Ahmadinejad’s ‘mature democracy’: reply to Andy Newman
Posted on Wednesday 30 December, 2009
Filed Under International
HOW would you define a ‘mature democracy’? Would a government that restricts the right to stand in elections solely to candidates approved in advance, and even then regularly stuffs ballot boxes, deserve the designation in your book?
What if you were told that the state in question was an open theocracy which consolidated its hold on power through the execution of tens of thousands of communists and other leftists, at a conservative estimate?
Would it affect your judgement if you were further informed that in the country we are talking about, independent trade unionism is not allowed, and homosexual acts sometimes attract the death penalty?
If you see yourself as a socialist or a liberal, would you pen a leftist apologia for a ‘mature democracy’ that has in the last few days killed at least eight pro-democracy protestors and arrested several key opposition leaders?
Blogger Andy Newman – main writer on Socialist Unity, Britain’s most widely read far left website – would. Thanks to his cadre Marxist background, he can see through the smokescreen of ideology generated by the bourgeois press, designed to dupe the impressionable into misguided solidarity with the victims of the dictatorship in Iran.
It’s their own fault they are corpses. The stupid bastards didn’t seek the ‘dialogue and compromise required for a peaceful win-win resolution’ with Ahmadinejad’s ‘mature democracy’. Read it all here.
The spooky thing is the way that Newman’s long and unnecessarily prolix screed transposes the arguments that Stalinists and even some orthodox Trotskyists deployed in decades past in defence of the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes.
Readers with long enough memories will find many claims in the piece strangely familiar. There is the contention that while the system under discussion is obviously not democratic by our standards, it can – by chop-logic yardsticks – be classified as democratic in a different way; standard liberal criteria do not apply.
Oh, and the economy works to the advantage of the poor. Any amount of evidence adduced that points to the enrichment of the elite is by the by here.
Newman notes that ‘general subsidies have been a big part of the welfare state in post-revolution Iran’, risibly painting Ahmadinejad as some kind of Persian Polly Toynbee.
He thereby forgets that all modern states have some kind of welfare element. He might as well maintain that Hitler operated a pretty neat job creation programme, and offered soft loans to unusually fecund German mothers.
Given the centre of gravity in Marxist thinking in the past, it is just about possible to see where Uncle Joe’s fellow travellers were coming from. But somehow a man politically formed in the one far left tendency that above all others resisted this chain of thought has ended up as a compagnon de route of repressive political Islam.
Let’s dispose right way of the inevitable canards that will surely be thrown in my face. I am opposed to military intervention in Iran by any imperialist power or any imperialist proxy. Nor does opposition to Ahmadinejad imply backing for Mousavi.
Elementary Marxism suggests that both represent opposing factional interests within the same ruling class. So we are duly reminded by Newman that ‘progressives need to avoid a simplistic polarisation between different strands of elite opinion both of which are disadvantageous to the mass of the population’.
That’s a bit of a contradiction, given the way in which he is plainly aligned to Ahmadinejad’s ‘populist and redistributive social welfare policies’.
But we should take our guidance from the Iranian left on this one; you know, Andy, the people you ostensibly uphold as co-thinkers. They are on the streets, participating independently within the broader Mousavi current.
In need of some wriggle room, Newman opts for the famous ‘in so far as’ tactic. ‘In so far as’ the protestors wish to change some of the ‘more oppressive aspects of Iranian society’ and stick to demanding such things as union rights, they can be completely supported. Presumably the less oppressive aspects of Iranian society are fair enough. Newman does not say under which category throwing students off tall buildings can be classified.
Many of Newman’s other positions will astound anyone aware of the revolutionary Marxist tradition in which he was formed. Revolution ‘might mean civil war’, Newman points out. Nobody who has read a few history books will doubt that.
Hilariously, he blasts the Mousavi opposition for its resort to ‘extra-constitutional means’. One shudders to think what he would have made of that naughty boy Lenin, or even the early 1980s Labour Party soft left, which advocated ‘extraparliamentary action’.
The clincher for Andy is that Ahmadinejad has the armed forces on his side. Dictatorships generally do, mate. You are politely referred back to Engels for the Marxist position on ‘bodies of armed men’, comrade.
