proposed to the Guardian Council a set of additional protocols for assuring a clean process during the elections. Obviously they had realistic fears of fraud. But the Supreme Leader rejected the adoption of any extra precautions, insinuating that the election procedures were transparent enough as is, in effect chiding the two candidates for casting doubts on the cleanliness of the procedures already in place.

Some of the procedures, however, were in fact very faulty. According to reports, prior to the elections, “Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi sent a letter to Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, chair of the country’s powerful Guardian Council, citing discrepancies in the run-up to the election. According to the letter, the actual number of ballots printed for the first round of voting is 59.6 million, but the Interior Ministry officially says the number is 56 million.” (“Reformist candidates complain of too many ballots,” Inter Press Service, June 10, 2009) Meaning, there were at least a few million extra ballots hiding somewhere. Given that more than fifteen million eligible voters did not vote, that amounts to about eighteen million ballots that could be had fraudulently.

The same report also states: “Ali Akbar Mohtashami Pour and Morteza Alviri, of the Mousavi and Karroubi campaigns’ committees on poll supervision, also said that the number of electoral stamps circulating is ‘twice the number of polling sites plus 10 percent.’ These extra stamps were a particular worry since, it was argued, any attempted vote rigging could be organized, “through use of extra ballots and stamps and through use of additional boxes and mobile ballot boxes, especially as we have been informed that soldiers’ birth certificates have been collected at military bases.”

Also, from the above-cited IPS report: “Saeed Razavi Faghih, a spokesperson for the Karroubi campaign, told IPS, ‘Inviting the [pro-Ahmadinejad] Revolutionary Guard Corps to supervise ballot-box security instead of the police has raised serious doubts for us.’” And these were some of the red flags thrown up before the elections.

Other inconsistencies:

The Iranian filmmaker, Makhmalbaf, who worked with Mousavi’s campaign, in interviews to different news outlets, including BBC and Radio Farda, has claimed that Mousavi’s campaign received phone calls from interior ministry on the night of the election day informing them that they looked bound for victory, telling them they could go ahead with preparing their victory speech, but also asking them to not gloat too much, so as to not humiliate Ahmadinejad supporters. If Ahmadinejad were headed for a clear ‘landslide’, why would the interior ministry make such a phone call?

Another suspicious move was Ahmadinejad campaign’s statement on the night of the elections, declaring that his victory was supported by the other conservative candidate in the race, Mohsen Rezaee. The next day, however, it became clear that was the opposite of truth, as Rezaee came out expressing serious doubts about the announced results, and by Sunday (June 14th) he along with Mousavi filed a complaint with the Guardian Council (responsible for certifying election results), demanding that he wants to see the serial numbers for the ballots cast. He must know a thing or two about how you can get cheated. And again, this is Mohsen Rezaee we are talking about: a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, a staunch supporter of the theocratic system in Iran — no imperialist stooge.

Another irregularity was that, as per usual, the results were not certified (before being announced) by the Guardian Council, constitutionally recognized as the body responsible for overseeing the elections, for double checking all the ballots and announcing the official results, usually after a three-day period (to clear up any possible complaints).

What did happen was an announcement made by the Interior minister (not the Guardian Council) in a very hurried form, and despite the fact that there were loud complaints still unresolved regarding the elections just held. Subsequently, when reformist supporters took to the streets to express their outrage, more than a hundred reformist leaders were detained over the weekend.

The very loud and public objections voiced initially by Mousavi are now voiced by all three candidates who ran against Ahmadinejad. They are also joined by a large number of parliamentarians and groups of clerics, even in Qom, the most conservative of all theocratic bastions.

Given that within the already highly restrictive electoral procedures, the establishment’s conventional protocols were changed so much so that it has created such a large outcry, one is quite right to suspect something was done to tilt the results, in an unfair fashion, toward a pre-determined outcome.

So, it is certainly not the case that Mousavi, America’s candidate, and his middle class, designer-eyeglass-wearing supporters were the only ‘sore losers.’ A large part of the establishment is up in arms. Otherwise, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei would not have felt it necessary to issue a public statement insisting that the Guardian Council look ‘carefully’ into the allegations of vote fraud.

News reports are now saying that the Guardian Council will indeed look into the matter. According to PressTV, “The spokesman of Iran’s Guardian Council says the body will issue its ruling on the results of the country’s presidential elections within 10 days.”

* * *

Now, it is of course true that imperialist mainstream media have their own agenda and will take advantage of the situation on the streets of Iran. But, what is new there? All manner of media will (as they always do) look at any situation in Iran and agitate their respective audiences in whichever direction they please.

And we on the left also have to do our part in contextualizing the events. Just because the imperialist media are screaming foul, it does not mean that everything to do with the just-concluded ‘elections’ were A-OK. Also, the flip side is, I doubt very much that a large segment of the Iranian ruling theocrats are collaborating with the imperialists to overthrow themselves!

So, we need to see what is going on. I think to call it a soft-coup is actually more appropriate than to call it vote rigging. ‘Vote rigging’ has meaning when the election process is at least half-free; when explicit religious requirements are put upon candidates before they can even run for office, this does not meet the minimum requirements for an honest election process. What happens in Iranian elections is a very careful selection process, first carried out from above by the Guardian Council, followed by a vote-getting process, which approves one of the already selected.

So, ‘rigging’ votes is explicitly inscribed into the elections, period. A majority of the Iranian population is legally banned from running for the office of president (no women allowed, ever). I am therefore at a loss to see such a process as anything but fundamentally rigged.

Those on the Left in the U.S. who are screaming in defense of the ‘integrity’ of the elections in Iran, and talk about our duty to ‘respect the decision of the Iranian people’ assign unrealistic characteristics that do not exist in the Iranian elections.

I wonder how the U.S. Left would characterize any elections in America which, first and foremost, required of the candidates an explicitly avowed allegiance to the Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ (with a particular denomination’s scriptures, mind you), and banned all women, all other religious tendencies, and ALL secularists from running for the post of president? The fact that the Left cannot mentally juxtapose the two situations points in my view to latent racism. The thinking is akin to absolute cultural relativism, which assumes that surely those rag-heads over in Eye-ran don’t mind a theocracy. “After all, it is in their culture!”

Well, it is not in our culture, and we do mind theocracy. The evidence of it is on the streets of Iran right now.

* * *

There is a history to remember here; the history of skin-shedding that this theocracy has witnessed. Here, I am not talking about all the thousands of the opposition members executed, or jailed and tortured or else chased away. I am talking about the internal purges.

One famous coup d’état against one of their own that took place very early in the life of the Islamic Republic occurred in June 1981, with the ‘impeachment’ of Banisadr, the first post-revolution president, by the parliament at Khomeini’s instigation. (Banisadr went underground and eventually escaped from Iran and currently lives in France) Later, in April 1982 there was a coup against Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a close aid to Khomeini during his exile in France, and a foreign minister. He was accused of plotting to kill Khomeini and summarily executed.

There was also a famous coup against Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, one-time designated successor to Grand Ayatollah Khomeini for the position of Supreme Leader. Montazeri had both revolutionary and impeccable religious credentials (as a Grand Ayatollah, which is like a PhD in the field). Despite (because of?) his supremely high qualifications, he was causing constant headaches for the heads of the theocratic setup. In an interview published in Keyhan, “in early 1989, [Montazeri] criticized Khomeini in language that is said to have sealed “his political fate”:

The denial of people’s rights, injustice and disregard for the revolution’s true values have delivered the most severe blows against the revolution. Before any [post-war] reconstruction, there must first be a political and ideological reconstruction . . . This is something that the people expect of a leader.

Further, when after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, a massive wave of rushed political executions engulfed Iran’s political prison houses, Montazeri was among the most high-ranking critics of these mass killings. The Wikipedia entry for him explains further:

Still worse was the publication abroad and broadcast on BBC of [Montazeri's] letters condemning post-war wave of executions in March [1989]. Montazeri also criticized Khomeini’s fatwa ordering the killing of author Salman Rushdie, saying: “People in the world are getting the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people.

By the end of March 1989, Khomeini had heard enough, and declared that Montazeri had ‘resigned’ from his position. Montazeri went off graciously asking his supporters to not utter a word in his support. Khamenei, at the time a mid-ranking Hojatoleslam (equivalent of an undergrad degree), was speedily promoted in religious ranks to an Ayatollah so as to qualify him for the position of vali-e faqih (guardian jurist), and that’s how the current Supreme Leader Khamenei got to be supreme.

We can conclude, then, that skin shedding, metamorphosis, periodical transformations and adaptations to the perceived conditions in the world are a systemic characteristic of the rulers of the Iranian theocracy.

The reason I say that a ‘coup’ is more appropriate to talk about than ‘vote rigging’ is because it’s more realistic. I think the government of Iran realizes that despite Obama’s reconciliatory gestures, the overall posture of the imperialists toward Iran has not changed fundamentally, so they don’t view this as a time to lower their guards.

The system, as it is, cannot be reformed without some major pain. The most basic reforms of any kind and magnitude would open up a wide spectrum of socio-political spheres that need serious reconsideration. More importantly, any reform of the existing constitution will eventually have to be approved first by the Guardian Council (a non-elected, appointed body), and eventually by the Supreme Leader. This means, that unless the post of the Supreme Leader, along with any structures standing above the parliament, are abolished (in effect, destroying the system), all attempts at ‘reform’ will remain highly moot.

So, from the regime’s point of view, it is best that any talk of ‘reforms’ stop for the time being (if not forever), so that the state can concentrate on more existential worries. Hence, the speedy announcement of the results, since it was already decided what was to be the outcome.

That is how I can understand the ‘rigged elections’ that put an end to the hopes of the ‘reformers’ and approved the continuation of the Ahmadinejad presidency. All of this, of course, may change with the deliberations of the Guardian Council, although the overturning of the elections’ outcome is not very likely.

Most definitely, these are superficial likenesses, but they could also point to deeper parallels. For one, both political systems protect and prolong the rule of an absolute minority. Another deep similarity is that in both political setups, exclusively for the participation of the ruling elites (no matter how many factions they come in), a certain level of ‘democracy’ (meaning here, tolerance) is institutionally allowed/required.

Now to the superficial similarities. In these presidential elections, Iranians have a ‘candidate of change’ (yes, literally the same slogan) in the person of Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Now, this is very interesting, since Mir-Hossein Mousavi, currently a member of the ‘reformist’ camp in Iran, was the prime minister (when the post existed) from 1981 to 1989. Back then he was a member of the ‘left wing’ due to his advocacy for a state run economy. Nowadays, he has changed indeed and supports all manner of privatization (as do all ‘reformers’).

Mousavi’s premiership coincided with the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), during which his economic management carried the country through very rough times. Among other innovations, he introduced the coupon system that made sure everybody received the minimum ration of needed nutrients during those hard times.

Mousavi’s premiership also coincided with the bloodiest period of post-revolutionary internal violence against the people in Iran. Not only was the country engulfed in a World War I-type of high-fatality military conflict for eight years (which required active-to-the-point-of-forceful recruiting of people to send to the fronts), the new regime was also going through its consolidation; a period that has historically included eradication of internal opponents. During this period, thousands of dissidents were jailed, tortured and executed in summary executions after phony ‘trials’.

In one ominous event, at the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war, in the summer of 1988, according to human rights organizations in and outside Iran, between two and five thousand political prisoners were summarily executed. Among the executed were some who had served their sentences, or could qualify for early release. But, in a deliberate move to ‘clean up’ the political prisons, the government (headed partly by Mousavi) pushed for rushed executions of thousands of these prisoners.

Beside Mousavi’s ‘Elections for Change’ slogan that mirrors Obama’s, another interesting parallel is how Mousavi is situating himself to breach some of the divide between the so-called reformists with the conservatives; just like Obama promising to represent the Democrats and Republicans (not necessarily all the people, mind you).

In elaborate speeches, Mousavi has been mesmerizing university audiences thirsting for anything other than stale lectures filled with long quotations from Koran in Arabic verse, which most people don’t understand, riddled with militant-sounding speechifying typical of the ideological conservatives. Mousavi has been spreading the news that, unlike others, he believes that ‘principled orthodoxy’ (osool-geraa’ee) and ‘reformism’ are but two sides of the same coin, and both are needed for an Islamic society to thrive in the modern world. He calls himself a ‘conservative reformer’ or a ‘reformist conservative’, and does not care which particular way you say it. Mousavi, the ‘change candidate’, is the ‘reformist’ candidate with the biggest following supposedly, and with the best chance of ousting the incumbent president Ahmadinejad.

Another trend that has traveled well across the oceans is the ‘Anybody But’ phenomenon. This year, it finally reached our shores, and we now have the much awaited, ‘Anybody but Ahmadinejad!’ In many ways, he is Iran’s George W. Bush. Just as much as Bush was hated by all but the most dedicated American right-wingers, Ahmadinejad is hated by all but the most dedicated Iranian right-wingers (the Basiji’s and the Revolutionary Guards).

And just like George Bush Jr., Ahmadinejad is un-liked so thoroughly that he has split the Iranian conservatives. There are as many (if not more) conservatives against him as there are for him; hence, the decision by another conservative, Mohsen Rezaee, a former Revolutionary Guards chief commander, to run for the presidency in these elections. Some other bigwig conservatives who have chosen to distance themselves from Ahmadinejad include: Ali Larijani (former chief nuclear negotiator), Mohammad Reza Bahonar (first deputy speaker of Majles), and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf (current Tehran mayor).

Indeed, Ahmadinejad is so not-liked by some conservatives, that he has driven some to the ‘reformist’ camp, presumably to assure Ahmadinejad’s ouster. According to reports, “some major figures in the conservative/principlist camp, led by Mr. Emad Afrough, the Tehran deputy to the 7th Majles (the parliament), announced the formation of a committee in support of Mr. Mousavi.”¹

In short, just like Bush Jr., Ahmadinejad is too much of a divider, does not play well with others, is an anti-unifier of first degree, and that has become a source of deep worry in the Iranian elite establishment.

Naturally all this has really pissed off the Bush-like incumbent, who is just as testy with criticism, and he’s been getting it non-stop for his entire presidency, and with particular vigor during the past few months. In his first nationally televised debate with his ‘reformist’ rival candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the sitting president and candidate Ahmadinejad seemed to have opted for an all-out accusatory posture against all three candidates running against him, claiming, “I am not just running against one candidate. I am opposed by all three candidates,” intoning victimhood.

Of course, he is a fighter and vowed to continue his fight (to paraphrase him) for people and against an unjust gang of about 150 or so people, who, for the 24 years before his administration, controlled the government and tried to establish themselves as autocratic overlords, deciding what’s good for the country and for the people and what’s not good for them, and slowly yet deliberately derailing the Iranian society from the righteous path set by Imam Khomeini (bless his bygone soul), until the will of the people intervened in 2005 and put him, Ahmadinejad, at the helm of the country in order to correct the path of the state, to expose the corruption, and to redirect the country to the path of justice and equality.

The ‘reformists’, though, are not about to let go of a historic opportunity to fool the public in their own fashion, yet again. The ‘reformists’ are (and this is the other silly similarity) the Iranian ‘lesser evils’, and they seem to have sensed that the ‘Anybody but Ahmadinejad’ is putting enough wind in their sails.

[Note: In a constitution that bans from public life any and all political parties not explicitly vowing allegiance to an Inquisition-type theocracy, it is impossible to identify 'elections' as anything but an opportunity to examine different degrees of political meanness. What we have there is a clear, unadulterated case of a cyclical, meaningless 'choice' that comes around every so often between really bad and much worse.]

Be that as it is, a spectacle, especially a political one, can be appreciated by the peoples of many a different country, for any number of reasons. The accusations the politicians throw at each other reveal quite a lot. Likewise, claims made of extravagant successes could be quite entertaining to hear and read about. The more divisive political things look, in short, the more thrilling; especially for the endemically powerless. Participation can indeed be considered tempting, especially when the powerful are visibly squirming in their seats, begging to be voted in. To feel, even for a moment, that you really matter is a powerful opiate, on which politicians of all colors bank on.

Where Ahmadinejad has made loud claims of victory — e.g., pushing forth Iran’s nuclear program — the ‘reformists’ hit back with the assertion that the nuclear program started some 25 years ago (when the ‘reformist’ candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was the prime minister), and that Ahmadinejad should stop pretending as if he was the sole creator of the nuclear program.

Where the ‘reformists’ have piled on the accusations of economic mismanagement, Ahmadinejad has hit back with (I’m paraphrasing here): “It does not take a mere four years to be in such economic mess. Did it all just start with my government? Was there no unemployment before my government? Was there no inflation? Was I handed a spotless Garden of Eden created by you (Mousavi) and your reformist colleagues, which has now turned into ruins?”

As for some of the foreign policy ‘victories’ claimed by Ahmadinejad, the ‘reformists’ point to Iran’s pariah status in some diplomatic circles, to Ahmadinejad’s unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric regarding the Jewish Holocaust, as well as to his adventurous overtures to leftist Latin American leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba. (Funny how readily Ahmadinejad buddies up to and has official dinners with leftist leaders abroad, yet the leftists who are unfortunate enough to be living inside Iran, should they dare speak up for anything, invariably end up in jail!)

Reformists, like good politicians and clerics anywhere, adept at sophism (safsateh), know a thing or two about electioneering rhetoric, and they definitely know a thing or two about sinister moves. So, they confidently object to Ahmadinejad’s ‘wild behavior’ and question why, instead of venturing across the globe to Latin America in search of glory, could not Ahmadinejad have been repairing/building more pragmatic regional connections and cooperation? And instead of over-vehemently beating his chest in defense of the dignity of the people of Gaza, the ‘reformists’ counter that he should have been paying more attention to the country’s economy and the sullied dignity of the Iranian people subjected to a direction-less Ahmadinejad government that only knows how to blow hot air, and not how to attend to people’s real needs.

It must be admitted, having watched the debate between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, this particular presidential debate was way more interesting to watch than the American ones I have suffered through, all filled with quasi-elaborations over sweet nothings and lock-jawed stabs clothed in self-righteous slick remarks.

It is very interesting for sure to hear a sitting president openly accusing all the administrations prior to him, all 24 years of them, of corruption, and to claim that he has documents proving this charge, and to promise that, if reelected, he would bring all the wrongdoers to justice and return all the looted wealth back to the public treasury.

Such open accusations, effectively condemning the entire governing structure, surely cannot be tolerated for too long by any ruling elite. Ahmadinejad’s major problem is that, though he really is clearly telling the truth (not the bit about the ‘150 people dominating everything’ part, but the general truth) about the deeply corrupt nature and reality of the Iranian state, he himself is part and product of that state.

Ahmadinejad’s electoral problems, though, have less to do with ‘the truth’ and more with practical reality: besides the ideological armed forces of the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards, his urban social base is not numerous enough, especially given that the structural deformities of the Iranian economy prevent any president working within the current capitalist setup in Iran to deliver much needed economic relief to the Iranian lower working classes, to the unemployed or under-employed, and to the abject poor.

As a result, those outside the ideological armed forces, who were previously persuaded by his promises of economic equality, are mostly disillusioned with his presidency and unlikely to give him much enthusiastic support. It may be this very fact that compels him to grasp at whatever straws are at hand, and promise retribution against those allegedly stopping his efforts to help the people. That, at least, seems to be his story and he is not letting go of it. This, in hopes of energizing people who are outraged by lack of economic relief, and in hopes of getting them fired up enough to vote him into office, once more. And, besides, who knows how clean the elections are anyway?

