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The Myth Of An Isolated Iran
While on the road today I listened to the hourly news broadcast of the German public radio station DLF. The station is available countrywide and the program is usually of very high quality. It is seen as somewhat official.
But one of the news item in today's 6:00 pm broadcast was schizophrenic. Here is my translation of the Germany text:
Summit of non-aligned States opened in Teheran
The summit of the Non-Aligned Movement opened today in the Iranian capital Teheran. More than 40 head of states and head of governments are expected to attend, including the Egyptian president Morsi and Cuba's head of state Castro. The secretary general of the United Nations Ban Ki Moon has also agreed to participate which is seen as diplomatic success for the internationally isolated Iran. The five day long gathering is the biggest international meeting in Iran in more than a decade.
One wonders what the news writer at the DLF was thinking when she wrote that piece. Did it escape her that the country which now leads the NAM, the biggest international political association of states next to the UN, is by definition not isolated? That the attendance of more then 40 head of states plus the UN secretary general and lots of foreign ministers in Tehran proves indeed the opposite of international isolation?
The alleged "international isolation" of Iran is obviously nothing but a western propaganda item and the NAM meeting in Tehran proves this. Still western news media, DLF isn't far from alone in this, repeat this propaganda item even while reporting the facts reveal it as such. Do they really expect that their listeners will not detect such doublethink?
A decade ago the “left” in Europe was mounting marches involving a million here, two million there and hundreds of thousands everywhere, to protest against the drive to war with Iraq.
If you look back on the debates surrounding that war two things are striking: the warmongers’ case against Saddam Hussein, which all on the left but renegades rejected as nothing more than excuses for an imperialist power play, was a lot stronger than those against Ghadaffi or Assad, where clearly the Empire is bent on regime change in order to advance the same strategy which prompted the attack on Iraq, and presages one on Iran.
Add to this the fact that, from the imperialists point of view, the war on Iraq proved to be a disaster, revealing both their military weakness, their and amorality and the fragility of their economies. The immediate effect of which was, in the aftermath of the war, to add incompetence and ignorance to the case against Bush, Blair and their allies.
And it pays to recall how few those allies were: the governments in Germany and France both advised against attacking Iraq and were widely supported for doing so. The neo-fascists in Spain were enthusiastic but they lost power as a direct result of being seen as too close to Bush. The “coalition of the willing” consisted of the bare minimum of Washington’s clients and puppets.
Now, however if you wanted to rally a million “leftist” people in London, Toronto or Paris you would be advised to march not against but for war and imperialism.
The anti-imperialism that was once central to the post war left has been replaced by a banal CIA friendly “humanitarian interventionism” which has spread far beyond the right wing of social democracy (which has long been sponsored by the State Department) to the very Trotskyist sects which grew up in the anti-Vietnam war agitation.
In France, so I gather, large swaths of the “left” see the wahhabi led war against heretics as a (please don’t laugh) workers revolution against a Syrian Romanov. In the UK not only is this view widely held but the “revolution” in Libya, now clearly identifiable as an imperialist adventure with sickeningly violent sectarian and racist pogroms, is held to be a triumph, a vital stage in the “permanent revolution.”
In terms of real politics the Empire has never been weaker. Its credibility, the trump card throughout the Cold War, has evaporated. Throughout the world people may not know where their next meal is coming from but they know that America is cruel and evil, and its white European allies jackals, as cowardly as they are weak.
Diplomatically China and Russia are running rings around NATO, and, while doing so, shoring up nationalist domestic support in the very circles which were once a cultural Fifth Column for the USA.
Economically countries like Iran, Ecuador, Venezuela and many others are being driven by sanctions, snubs and injustices to form countervailing systems, alternatives to the dollar, Wall St and The City. And the more the Empire bullies, as it always does, the more dangerous its position becomes. Take Egypt, for example, in need of loans but not in need of the IMF’s insistence that it reduces its population to peonage. Take Greece where there is no let up and the Troika seems to have a death wish and to be determined to make it impossible for its clients and creatures to survive politically. The list of such countries is getting very long, and as the Depression deepens it will get longer…
Just as, when the capitalist world system showed signs of finally imploding, the “left” stopped pretending to be socialist, to criticise capitalism as a system, to ally itself with the working class and to insist upon the public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. Just as, when mass unemployment returned, the left gave up its commitment to Full employment and the Welfare State.
So, as the Empire, with drums a-beating and bugles blowing marches angrily and proudly up its own arsehole, the “left” throws up its criticisms and joins with its enemies, the warmongers, imperialists and authoritarians to surrender its fate to a ruling class longing for Armageddon. It is like 1914 all over again only the high explosives have been replaced by H bombs.
Posted by: bevin | Aug 27 2012 20:50 utc | 31
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