Newman’s conclusion? The western left should avoid ‘trite cheerleading’ in support of the Mousavi tendency. What we need is to be trite cheerleaders for Ahmadinejad’s ‘mature democracy’ instead, he seems to suggest. I think he is wrong.
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77 Responses to “Ahmadinejad’s ‘mature democracy’: reply to Andy Newman”
We sure seem to be wandering away from the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Republic, don’t we?
Is it really plausible that ASIA TIMES ONLINE would bankroll ISLAMOPHOBIA WATCH?
Possibly; stranger things have happened.
Who bankrolls KAVKAZ CENTER then? It is REALLY poisonous stuff, no matter how informative it is:
http://www.kavkazcenter.com/eng/
And who runs REDWATCH? It isn’t anywhere near as slickly presented as ISLAMOPHOBIA WATCH but MPs have denounced it.
There are people who assert that such sites are bankrolled by intelligence services, in part to justify their own existances and in part to keep tabs on those drawn to them. It has been claimed that COMBAT 18 and CLASS WAR were – or are – ‘false flag’ operations.
One can be sure that if the British state REALLY wanted to close down REDWATCH it could.
KAVKAZ CENTER is supposedly hosted in Sweden; the Swedes acted to great promptness to close down a site with the supposedly-offensive cartoons of Mohammed [those who wish to see them can easily do so by going through Wikipedia] but tolerate KAVKAZ CENTER.
It’s surprising that Comrade Putin’s assassination squads haven’t dropped round with a cup of plutonium-enriched tea.
Southpawpunch. I suppose you have deemed your esteem self not to be in the catagories you mention above. Your apparant dislike of free speech is exactly why your type of Left is regarded as a joke.
Dave,
Southpaw makes a good point, might be time for a re-think on comment policy?
To filter out the Holocaust deniers (Jock McTrousers) and flaming bigots (Bill Corr), thus allowing the return to a more agreeable environment
Eddie Truman. The general idea of the Islamic dictatorship is to take over and not to be won over. Islam is fascist and totally incompatable with socialism. Honor Killings, head and hand decapitations the burkha,kneeling on carpets five times a day for something that does not exist, suicide bombers etc etc. You think this can be won over. They laugh at you. Get your head out mate.
More righteous indignation from Eddie Truman, who apparently wants to build a “better world based on human compassion and understanding,” presumably through the medium of a McCarthyite website that pursues pointless sectarian vendettas; smears secularists as racists; conflates atheism with Islamophobia and clearly takes the fascist ‘redwatch’ website as its defining model.
Eddie, if you want to build a better world based on human values you could do us all a tremendous service by simply retiring from your poisonous pardody of left activism.
modernity. Do you actually mean censorship in the fine tradition of fascism and socialism! Perhaps you could be the comrade moderator.
The General Election countdown commences tomorrow. What a dilemma the looney tune left have. Do they campaign for the elderly poor and disabled or the Tories hoping that the revolution will take a step forward. Aye Right.
Well it is not worth me responding to this, dave seems able to make up his mind on issues without recourse to the facts.
But this idiocy does merit comment:
‘Not worth you responding’? Please Andy, don’t do me any favours.
I’ve got half a mind to delete the above comment, because that’s the kind of treatment it would meet with on Socialist Unity.
But I think I can live with the devastating critique.
Bill Corr: As someone raised in a Puritanical British tradition, I did not care for your comments on 9-year old girls. I know that some of them can appear very knowing and they are interested in make-up, but why if they are actually engaged in sexual relations does it cause them mental distress and personality problems? Doesn’t this suggest that it is not that easy.
As for Islam, the fundamental problem is social relations. It seems to me that Islam thrives in feudal societies, where submission and dominance is preordained. What is needed is revolutions in Islamic countries that destroy feudal relations. Let’s not forget that that was the political importance of the French Revolution in Europe, while in Britain it was more gradual, but are these pro-Islamacists seriously arguing that we should go back to feudalism or institute a modern version of it?
Dave, I think you’re a saint for not deleting Newman’s comments. I would have lost it long ago. Well done for sticking to your principles against the most infuriating provocation.