As spectacles go, I’d say this one has shaped up to be quite entertaining so far. The sad truth, though, is that a majority of people in Iran would not find it funny at all. For those who are planning on voting this time around, claiming that this is THE MOST IMPORTANT election EVER in Iran (something that was claimed on the occasion of previous elections), these elections and the ouster of Ahmadinejad, or his reelection, is dead serious. And for those who are disenfranchised in Iran, a majority, the farce presented as ‘elections’ is as deadly serious as severe heartache, blood and tears.

1. ”The Hard-Liners in a Panic.”

The other way is to start from principles, observe the changes in reality, study the history of the social forces involved in those changes, and derive your own positions and demands, based on where you stand in the course of your struggles.

A lot of alarms have been ringing for the past four or five years, regarding interventionist strategies taken up by imperialist planners, in which under the guise of ‘democracy building’, truer aims of the American power elites (regime change where needed) are furthered by the CIA or any of the sixteen assorted intelligence agencies run by the U.S.¹

Large sums of money have been and are being spent on creating seemingly spontaneously grown citizens’ organizations that shape and give direction to dissent among the populations over-lorded by governments not liked by the U.S. Such ‘revolutions’ as the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or the 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon — are sighted as examples of this ‘democracy movement’ type of moving of pieces by imperialist game planners. It is natural that, in these half-covert operations, human rights are used as a wedge issue.

Because of this push by the right into the discursive and practical area of ‘human rights’, some western leftists have abandoned this area of advocacy when it comes to countries they perceive as being under attack by the imperialists, and therefore most talk of human rights violations in such countries has become taboo, since it allegedly paves the way for the continuation of the imperialist interventions, and subjugation of more natives around the world.

Leaving aside the unjustifiable presuppositions of such a stance, this position completely yields, uncontested, a major domain of class conflict to the dictates of the right wing ideologues, and leaves it completely up to the right wing fanatics to frame this issue. Though it seems easy to forget, it is important to bear in mind that most of the ‘natives’ have been living under brutal social conditions for a long time, otherwise imperialists would never be able to exploit their misery in the first place (and here I am talking about places where supposedly the imperialists are not the direct and immediate over-lords).

Ironically, the more militant members of what I call the ‘Human Rights? Ba-Humbug!’ faction, actually fight most vehemently against the advocates of human rights in countries like Iran! So we have a situation where Iranian secularists — secular liberals, democrats and radical democrats, social democrats and socialists, supporters of student activists, labor and women’s rights activists, and all others — who for the past thirty years have been fighting for more rights in Iran, not only have a medieval theocratic setup with vast oppressive capabilities to fight, but now have the western leftists to fight as well!

This effectively amounts to the first ever anti-solidarity movement I know of, sort of launched by the western left! (It’s only ’sort of’, since none dares give it formal expression!) An innovation in ’socialist’ surrealism!

But just because the right wing exploits a dire situation, in the process contextualizing ‘human rights’ in an upside down manner for its own agenda, it does not mean that we should just drop this concept. What’s wrong with offering our own, leftist, humanist, emancipatory contextualization of human rights, something that is so fundamental to our strategic dreams? A contextualization that offers both a critique of the imperialist abuses of the concept and demands an expanded concept of human rights everywhere is the true challenge that the western left faces in this are, yet seems to be desperately wishing it away.

But, what of the second road to ‘what is to be done’ about human rights? Start with a basic principle: Democracy (the real thing, not just having some elections) is anathema to imperialism. Therefore, when people’s democratic rights are crushed anywhere, that’s an actual present, or a potential future, victory for imperialism. 



When labor rights activists in Iran, for example, are jailed, tortured and/or executed for, judicially speaking, completely absurd ‘crimes’ such as ‘fighting against god’ (whereas in reality, for example, they’re being persecuted for organizing against the ravages of capitalism in their locale), this lowers the floor on the workers’ rights and wellbeing everywhere in Iran, and is to the long-term benefit of the imperialists (as well as, naturally, to the benefit of the local capitalists all the time).

When women are kept under the thumb of an oppressive misogynistic and patriarchal regime, this also lowers the floor for accepted/acceptable social misery OVERALL (not just for women), and this is very beneficial for the future or current plans of the imperialists (not to forget the local capitalist pigs who love it too; what with the four full-time wives and the infinite number of temporary wives they can have in that system).

Those two items should suffice. You can extrapolate in the same manner in all areas of social oppression allowed by the theocrats ruling Iran (non-existent political rights of assembly and the right to form independent political organizations, no free speech rights, no cultural national and religious minority rights, forget completely about gay and lesbian rights, the list goes on.)



Why trash human rights?

For some leftists in the U.S., ‘human rights’ is always in between inverted commas, particularly since the political culture in the U.S. is very much inclined to single-issue politics. But even (especially?) for those who think in more programmatic fashion and in terms of platforms representing social demands and solutions, the human rights topics are separate from and subservient to fighting for overall change of the system, and definitely subservient to the ’socialist project’. This is a grave mistake. 



Let’s imagine a somewhat inverse situation. It would not be acceptable to most American socialists if I were to say, for example, “It’s not really worth spending so much time and energy on things like, ‘Free Mumia!’ or ‘Reform the Prison System!’ or ‘End Death Penalty!’ Those are side-issues; they take away from the fight against imperialism, which is the most important conflict, overshadowing everything else. Plus, those sorts of campaigns narrow the horizon on the larger issues.”

To that, an informed American socialist could say that the oppression of the African Americans (which by nature must include the persecution of black radical leaders) is structurally tied up with American imperialism. Without (slavery and) racism and its uninterrupted existence under morphed dynamics throughout the different stages of the North American modern social history, American imperialism most likely would not have materialized in the first place. Therefore, the fight for human rights and dignity of the African Americans (and therefore the defense of their radical leaders wrongfully imprisoned) is integral to a socialist project in the U.S., and all those so-called ‘reformist’ slogans are just and even revolutionary demands because they address part of the social conditions currently oppressing large sections of the working classes. 



The situation with political prisoners in countries like Iran is very much analogous to the above scenario. Political prisoners represent the most radical of the activists working against oppression in their societies, and their persecution is structurally required, a part and parcel of the continuation of oppressive class-based injustices in the global south.

So, as global southerners, our fight for democracy and human rights must at the same time be an anti-imperialist struggle, just as the struggle of African Americans for social justice must by necessity find its anti-imperialist edge if it is to succeed in the long-term.

Cynicism

Now, I know I’m not the world’s dumbest man, but I just can’t see why some tend to talk like leftists, but act like the right. Are they on a mission to confound, or are they truly confused?

I think deep down, for some people who have ended up in the left, for one reason or another, their overall attitude is tainted by cynicism. Not saying that this is a huge crowd, but the presence is significant enough to warrant a little something about cynicism.

Here I have in mind a person who, knowing something about the U.S. government’s terrible crimes, to my statement, “Iran’s government tortures political prisoners!” does not say immediately, “Well, let’s get together and fight both those bastards!” but says instead, “Oh, yeah?! Big deal; the U.S. government does it too! Take a number and join the line!”

Love … so hard to find! Such responses indicate deep cynicism, nihilism and narcissism, all of it boxed up in a finely bejeweled self-referential worldview.

When I say to a man or a woman that so and so is being tortured in Iran, what does the western cynic imply? That, “If WE — the repository for all good — do it, then of course you little, lesser people do it, too!” Hear the racism?

And so it goes with the cynic, as the bottom drops farther and farther out of sight.

The dominant rhetorical schema here is that of evasion. Evading what’s real. Evading the responsibilities of looking at the reality and analyzing it, talking to others about it; evading doing the hard work of studying things before offering analysis, and instead jumping to the first knee-jerk reaction that comes to mind; evading learning how to ask the right questions, taking the right actions, accepting that you could be wrong and make mistakes, learning from mistakes, actions and their results, and on and on.

In the realm of a discussion related to ‘human rights’, the cynic elaborates in reasonably authoritative sounding language, for example, that working on the human rights situation in Iran is really the work of the Iranian people. People outside Iran should just stay quiet about that. Especially right now! (The present always carries exceptionalities!) If you can do something to stop ‘your own’ government (the U.S., the U.K., what have you) from abusing human rights, do that. But, don’t meddle in other people’s business.

Ironically, a good number of people most likely to say something like that (Iranians among them), especially right now (!), regularly advocate without any qualms on behalf of other nationalities such as the Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, or at one point advocated on behalf of East Timorese, or black South Africans fighting apartheid, and participated in lively international campaigns of solidarity with the people of El Salvador. So, of all the people, they should know best about the importance of international solidarity movements in achieving historical goals. So, what is it that makes them stop seeing the harm they are doing by refusing solidarity to the people of Iran, living under a theocratic dictatorship?

Reconceptualize it!

‘Human rights’ must be taken out of the inverted commas between which it exists in most people’s minds; it is not a single-issue, a one-track, way of looking at social struggles for justice.

Socialists familiar with the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 must know how Marx felt about the need for total revolt against a social system that alienates all from all.

Spreading and reconstituting alienation of laborers, men and women, from their means of independent survival (e.g., during the historical period of primitive accumulation of capital, and still to this day), the alienation of laborers from their tools as well as the products of labor (in the manufactories and factories, and even small, mom and pop subcontracting workshops), and the alienation of workers from the entire process of labor; and ultimately, the overall alienation of men and women from other men and women, and the maximum atomization of societies — these are central processes of control, from the standpoint of Capital and the States that represent it.

If we take the kernel of the concept alienation and apply it to ‘human rights’ as a much larger issue (taken as including social economic justice), then we can understand that imprisoning social activists is not an incidental case of random injustice practiced a lot in some locations and less so in others but is a symbolic and necessary social act on the part of states representing capital that can and does happen everywhere. It is to quash preventatively any ideas by any others about daring to oppose, it is to spread terror in the hearts of the doubters and skeptics lest they actively turn oppositional, and it is meant to freeze any hopes of disrupting the alienating processes needed by capital’s endless accumulation.

I leave it up to the reader then to answer the question: To show or not to show solidarity with a man or woman, anywhere, who attracts the wrath of any capitalist state; to support or not to support his or her acts of defiance?

A grave fallacy

It is often taken as a point of departure, often assumed, that imperialism and its structures are external to the local socio-political conditions existing in separate nation-states in the periphery/global south. (This is separate from the fallacy that assumes imperialism is simply the foreign policy of powerful states.)

In reality, imperialism is the whole that is larger than the sum of the individual local conditions of all the class-based social existences and injustices on the globe. Put differently, although the sum of the local class-based injustices everywhere does not add up to all the capabilities of (or possibilities for maneuver by) the imperialists, those local injustices greatly contribute to and significantly define the conditions within which the imperialists are bound materially.

The flip side is: the more real democracy exists in more locations in the periphery, the more levers of economic and political powers are held in the hands of the people, and the less able are the imperialists to maneuver and position themselves for long-term survival.

By democracy, I do not mean having mere elections, though real and meaningful elections must always be present and on a far more universal level, with the right to recall at any point. But much more so, these electoral procedures must be in relation to some real social substance; Democracy means real and visible control by the people over the political and economic social factors that determine their wellbeing.

So, the fight for real democracy must by necessity include the fight for human rights as a permanent duty; for the rights of the people, social groups, communities, and yes the individuals are not and cannot be taken as some political expedience. As socialists, we are fighting for a society in which the free and unfettered development of the individual is the precondition for the development of the society. That fight starts right now, not after some abstract utopian miracle brought to earth at a moment in some unknown future.

Imperialism and the local miseries

Just as it is ill advised to separate the fight against a brutal prison system in the U.S. from the fight against imperialism at home, it is harmful to conceptually disconnect the fight for democracy and human rights in the global south from the anti-imperialist fight.

What we have to recognize, if we are to build a true internationalism, is that imperialism is, in its essence, the sum-total of all the local miseries and injustices aggregated in the world, plus some (more on this, below).

By creating and recreating anew each day a world, in which a thousand-and-one layered, myriad differentiations of misery and social injustice are the routine, imperialists create a multitude of spaces into which they can crawl, either in their overt, institutional forms (extraction of raw materials and resources by their corporations seeking lower taxes, lower wages and/or lesser environmental internalization costs; or, CIA overt access; or, when needed, armies of war), or in their covert guises (George Soros-type ‘democracy proliferation movements’, covert and semi-covert ops, etc.).

The ‘plus some’ in the above quasi definition is important if we are to fully understand the workings of imperialism. The ‘plus some’ is all the structures, all the institutions and their histories. But, institutions and structures built on misery and injustice cannot last forever. Which brings us back to the radical human agency, to the necessity of fighting injustice and misery everywhere and anywhere we can, with a truly internationalist mindset.

Put very simply, we have to realize that we are all just as important. I know that this is a big jump and quite difficult for a western reader to accept immediately, or easily. But, happily it is true.

Every locality is equally imperative. No locality has any more import nor should hold any arrogance over any other locale. The more democracy we can create in more localities of the globe, the more areas of maneuver we remove from the imperialists. The more areas are liberated, the more exponentially the balance of forces shall be inverted.

So … Why leave all the playing field to the imperialists by playing it cynically? If we start from solidarity, if we take our multitudes of ideas and opinions and angles and contributions as something positive, and not something amounting to ‘cacophony’, then we’ll find our strengths more readily.

But, step one: if you suspect that you may suffer from, or if like me you have observed yourself at times in the company of, cynical thoughts, even if but for fleeting seconds as they might have been, then find those thoughts and interrogate them; and watch them dissolve.

And take human rights seriously; for else, real humans won’t take you seriously.

1. See: The Burbank Digest for exposes on these people.

The Iranian President Ahmadinejad along with the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Shahroudi, have made public announcements, urging the relevant courts to play fair with Ms. Saberi’s case and to allow her all the legal means available to her by law, including the chance for a fair defense.

Iran’s Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi announced recently that she would be joining the team representing Saberi in her appeal of the espionage charges and the eight-year sentence.

As reported by Inter Press Service, “The former beauty queen — Saberi was the 1997 “Miss North Dakota” — was arrested in January and initially accused of trying to buy wine, later of lacking valid press credentials, and finally with espionage,” (”Int’l. Support Mounts for Jailed Journalist,” IPS, April 21, 2009). This summary of the rapid evolution of her alleged ‘crime’ should be enough to evince the spurious nature of the charges brought against her, and is a great example of the sham called ‘judiciary’ in Iran.

There are speculations regarding:

1) Whether or not some conservative elements are using their tentacles within the judiciary to pick on Saberi so as to stick a crowbar in the wheels of the advocates of normalization with the U.S. Very possible.

2) Whether or not Saberi’s case is a show of toughness by some who need to showcase their credentials in the coming elections, in June. Possible, but a weak explanation.

It could also be a manufactured case so as to have something for the Iranian government with which to show their ‘high intentions and good will’. My guess is Saberi will be released as a ‘show of good will.’ (Naturally, it would be very dreadful if things came to a situation where I would have to eat those words!)

Another case, that of Hossein Derakhshan, is equally indicative of how politicized the Iranian judiciary is. Derakhshan is known as the ‘godfather of blogging in Iran’ (under the blogger name, Hoder). His politics is pretty much aligned with the reformists’ platform, though he has also written approvingly of Ahmadinejad’s policies (see his blog). Yet, he has been in detention since November 2008. The charge against him is quite an unfounded one of spying for Israel. The apparent reason for his being in prison is a trip to Israel in 2006 on his Canadian passport, to build ‘people-to-people’ understanding between the two countries, a trip used by the authorities as the excuse to bring the espionage charges. It must be said that additional motivation for bringing such absurd charges against him could have been provided by Derakhshan’s ideas for some very mild reforms for more free expression than currently allowed, and his gentler criticisms of the wilder aspects of the theocratic-obsessive policies of the state.

In his letter to urge the head of the Iranian judiciary to ensure fairness in dealing with Roxana Saberi’s case, President Ahmadinejad asked that the case of Derakhshan also be looked into with more care, thus extending his good will to those who in the past have spoken kindly of his policies.

[Note: My reference here to Derakhshan's expressed support for some of Ahmadinejad policies is in no way to be taken as implying that he 'got his just deserts', or anything as obscene as that; not at all. Nobody should be jailed based on ideas they express. Whether or not Derakhshan exercised good political foresight, or whether or not he should have/could have spoken in defense of other, more radical political prisoners in Iran when he had a large platform ... all those things are completely beside the point and have absolutely nothing to do with his unqualified right to free speech. The point here is to establish that in Iran even political non-foes are not spared the random brutality of the 'justice' system.]

Be that as it may, ‘good will’ toward the Iranian people is a torturous joke and, from the government side, in very scarce supply. Especially when it comes to other prisoners held purely on political grounds: women’s rights activists, labor unionists, student activists, socialists and radical democrats, national-minority rights activists (mostly Kurdish, Azeri and some Arabs) or … and this one takes the cake … blasphemers. That’s right, apostates and blasphemers. Iranian socialists are obliged to repeatedly remind western readers and followers of things Iranian that for the past thirty years in our country, if a judge really wants to, he can throw the charge of ‘fighting against God’ (in Farsi, ‘Moharebeh baa Khoda’) at anybody he wishes.

Now, isn’t it insanely presumptuous for any human agency, and more so for a religious-based one, to imply that God cannot take care of himself in a fight against a mere human being? But, lucky and convenient for God the Iranian mullahs have the charge in their books, and, lucky for the mullahs, those statutes come in handy in putting the lid on undesirable advocacy by any of the millions kept under the thumb of the state.

It is completely fair, I think, to say that a judiciary so flawed as to prosecute people’s thoughts and ideas, and thoughts and ideas alone, is nothing but a frightful insult on top of a kick in the head. Of course, to its credit, the Iranian judiciary does not burn people at the stake for witchcraft; nevertheless, qualitatively speaking, it’s nothing but the second cousin to what the Europeans must have experienced under the Spanish Inquisition. Let’s call it ‘Selective, Low-Intensity Inquisition’. And if you think it’s not medieval enough, just arrange for an in-depth interview with any of the numerous relatives of Iranian women who, for the alleged ‘crime’ of loving another man, have been stoned to death, while buried waste deep.

Among the solidarity actions taken toward the Iranian activists, I must mention at least two:

1) Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace & Justice (part of USLAW), on April 16, 2009, issued a statement of solidarity with the Haft-Tapeh Sugarcane Co. Syndicate members arrested and detained. Their umbrella organization, U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW), has generally been supportive of Iranian labor unionists under fire.

2) The US-based organization Feminist Majority Foundation recently awarded the ‘One Million Signatures Campaign’ with the Global Women’s Rights Award, a clear statement of solidarity with the women’s rights movement in Iran, and in particular with the One Million Signature movement, a peaceful and legal campaign in Iran to collect signatures for a petition to be presented to the state, demanding that Iranian women be recognized legally as equal to men; meaning, in plainer language, to be recognized as having equal worth as men, something the current constitution denies.

