Presidents Ahmadinejad and Chevez
It seems that the ruling-class politicians, the American and European pundits and the sectarian left have all dismissed Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s re-election Friday last as blatantly fraudulent. This is based on nothing more nor less than the smarmy self-confidence of the politically motivated know-it-all contingent.
Since the elections Medialand has been abuzz with excitement. Something finally happened ! Many commentators who know nothing about a non-ideologically distorted estimate of political dynamics in Iran conclude that Iran's recent elections were a farce -- and moreover perhaps a conservative "coup d’état" is presently attempting a power-play for total control of the Iranian state...
This is of course a nonsense: one could more reasonably argue that if a coup is in the offing it is being effected by the the losers in Friday’s election who are going from green to black with bilious dyspepsia. Was it not Mousavi who declared victory on Friday even before Iran’s polls closed? And they call this man a paragon of democracy?
The Islamic Republic is not all about personality politics like America in Dem Party Primary frenzy,- Iran is not preoccupied with Ahmadinejad's preference for arugula or the name of his domestic pets. What Iran does possess in its complex multi-centred power-grid is a strong consensus about central issues of national identity, national security and foreign policy. This consensus on core matters is not up for grabs. It includes Iran’s nuclear program and Iran's anti-imperialist front with other US-designated rogue-states like Venezuela and Bolivia.. For instance, each of the four candidates in last week's election would have continued the nuclear program if elected.
The western media, with most of the blogging trolls and talking heads in tow,seriously over-estimated Mousavi’s modestly accelerating momentum in the last weeks of the campaign. And they also under-estimated Ahmadinejad’s appeal to the masses in many sectors as a populist politician and strong campaigner. Western commentators failed to pick up on the widespread Iranian perception that Ahmadinejad had won the nationally televised debates with his 3 opponents, particularly the perception that he trounced Mousavi in their tete-a-tete.
As might have been predicted, the student cadre of irrepressible revolutionists who follow one Trotskyist line or another are once again all in an uproar ready to man the barricades of Victoria, Seattle, Detroit and "the Windy City". They have not needed to convince themselves that the class-facts are untrue because by long habit they have internalised an Alice Through The Looking Glass perspective where one may believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast...
Mesmerised like proverbial lemmings by the loud and long street protests of Tehran's students and the rage of the Iranian upscale bourgeoisie, the ultra-left misconceive the pent-up frustration of the most americanised among the people for 'the vanguard of the proletariat'. They cannot admit the depth and strength of Ahmadinejad’s base because they do not wish him to have a base. So they ignore the news stories that report the telephone poll conducted by the DC-based 'Terror-Free Tomorrow' from May 11 to 20, a pan-Iranian polling that found Ahmadinejad a full 20 points ahead of Mousavi. After all, why would the followers of L.D even countenance such relics of "electoralism"?
One would think a class analysis of Iran must take economic conditions in Iran into account...However, the fact that the IMF projects that Iran’s economy will actually grow this year is neither here nor there to the international sectaries in their multitudinous conventicles! So the Iranian economy looks as if it's growing whilst the economies of most Gulf Arab states are deep in recession? What is that to me and thee, to Senator John McCain and to Mr.Alan Woods?
Woods, a Trotskyist leader, has said in his org's publication: "Our duty is to ... to try to fertilize the [Iranian protest] movement with clear revolutionary socialist slogans." There we have it - the devotees of the marxism.com tendency have a NEW task ahead of them: Sloganeering!; their 'No.1' enjoins them to begin fertilizing the Iranian protest movement with "clear revolutionary socialist slogans"! Net decorum forbids me to say what I think of Woods's "fertilizing" online, but suffice it to say he's been spreading it wide and thick for these long years, and few and far between are the green shoots that have sprung from his embrowning of the earth.
In conclusion, broad sectors of the Iranians including the much pilloried "pious" , as well as the majority of the working-class, rural people, the civil servants and the elderly pensioners— have indicated when polled that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s policies suit them better than the other candidates.
By all means let the protesters protest their loss. the Iranian students and middle class who are affluent and who have internet hookup, pc's, and blackberries are the ones we hear from... And undoubtedly this strata s discontent with the election result represents a clash in Iran about how to accommodate the rightful discontent of many of the young women; the protest represents a real clash in Iran how to juggle post-Revolution Iranian style Islam with an Americanized global popular culture of consumerism and entitlement...These clashes are real. It is a democratic contest about the balancing of religious culture and democratic norms.
And as well, in the ruling clerical council there seems to be division about whom the different ayatollahs wish to be president.No one in the clerical strata wants to abandon support for the anti-Israeli Resistance.....That is why Pres. Obama said that no matter who is President of Iran, Iran will remain a "problem", a troublemaker for "American interest"
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