“It is simply a fact that the Iranian government is regarded as legitimate by large parts of the population,”
Which is why the government resorts to torture, jailing journalists, banning demonstrations, arbitary arrest, passing ‘web crime’ laws, judicial amputations, outlawing dissent, criminalising trade unions, armed attacks on students, etc, etc. Actions of a state that enjoys virtually no public legitimacy.
But who cares? Swiss Tony (George Galloway) has a regular slot on ‘Press TV’ and that certainly outweighs any concerns about the domestic situation in Iran.
Sue R.
I really ought to write IRONY ALERT or PARTIAL IRONY ALERT as the heading to some pieces.
Being a rational person, one accepts that VERY young girls cannot give birth safely via the birth canal because their pelvises are not suffiently grown.
When one reads of girls of nine giving birth to a living infant at full term it is invariably by Ceasarian section. American supermarket newspapers like ‘National Enquirer’ and the ‘Weekly World News’ feature such tales, usually from South America or Central America.
Gandhi says in his autobiography that he and his wife were engaging in marital relations before they reached their teens. Of course, there are plenty of people who think that Gandhi was totally off his box when it came to matters sexual.
The reasons given for VERY young marriage were, and still are, to ensure that neither partner is grabbed and married to another person and the purely pragmatic reason that in primitive societies people simply didn’t – and sometimes still don’t – last very long so the sooner pair-bonding and procreation gets started the better for all concerned.
This still happens among some tribal people in India and Sarawak, despite all the government tries to do to stop it happening.
As for societies like Muslim societies sliding backwards, the issue can be debated either way. At the time the Shah was overthrown, Iranian women were conspicuously fecund and this fecundity continued for some years after the Ayatollahs’ revolution. Then, as in postwar Japan, there was a visible change almost overnight; in urban Iran now family size is practically indentical to the European norm.
Say what you like about Saudi Arabia, but child marriage is gradually disappearing – the Jeddah-published English-language Arab News’ has an online edition* for all to read – and almost all girls are getting educated.
The student nurses may be veiled [four out of the seven in a class I taught recently chose to be veiled] but they are more than sharp enough and know all about birth control and so on.
* If one reads it only to find ludicrous tales, like the Indian kidnapped from a bus stop at Al Kharj and driven deep into the semi-desert and obliged to fodder and water his abduictor’s camels, it reads like an updated ‘Arabian Night’ but the REAL point is that Saudi journalists make a big howling fuss about the wickedness of a nine-year-old girl being married to a husband six times her age.
Lets remember that it was the NATIONAL ENQUIRER that broke the totally true story of Madame Clinton’s fat brother peddling Presidential pardons out of the back door of the White House.
In its later years the print edition of the WEEKLY WORLD NEWS was mainly fiction
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/06/AR2007080601293_pf.html
It still lives, online.
The nine-year-old mothers in Costa Rice [true] were juxtraposed with rather-less-than-true stories which appealed to many bored with dull real news:
NAZI ASTRONAUT RETURNS FROM MOON
was a particular favourite and was pinned on the wall at the aerospace company where I worked a quarter-century ago.
“His politics are about as sound as Mark Perryman’s i.e. crap.” Doug
Mmm. With such a deep-seated political analysis it is hard to know where to begin my response.
How about this. My politics are crap left social-democratic. I;m a fairly inactive member of an organisation, Respect, which shows no serious signs of growth, but at least stands a decent chance of holding on to most of its East London council seats next year, and in Salma Yaqoob has far and away the best chance in England of an Outside Left win in the General Election. None of this amounts to much but its something. Overall I loath the organisation culture of the pre-existing left which is backward looking, exclusive, devoid of pleasure and participation, and in most of its public statements pompous and entirely unreflective.
So. Will you have the guts to own up to the weaknesses and deficiencies of your own politics and organisation in 2009. Or like most of your sort are you happy to dish it out to others but incapable of analysing your own shortcomings? I won’t hold my breath waiting for a response.
Mark P
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FORMER STALINIST
Please share this link with those who might be interested.
http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/mybook2.html
P.S. The book is waiting for a reviewer
Those wacky fun-loving Ayatollahs in Iran and their subordinates were responsible for the Brits’ kidnapping and murder according to the GRAUNIAD
My teachers and smartish chums used to believe every word of the dear old GRAUNIAD as gospel truth:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/31/peter-moore-kidnapping-iran-militia
It was all about $18,000,000,000 in aid money which had somehow slipped through the cracks
To imagine this sum is quite easy: think of a nice new million-dollar house with a 3-car garage and a pool and a landscaped garden and a few bits of sculpture.