* * * *

Due to the different sets of circumstances that have come together, international community’s attention has now been brought onto the unfortunate case of Roxana Saberi (and less so, onto the case of Hossein Derakhshan). As a result, the Iranian President and the Judiciary Head have taken notice and are expressing concern. So, we must use this moment of attentiveness to bring to the attention of the international community, and hopefully more specifically to the attention of the American left, the plight of hundreds of other political prisoners in Iran, and point to the general poverty of the judicial conditions there.

Further, we would like to call on all left-leaning, progressive, freedom-loving and justice-seeking individuals and organizations to call on the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Head of the Judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi (see contact information at bottom), to look into the injustices done in the cases of the following groups of people.

It must be emphasized that these individuals are only some representative examples of the social injustices being laundered through the Iranian judiciary. We urge the Iranian government that true diligence and justice be afforded to these individuals unjustly imprisoned, by immediately and unconditionally setting them free, and to restore and respect their rights of advocacy on their own behalf and for their rights. To do so, Mr. President Ahmadinejad, could well be taken as a symbolic show of your good will toward the people of Iran. In this spring of renewals, why not free ALL political prisoners?

I) Women’s Rights Activists
Free imprisoned ‘One Million Signatures’ campaigners!

According to Change for Equality, “Nearly 900 women’s rights and civil society activists have signed a petition requesting the judiciary to immediately and unconditionally release Khadijeh Moghaddam and Mahboubeh Karami and drop the charges against all the 12 activists arrested on March 26th, while meeting up on a street corner to go for visits of the late Dr. Zahra Baniyaghoob’s family, on the occasion of the Iranian New Year.”

Further, Change for Equality states: “Twelve women’s rights activists were arrested on March 26, 2009, on Sohrevardi Avenue in Tehran, while meeting up to go for New Years visits of families of imprisoned social and political activists. Ten of those arrested are members of the One Million Signatures Campaign. The Campaign members arrested are: Delaram Ali, Leila Nazari, Khadijeh Moghaddam, Farkhondeh Ehtesabian, Mahboubeh Karami, Baharah Behravan, Ali Abdi, Amir Rashidi, Mohammad Shourab, and Arash Nasiri Eghbali. Also, Soraya Yousefi and Shahla Forouzanfar were arrested.”

We also urge action on the cases of Ronak Safazadeh and Parvin Ardalan.

II) Labor Rights Activists
Free Mansour Osanloo!
(also, see his bio)

Further, besides Mansour Osanloo, the following are either in detention or else their cases are still pending, meaning they are subject to random state harassment:

1) Labor unionists associated with Haft-Tapeh Sugar Cane Co. Syndicate: Jalil Ahmadi, Fereydoon Nikoofar, Ali Nejati (released on bail, but ‘case still pending’), Ghorban Alipoor and Mohammad Heidarimehr. (see, in Farsi only)

2) Labor unionists associated with Coordinating Committee to Help Form Workers’ Organizations: Ghaleb Hosseini and Abdullah Khani (held in Sanandaj Central Prison after being arrested for participating in activities, including strikes, on the occasion of May 1st of 2008). (see: http://komitteyehamahangi.com/English.htm)

III) Student Activists
Free jailed university student activists!

As announced by Amnesty International, on 1 April 2009, urgent action was called on the Iranian government to ensure that Nasim Roshana’i, Maryam Sheikh and Mohammad Pour-Abdollah [all university student activists in Tehran's Evin prison] are protected against torture or other ill-treatment and are allowed immediate access to their family, legal representation and any medical attention that they may require.” (see: http://freeirstudent.blogspot.com/)
(see AI’s appeal)

Also of concern is the fate of the following: Alireza Davoudi, Amin Ghazaei, Shabnam Madadzadeh (all university students in Tehran).

Other students unjustly detained, according to AI: Esmail Salmanpour, Majid Tavakkoli, Hossein Tarkashvand, Kourosh Daneshyar, Mehdi Mashayekhi, Nariman Mostafavi, Ahmad Ghasaban, Abbas Hakimzadeh, and Yasser Torkaman.

* * * *

In closing, it is important to bear in mind the following: If the Iranian authorities have found it within their willed rights to bring clearly ludicrous and spurious charges of espionage (based, allegedly, on her ‘confession’) against an internationally known journalist, Roxana Saberi; and have further brought absurd charges of spying against a mere blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, who advocates nothing outside of the current theocratic setup and has even written kind words about Ahmadinejad and his policies … well, dear reader, it should not be too difficult to imagine the kind of Guantanamo like treatment handed out to political prisoners lost in the shadows of anonymity and those with serious ideological and political differences with the state. Their horror is daily, their futures uncertain at best, and their cries of help unheard by any in the ‘international community’, or else deliberately ignored.

Iranian President
His Excellency Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The Presidency
Palestine Avenue, Azerbaijan Intersection
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: dr-ahmadinejad@president.ir
Salutation: Your Excellency

Iranian Head of the Judiciary
Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi
Howzeh Riyasat-e Qoveh Qazaiyeh / Office of the Head of the Judiciary
Pasteur St., Vali Asr Ave., south of Serah-e Jomhouri
Tehran 1316814737, Islamic Republic of Iran
Email: shahroudi@dadgostary-tehran.ir (in the subject line write: FAO Ayatollah Shahroudi)

Salutation: Your Excellency

And so it was, thirty years ago, during these very months past, that we stormed ministries, prisons and government buildings, sat down in school yards, refused to go to or teach classes, went on strike in factories, oil refineries and petrochemical plants, marched in the streets in hundreds, then thousands, and soon in hundreds of thousands.

The revolution had such a force that even in the most laid back towns, like Shiraz, people started taking to the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands. In the famously mellow town of our beloved poets Sadi and Haafez, where martial law was declared last and lifted first, I saw hundreds of thousands in the streets and it was a sight to behold.

Back in those days thirty years ago, we were storming SAVAK buildings after pitch battles, some lasting hours some days, finding instruments of torture and files, files and more files. All those files that our rulers had indeed been keeping: on us, on our friends and classmates, our fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins and more. Those files, the cumulative result of diligent work, of years of training by the Israeli Mossad agents bringing the Shah’s ability for secret information gathering up to par.

All those files that, just as swiftly as they were being unearthed, were trucked away to the mosques. For safe keeping they said. But, some knew better. Soon, those files would be added to. Soon, those files would be swallowed up by a far greater secret service that the theocrats had in mind.

Yes, truckloads of those files were quickly hurried to the mosques. A regime we did not see clearly — or rather, a state of affairs we refused to believe was forming right in front of our very eyes — was creeping slowly into formation, moving steady, gleeful and quietly smirking, ready to make the final leap, which it did soon enough.

Must hand it to them; the mullahs, these ruling class ideologues with a resume of sharing power running longer than a thousand years, successfully blind-sighted much of the left.

In Iran, we have a very telling and popular expression for ‘being cheated’ or ‘burned’, in cases where something honestly and deservedly belonging to someone gets stolen or taken away in an unfair fashion. The expression is: it [the stolen item] was ‘eaten by the mullah’ (’mollah-khor shod’). Popular street language that has traveled through the ages and generations more often than not carries lessons bitterly learned.

Our generation, by force of necessity, came to learn this socio-linguistic lesson bitterly, painfully and at a huge cost. No shame in saying it. We carried out a revolution with everybody else in the country. We became humans just like everybody else. We did our fighting and got our butts kicked. The fight is not over, though, and will not be any time soon. We are still here and still doing what we can, and the next generation of socialists inside the country has picked up beautifully where we got beat, imprisoned, executed or driven out of the country.

But, we learned and proved something that cannot be taken away. It is a lesson that puts the deepest fears in any dictatorial regime. We proved that it is possible to get rid of tyrants. Sure, it’s easy when the armed forces step aside. True, but there is a lesson there, too: befriend the armed forces and make them your own! We proved how hollow Government was without the armed forces standing on its side to back up its lies, its bullying and irrationalities.

Thirty years ago right around these past months and the months to come, we didn’t just take to the street. We took the street.

We turned the sidewalks into abundant libraries of literature previously banned. No longer were we bound by dictatorial rules banning books, a form of stupidity verging on insanity, dictating that reading a book like Bread and Wine (by Ignazio Silone) should land you in jail, served up with harsh interrogation methods available for the imbibers of such an extreme revolutionary manual.

I finally read the book in English when I was a student in England, not quite getting its full significance since I didn’t know the historical background (a condition shared by all those millions who were banned from reading the same book during the Shah’s dictatorship). I did not see all the fuss. Surely, a dictator should have been far more worried by really significant problems shaking the foundations of his little ‘kingdom’!

* * *

After shaking off the Shah, we the Iranian people, everybody, had the streets. For a while.

It started to be take away soon enough, though, and by large chunks. First attacks targeted minority nationalities in Turkmenistan and particularly in Kurdistan. Then came the attacks on women, in the form of introduction of mandatory hejab (Islamic cover) and the backward ‘reform’ (legal regression to early 20th century Iranian laws) of family laws that eradicated a whole host of rights previously granted to women; social rights such as voting, and rights as married spouses and mothers in cases of divorce. These regressive reforms by the new regime set the women’s rights back many decades, and were naturally opposed by a majority of women especially in urban areas. Their fight continues to this day, and will do so for a long time to come.

After the overthrow of the monarchy, there was naturally a public arena opened up by the revolutionary leap made by the people. The old-timers knew and warned that a fiercer dictatorship was in the offing, and perhaps had foreseen hints of it in more detailed horror, I am sure, but somewhere in the back of everybody’s mind there were suspicions that what we were experiencing in that one-year between the overthrow of the Shah and the total consolidation of the new regime — a period of what I would call absolute political freedom — was just too good to last long.

The attacks started to widen in scope. At the time the attacks started picking up, I was a first year university student in Shiraz, and was a supporter of the Marxist left organization, Fedayeen Khalq. Soon, we faced a situation where our demonstrations were disrupted and attacked by Hezbollahi vigilantes, already in formation. Whereas previously, in the forward leap to overthrow the monarchy, people had indulged greedily and joyously in absolute unity of purpose and will, the deep abyss and walls separating the secularists and the religionists were being chiseled out in front of us, and, as our demonstrations would witness, those attacks would become more frequent, more violent.

This war of beating back the left and dispersing our forces, and not letting us gain any deep roots, started early, only a few months into the new revolutionary government, a wide coalition of religionists, nationalists and religious-oriented liberals. Leftists like myself can surely remember many an occasion, when peddling leftist papers in working class neighborhoods, while setting up sidewalk shop, being shown the way out of the neighborhood after being relieved of our newspapers, not to be read but all torn up or burned right in front of us. The beating was optional and dependent mostly on how cooperative we were in leaving.

As leftist demonstrators, we soon found that along our rally routes, we should expect to face well organized contingents of very energetic, very hard looking, mostly lumpen proletarian vigilantes, backed with deliveries of truck loads of bricks to be thrown at us and at our banners for nationality rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, freedom of expression and against new laws banning one after another of our newly gained rights.

These skirmishes would widen and broaden until there was the final assault, which was inaugurated by the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran, an event whose importance in the consolidation of the theocracy cannot be over-emphasized.

Some months after that, in March of 1980, about two weeks after I, pushed persistently by parental foresight, had left the country, the new regime shut down all universities, strongholds of leftist organizing. They would remain closed for two years, during which all leftists were systematically pursued and silenced one way or another. The arrests, tortures and summary executions followed.

The final plank in the consolidation of the new regime came as a gift from Saddam Hussein, whose armies invaded Iran in September 1980. Imam Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the religionists, in fact, declared the war as a gift from god. The Iran-Iraq war was on, and any opposition to the new regime could be branded as treason. More arrests, tortures and summary executions would follow.

The circle of the new religious state’s intrusive authorities kept widening until every form of a civil society’s daily and hourly behavior had a sanctioned manual issued for it. In the words of Shamloo (1925-2000), our greatest contemporary poet, writer and journalist, in a poem on the intrusiveness of the religionists’ rules of conduct, which look into every private space they shouldn’t: “They smell your breath, lest you have said, ‘I love you!’”

* * *

The crimes committed by the Islamic Republic against the people of Iran started from the earliest stages of the regime’s life. It started with the graveyard-shift kangaroo ‘courts’ that tried, and executed by the next morning, the civilian and military leaders of the previous regime. This was a crime since it is the people (not just a posse of religious vigilantes headed by a mullah) who had the right, the fundamental right in any revolution, to try previous leaders for accountability.

People, not a posse deputized by the neighborhood mullah or Imam, had the sovereign right to try the leaders of Shah’s regime, overthrown by the people. The real and meaningful objective of any such trial is not, and must not be, revenge. The objective is to get a detailed account of all the crimes committed by the previous regime, so as to make sure no future government can repeat those crimes. But, the way the new regime dealt with those ‘trials’, no enlightenment came of them. Only blood.

The Islamic Republic’s crimes against the people continued when it started its campaign of terror against all opposition in all spheres, imprisoning thousands based purely on political affiliations; torturing people with impunity, executing hundreds after phony ‘trials’, in which no right of attorney was ever considered. Those imprisoned and executed included people who did not even directly oppose the new religious state. The Tudeh Pary, for example, the most rightwing of the leftist parties, stayed loyal to the new state and even collaborated with its security forces, identifying other leftists. But, even they, after their services were no longer needed, came under the blade.

The persecuted thoughts were not limited to the realm of politics. Members of the Bahai faith, a minority sect of Islam created in the 19th century in Iran, were likewise pursued.

Other crimes of the regime includes the constant and systematic attack on women’s rights and freedoms, including the suspension of their right to initiate divorce or have child custody, the suspension of their right to travel (regardless of their father, husband or some other male relative having given them permission), halving of the worth of women’s court testimony, halving of damages permitted in a law suit, halving of a woman’s inheritance, and the barbaric introduction of stoning to death in cases of adultery.

The Islamic Republic’s crimes against our people includes also a most ghastly case of an en-masse execution of hundreds of political prisoners in the summer of 1988, and the mass burial of the bodies in Khavaran grave site, in south Tehran. Ever since the summer of 1988, the families of political prisoners who were summarily killed extra-judicially have been demanding to be given exact details of the executions and places of burial of their loved ones. To no avail.

Not only has the Iranian government not pursued any legal actions against those involved in the mass killings of the political prisoners in the summer of 1988, starting in January of this year, the government has started a project even more ominous and sinister. According to Iranian human rights activists inside and outside Iran, and according to Amnesty International, starting in early-to-mid-January 2009, the government began moving tons of earth onto the Khavaran grave site, covering the graves with a thick layer of earth, with trees being planted every two or three meters. In other words, the Iranian government is now attempting to literally cover up a key site (evidence) of one of its most heinous crimes. This is the mullahs’ gift, on this thirtieth anniversary of the revolution, to the families of all political prisoners.

That is sadly one of the legacies of the national uprising that took place in Iran thirty years ago, the legacy of how a revolution was stolen, and how a new dictatorship has been attempting to bury the gains of a popular revolution.

Thirty years ago these past months and for several more to come, we were free. We were free to read whatever we wanted. We were free to write and say whatever we wanted. We freely printed and handed out fliers with whatever message or information about a gathering we wished to announce to the world, unafraid of a secretive police that would snatch us in the middle of the night to dark dungeons to torture us. In the aftermath of the overthrow of the Shah, we held impromptu street discussions on social subjects that mattered to us, we deliberated on social forces affecting us. We held street parliaments, debating those willing to give us an argument.

In those days, we did not feel fearful facing the religionists, because, unlike now, back then we were equals, both equally human, equally rightful to have our opinions and political thoughts, both equally justified to have a say in the political matters of our lives. Certain religious-minded thugs would attack our demonstrations, but in presenting our ideas and thoughts and in an argument we were unafraid. We had just carried out a revolution and kicked out a most arrogant state, exactly to assert our right to free speech, to freedom of assembly and to form our political organizations, to freedom from state harassment based purely on our political ideas. Who was anybody to want to drive us back to the same fearful corner, just because of our political thoughts? We were righteous and we were free.

Thirty years ago we had a moment. An opening. Universities were used by political organizations to hold free classes, in which we learned about any ideas we had been denied the right to even study. We were learning. We were growing.

Building democracy and democratic institutions requires not only the absolute freedoms we had just gained. But such an immense social task requires time, too. Time that we thought we would have plenty of. Or, rather, time that we wished we had plenty of.

To a lot of Iranians it became clear soon that we were not to be given much time to develop much of anything resembling democracy.

A vote-producing machinery, a purely perfunctory facade, was soon erected by the new regime, one in which the public would be given vote-casting opportunities, with tightly narrow political range limited to the religious right; but absolutely no real democracy. The parliament (or, majlis) may pass laws, but those laws are subject to review by two other extra-parliamentary bodies (Guardian Council and Expediency Council), and finally by the Supreme Leader (the faqhih), rendering the parliament a farce. To make parliament a further farce, numerous ideological requirements, including explicitly stated requirements for holding a very narrow definition of Islam as your guiding ideology, are applied to determine eligibility and the right to run as the representative of a community. And this fraud is sold internationally as holding ‘elections’.

So, we had a moment, but the moment was stolen. The thieves are still in possession of our jewels. We, however, have not died out. Worse for the mullahs, those who hate their rule constitute an absolute majority of the Iranian population. Yes, indeed, we have not gone away. The thieves may be in power, but everybody knows they are thieves. They have no credibility, and that is why they have to employ vast networks of terror against any existing or potential opposition, even if the opposition is merely in thought.

As Iranians, we have had strands of socialist thinking in our own local, historical consciousness in the form of Mazdak (died c. 525), a popular and true maverick leader of old who advocated for the equality of all and for fair distribution of all wealth. This is simply a positive affirmation that socialist desires are historically just and have existed in different forms and expressions throughout the ages in different regions of the world, expressed by people wishing to establish societies without the horrible destructions associated with class-based societies.

And so, on this thirtieth anniversary of an immense uprising that was suppressed, we look forward to a future when we the Iranian people will be free from all dictatorship, when we have gender equality, when we have social justice, when our thoughts will not be subject to persecution, when our mouths will not be smelled by religious police in search of evidence of sin. And we look forward to a time when clerical tyranny can be looked back at, with rejoicing sighs of relief at the passing of that horror.

The Iranian Revolution of 1978 is not dead. Long Live the Revolution!

I am not talking about Israeli genocidal barbarities in not only the Gaza Strip but in all of the Palestinian Occupied Territories, barbarities that the Israelis call ’self-defense’ against a captive and tortured people. Those barbarities are clearly monstrous and in calling them that I am not in a small minority but standing with the absolute majority of humanity.

No, here I am talking about less directly militaristic items of news. Take for example the headlines and the news reports about ‘over-paying’ the banks while distributing TARP money (read, looted taxes), during the dying months of the former Bush administration, worth a whopping $78 billion.

The way this theft is reported, it is made to look as if nothing can be done about it.

As if some fly-by operation run by aliens from another planet had sucked the money right out of our earthly banking system, and disappeared into the outer galaxy. As if these banks were not huge institutions with registered headquarters located on our very planet, to which the U.S. government with all its resourcefulness can deliver a ‘You Owe Us’ notice; banks whose assets the U.S. Government can freeze.

I am sure that I am not the only one whose immediate question is: Well, why haven’t the banks been told to return the money already?

[Anecdotal evidence of alternative solutions already used: I once received, by mistake, a paycheck for an additional month of services not rendered, after I had stopped working for an educational institution. They contacted me and informed me of the situation, and I sent them a check for the amount. Done. Simple. Can't the same simplicity be applied to the $78 billion overpaid funds? If not, exactly why not?]

Then there is the issue of canceling the ‘torture policies‘ of the former, very bad and ugly Bush administration that was supposedly reversed by the new, sweet hope Obama administration.

First, of course, as we all know, imperialists always try to cover their bases, so some implicit loopholes have been hinted at and other explicit loopholes stated, which together make the ‘reversal’ look more like a gentle bearing to the left on the winding roads of the imperial super highway, built mainly in the far right direction. Not a U-turn by any means, even if such were ill advisedly considered a good turn of events.

But, more importantly, even if we believed that some sort of reversal of rules has been attempted, the new Obama administration can only pretend that they have done something positive. In fact, though, they have merely reminded the world that the U.S. knows and recognizes that it was acting (egregiously) not so nicely for the past eight years; they can’t say ‘illegally,’ for that would be going too far, and would in fact render most of the history of the United States illegal.

But is that it? Just ‘change’ the law and move on? Yes. Quick; change the subject!

Yes, as far as real actions go, all is to be dealt with as if … well, as if all is fine; with a quick swishing scratch on the paper, a few swift muscle movements of the wrist, the stroke of the pen has made everything A-OK. “Smile! Now, keep that smile, and see? All is good. Just keep smiling and keep stepping away and past this icky issue; it’s done and dealt with, best be forgotten ASAP. Phew! So GLAD that’s over!!”

And my jaw is hanging very low, right above the floor.

‘Dealt with’? What, you mean, like it’s not an ‘issue’ anymore? Like, it has been resolved, all the legal ramifications clarified and the ship of the U.S. State can now move on, continuing to act legally? Of course only somewhat, due to all the ‘interrogation techniques’ that may be needed, just in case you know, so they must be retained or developed further, for security reasons that cannot be discussed publicly, for that would aid and abet the terrorists. Ahem!

So, yes, the U.S. is getting there, making progress towards that most difficult of all goal of all, i.e., acting in a civilized manner, continuing to scramble in that generally well-considered direction willfully, methodically and of course patiently, heavy-footedly, excruciatingly slowly. But, always making progress.

In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Democrat functionaries and apologists making a positive and hopeful case for the necessity of moving very slowly in the direction of civilized behavior: the pace is to ensure that no mistakes are made in the undoing of badness; don’t forget it was the haste in the original arousing of evil that brought so many wrong and ugly consequences. In detoxifying the state apparatuses left behind by that frat boy Bush and his sadistic, jerk friends, we must be patient.

So, now the ’supreme’ task’ becomes the clean-up efforts, for which we must be patient and undemanding, and in this task all Americans (not just Blue ones) must participate; unity of voice (can’t rock the boat) is of utmost import for the Obama sweet hope machine.

It’s as if there has been no egregious violations of the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the U.S.’s own laws, including the War Crimes Act of 1996, not to forget the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibiting ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ (remember that?). It’s as if no crimes have been committed, and it’s all been just one big misunderstanding.

To use a Malcolm X-like analogy, let’s suppose that during the previous eight years, the administration of George Bush had made it legal for people to rob others’ houses, provided they met some newly legalized conditions. Now, after eight years of people getting their houses robbed, imagine they were told the new administration has reversed those rules, and it is no longer legal for people to rob others’ houses (although under some special conditions it may still be OK). This is then celebrated as huge progress in the restoration of the ‘country’s image’ and treated, in the corporate ‘news’ media, as a positive ‘change’.

But, the imaginary move above only and merely restores the status quo ante. It still does not address all the hundreds and thousands of cases of wrong done during those eight years. To those thousands and thousands who got robbed, this is the epitome of justice evaded, denied and not done. Getting their belongings back and getting compensated for having been violated all those years would be a good start; though not completely there yet.

People lost their lives and livelihoods due to those torture policies. Ask Jose Padilla, just for one case. And in matters of torture, one is already too many. How about prosecuting the perpetrators of torture, or those who authorized them? If those acts were reprehensible, then surely there must be some penalties handed out to those authorizing and carrying out such reprehensible acts. But, is there any? Is there even a hint of any?

Am I on crazy pills not seeing any, or are there really none to be seen?

The whole matter is being treated as if it was some kind of ‘mismanagement’ or a ‘foolish’ policy; something on par with a drunken fool acting stupidly and annoyingly, swearing loudly, disturbing the public peace, flaying his arms about wildly, catching passers-by in the jaw, in the eyes, showering spittle on children while in slurred speech spewing lasciviously about their mothers.

The way Team Hope Obama is behaving is more like reacting to an embarrassing moment, something over which you had no control yet must apologize for: “Well, well, well …” (nervous, broad smile) “Phew! Wasn’t that something! Well … Thank god the drunken fool is home sleeping off his hangover!” Or, like the police dispersing the onlookers hanging out at the scene of a crime after the crime evidence are removed: Nothing to see here, folks! Go on home! Be thankful the idiot’s gone. Something else, eh? C’mon, keep stepping!

Just like that?! And all the Obama zombies are like, ‘Well, what more do you want?! He changed the laws back, didn’t he? Duh!!’

‘Duh’, indeed … These crazy pills are something else!

Benjamin’s descriptions are at times patronizing and at times quite frustrating to read, though I should admit she sounds sincere in her intent. I do doubt their judgment though. Code Pink did support Obama, and Jodie Evans, in an interview on Air America radio program, Clout, sounded ecstatic about Obama’s election, saying, “War is over!” (Meaning it not literally, of course, but believing that with Obama as president, the whole mess will soon come to a speedy end.) As if!

Anyway, on the patronizing side … Here’s the problem: Benjamin sounds surprised to have met so many interesting, intelligent people who like and want peace!

Why would that be surprising? It can only be surprising if she were going by some stereotypes of what Iranians are supposed to be like. Of course most people are peace loving! Most humans in every country on every continent of the world are peace loving. That’s why wars are so unpopular everywhere!

The other side of it is, of course, that the Code Pink entourage are either unaware, or have not fully taken in the consequences, of the fact that some 80% of the Iranian population do not support the theocratic setup. The government of Iran knows this. So, clearly an overwhelming majority of the population consists of highly intelligent people indeed! No surprise then that Code Pink delegation ran into some of these intelligent human beings living in Iran.

The sad part, though, is that because the itinerary must have been manipulated by the government, partly due to their own foresight and partly due to Rostam Pourzal’s, I can only imagine that the groups who have come to discourse with Code Pink in all the arranged as well as the spontaneous-seeming situations must have been packed with all the ‘right’ people (at least some, anyway); let’s face it, if you don’t speak Farsi, and especially if you are dependent on government-provided people to arrange your contacts, you would most likely meet only with the affluent or those connected to the government — such as the women parliamentarians Code Pink met or other ministers they were supposed to meet — or else you will see an assortment of middle class professionals and others; all of whom, quite frankly, are not likely to be openly critical of the theocratic government around lobbyists for the regime (such as Pourzal), or other handlers provided by the government.

So, most likely Code Pink is not going to communicate with the people whose voices are drowned out in the international macho games of intrigue played out between different-level bullys. So, Code Pink will not get to meet with and talk to the most venerable of the society, the working classes, for example, or their unionist leaders (mostly in jail), nor with those whose rights have been viciously violated, such as political activists on behalf of students’ rights, minority rights (e.g., Kurdish activists), women’s rights and civil libertarians and free speech activists.

One interesting project that Code Pink is working on, according to their blog, is to record some video clips in Iran to be posted on YouTube, as messages to Obama. While meeting with a group of Iranian peace activists, Miles for Peace (a group of cyclists for peace), Code Pink mentioned their YouTube video series Idea. “We told them about the YouTube series we wanted to make called Iran talks to Obama, with Iranians from all walks of life giving advice to the new U.S. president. They loved the idea, and signed up right then and there to be interviewed.”

Now, first of all, Obama does not listen to ordinary American people ‘from all walks of life’, so to think that he would listen to Eye-rainian regular folk is just absurd thinking. But, the irony of all ironies about this video project is that just last week, the Iranian government started blocking some five MILLION website; included in the list is, you guessed it, YouTube! Also included are, of course, blogs and websites expressing dissent. The government says the blocked websites are ‘immoral and antisocial’ (pornographic ones presumably). But what is immoral or anti-social about dissenting against a theocratic dictatorship?

Here is another example of people Code Pink will likely not get to meet, or be allowed to even talk about. As an anti-war organization with feminist sympathies, Code Pink entourage should love to visit some of the women from Change for Equality (or better known as One Million Signature), some of whom are prisoners in Evin prison. Their ‘crime’? Peacefully asking people to put their names and signatures on a petition to be presented, peacefully, to the Iranian government asking it for a simple thing, namely recognizing that women are legally equal to men. I deeply doubt that Code Pink sought from Ahmadinejad an opportunity to meet some of the activists of this organization in prison, just to hear their stories.

Code Pink’s stated objective for their Iran trip is to create a people-to-people contact. As they have stated it, they wish to repeat such trips, and would like them to be reciprocated; meaning, they would push the Obama administration to allow similar citizens’ groups from Iran to travel to the U.S. Fair enough, and an agreeable enough mission.

But, from its first steps, the trip has been one of a people-to-government mission. The trip was made possible by an invitation of president Ahmadinejad, an invitation solicited by Code Pink in a September meeting between Ahmadinejad and a group of American peace activists. Having arrived in Iran, at least from their own reports (available on their blog), it seems that most of the people they are meeting are government people, or people whom the government has arranged for them to meet.

Another shortcoming is this: how about bringing some news of solidarity and hope to the people who most deserve and need it, those who are persecuted by the Iranian government? That would be a real people-to-people (social activist-to-social activist, that is) meeting of minds. Thousands of political prisoners languish in Iranian prisons without having committed any crime whatsoever, other than holding certain political beliefs at variance with the theocratic setup. The only reason they are in prison is related to those ideas; i.e., for activities such as speaking up against injustices practiced routinely in Iran. Does Code Pink, or any other U.S. leftists, feel any obligation to reach out to these people?

Code Pink has created a situation in which they are going along with a policy of no-arguments with a theocratic dictatorship, no criticisms and no explanations asked. It’s an odious form of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’.

Now, in case there are some cultural relativists, who spew out garbage such as, “Well, having an Islamic state is in their culture!” it must be said unequivocally, NO, it is not in OUR culture. It is in the culture of a small minority in our country, the same minority that wields very formidable instruments of oppression, and the same minority that has enacted repressive medieval laws, which the state uses to imprison people who have ‘acted illegally’.

Since Code Pink plans to repeat such trips, we ask that they reflect on their November 2008 trip, and in their future trips seek to find ways to arrange for visits to Evin and Gohar-dasht prisons, which hold most of the political prisoners in Iran. That would be a welcome complement to their people-to-government trip they have just concluded.

By now it must be clear that the ‘two-party’ system is not only no such thing; it is corrupt to the bone.

It should be instructive to recount some major points of Obama’s record:

Barack Obama has voted for all the war funding bills that have gone through the Congress; Obama has voted for USA PATRIOT ACT that effectively suspended habeas corpus, and he voted for the FISA bill that gave free reign to government to spy on all Americans; his Democratic Party has gone along with policies allowing torture, and we have not heard a single word out of candidate Obama regarding the evils of torturing people; had it not been for the Supreme Court rulings, the Democrats would not have been the ones to come to the defense of habeas corpus, this oldest of legal protections granted to human beings against arbitrary government harassment, and neither have we heard anything from Obama, although he is reported to be a constitutional lawyer; it was with the energetic pushing and shoving of the Democratic presidential nominee, Barak Obama, that the theft of people’s money was given legal cover in the recent $700 billion bailout of the banking industry (the actual figures are much higher).

Moreover, as pertains to how the American imperial machinations work beyond the American borders, Obama, or at least his rhetoric, is every bit as dangerous and bloodthirsty as McCain’s. He was one of the first people to advocate publicly (and on campaign trail, which is even more telling) that Pakistani sovereignty be disregarded and indeed violated completely if, with regards to the ‘war on terror’, the Pakistani government ‘can’t do the job’. He is a strong advocate of increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan and to intensify the bloodletting in that country, in a war of occupation every bit as barbaric and immoral as that in Iraq. As regards the war of occupation in Iraq, Obama has never said he will end the occupation; in his stated policy, he will leave a substantial number of troops in Iraq to ‘fight the terrorists’ and protect the embassy, ‘aid workers’, etc., which is to say he too will leave substantial troops in Iraq, into an indefinite future. Finally, as regards the ongoing, brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people, the theft of their lands, water and resources under one of the most barbaric contemporary colonial ventures, he is every bit a slave to the Israeli lobby and government.

If all these were not enough, we are now witnessing the defection of ‘moderate’ (the lesser of the bigger evil) Republicans onto the bandwagon of this able champion of empire; not just any Republican (for example, Ron Paul), but the likes of the war criminal Colin Powell, whose UN speech in February 2003 — while holding up some supposedly evidential glass vial, with the CIA chief, Tenet, and the hated Negroponte right behind him — is now remembered only too painfully by the world that continues to pay in blood, tears and humiliation for the crimes of the American empire.

His running mate’s resume is even darker, but we need not go there.

Despite all this, a good section of the American left is still agonizing over whether or not to vote for this ‘lesser’ evil! Luminaries as large as Chomsky and Zinn, The Nation magazine, and even the Communist Party USA, as they did in the 2004 presidential elections, are again raising the specter of the ‘necessity’ of voting, albeit with noses well held, for Obama. Some qualify this support with: “But, don’t have any illusions!” Anybody who supports, even qualified twenty-fold, the notion of voting for an imperial (hence criminal) Democratic Party candidate is already filled with illusions.

What on earth is the point of voting at all when the two evils under consideration do not present much noticeable degree of difference in their dispositions? Such recommendations coming from the ‘left’ are stunningly amusing if it weren’t so infuriating to hear such talk always certified with tons of qualifications, which in turn make the recommendations not just absurd but insane.

A nice sample of such was posted on Dissident Voice (”Taking Politics Seriously“). The authors, Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood, after stating that they would be voting for Obama, proceed to acknowledge all the horrible qualities of Obama the candidate, leaving the reader to wonder why then they are voting for him! And the answer is simple: it is a vote against McCain. Basically, they argue that the Obama-Biden ticket is less scary than McCain-Palin. Obama’s own qualities do not make him a very desirable candidate to be supported by the left, but since the left must by all means necessary defeat the crazy far right, then by simplistic syllogism they conclude that the left must vote for Obama.

The other point they make is that a vote for Obama is a slap in the face of racism. To think that one is fighting racism while voting for a candidate that upholds every racist element of the structures of imperialism is to venture into political oblivion.

Such arguments can only come from people who do nothing whatsoever to change the really existing political life of the U.S. in between presidential elections. But, of course, every four years they must express some political recommendation of sorts, and out of desperate frustration, due to seeing the political field as only what the system presents (i.e., due to the fact that they do not act as subjective agencies), they can only decide which system-provided choice is less harmful. This is the gist of their dilemma.

So long as the left in the U.S. does not create its own independent institutions, so long as there is no institutional alternative that can channel people’s grievances, and so long as there is no political party representing the working classes along a socialist outlook, the current balance of forces will continue to work increasingly against the working people and those interested in a more just society, and no matter how learned we might be, we will end up supporting the ‘lesser’ of the two evil parties dominating the people; in other words, supporting the imperial system.

What to do then? For starters, a good half of the eligible voters have been conducting a de facto boycott of the presidential elections, since they instinctively and correctly realize that the two ruling parties do not represent them. So, why not join them?

The only thing that can transform ‘apathy’ into an actual political force is to recognize that a boycott of the elections must be done loudly and with the purpose of announcing to the non-voting public that another way must be sought and created to bring about political change. This other way must engage them, the non-voting population, in a serious effort to build a real party of opposition.

This, in turn, requires a genuine opposition party-building effort. The Populists in the 19th century did not agonize over whether or not to vote for the lesser evils of their days. They built their own party. Granted, by the end of the 19th century, the Democrats had pretty much swallowed them whole, by adopting key elements of their platform reflecting their social demands, while watering them down, and blunting their force. But, the organizing spirit of the Populists is something to learn from. The lesson: Build your own party! Oppose both ruling parties consistently.

Within the context of building a real opposition party, then, a boycott as a tactical move makes good political sense. It would bring coherence and political direction to energies not wasted in the electoral fraud (yet sitting still), not burned in the electoral game presented by the system as an opiate (to paraphrase Max Kantar).

In my opinion, at this point, the tiny benefits of getting the independent candidates, such as McKinney or Nader, enough votes to bring them Federal dollars and a place on the presidential debates in the next election, is simply not worth the participation in the fraud created by this machinery of deception called ‘voting’, which in turn only helps feed the illusion that there is strong democracy in America.

The American people are fed this lie every four years that their voices can make a difference. Really? It didn’t make a jot of difference in 2006, when people, out of pure illusion, voted into the Congress a majority of Democrats with the hope that they would bring the war of occupation in Iraq to a speedy end. As George Carlin would have said, people might as well have wished on a rabbit’s foot!

It didn’t make any difference when a huge majority of the American people kept yelling down the jammed Congressional telephone lines, and over-stuffed Congressional email inboxes with, “Don’t give my money away to those scum sucking swine!” The people’s ‘representatives’ stole people’s money anyway and handed it over to the banksters in broad daylight!

So, to repeat, what’s the point of voting for these people? Except getting demoralized, such behavior has no other effect.

If people such as Chomsky and Zinn had spent the last thirty years of their lives, using their immense authority and influence, building truly oppositional parties, maybe for the past two presidential elections they wouldn’t have to recommend voting for such a corrupt bunch of people and instead could recommend voting for a truly oppositional party that really channeled people’s grievances, with some (even if symbolic) presence in the legislature.

The irony of it all is that Mr. Chomsky has built himself a reputation (at least he used to talk about this in his lectures and interviews) for not telling people what they should do, since, according to him, such is not desirable in his anarchist belief system. Yet, in the last two presidential elections, he has chosen to recommend supporting one of the major (and arguably the most successful) pillars of American imperialism!

Whence the contradictions? These contradictions come from the material conditions of lack of political alternatives, which, fret not, can be built starting now.

So, instead of wringing our hands over whether or not to vote for an evil, which is only a tiny bit less so, let us recognize the necessity of building a truly oppositional party. The first step in that direction is a loud boycott of these elections with an even louder declaration that voting is bunk until real political alternatives representing people’s needs are built. Don’t waste your vote, and don’t encourage the bastards. Invest your time vociferously boycotting the voting farce, and build an oppositional socialist party.

In short, all suggestions are for saving the system and not challenging it on a fundamental basis. They all ignore the realities of their times. As argued by Immanuel Wallerstein, capitalism has morphed structurally to such a degree that it is becoming something else. So, wishing to go back to FDR’s New Deal, even if desirable for some, is simply a reactionary pipe dream. There is only the way forward.

So, I would like to return to a favorite theme: direct representation for taxation.

One issue that has been repeated unanimously (without any concrete suggestions, though) by the U.S. left is realization that there is a complete lack of representation for an absolute majority of the population; not merely the voting population (about 50% of eligible voters), but more so the entire population.