Now image a gleaming new town with 18,000 such houses.
Mark Perryman hasn’t quite, er, ‘got’ what Respect actually is, has he?
Mark, take a look at the names of the Respect councillors and then take a stroll round their electoral areas.
The Respect vote is a tribal vote, like the Druze of Lebanon voting for the Jumblatt clan or the Taigs of West Belfast voting for Gerry Adams.
Ideological purity doesn’t come into the issue at all.
the main problem of “comrades” like Andy Newman & Co. is, that they indulge in geopolitical speculations and consider western pseudo-anti-imperialist “experts” to be more competent on issues “down there” than revolutionary leftists from these countries
Bill Corr: Aren’t you being a bit slippery on paedophilia? Most reasonable people would not object to some sort of sexual activity between young people of the same or very similiar ages, except of course if there was a high social value put on virginity or ‘purity, but that’s not what teh story of Mohammed and Ayesha is about. He was reported to be an old man of 54, and paedophiles are generally considered to be ‘dirty old men’. I watched a programme once on tv about the Masai in Kenya. It is their custom to allow warriors to have sexual intercourse with pre-pubescent girls but they must stop once the girl reaches puberty, because they do not want children produced. I don’t want to take on a sort of ‘fat white woman’ approach on this, but I wonder if it causes any harm, mentally or physically, to the girls concerned. I mean if it’s the social norm presumably they would not feel ashamed, in fact it may even benefit teir family to be associated with a young man who may go on to become powerful, on the other hand, I wonder if there is any danger of infection, especially nowadays things like AIDS. I should add that the warriors they were talking about were all young men ie 20 years of age or thereabouts, not grizzled old soldiers.
About birth control…isn’t that a slightly different question? I’m very glad that birth control is making headway in Saudia and Iran. Let’s hope that a few other places realise the benefits of family limitation.
SueR. From what you have stated above it would seem in all cases the men call the tune and that women are just objects for lying on their backs when required. You have made the case for female emancipation.
Sue R. is, of course, totally right and it is very wrong of anyone to tease her if she’s going to rise like a trout to every fly.
Sue R. mentioned AIDS; here is one of my father’s true stories:
In the East African campaign in WW2 the African troops of the King’s African Rifles were issued with condoms to stop them being laid low with sundry nasty venereal infections [this was long before AIDS, of course] as they marched northwards into Italian-occupied territory.
Nonetheless, the troops were still developing the tell-tale symptoms – which are to be seen in very graphic detail on billboards all over Yunnan – of nasty infections so the KAR Medical Officers stormed about the men’s lines to find what was wrong and it was soon discovered that the condoms supplied by the War Office were being put over the muzzles of the soldiers’ Lee-Enfield 303s to keep the dust out rather than being used as barrier prophylactics.
Happy New Year
I have just made the point on Socialist Unity that Mr Newman quotes from Alistair Crooke as an expert on Iran, without bothering to tell us that Crooke is ex-MI6.
As such his interests are not necessarily the same as those of progressive forces…….
Go on, Bill Corr, I likes to be tickled.
Can we expect a ‘solidarity’ statement from Galloway and Respect shortly? Perhaps one praising the swift response of the ‘Iranaian leadership’ in preserving the ‘Islamic’ democracy from internal challenge, and preserving ‘the rule of law’ against adventurist terrorists.
It may sound like a bad joke, but check the link below. With exception of calling on the brave Sons of the Revoloution to wade through rivers of Zionist blood, Galloway pretty much delivers as expected.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v8BNaWKuMM
Over at Harry’s Place, there has been a whole thread dissecting Andy Newman’s abject Iranophilia. He posts in the thread denying that he has ever claimed to be a’revolutionary marxist’, so I guess at least we know where he stands now.
Newman excels with specious comparisons in another thread:
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=5066#comments
btw, Dave, did you really confess?
modernity. They were only killing others to satisfy their own political or financial ends. Hardly progressive. The genious Newman only states the obvious. Killing is a short term fix then it starts over again.