As I have argued, in relation to taxation, even a clear majority of the voting population does not get any representation for the taxes they pay. The recent robbing of the public treasury, virtually at gunpoint, to the tune of $2.1 trillion to be given to the richest bankers on land even as a majority of the population was clearly against it, proves (if any proof were needed) that the ‘representatives’ in the U.S. Congress represent not the people but the richest and the most powerful who own the Congresswomen/men.

When reading commentaries and analyses by the left, rarely do we see any plans for building a different kind of representation, one that would challenge the current system of representation, which is clearly bought and locked out of the reach of the working men and women, whose labor and sweat has built this society. ‘Capitalism’ has not built all the roads, the schools and hospitals, all the factories, all the goods produced, etc. Workers have. So, they need to build their own representative institutions.

Such institutions are of two types (actually three, if you are at the revolutionary-leap stages of a struggle): trade organizations, political organizations (and, the third, military organizations).

No matter the organization, the problem of modalities of representation will remain a constant in all three types of institutions. Here, I will discuss a form of direct representation, which I believe can be applied in any society (be it purely based on private capitalism, social democratic, or a transition/socialist).

As previously suggested, we need to introduce the idea of direct representation into our taxation systems. Taxation is not something that is supposed to disappear in a socialist society, as discussed in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. So, for the taxes that we pay, who will get to decide how it should be spent? I argue that the taxpayers themselves shall make that decision. Taxes may take the form of actual money or labor-hours spent.

The current system of representation (highly mediated and extremely indirect) has been perfected to the benefit of a tiny minority at the very apex of society, the people who actually own the politicians in the Congress. So, we need to gut that representation altogether. We need to build parallel representation structures that are directly controlled by the people.

How do we do it? Simple: Every year, when we file taxes, we also hand the government a list of priorities that dictates how our tax money should be spent.

Detractors will argue two things: A) people are stupid and don’t know how to decide on such important things, and B) the current Congressional members will never allow this to happen.

Our response: A) people are not stupid, and have a much clearer understanding of their needs than anybody ‘representing’ them in some distant institution not in daily contact with their struggles and needs.

Unless in some metaphysical sense we can believe that people’s needs are stupid, this argument is moot. A family without healthcare has every right to wish for their taxes to be spent on healthcare, and there is nothing stupid about that. Any person who wishes their tax money to be given to victims of imperialist warmongering in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan is not making a stupid decision; s/he is making a moral decision about where his/her money should be spent.

An aggregate of all the millions of decisions (regarding where our taxes should go) is far more representative of a society’s wishes than anything the current paradigms can provide. Even if such nonsensical statements regarding people’s level of intelligence were true, people’s stupidity cannot outpace the stupidity of the current system. Further, people with real needs have a higher likelihood of learning faster than does the current system, which has done all of its learning; as to how to build the best barricades against people’s wishes.

B) Our plan to reform the system of taxation is not going to be politely presented to the Congress, for them to decide whether they like it or not! It requires a state-by-state ballot initiative, which means it will in the process build a vast grassroots network of activists and citizens who are well educated and committed to this issue. Which is what’s needed for the move in this direction to be successful in the long run.

The time is now for serious, concrete, practical and realistic reform movements to be advocated by the socialist left.

Now, another objection is that this is ‘reformism’.

Our response: ‘reformism’ is reform for its own sake. Reform, per se, is neither here nor there. Just because something is a reform does not mean it is bad. All the improvements in the lives of the First World working classes have come in the shape of ‘reforms’. Marx himself was suggesting things in the Communist Manifesto, which were later enacted through reforms. Would our ‘revolutionaries’ object to those?

So, the real distinction that matters is this: Does the proposed reform idea reinforce or undermine the current setup?

I believe the idea of direct representation for taxation undermines the existing system in a serious way, and can create real conditions for fundamental change, since such direct representation cuts out one of the biggest safe-guards the system has erected against people’s wishes to determine how the social resources should be distributed back toward meeting people’s needs.

So, let’s raise the banner of Direct Representation for Taxation!

The less known one was the 20th anniversary of the wholesale execution/massacre of up to 5,000 political prisoners. These political prisoners were tortured horrendously after being tried in summary sham trials (without any legal representations) and their bodies buried, at times in mass graves, in a cemetery for “unbelievers”, Khavaran Cemetery, or better known as the La’nat-abad (translated as “place of the damned”), in the southern outskirts of Tehran.

Back in 1989, in a piece for The Nation, Alexander Cockburn reported, “The mullahs appear to be cleaning house before February’s celebration of the tenth year of the revolution, hanging prisoners, placing them before firing squads and dynamiting whole prisons. On one account, all political prisoners in the city of Hamadan were shot. In Teheran, Jadeh Khavaran Cemetery, known as the Place of the Damned, is crammed with shallow, unmarked graves.” (“Heart of Darkness Department,” February 6, 1989).

For any references to the 20th anniversary of this wholesale massacre of political prisoners, however, you would have been looking in vain among the Western leftist websites and publications. This is because mentions of human rights violations in Iran, thanks to the efforts of the Islamic Republic’s lobbyists in the West, have come to be viewed as “aiding and abetting the Western imperialists”! It is a strange world. Indeed, to voice any criticism of this theocratic dictatorship is characterized by the detractors as “sowing antagonism against Iran,” as if the Iranian government were identical to the Iranian people!

As reported, just recently the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives chose to shelve a long-pending Congressional Resolution (HR) 362, “whose passage the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had made its top legislative priority this year, [and] had been poised to pass virtually by acclamation last summer.” As activists for social justice, we rejoice over this tactical victory.

At the same time, we must assume that “the grassroots Iranian-American, Jewish-American, peace, and church groups,” who lobbied against this House Resolution, support the civil and individual rights of the Iranian people. The same citizens’ groups should therefore be raising the alarms about the attacks the Iranian people suffer daily at the hands of their own government. After all, regular Iranian people, women and student organizations as well as unionists in the country, and even members of clergy regularly protest the conditions of human rights in Iran.

It must be emphasized that we are talking about a theocracy, something no western leftist or liberal would put up with in their countries, yet seem to see fit for us lesser peoples (Edward Said, you are sorely missed!). This is a theocracy in which women are legally half as worthy as men; in which many (up to twenty-something) university subjects remain closed to women (including mining-engineering, management, and other professions considered inappropriate for women); in which women cannot become judges; in which women cannot choose their dress; in which men and women can be stoned to death for the act of making love to another; and in which a good 90% of the population is legally (as dictated in the constitution) barred from running for public office or running for leadership positions.

In today’s Iran, women, socialists, atheists, Sunnis, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Bahais, and Sufis are legally barred from any of the leadership positions. According to Amnesty International, the Islamist republic in Iran is among a minority of states in which discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, sexual orientation, and even philosophical outlook is LEGAL (Saudi Arabia and Israel are other examples).

* * *

The Iranian government has been manufacturing a completely false case regarding its likenesses to the government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh who, as Prime Minister, brought about the nationalization of Iranian oil in 1951, and who was overthrown in a coup organized by the British and the Americans in 1953. The fundamental similarities alluded to by the current government are to reinforce the legitimacy of its right to mastering the full nuclear fuel enrichment cycle and to silence all dissent.

The core likenesses claimed by regime leaders and their supporters are based on nothing except mere assertions, and the historical record glaringly indicates otherwise. So, let us look at the differences.

First, though, one historical note of profound irony. Ayatollah Kashani, mentor to Ayatollah Khomeini, and the leading Shiite clerical leader at the time of Mossadegh’s government, as the Speaker of Majlis (parliament) had great influence and power in the Iranian society back then, especially among the rural population (a majority at the time) and the traditional lower middle classes and the bazaar merchants. He used his enormous power and influence to support the CIA-orchestrated coup against Mossadegh. This is a historical fact.

Much of the “street wisdom” in Iran has traditionally blamed the Tudeh Party (the communists) for abandoning Mossadegh, thus facilitating the coup against him, and considers that act as a big treachery (and their charge is correct). But, the same “wisdom” is very forgetful when it comes to the treachery of the clerics. We must not forget that at least the Tudeh, especially the rank and file and their social base, remained loyal to Mossadegh much longer than did the clergy. This was mainly due to Mossadegh’s attempts at some rural reforms, highly unpopular among the rural landowners, naturally allied with the clerics.

So, for today’s Iranian ruling theocrats to liken themselves to Mossadegh, whom the clerics’ forefathers helped overthrow, is . . . well, what else should we call it other than blasphemous?

This is to remind the readers that the cleric and the Rationalist have never been good friends. The structural differences between the current theocracy in Iran and Mossadegh’s government could not be more glaring than if Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, with their vast network of churches, established a Christian Republic of America, and then some permutation of their regime down the line likened itself to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

During Mossadegh’s government, we had an absolute, guaranteed right of forming political parties, and such parties existed openly and freely, ranging from right wing nationalists to communists. Likewise, hundreds of publications were freely printed and distributed, with no ideological preconditions forced on them by the state. That’s real democracy. During the reign of the theocrats, by contrast, it is illegal to form independent non-religious political parties; additionally, freedom of expression has not only been eradicated for a majority of political persuasions, it has far too often turned into freedom of death for numerous intellectuals.

During Mossadegh’s government, women and men were not stoned to death for the mere act of making love to another human being.

During Mossadegh’s government, we did not have to swear oath to a theocratic (Inquisition style) state formation before being allowed to run as a representative of our community, rendering over 90% of the population ineligible to run for any office, particularly in the executive branch.

During Mossadegh’s government, women’s testimony in a court of law did not count as half as much as that of a man’s, and women’s inheritance would not be automatically half their male siblings’, and they could choose their own clothing and could even wear lip stick (Oh, the horror!) if they so wished, without fear of ‘clothing police’ and lashes.

During Mossadegh’s government, women were not automatically barred from studying certain subjects in the university, based on the “unsuitability” of said subjects for the “female mind.”

Most importantly, under Mossadegh imperialism was barred from the country, while with no oil income there was a balanced budget with no inflation; currently standing at $21 bn of foreign debt and 25% inflation rate (a conservative estimate), we now even import refined oil!

Finally, on the Mossadegh’s likeness to the theocrats, a highly astute observer, whose weblogs from Tehran I was fond of keeping up with, way back in the early twenty-first century, noted that the theocrats had decided the nuclear issue was the most convenient front to engage the western demands on them for change of behavior. Back then, it was argued openly that the nuclear issue, as a singular topic, would galvanize a nationalistic fervor among the Iranian people, much like the nationalization of oil by Mossadegh, which created righteous, nationalistically positive sentiments among the people back in the late 1940s and until the nationalization of oil in 1951.

To paraphrase, it was argued by the clergy that the most effective propaganda arena to engage the west would be the nuclear technology, instead of human rights, women’s rights, political prisoner’s rights or, god forbid, labor rights.

And guess what? They got their wish!

Which brings us back to the less known 20th anniversary of the massacre of nearly 5,000 political prisoners and their dispatch to the Place of the Damned. Gone are the news items about the thousands of political prisoners currently held under bogus charges in Iran, though plenty of them perish in Guantanamo-like conditions. These political prisoners range from student activists to women’s rights activists to unionists. There are women political prisoners held in Iranian prisons, whose only “crime” is gathering signatures petitioning the government to recognize women as legally equal to men.

In the US, some “leftist” publications such as MRZine have become de facto platforms for apologists of this theocratic dictatorship based on the fact that American imperialists are picking on this regime. On the website of MRZine, we regularly see writings by CASMII personnel, who are nothing but lobbyists for the Iranian regime (not the Iranian people, mind you), and readers of the website are treated to regular articles detracting from the human rights atrocities the Iranian people have to suffer. But, on this “socialist” website, the violations of the human rights of the Iranian people find not a single mention; — ever.

So, we must ask: What is the meaning of socialism if it does not even include basic, civil rights of individuals?

Some of the political positions of the rightist “left” (e.g., CASMII) are absurd indeed. In their political thinking, mere talk of human rights is equal to aiding and abetting neo-conservatives. Never mind that Iranian socialists have been talking about these egregious violations for nearly three decades, while standing steadfastly against imperialism. To these gentlemen, to even make a reference to Amnesty International reports would bring charges of being a “neocon”. The reader is, nevertheless, encouraged to read AI’s reports on Iran, especially the report on the 20th anniversary of the mass slaughter of political prisoners in Iran (see here) and inform themselves accordingly.

No mass executions ever took place at any time during Mossadegh’s reign; ironically, such massacres did not even occur during the Shah’s hated dictatorship. Activists for social justice worldwide and socialists in particular should not be derailed by the fact that “Human Rights” is used opportunistically by the neoconservatives and the neoliberals for so-called “humanitarian” (i.e., plain rapist) interventions. Human rights are still human rights, and as such must be held as sacrosanct by anybody fighting for social justice.

The utilitarian view of politics held by opportunists has always mandated downplaying the atrocities committed by “our own SOBs.” This outlook has now seeped well into the American left. It is a variation on the theme of “lesser evil.” And, unfortunately, this is one reason the American rightist “left” — who, for example, cannot stand unambiguously against imperialism AND a theocracy at the same time — is so bereft of any moral vision to show the way out of the turbulence and crises of our times vis-à-vis the American state and Capital in general.

Here is the situation with large segments of the American left: Bush announced that “you are either with us or against us,” and the they bought this line in it’s entirety, switched off their independent principles and lined up behind whomever the Bush administration opposed. As if the solutions to the problems of our time can only come from two sources: one imperialist, one “enemy du jour.” As if socialists don’t have brains of their own. If these “leftists” really believe this line of thinking, why don’t they just fold up their tents? What is the point of keeping up pretenses of “socialism” when not a shred of socialist principles is reflected in our political actions?

This inability to maneuver politically is all the more glaring since, as the old-timers used to say, the objective conditions are over-ripe for socialist forces to organize the subjective agency, and push an effective counter-move to mobilize social forces in the strategic direction of challenging capital in a practical and realistic fashion.

Most of the demands of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 are still unmet. In that revolution, we were demanding unconditional political freedoms we did not have, such as freedom of assembly and freedom to form political parties; we still don’t have those freedoms. We were demanding unconditional freedom of expression, which we still don’t have. We were demanding freedom from arbitrary state harassment, which we still don’t have. We were demanding freedom from arbitrary arrest and torture for merely holding certain philosophical outlooks; we still don’t have that freedom. We were demanding a government representing a majority of the people, a government that is truly free, not a theocratic dictatorship representing only a small minority (15% according to the regime’s own understanding).

Likewise, we were demanding freedom from imperialists dictating how we should conduct our economic life; this demand is likewise still unmet, since ‘world markets’ for resources and a speculative capitalist system in Iran continue to dictate to a great degree what economic benefits we the Iranian people (not just a few at the top) enjoy from our vast natural and social resources.

The current regime, following one of the key demands of the revolution, has kept up pretences of anti-imperialism, just to keep up a facade. Meanwhile, political and civil freedoms that people demanded through that revolution are still not materialized, and instead the Iranian people are faced with a dictatorship far more thorough than anything the Shah could fathom. The solution for Iranian socialists is clear: No to imperialist interventions in any form, No to theocracy, Viva socialism!

A lot of Iranian socialists, liberals, radical democrats and plenty of people in the clerical and merchant classes, as well as millions of ordinary citizens know that the ruling classes in the U.S., divided as they are over attacking Iran militarily, are united in preferring an Islamic Republic, rather than a secular republic, in Iran. The American rulers know, or at least calculate, that any other political formation in Iran will definitely be socially to the left of the current set up. The Mullahs also know that the Americans know this. So, both are clear on this.

Those of us who grew up under Shah’s dictatorship used to think that he was the limit, but of course leave it up to the clergymen, the ideological singing birds of the ruling classes in Iran for the past one thousand years and more, to come up with an infinitely improved dictatorship, something the Pahlavi ‘dynasty’ could only dream about (the ‘dynasty’ was a mere two kings long; both took power through Western-supported coups; I’d call it ‘foreign investment’, not ‘dynasty’).

In terms of a sufficiently thorough dictatorial set up, then, beneficial to anybody wishing to do business (wink) with Iran, Western imperialists cannot have it any better than the regime that exists there now; they don’t want this regime to disappear. So, if and when talking regime change, they mean merely a change of behavior. The major differences between the American and the Iranian regimes revolve around the terms and conditions under which the Islamic Republic will continue to rule.

Over the recent years of the verbal back and forth between the ugly duckling Uncle Sam and bad, bad Ayatollahs, I have noticed a curious side-correlation. The rise in the level of belligerent talk directed at Iran coming out of Washington has usually accompanied a rise of violence in Iraq. Every time the Americans experience intensified resistance from the Iraqis, there is a surge of accusations regarding Iranian nuclear ambitions and ‘meddling in Iraq’.

So, one can imagine that what the U.S. administration is really saying is that the Iranian regime and their capable military and paramilitary presence, in terms of personnel and influence in Iraq, are not doing enough to keep the violence under an acceptable level; ‘acceptable’ meaning here, a level which can still be spun somehow positively in the establishment mass media in the west, particularly in the U.S.

For example, right now, due to Iranian exertion of influence, as thoroughly reported by Patrick Cockburn, Sadr’s militia’s have been given stand-down orders. This has partly been responsible for the ‘relative success’ of the so-called surge of American military forces into the Baghdad area. In such a context, a death rate of more than 550 per month in Iraq, can be presented in the American mass media as a ’success’. In order for this death rate to be presented as progress, the Iranian regime has done its fare share. No wonder then that, diplomatically, the Iranians act like the Americans owe them something; which they indeed do!

Mixed in with the nuclear-related accusations, when attacking Iran undiplomatically, has been the issue of Iranian military involvement in Iraq. Since at least 2004, we have heard accusations of ‘Iranian meddling’ by U.S. military and political leaders. That these accusations of ‘foreign meddling’ are forwarded by a mercenary army of more than 350,000 (including the contractors) who flew or sailed thousands of miles to get to Iraq is of course totally beside the point.

The factual truth, however, is different. The Americans knew from the very start of the invasion’s planning stages that the Iranians would be there; in fact, during the aerial bombardments and the initial land invasion of Iraq in 2003, American military was coordinating with the Iranian-based Badr brigades, which meant coordinating with the Iranian military.

So far as Iranian ‘meddling’ goes, then, the Americans were relying on it to achieve their own politico-military objectives in Iraq. So, to now turn their presence in Iraq into an excuse to attack Iran is not just outrageous, it is in fact insane. Would the U.S. not intervene in Mexico if, say, a European country or, who’s kidding who, even if Belize invaded Mexico?

A broken Afghanistan and a broken Iraq along with a huge American military presence on two of its borders with enormously destabilizing effects — all these have brought lots of problems for the Iranian government. Yet, the plus side has outpaced the negative by strides. In short, the Iranian regime does not have an unambiguous anti-imperialist stance vis-à-vis the U.S; in fact, at key junctures it has moved quite pro-imperialistically.

As relates to the U.S. side, Zbigniew Brzezinski is as well an established heavy weight as there has ever been in the contemporary political life of American capitalism. His share in the architectural design of late twentieth century posture of the U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and in particular his role in militarization and destabilization of Afghanistan starting in late 1970s, is well known. As well, he was and is a big supporter of the ‘adventures’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most recently, Brzezinski has reiterated that the Iranian regime must be engaged with diplomatically by the U.S. and not belligerently, while talking like a bully. This stance is consistent with his pronouncement back in the late 1970s that Ayatollah Khomeini was a man the U.S. could consider a strategic ally. Remember his ‘Green Belt’ strategy? Well, the late Ayatollah fit right in the buckle of the belt.

Western imperialists plan ahead and do have enormous resources to employ as they adapt to changed situations. Chance does favor those better prepared; especially when those chances are created by the better prepared.

Iran may talk big about anti-imperialism but has cooperated with the U.S. at strategic junctures. The Ayatollahs helped the Afghan mujaheddin from their early days (cooperating with the U.S.); they helped Reagan administration get money for the Contra army to harass and terrorize a truly revolutionary government in Nicaragua; later still, they facilitated the U.S. invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Iranian government, like most other states, knows that there are limits to the U.S. power and that the U.S. rulers need cooperative regional client states. And the American policy makers know well the price for a successful-looking reorganization of Iraq; with the helpful hand of the Iranians, they can make a show case of the ’success’ of the U.S.’s power projections, military and otherwise, oh so beneficial for the ’stability’ of the region and for its future prospects for economic development — all of it privatized, securitized and stashed away in fat western banks.

The fact is, as Gary Leupp among others has explained, the U.S. ruling class is divided over whether or not to militarily push the mullahs a bit further, so as to extract the concessions they are seeking. Likewise, the regime in Iran is very much divided over how to approach the Americans. However, the Iranian theocrats have a unique problem when it comes to this one particular issue.

If there is one bit of legitimacy that holds the Islamic Republic as something unique — compared to the Pahlavi regime, which the people overthrew — it is their ‘anti-imperialist’, or more specifically anti-American-imperialist, stance (they do lots of economic and other dealings with many European powers).

In terms of lack of democracy and the presence of violently repressive measures taken by the state to maintain control, the mullahs are far more effective than anything the Shah could put together. Additionally, in terms of economic mismanagement, they have done thousands of times worse than the Shah, who at least could deliver an economic ‘development plan’ that froze the inflation rate to lower single digits for some twenty years.

The mullahs, on the other hand, have produced inflation rates in the hundreds of percents per year, for decades; poverty rate is above 50%; class A drug addiction, in a country of 68 million, is crippling the lives and aspirations of some eight million (a conservative estimate); meanwhile, the clerical and merchant ruling classes, who are not by any measure of imagination productive and purely speculative in their economic activities, are building giant mansions on choice real estate around Iran, and luxury villas and houses around the world, while padding their Swiss bank accounts.

So, if they were to give up their Anti-Americanism, their last shred of a fig leaf, what else would they have that shows any improvement on the previous regime, to prove their legitimacy?

Still, there is a very strong ‘realist’ faction (sure, we have them too) within the regime that has wanted for a long time to ditch all pretense of anti-American posturing, and get on with the business of doing business. This faction includes big establishment figureheads such as Hashemi Rafsenjani and Khatami, and has a strong social appeal among swaths of the middle classes and professionals ideologically aligned with the regime, among the ideologically neutral, and the support runs even as deep as mid-ranking Revolutionary Guards officers.

The Americans know this, as do the Europeans. If this were not the case, there would not be any backdoor negotiations (always the prelude to overt ones), nor would there be any overtures such as sending undersecretary William Burns to the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the European powers underway in Geneva, on July 19.

So, in short, the Americans as well as the Europeans do not want a complete regime change in Iran (at least not for a while), but merely a change of behavior of the Iranian regime.

All of this leads one to conclude that if a military attack takes place, it is because the U.S. administration of George Bush (or McCain or Obama) has reached the conclusion that the only way to force the ‘behavior change’ is by splitting the Iranian regime through a military shock, thus nudging the pro-American faction to take more decisive actions in the fog of the chaos. Any military attack by the U.S. would be done in the spirit of splitting the Iranian regime and forcing a regime self-adjustment or fine-tuning.

A final point is to pay attention to what is entailed in ‘normalization’. To a lot of people, normalization has a soothing diplomatic sound to it. It forms the artificial antonym of ‘attacking’. An ‘attack’ on Iran is strictly defined to be something that can happen only militarily. The economic attacks, meanwhile, are not even registered on the liberals’ and most leftists’ radars. Yet, the economic interests are the real motivation driving the aggressive diplomatic postures as well as the threats or actual uses of military harassment.

When discussing ‘normalization’ of relations, what are we really talking about? We are talking about allowing a certain market to be penetrated by certain western economic interests. The economic interests should be self-evident, and the recent announcements by Iranian government regarding new laws allowing unlimited foreign ownership rights in Iranian firms and resources is a clear enough indication that the current regime is willing and able to accommodate all western needs. Last month, Iran’s deputy minister of commerce, Gazanfari, declared to a South Korean delegation that, “The volume of foreign investment in Iran is not subject to any limitation.”

The second plank of the ‘normalization’, in the particular case of the U.S., is the restoration of full diplomatic relations, with embassies and the works. This means the return of American spies to Iran, under a full legal protection, which, according to knowledgeable sources, is usually a precondition for relational normalization with Uncle Sam.

Understandably, professional spooks are impatiently lining the corridors of the American intelligent and foreign services, ready to be deployed to their posts of choice in any of the very desirable locations around Iran. These days, besides the beautiful geography, a wide range of habitats, great people and great food, these professionals can even enjoy the added delights of temporary sigheh brides,¹ should they wish to partake.

These professionals are actively for ‘normalization’ — as is Sen. Biden, as is Brzezinski and the entire ‘realist’ wing of the American imperialism — as are some ‘leftist’ organizations such as CASMII who, consciously or unconsciously, have become unofficial lobbyists for a theocratic dictatorship, the Islamic Republic — all of whom, and their NGO brothers and sisters, must surely toast their drinks and clink their glasses to the soon-please-come-quick detente that would bring them back to Iran, pockets full of grant money from CIA, NSA, State Dept., or whatever, salivating all over the scene, padding resumes, telling us how to dig holes and plant things we have planted for thousands of years.

Iranian people, free from imperialist interference, will change their regime, as they have been trying to do peacefully for some time now. Iranians are not deeply religious (in the strict, establishmentarian sense of the term), though the current regime does have a sizeable, and clearly well organized (since they have the state), minority of religious supporters. But this support, according to regime’s own men (e.g., Hashemi Rafsanjani), adds up to at most 15% of the population. The 85% of the population not actively with the regime is the unknown, and therefore the variable, factor.

Iranians have in fact a deep-rooted tradition of skepticism toward religious thought, something that has been aesthetically best expressed by our great poets historically. Further, we have a strong tendency toward an egalitarian society. Long before Saint Simon, Proudhon, Robert Owen, or Babeuf, and long before Marx, Engels or Lenin, we had Mazdak (died c. 524 A.D.), a popular figure in our historical consciousness, who stood against the corrupt established clerical hierarchy of his own day, and advocated public ownership of all resources as well as for the eradication of classes.

Our history and our egalitarian natural inclinations are known to both the Iranian regime as well as to westerners, and they know that any opening of the gates will unleash a situation, the outcome of which can be a big loss to big business and a huge setback to imperialists’ strategic designs for our country. So they will try their best to keep the gates closed by keeping the current regime in power, with certain adjustments, which will be extracted one way or another.

Socialists worldwide, and particularly in the Middle East and Iran, must persist on a line of thinking and action that demands the independence of all the countries in the region, including Iran, from western imperialism in all its forms; socialists must consistently demand freedom from threats of military attacks and freedom from a ‘normalization’ that enslaves the people of Iran or any other country to western economic interests.

1. Sigheh marriage/bride is a form of marriage, legal in Shiite Islam, which is a temporary marriage, certified by a clergyman.

Here is a one-liner from a Yahoo! News piece on the recent passage of the Snoops-R-Us bill in the Senate: “Obama ended up voting for the final bill, as did Specter.”

That one sentence tells you all you need to know about where Obama and most Democrats stand on the issue of civil liberties and what political leaders are not willing to do to protect those liberties. Now, that should be enough to make you withdraw your support from Obama’s presidency — if, that is, you still have illusions about the Democrats in general, and Barak Obama in this round of Anybody-But-Bush/McCain.

“What?” says you, “And let McCain win the election?”

To that it must be said: What on earth is the difference when the Democratic presidential nominee, during the election campaign, votes in the same way as a right-wing Republican not just on any bill, but on a bill curtailing people’s civil liberties?

Of course, Obama, being a smooth political operator, made a mountain out of his molehill of an ‘opposition’ to the bill, by supporting an amendment to the bill that would have removed the telecom’s immunity, but when the amendment failed, he simply dropped the ball on the whole thing and plainly didn’t care enough to vote No (only symbolically mind you, since its passage was assured tremendously by the rest of the Democratic corporate lackeys masquerading as people’s representatives).

This, in an election year, is highly telling, if not plain astonishing. It is customary for Democratic politicians to pull symbolically left-leaning gestures during the presidential campaign seasons, to prove this or that credential with this or that constituency that has real and therefore left-leaning needs. So, one would have expected Obama to move slightly to the left of the right end of the political spectrum, if only for just a quick photo op.

As the presumptive nominee, he could have rallied all the Democrats into a cohesive voting block to stop this further erosion of people’s civil liberties; he would have raised his political capital by millions. One would have expected fiery speeches in support of a change from the totalitarian path set by the Bush administration to a situation where people’s rights were restored, secured and hopefully expanded. Instead, this Democratic candidate has been proving his right-wing credentials one after another.

First, he made it clear he’s all for the intensification of the Afghan war; he has announced an indefinite open season on Pakistani soil and airspace; he has announced he will uphold Israel’s strategic supremacy in the Middle East (read, barbaric oppression of Palestinians, and indefinite bullying rights against Arab neighbors); now he has shown that he will go along with governmental infinite access to all households in the U.S. Obama does not defend the constitution, and he is a constitutional lawyer?

If Obama cannot even make a show or a pretense of a defense of people’s rights when he is not the president, I for one am vastly fearful of what he is capable of doing when/if he is the president!

Here is a classic, textbook case of a man simply and purely hungry for power and willing to do anything to get to it; a man who is beholden to the same exact lobbies that control the Republicans, the Congress and the Executive branch and a man who does not shy away from curtailing, in broad daylight, people’s rights and safety from arbitrary government search and seizure.

What more proof does anybody need to conclude that Obama is just as bad and harmful for the well being of the Americans (and others) as is McCain or Bush? Your vote for one or the other makes no difference. Voting for either is the same as throwing your voting ballot in the toilet. Political hacks that throw away people’s rights and their protections against arbitrary governance do not deserve to be elected at all.

If you want real change and you think voting can bring some change, then know this: the only difference you can make by voting is casting a protest vote. Tell the establishment they don’t represent you in a written, documented form.

Write in your own name on the ballot; better, write in your grandmother’s name. Stop handing blank checks to a government that is so plainly bent on screwing you. Stop being slaves. At least spit back in their face. Don’t waste your vote, don’t waste the only political force you can legally exercise, and don’t waste your voice; vote for Nader, vote for McKinney, for anybody but the establishment boys.

There are many problems, of the conceptual and political kind, with the explanations by the proponents of the idea that the current oil prices and the ongoing wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan are the direct results of having reached a peak in the worldwide oil production. In what follows, I will list five fundamental shortcomings of Peak Oil explanations.

1. Racist Thinking

Here is a challenge for all American environmentalists: Find any utterance made by any environmentalist in the U.S. that falls to the left of the following quote from an article by the certified right-winger, Charles Krauthammer: “Forbidding drilling [in the Arctic refuge] does not prevent despoliation. It merely exports it. The crude oil we’re not getting from the Arctic we import instead from places like the Niger Delta, where millions live and where the resulting pollution and oil spillages poison the lives of many of the world’s most abysmally poor” (emphasis added).

A very kind and well-informed person provided me an insight regarding the difference between the ‘profitability of extraction’ as opposed to the ‘required energy needed for extraction’. It was pointed out that profitability of oil extraction should not be the key consideration. Instead, the most important consideration should be how much energy is put into the extraction process v. the amount of usable energy dug up (in the form of oil). Fair and well. And I would add that the amount of energy input required to get the oil must also include the ‘cost’ of basic human life.

Myriad forms of socio-historically necessary labor-hours go into creating the material conditions in which to exploit the energy hidden in a natural resource (say, oil). If we only look at a tiny slice of this huge spectrum of energy-types spent over many decades and even entire centuries — i.e. if, out of a miles-long chain, we only look at a few chain-links pertaining to the drilling/extraction/distribution — then of course we end up with a limited understanding of the larger chain of events.

For example, consider how long (i.e., how many human labor hours) it takes to build a school. If it takes a crew of 100 people one year to finish this school, that’s 200,000 human hours (assuming work week is 40 hours, and work year 50 weeks). Now, consider how many different types of expertise go into building such a school. Now add to that the many millions of human hours spent on raising (feeding, housing, healthcare) and educating this 100-person crew.

Then, enlarge the picture: think building roads, bridges, factories, other needed buildings, stores, farms, sewage systems, houses, universities, hospitals, theaters, concert halls, sports facilities and stadiums. And then what about training and professionally nurturing the teachers, doctors and nurses, carpenters, plumbers, factory workers, shopkeepers, engineers, writers and journalists, trade unionists, film makers, painters, poets? How many billions and billions of human-hours does it take to build a city, a working government?

Now answer this: Do all the billions of hours of materialized human labor that have historically been destroyed by Westerners in the Middle East enter the equations telling us how many energy units are needed, under the current market conditions, to produce the equivalent of one BTU (British Thermal Unit) of energy?

The fact that mainstream publications screaming about peak oil (when talking about the ‘cost’ of oil) never take into account the obliterated billions of human labor-hours spent developing the societies in the Middle East is proof enough of the racist thinking common among the western powers and their media. [That some leftists get starry-eyed by the unscientific numbers presented by Peak Oilers says more about the sorry state of affairs in the so-called American Left, than it says about the persuasive powers of the 'explanations' presented.]

We can find it justifiable to exclude human lives and the ‘cost’ of their socio-historical accumulations, and instead concentrate only on technical side of capital’s operational costs exclusively connected to extraction/packaging/distribution, if and only if other peoples’ lives have no value.

When discussing human-created problems — particularly pertaining to exploiting natural resources through socially organized activities — any proposed ‘cost analysis’ that excludes historically accumulated human social labor is not an a scientific explanation. Further, such a perspective is racist since the only human life worth its consideration, implicit in its tenets, is the ethnocentric, western self.

Just the amount spent on the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan is in the trillions of dollars. How many tens of trillions of dollars worth of human creation has this war actually destroyed? Do these destructions enter American environmentalists’ calculations?

2. Warning sign is all they are; panic is all they breed

In a global social system run by imperialistic capitalism, the key factor is profitability, and nothing else. For those who wish to maximize their profits, panic may be induced regarding the slower rates of discoveries of easy oil; not ‘peak’ oil.

Peak Oil hysteria — and it is hysteria, since it comes with no realistically thought out solution plans — in this context, only feeds the ideological ruling paradigms, which translate the supposed shortages into a need for more severe wars of possession for natural resources. This is so, because in the metropolises of the world capitalist system, it is only the right wing that wields real power, and right wing solutions are the only ones with buyers. (Which incidentally is exactly why the Democrats must remain very right wing if they want to find any buyers for their ideas.)

In the context of the really existing capitalism, Peak Oilers are therefore basically a warning sign, which has been flashing on and off since the 1970s, and still decked in the same 70s accompaniments: intensification of the oppression of the Palestinian Arabs; high oil prices; high inflation; and a rising trend toward higher unemployment rates.

Peak Oil’s flashing sign is old, certain wires hanging loose disconnected, at times zapping itself; consequently, it needs artificially enhanced energy. The current war, like a lovely dose of Viagra, has given its arguments excessive blood and vigor. Just as heart-throbbing the effects are of the elixir of manhood, hold on to your hats boys and girls, for you’ll be hearing the siren songs to the tune of the equivalent of a 6-hour hard-on: very excited and energetic commentary-pronouncements running on feverishly for a long time, warning of how fucked up the situation’s gonna get, then, WAM, heart attack! On the background wall to the stage on which this stupidity performs, the sign flashing: Tank Half Empty! Tank Half Empty! (Brain Half Dead!)

Peak Oilers are very much like the local evening news: A house/office building/mountain burned down; shootings at a high school, in neighborhood X, mostly poor, police say the gunmen are still at large, motive unknown; 53 arrested after police broke up a high school brawl involving 300 students, reasons unclear; man/woman/child killed, police interviewed the neighbors, motive unknown; local convenience store held up, the cashier unharmed/was gunned down, police have no explanations.

Now, we know that even in the worst locations on earth (except war zones) those fires, shootings, school fights due to hanging nooses, teachers and priests having sex with students/believers, and all the millions of miles of footage on this or that celebrity seen locally (or anywhere) were obviously not the only things happening within the local universe in the 24-hour interval between last night and tonight. Some selection has clearly taken place, which is of course what ‘news’ organizations do to prepare their programs. This carefully produced selection, when repeated daily and over the decades, keeps the public on edge on two levels: envious of the rich and the famous and, more so and more importantly, scared and insecure about their own lives. And that, not information sharing, is the rhetorical agenda of ‘news organizations’: Danger creeps around every corner! Put your trust in the authorities! State violence is your only security!

Peak Oil serves exactly the same rhetorical purpose in a more nuanced way, with regard to the ‘energy crisis’: it keeps people revved up and on edge about the coming doom regarding oil and ‘our way of life’. And who to trust to solve the problem? Since Peak Oilers don’t say, the actually existing answer is provided happily by, who else, the western corporations, the global ‘free market’ and the first world governments.

3. Magical disappearance of American oil

Since this has been dealt with to some degree in a previous article, the actual estimates for how much oil (in different forms) is available in the U.S. are presented for the reader in two documents that were prepared for the U.S. Congress (see here, and here). These two documents make it clear that the U.S., including its outer continental shelf, contains, just in terms of crude oil, about 115 billion barrels of crude oil (not 21 billion, as is widely circulated in the mainstream media). Additionally, the U.S. also has a huge reserve of oil shale, from which at least tens of billions more barrels of oil can be had.

Further, as has been thoroughly explained by William Engdahl, 60% of the current price of oil is caused by the futures traders in this commodity, and has nothing to do with supply shortages. In fact, there is too much supply for the actually existing capacity of refineries to refine the available oil fast enough!

So, ’shortages’ have nothing to do with the oil prices, and there is plenty of American oil still available for American users. So Peak Oilers must be experiencing a severe case of ‘Thou panicketh too much!’

4. Magical disappearance of American culpability

Since Peak Oilers work with capitalist vocabulary, their solutions will never have anything to do with a fundamental re-conceptualization of property rights, and no form of socialization of natural resources will enter their platforms.

Their remedies are limited to suggestions regarding consumption patterns purely. So, let us take them seriously, and consider the consequences of their recommendations for change of consumption patterns.

According to Wikipedia, “Energy demand is distributed amongst four broad sectors: transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial. The sector that generally sees the highest annual growth in petroleum demand is transportation, in the form of new demand for personal-use vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. [...] This sector also has the highest consumption rates, accounting for approximately 68.9% of the oil used in the United States in 2006.”

Let us now praise and appraise the big, blue and purple elephant sitting in front of the TVs of all Americans still in their homes: the North American urban planning.

Apart from New York City, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland (OR) and Seattle and a few other metropolitan centers, which together comprise a small percentage of the land mass of the country, in all the rest of the U.S. you pretty much must have a car to get around; or else it takes you about three times as much (if at all) to do anything. A large percentage own two cars per family.

This is because of the city planning, which imposes such conditions that you cannot simply walk or take a bus to school, or to work, or to the grocery store; or walk to the drug store, the cobbler (seen any of those around lately?), or to buy a newspaper, a pack of cigarettes, a loaf of bread, some eggs, some cookies. No. You must drive! You must start up an internal combustion engine, and burn up thousands upon thousands of additional calorie-equivalents of energy unnecessarily spent for doing tasks that can be done far more efficiently, in the same amount of time; like they’re done in about all the other countries in the world.

So, what do Peak Oilers suggest we do about this very fundamental, and very large, part of the American demand side of the ‘oil crisis’? Nothing short of a social revolution can solve this specifically American problem. Are the Peak Oilers advocating a new American revolution and preparing for it? That would be the politico-logical thing to do.

5. The real cause of the U.S. direct military attacks

Peak Oil explanations, having done their job of delivering baseless warnings, stop way short of seeing the historical evidence in any meaningful manner. For example, they either do not want to account for since they just cannot, or see no significance in the fact that ever since the beginning of the last century, Middle Eastern societies have been under attack because of their large quantities of oil. This oil had been secured and readily available at handsome profits to western corporations and their governments without any need for direct military interventions, until 1990-91. The Peak Oilers do not draw any conclusions from this fact. Because they have not seen militaries moved into an area, they assume that no attacks had been launched. But, they must understand and draw some political conclusions from the fact that Middle Easterners have for a century been under western attack for their resources.

Only recently, did direct military interventions in our region become necessary for the U.S. Other kinds of attacks have been launched numerous times and periodically. The amount of remaining/existing oil has made no difference in the strategic designs of the western imperialists when it has come to securing their ‘interests’ in our region.

So, it is clear to most people in the Middle East that the supposed peak in the ‘Peak Oil’ has nothing to do with the current U.S. military invasion of the greater Middle East. The invasion has had something tangentially to do with oil per se, as this commodity has for a century had something to do with how westerners have approached us.

The real reason Saddam Hussein had to go has far more to do with the fact that he stopped being a stooge and was acting too independently, and challenging the set-up favored by the U.S. and Israel. The real political-economic causes in this case were more political than purely economic.

Unlike the German and Japanese imperialists, whose post-World War II interventions into Third World countries have been through economic levers, the U.S. is a world imperialist power that historically has as often projected power through ‘civil’ means (corporations and financial institutions) as through state violence (coups, bilateral security agreements previously, and now open military interventions). For this type of imperialism, local or regional powers willing to and capable of acting independently and wielding power are not desirable, unless (as with Israel) such a local power is in a fundamental fashion (existentially?) dependent on Washington’s patronage.

Once Saddam Hussein practiced his right (common among thieves) to claim a larger take, the U.S. had to step in, to teach the uppity Ay-rab (and others by extension) a lesson. A tiny little, ‘backwards’, third world nation that people educated in the U.S. cannot even spot on a map, not only gives the finger to Uncle Sam but slaps him in the face, too! Uncle Sam did not have a choice; but in that very act of showing that Uncle Sam did not have a choice, he also proved his relative (and fast increasing) impotence in the new ‘world order’.

The military invasions of the greater Middle East have everything to do with a quick-you-missed-it’s-dead hegemonic structure that was set up after World War II. In that structure, the U.S. could simply tug at some economic strings here and there, call in an ambassador or minister or two, pull off some custom made precision covert actions, and the local regimes would either dance accordingly or change (their behavior, or physically) as desired. The fact that the U.S. now has to intervene militarily is proof that the old system has vanished, and the U.S. is in a scramble to make something, strategically, out of the chaos of its own making. But, in this scramble, there are far more unknowns than there are known factors! Which is why people in the Middle East can and will defeat the aggressors.

The Arabs, I believe, will free themselves of imperialism in the long run; as will everybody else. The Middle Eastern cultures run thousands of years deep. Nothing can destroy this. I have no doubt that the Americans too, just like the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, and the Turks, will eventually have to creep back to where they came from, and in their case to face their true selves: neurosis-filled, self-indulged. And maybe, just maybe, when they do face themselves as societies, they can figure out a thing or two about how to enhance the human species not corrupt and destroy it. The only problem is that until then, there will be lots of nastiness going around since the American imperialists, like the Mongols, just can’t create anything other than total destruction.

For the people who have grown up and lived in the relative comfort of the metropoles of our world capitalist system, the establishment media and academics alike pose the question in terms of the ‘ticking time bomb’, and focus merely on a singular moment that could make or break the difference between tens, hundreds or thousands or more of lives of innocents saved or not. And for that heroic moment to arrive, a mere piece of information stands in the way of the hero and the happy ending.

The discourse is thus focused on that singularly exceptional moment, filled maximally with good intentions, of course. And while your attention is kept glued on that moment, other amenities of modernity are brought in for the benefit of the glued. Things like ‘experts’ will appear to walk you through the process that ends in that particularly singular moment; the process passing entirely through that wonderful concept of ’security’. What’s holier than security? Experts will explain how it is not at all unusual, after all, to torture in times of extremeness, such as in a terrorist-afflicted era. Easy enough to understand!

Others walk you through the legalities, and ‘explain’ that laws are not to be taken as written in stone (’a bit of common sense truth’ tactic). Most laws, they argue, deal with normally functioning societies and therefore have no place in a war-conditioned situation.

[In their haste to construct legal 'reasoning', they commit the fallacy of 'I cannot read good', since the laws they are breaking (or advising to be broken) are war crimes, by TITLE; not to forget by their very legally-and-explicitly stated definition. These laws are written for exactly such conditions as created by the warmongers who started this war of terror a very long time ago.]

Yet other special groups of experts will be presented to recommend other experts to oversee those very important and professionally administered information-gathering (wink) sessions.

This is of course the establishment defense of torture, and is usually packaged and delivered with the question: What if the terrorist knows where a bomb is hidden, about to go off any minute, seconds away? Any minute now! Aren’t those sweet innocent lives, those children, those buds about to flower into full lives, are they not a billion times more important than the temporary pain and possible inconvenience inflicted on a worthless, miserable, envy-ridden, scum-sucking fanatical piece of shit bastard son of a bitch?

The Dershowitz Defense (let’s call it) presents itself as clinical; though righteous, still self-uninterested, and purely for the benefit of the greater good of the society. And since this is the case (simply because it is stated to be the case), the argument can now proceed in ebullient manner and get right into all the natty details too mundane and way too clinical for the average Joe, Jose or Mohammad to understand: hence, the need for the presence of professionals (doctors, psychologists, nurses, researchers, etc.) at such truth-extraction sights, and the regulatory measures needed to rationalize the practice of information-retrieval (to borrow from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil), maximizing its efficacy at the same time as ensuring the humaneness that we, the First World gentle hearts, demand of all practices done on our behalf.

The brilliance (as well as the snakiness) of the reasoning! It speeds right past huge moral and ethical requirements without fulfilling any, preempting any debate at the ethico-judicial, or legislative, level, forcing the debate way past the point of acceptance, zipping right to a fallaciously thrown together conclusion. And the conclusion: “Who? We? Torture?”

Exactly. No reasoning at all. Thus, the brilliance!

Yes, in the dominant ideological world of the establishment media-academia, we are now way past the point of acceptance and well into the territory of modality (of how to do the torturing). All of which is very convenient for the likes of Dershowitz, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Condi Rice, the departed yet not sufficiently parted Rumsfeld, Secretary Gates, Dick “Chain-me” Cheney, Bush the Torturer-in-Chief, all the heads of the CIA, NSA, Pentagon and on and on; all of whom must be happy as pigs-on-crack since the open and repeated distortion-discussion is the best way of normalization of really existing torture.

For those who grow up and live in the Third World, however, the situation with torture is slightly different on two levels. First level is what our own governments take for granted as being able to do to us. The second level is what is now openly announced as what we can expect to also get from the U.S., whenever and wherever any security agency (or surrogate thereof) of the U.S. government finds torturous acts necessary in pursuit of their interests.

Most Third World societies have had to live with, or under, the weight of dictatorships, of one form or another (either directly colonial in the past, or indirectly colonial later, or our own bullies), supported by those in power in the global north. As a result, we are well familiar with torture as a social tool of control. We understand what torture is there for. We know that the existence of torture is a constant reminder of how much the state can take liberties with us and terrorize the citizenry, with complete immunity. The overt message being: You best keep our mouths shut, and don’t think of doing anything to oppose. Some expect even more; like, don’t complain, don’t oppose, shut up and look-act happy!

So, things look a bit less civilized in the Third World, where political setups are backward (in terms of sophistication and ability in concealment of the fact of dictatorship), somewhat more barbaric looking; yet more honest about practices required to keep a people under the thumb. In our countries, torture is practiced, though not always silently, yet definitely without any open, mostly ambiguous at best (as in the West), discussions in the media or the legislature and without all the professional classes openly discussing the topic as it relates to our own governments’ practices. We do read in our officially acceptable media about all others doing it, but not our own.

When growing up in Iran, like everybody else and without reading about it anywhere, I knew exactly what SAVAK, well trained by the Israelis, would do when interrogating the ‘enemies of the state’; it was intended to be known and was kept alive barely under the surface of the social fabric of interaction; with the amendment that it should not be talked about openly, lest some criticism may be intoned, heard, insinuated, implied. Sublimation is the mode: that which has solid physical existence must be evaporated into a fleeting thought. This thought, though fleeting, recurs on a high frequency. Yet still, beware: the walls have not only ears, but all five senses; some even read thoughts.

After the fall of the Shah, and with the institutionalization of the counter-revolution, the Islamic Republic regime inherited those Israeli-perfected techniques, and further improved and upgraded the practice and raised it to an art. They can not only make you give out information on a whole host of things they haven’t even asked for, they can make you then sing the praises of your torturers on national TV. Really.

The boys back home have honed their torture techniques to such levels that they can do complete and exhaustive brain remodeling. Early on in the life of the regime, a lot of leftists witnessed some of their long time Old Left leaders, paraded on the national TV after being arrested and ‘interrogated’ by the security forces, looking seemingly in one piece, no visible marks of bruising or broken anything, but gone completely insane (not like Jose Padilla insane, but very coherent and with a natural tone): admitting wrong doings of all sorts, confessing to crimes of anti-revolutionary behavior, apologizing for picking a fight with the Almighty (there is a crime in the legal code in Iran, titled literally, Battle against God; one would think that God can take good care of himself in such a battle).

Most things about torture have very little to do with gathering information. Torture has the equivalent of zilch to do with providing anybody any security, and no legalese can cover any of its ugliness or stench.

Torture, especially when openly discussed in national legislative and judicial bodies as well as the executive branches of first world nations, has everything to do with global bullies announcing clearly and unambiguously that they will do anything they like to anybody, anywhere, in any way they see fit, and with whatever frequency and ferocity as needed.

It is meant to instill fear in those who would oppose. It is part of the psychological side of the warfare against those accursedly lesser peoples; be those lesser peoples defined so by the local governments or those from across the planet.

It is also, and more fundamentally, an ideological redefinition of ‘citizenship’; it is meant to transform that concept to that of ‘membership’; in the status quo. The threat of extreme debasement hangs over every person, forcing them to decide how actively they support the state. For God help you if you’re not cooperative enough!

[African Americans are familiar with this concept, and continue to enjoy opportunities to sociologically observe it closely, in longitudinal auto-ethnographic studies with rich data provided by simply living. Millions of dissertations lie seething just beneath the surface, waiting in an ocean of fury, in our urban and rural mind fields.]

As explained by Marnia Lazreg, in her recently published Torture and the Twilight of Empire, commenting on Fanon and Sartre’s take on the topic, “Like Sartre, Fanon understood torture to be a feature of the colonial situation.”

Lazreg goes on to explain, “[In] this perspective, the use of physical force was only one aspect of the colonial venture. Expropriations, unemployment, educational policies that denigrated and dismissed local cultures and histories, police brutality, and rampant poverty were all manifestations of colonial force,” (p. 218).

This fact is as true for the Palestinians today as it is for the Iraqis and the Afghans, as it was for the Algerians and the Vietnamese at one point, and as it is and has been for the original peoples of (particularly) North America and the African Americans.

In the practice of colonialism, physical torture of ‘detainees’ is of the species of factual certainty. Yet, focusing on the particularities of physical torture is the best way of making the public lose sight of the fact that dispossession too is torturous; as is arbitrary brutalization when one is not in ‘detention centers’ and is just trying to do things necessary to live; as is the arbitrary and never-explained devaluing of the lives of subjugated society’s people. But, the explanation withheld is old and easy to guess: racism. (In this, all three presidential candidates are united in their guilt-to-the-extreme.)

The questions asked through the prism of racism, which is a corollary to colonialism and imperialism, are always of the technical nature, focusing on minute details, thereby hiding the big picture: the picture of shameless barbarity crushing humanity, just for better profit margins.

Now, in case you thought Clinton was only talking about obliterating Iran, you are wrong.

When a person running for a U.S. national office, any person, supports the ‘war on terror’, that person is also supporting the loss of civil liberties for the citizens of the U.S. He or she supports the suspension of habeas corpus (have you heard a single comment on that topic this election year? Didn’t think so!). The same person supports the exorbitant theft of people’s money (taxes) and the hand-over of the same money to the financial-military-oil complex currently running the major levers of power in the U.S.

The same candidate supports the loss of all money for education, healthcare and all other needs of the working classes in the U.S., the very people who create all the wealth and provide all the services. The same candidate also supports all the international institutions created for the flow of the so-called Free Trade, which in fact should be called the absolute freedom, with no discrimination, of capital to do as it wishes to all; which in turn means the candidate will do nothing to stop the loss of jobs to cheaper labor markets, as well as the loss of purchasing power of the people in the U.S.; nor will the said candidate do anything to address poverty besetting 50 million people in the U.S.

So, when a desperate candidate, out of frustration and the need to show how tough s/he can be, announces s/he is willing and ready to obliterate a people far way across the globe, you can bet your sweet tooth that s/he will not hesitate a second to continue obliterating YOU, the American voter!

In fact, bet that the very candidate is so assured of your obliteration that s/he sees no problem enunciating, out loud and unashamed, the most horrid, the most vicious, the most barbaric thoughts; assured that none of the stench, the ugliness or the absurdity will be sensed, nor any emotional shocks caused for a second, thanks to the corporate media.

To sum up: when a political candidate running for national office says to your face that s/he does not give a flying duck about your education, your health, your jobs, your life or those of your children’s and grand kids’, you are obliterated!

A small example: I am an educator by day (and most of the night, which is what it takes to be an educator). We learned recently that teachers lost a ‘privilege’ previously available, which was the permission to deduct up to $250 a year on our taxes, for work-related expenses such as teaching materials (needed to do one’s job as a teacher). We can no longer deduct that paltry sum (which, to us lesser earners is not that paltry). And why? Budget cuts. Now, as professionals go, we occupy pretty much the bottom of the bottom rungs of all trades; lower than any carpenter, plumber, lower than a lot of wait staff and bartenders, way lower than accountants, and I hear even lower than some sanitary workers — God bless them. Even so, a lot of us pay out of pocket for tons of things we need to use in our work with our students.

For all the money we spend throughout the year, a measly $250 could be deducted previously. Not any more! Why? Because the war must continue. In most likelihood, the students who would benefit from such teachers’ expenditures are students in ill-funded schools, where the teachers have more need to reach into their own pockets (because the school isn’t providing the funds) to provide the needed things for their lessons.

Or take another example: as noted by Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association and professor of history at Cal State Los Angeles, in a letter to editors published at New York Times, “Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes a 10 percent across-the-board cut in state financing that would leave our state university $386 million deeper in the hole” (March 1, 2008).

The amount ’saved’ by the government through denying the teachers a miserly tax write off, or the amount saved by cutting the California education budget by 10% could easily have been provided by suspending the war mongering for a few weeks. This is how wars of aggression obliterate people at home.

Clearly there is no shortage of money given by the American people to the government. The war mongers have no problem getting funded and would not let go of a penny of their budget (people’s taxes), even though the military budget of this country equals (or may in fact exceed) the combined military budgets of ALL other countries on this planet.

So, let’s not help the ruling class obliterate us any more. Let’s use this election year to get a tally of our own numbers and strength. Let’s see how many of us there really are! What is our actually existing numbers? Does anybody (besides the NSA and the CIA) know that number? What is the point of wasting votes by voting for establishment candidates? Whichever of the three establishment candidates gets into the White House, the fact and the ferocity of the Empire will continue unabated.

As you are right now, you are not represented. Period. Not only that, you are actively disenfranchised as you vote!

Just as you vote that once every two or four years, and just as you exit the polling station to go back to cook some food, pick up your kids from school, or go back to the office or the factory or the barracks, as you retreat to you ‘private life’ (very little of which is truly private, and majority of which is decided in the public realm of the political); as you deliver your full and complete political representational trust into a closed fist that then punches all life out of you and yours; you are obliterated!

You do not exist, except in so far as you grease the wheels of capital accumulation and migration. You can do your best and work your life away, but politically you count as zero. Until you start complaining, of course. Then the politicos pretend they ‘hear you’, just to shut you up. But how often has your mere complaining changed things?

Every time you vote and disappear behind the private life’s curtain, not bothering to demand anything for the political capital you hand over, you are obliterated a little bit more.

Every time you hand your tax money to the state and don’t get to dictate to them how to spend your money on you YOUR needs, you are obliterated.

Stop obliterating yourself! Stop it!

This election year, let’s say NO MORE! Say Ya Basta! Say fuck this! Screw this stupidity. Let’s act like Wobblies would, like Yippies would, like any decent thinking human would.

Let’s come together and use this so-called democratic moment and turn it around. In some countries they boycott elections, because the elections are so violently eschewed that to participate in them is to make an open fool of oneself.

In the U.S., voting ‘irregularities’ are not accompanied by open violence (unless you are black and your votes are not counted accurately when counted at all). Here, at least a good 50% of the population has already been boycotting the elections for the last forty years: on average, voter turnout for federal elections for the past forty years has been 46.3% (see here, and do the math yourself). So, obviously a majority of the population has already marked the legislature and the executive branches as beyond their reach; boycott by default.

But to simply withdraw from the legislative branch is a huge capitulation; it may seem revolutionary to some, but those ‘revolutionaries’ would have to explain the recent Maoist victories in the Nepalese legislative in some ‘reformist’ light (not in the revolutionary light they are currently praised), or else go begging for explanations for their own behavior for the past few decades.

In short, forget about anybody like Michael Moore, Medea Benjamin, Hollywood celebs, or any others who propagandize anything to do with supporting the Democrats. Get your own legislative seats: contest these seats, don’t give them away!

All Democrats are on record supporting the destruction of other countries if need be (the ‘need’ of the U.S. ruling class, that is). All Democrats will continue to use the public funds provided by the citizens of the U.S. to obliterate the wishes of the people of the U.S. to the same degree as the Republicans do.

So, why doesn’t the U.S. Left can take inventory of its numbers at least? Here is a perfectly legal and available way of finding out how many of us there really are. Let’s do get together. If you are going to vote at all, vote Nader or McKiney, vote together and let’s get past that federal-money-bringing 5% point; it’s our own freaking money: let’s take it back. Let’s get past that politically required minimal point.

You must have seen it aired last week, or maybe you heard it reported on FOX ‘News’, or may have even been IM’d or text’d about it. Yes, the topic at hand is that most moving event of the century, the all-special edition of American Idol Gives Back.

The enthusiasm was high. So high that you would have been excused if you fell into the mental abyss of forgetfulness and stopped thinking about all the war making, the looting, the pillage and the rape going on, both here at home and right through the other side of the planet.

It was a night of enormous delight for the producers, the technical and artistic staff and all the celebrities who donated their time and talent to persuade the public to ‘give back’. The proceeds came from the members of the generous public, from rich individuals and modestly well-off alike, as well as from neighborhood-friendly corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, and even the government of Gordon Brown (those across-the-Atlantic repressed, lesser imperialist cousins), who announced, with marble-in-mouth kind of delivery, that his government would donate to the tune of $200 million.

So, yes, the American Idol was giving back. But, of course, they weren’t.

First and least of all, the American Idol was not giving back anything, besides the enormously heavy air of self-congratulations. The people giving back were the public — manipulated by on-location clips and pictures of tearful, pitiful-rendered looking black and brown children, women and men.

Second, this giving public will be reaching into their pockets to give to some organization, whose overhead budget (the portion not reaching the children) is unknown. The portion that will reach the actually existing tearful kids paraded on TV is, for all we know, mostly still hypothetical; you can bet the bookkeepers will get their share before any of those bare-foot kids will theirs.

But all of that is at best, in my opinion, insignificant compared to the main point.

The main point is that the problem with such self-entertainment of the most manipulative type is how it de-contextualizes a very complex problem, which in truth must be phrased as, How Africa and Asia were looted and how the First World must pay back reparations.

Instead, in the world existing in the overlap between the culture industry and the NGO industry, the issue is packaged as ‘poverty’ in the abstract; poverty that has happened as a result of some inexplicable misfortune, amplified by irrational violence and of course local corruption; and, hey, anyway … since we can’t change anything over there, let’s at least reach out with a helping hand to those we can.

Now, it must be said that I have never had, nor will I ever have, any delusional expectations that American Idol Gives Back (or any other organization with similar inclinations, such as One, or Bono’s gig) would provide us with a deep-structure critique of the roots of the issue of poverty within a philosophical perspective, enumerating the mediations separating surface appearances from the essence or the notion of the phenomenon. The only thing I expectantly dream about, however, is at least a little less hypocrisy and more respect; but I should know better of course. When watching TV, expecting respect is, to paraphrase from Mr. Z, a sucker’s hope.

Posing the topic in the frames available to NGO-culture-industry is of course very convenient, since it puts the lion’s share of the problem ‘over there’, and diverts the attention from where the real responsibility and source of the problem lies, which is right here.

In repeated pleas packaged in on-location ‘reports’ from different African countries during the program, as the good-at-heart, mostly white people were acting patronizingly with the ‘locals’, doling out pity by the bucketfuls (queue in Chuck D: “Suckers, liars; get me a shovel!”), the audience was begged to do something that mattered, do something that could make a real change: give! Give back what you can!

‘Giving’ is of course a decent size industry in the First World, keeping herds of grazing NGO functionaries happily employed, we are to be sure. But, for the most part it is a self-serving industry. Those better informed can furnish exact figures, but I remember reading that a good 60% of NGOs/charitable organizations’ income (the donations gathered) is spent paying for the overhead; higher figures can be found for specific organizations. (At some point in my life, I hope to find the time to write a history of how a beautiful and lush country, Cambodia, was first destroyed by bombs, a second time by fanatics, and a third time by NGOs.)

The detailed history of the moral corruption of NGO and charitable organizations has yet to be written, but one can chip at it. I have lived in and traveled through plenty of places where NGO functionaries may roam. In numerous conversations with such good folk, I have noticed universally that none would even think of going to New Orleans to rebuild, for example, or to any of the thousands of equally deserving communities in the U.S. to help out or organize any form of collectivity that could give a hand with providing food, building schools, mobile or stationary clinics, irrigation, or help with environmental clean-up, or anything else. Could it be that it doesn’t look as good on the resume?

One cannot always correctly guess these kinds of motives, and any such judgments should definitely not be applied universally, but since most such gentle folk are also adept busy bodies in networking, ever in search of that ‘good’ NGO that they’ve heard ‘can lead to better jobs’, and since all the foreign adventure and giving a helping hand amount to a resume-building endeavor mostly, one would have to deduce that professional development (wink) is the motive.

Whatever the case, such professional development clearly affects the consciousness of the said professionals and the related celebrities lined up for the cause; and affect it in a way that must render the work-life narrative cohesive. Not without contradictions; simply cohesive. This cohesion dictated by the intended plan of the narrative requires immense omissions. Therefore, such narrative borrows wisdom from the old adage, “Best resolution is dissolution”, and simply presents the issue of poverty as inexplicable, bereft of any history.

The simplification and reduction of a complex social relationship of domination spanning six centuries to a still-frame picture of misfortune-induced poverty, abstracted out of the historical context, has an unambiguous politico-rhetorical purpose: denial. Denial of the fact that Africa and Asia are not poor, have never been poor, and will not be any time soon; and are in fact very rich in all kinds of resources. And that is exactly their problem. It is because Africa and Asia are very rich that the western empire builders have always been after their riches.

As social historians such as Wallerstein and Arrighi have shown, the empires of the Genoese, the Dutch, the British, (I would also add the late-arriving Japanese), have all been fed on the riches of Asia and Africa. The Spanish and the Portuguese came across the Americas on their way to Asia, to partake of her riches. And today, the U.S. is continuing in that tradition of sucking all life out of the resources of Asia (the ‘Middle East’ is a part of Asia; not that the U.S. and her multinationals have not been looting Asia for over a hundred years, starting with the rape of Philippines).

The most fundamental problems faced by the Africans and the Asians are historically rooted in the six centuries of pillage visited on them by the western imperialists as well as more than a century’s worth of it from the Japanese.

So, if the good-hearted people living in the first world agree that they would like to do something, don’t just let it be, don’t just ‘give back’; take back!

Take back your governments and stop them from raping the people all around the world. Take back your taxes and build useful things for yourself as well as pay back reparations to the people whose communities you have pillaged. Take back your armies and keep them at home. And finally, take back your pity and show respect!

I caught sight of a ‘news’ program, Hardball, showing Obama bowling in some place, and the chatter heads were having a blast at the repeated loops of Obama’s attempt at bowling (into the right gutter). Among all the laughter, one talking-head opined that Obama was trying to tap into the white working class vote, intoning something suspicious was going on there.

First of all, so what? Isn’t this an election season? Aren’t the candidates supposed to go around and talk to people in different walks of life, all the time lying through their teeth to as many ‘constituencies’ as it takes to make it to the White House?

Before rushing to the second point, let’s pause on a basic problem: the ‘constituencies’. Not people, and lots of them too, with problems in need of solutions (readily available by the way), to be found by using the very money those people hand over to the government, who then takes that money and gives it to weapons manufacturers and their associates in related industries. There are no absolutely egregious violations of people’s rights, life and dignity by the U.S. government with the aid of people’s taxes. There are no real people, tens of millions of them in fact (47 million without healthcare, 50 million in poverty, just for two counts), whose very problems are created by the system the government promotes and protects. There are no people getting zero political representation even though their very labor provides the state with the means to function.

Instead, we the people are fed through strange politico-rhetorical prisms masking abject ethical poverty, and out the other end come abstracted ‘constituencies’: Asian Americans (no mention of which class of them, since ‘Asians’ supposedly all think alike), African Americans (no classes here either), White/Black/Other Professional Middles Class (the only class ever mentioned), soccer moms, white male blue-color workers of the baby boomer generation, 18 to 25-year-old voters, retirees, ‘Women’, ‘Muslims’, Gays-Lesbians-Trans-Genders, environmentalists and tree-sitters (definitely depleted of classes and not a mention of environmental racism/class oppression), ‘Latinos’ (classless; amazing), fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, hard on defense/soft on defense voters, bleeding hard liberals, Gen-X-ers, Gen-Y-ers (I am told this is real), first-time voters, never-time voters (I salute you! Let’s get together!), and on and on.

A relevant aside: Is it just me, or do others too find it not at all shocking that in a presidential campaign year which is the seventh (not fifth) of a barbaric military occupation war in the Middle East, during a turbulent time when a clear majority of the U.S. citizens want this war to end and ditto with the plundering of their resources, under such extreme conditions of abundance of evidence of its existence, the corporate media can still not find the peace ‘constituency’, in all their reporting?

As for the constituencies that are covered, every single one of them is a window shopper, and will never get to taste any of the cookies in this system. Every one a window shopper, except the never-voters, who are most likely lesser shoppers in socio-economic indexing, and are too poor to afford illusions about American democracy.

And that’s why I’m with them. We see the circus for what it is. It is primarily for entertainment. More specifically, it is for self-entertainment.

Voting for establishment candidates is (electoral) masturbation. It gives you a euphoric high: I did my bit; I not only get complaining rights, I am an active citizen, even though after this singular act of delivering a ballot, which took me between an hour to a few, I will return to my private space, safe and self-pleased in the knowledge that I did my duty to uphold this wonderful citadel of democracy (no blood-fed empires here) and maintained the healthfulness element in the public domain; now, it’s back to me, again, after a brief democracy interruption.

This electoral euphoria, unlike auto-sexual masturbation, comes without any shame or possible embarrassments (if you’re religious, that is), thus magnifying its mystifying effects. A perfect democracy achieved with minimal effort required of the subjects; a miracle of efficiency! In fact, to demonstrate the available limits of its efficiency, citizens are actively encouraged by the system to reduce maximally any participation in the public sphere.

Voting at all would be purely masturbational if it were not for the occasional candidates who cause discomfort among the establishment candidates and the press; people such as Ralph Nader and Cynthia Mckinney, who come close enough to making sounds pleasing enough so as to cause some warm blood to flow back into an ear otherwise petrified by layers of repeated insults, corruption and violence, thirsty for the slightest talk of social justice and a fight for people’s rights, for workers’ rights, for immigrants’ rights, a good fight against racism.

So, and this is the second point, since the establishment candidates such as Clinton and Obama are not really going to do anything to change anything, and since they’re both playing for the zombies, why not try to sort out this family feud in a form that really shows us their character and temperament in the heat of some competitive activity that is more entertaining?

If Clinton and Obama want to persuade, indeed there’s everything right about going to a bowling alley. As suggested on Hardball, though, the only thing missing was Clinton in the same bowling alley. They should stop pretending this electoral thing means anything, and at least put up a good game.

They should play different games in fact: sport games, board games, card games, as well as word games, and why not drinking games. My good friend suggested mud wrestling. Why not! Let’s see them in the heat of the action.

Let’s do see them sweat a bit working under the command of Chef Ramsey, in Hell’s Kitchen. Let’s see who breaks down or loses their temper first.

They should be put on reality TV shows such as Survivor; people can watch them form alliances and study how they form alliances in a way that makes sense to the public to whom these candidates are pitching. Let’s see if they’re plain liars only, or, additionally, snakes, back-stabbers, and snitches too. Let’s see what other failings creep out of the bag in the heat of alliance-based cut throat competition.

For one thing, this merging of political campaigning with entertainment-proper side of the circus will at long last put the job of commenting on the workings of the political machinery in the hands of commentators who can actually describe things without their own noises fogging up the picture, and will increase the likelihood of not having to listen to the idiotic ‘news’ punditry classes whose asinine and jarring comments are looped and sampled 24/7.

For another thing, the alliance-making behavior of candidates in a Survivor mini-series type of show, for example, can reveal a million times more information about the candidates’ characters than can the current system of electoral circus management (after all, the corporate press does insist that ‘character’ is the most basic issue with the voters). Observing the candidates in such light can for one thing help us figure out which level of hell they end up on (we may want to switch sins, to avoid them in the next life). It can also give us information that is just plain necessary to have particularly since the U.S. executive leadership is itching to open yet another gateway to a major corridor in hell, by militarily attacking Iran. People who go with the flow really do need to know how skillful the CEO of the U.S.A. Inc. is at maneuvering hell’s labyrinthine passageways.

When in hell, you may basically follow two different paths, depending on your perspective. If you’re a zombie, most likely you’ll continue to follow the circus and have a good time, in a most lunatic kind of way. But, at least demand respect: candidates who want the thumbs-up from those in mud, must at least respect the intelligence of their audience and educate-persuade them using a proper format, entertainment, instead of boring them till hell’s frozen days dawn upon us.

The other path in our earthly hell is that of the visionary poets and artists, the socialist workers, and the revolutionaries. This path will always be there; as it has always been there, since the dawn of the capitalist world system.

Lou Dobbs was livid, though; he was beside himself. Other commentators too were more than furious: How can they be sending tens of thousands of American jobs to some rival company in France, especially at a time of economic recession? Franco-phobia was churned out now by the ideological workers and journalists organically affiliated with the liberal wing of the establishment. “These same Republicans changed the name of French fries to Freedom fries, for Christ’s sake! Now look at them!” “Can you believe it?” “The nerves of the Bush administration!” “Incredible!” “Outrageous!”

And what are these contracts for? For the production of tanker aircrafts that provide fueling for the continuous, around the clock delivery of mass murder, domination and pillage. So, pardon me if I differ.

Why should anybody give a damn which company produces these enablers of weapons that only serve to further the goals of a gang of mass murderers? We should be livid that these things are produced at all. There is not a single power on this earth that can do any harm to the U.S. militarily, yet more than 50 percent of the federal budget of this wealthiest country in the world continues to be poured into the pockets of arms producers, and all their related industries. So, until the people of the United States — the organized and the unorganized labor, as well as all other community and political organizations in the civil society — find a way of fundamentally challenging the existing setup, what does it matter that a portion of this blood money gets shifted to some other location within this global network of terror?

One question unlikely to crop up in the liberal commentary is: Since all the profits of the ‘war on terror’ are pocketed by a few private corporations, shouldn’t the costs (according to the rules of ‘free market’) be paid for by the same corporations?

Of course, I know that’s not going to happen. It is still just too pathetic that the Liberals would have problems with ‘our’ workers being denied a decent subsistence based on blood money; But these same liberal commentators have been parroting the mantra of free trade and freedom of capital to fly where it wills, and the freedom of the invisible hand of the market to do as it wishes. Now they cry, “All our good jobs are being shipped out!”

Bulletin: These are about the last of the ‘good jobs’; the battle was lost a long time ago. Just in the context of last generation’s history, labor misleaders who supported (and may still do) Clinton(s) are now merely getting their due for going along with Clinton administrations, even as he was pushing NAFTA all those years ago. And they would be even more foolish now to believe that a Clinton or an Obama administration would abandon NAFTA, the WTO, or any other not-so-free trade deals in the works.

According to an article on Political Affairs Magazine website (”Did John McCain’s Lobbyist Ties Help Scuttle Boeing Tanker Deal?” March 12, 2008), International Association of Machinists’ General Vice President, “Rich Michalski blasted the Bush administration, saying, ‘President Bush and his administration have denied real economic stimulus to the American people and chosen instead to create jobs in Toulouse, France.’”

Let us not overlook the fact that, by implication, the same union vice president would have no problems with an imperialistic economic setup that would provide his fellow machinists, and all their future offspring, endless employment; as long as the jobs stayed here. As a human born in the Third World — that world which has been receiving the ugly end of the shaft fathomed by the Western defense industries — I am quite content, nay, giddily ecstatic whenever workers in such industries lose their jobs. I for one hope they never find any work in death related ‘fields’. I wish such ‘fields’ dried up all together. These ‘fields’ are sick.

To those leftists and labor leaders outraged at this deal, here is a suggestion. It is way past time that those about-to-become-ex-machinists, and millions more in other trades and industries, along with their union leaders and other ideological representatives woke up to the fact that imperialism does not particularly care about the well being of ‘its’ workers.

What the imperialists do care about is having access to the material they need in a way that is the cheapest, most efficient and comes with the least possible maintenance cost. Since the American capitalists have been shipping larger shares of manufacturing and its related research and development to other countries, they cannot compete nimbly with the Europeans, because Americans are working with depleted (not rich) infrastructures.

It is established knowledge that even in its heyday the American capitalism was not that efficient in its manufacturing department; the only reason the U.S. capital could boast big after World War II and into the sixties was due to the fact that, unlike other major industrial powers in Europe and Japan, its physical infrastructure had not been utterly destroyed by the war. The post-industrially depleted infrastructure now, however, combined with an overworked, financially maxed-out workforce, means American manufacturing will continue to decline in competitiveness within the world capitalist order. Ergo, this contract to build better flying gas stations that went to a French company, which reportedly knows how to make them better.

Of course, we must also not forget the political dimension, which as Althusser taught us, could over-determine other dimensions. As suggested by others (e.g. by Paul Craig Roberts), the contract very likely was granted to EADS as a favor to the Europeans, and particularly to a Sarkozified France, for their embrace of the current regime of imperialist division of labor.

In either case, it is past time that American workers realized that their state is not a benevolent institution at the service of the people, and started seeing it as a predator on their lives and a protector only of a class of leeches, bent on screwing the world; a state there to protect itself and its puppet masters. And if that protection takes millions of laid off workers, and the complete evaporation of rights and quality of life of tens of millions more; if, in the pursuit of imperialist objectives, efficiency and cost cutting may necessitate up to millions of lost jobs and lives in ‘their’ own country, so be it. The bosses don’t mind it a bit.

That’s the way things are. What are you going to do about it?

What does the eradication of military-based industrial jobs in the U.S. mean for the American workers and ordinary citizens? Isn’t it very strange to have a situation in which we end up complaining about the ‘horror’ of job losses in an industry that causes so much death and destruction? It seems to me like a sick predicament to have.

As far as we Third World lesser people are concerned, unfortunately there still exist hundreds of thousands too many First World workers, from technicians to the highest scientific echelons in North America, Europe, Japan, and Israel (and a few other wannabe, weasel states) who continue to flourish in the ‘defense’ industries, and whose careers, trades, and fields will be nourished by the blood of millions of black, brown, yellow and red people down south.

If you are one of those laid off workers, pray that your livelihood will never again depend on destroyed lives. I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but as a machinist you clearly have a lot of practical intelligence and creativity. Surely there are needs in you community that can benefit from the creativity that you (as well as your fellow machinists, with whom you can form cooperatives) possess.

In the general scheme of things, you haven’t seen yet a thousandth of the misery imperialism can unleash on lives. Realize now, or perish even worse lacking the knowledge, that the cause of our misery and the cause of your misery have the same name: imperialism. And that cause is not going away as long as you align yourself with the Democrats, who are some of the most cunning imperialists. Stop talking to the Democrats, and for your own sake stop begging Pentagon for jobs; how low are you willing to go?

Build your own party and start living!