The nation is its people. You don’t get to wiggle out by saying “I just hate the government, not the popular movement that formed the government”. Iran isn’t being occupied from the top by an invading army. It’s a super-majority Muslim nation that is governed by a popular clergy and democratically elected bureaucracy.
You focus on the “anti-imperialist” side of the ledger, whereas I asked about all MENA countries.
The pattern of imperial conquest, ethnic divide-and-conquer governance, and villainization of popular politics isn’t unique to occupied MENA states. What sets Iran apart from Saudi Arabia or Turkiye or Jordan or Egypt is its unaligned status.
What Americans claim they hate about Iran and Yemen but can’t be bothered to care about in Dubai or Kuwait or Azerbaijan is a series of tropes drummed into them by Christian Fascist national media.
Why are the western allies also autocracies? Qatar, UAE, Saudi, Jordan. Who do they also suppress? Right: the Left, the socialists, the labour movement, the radical youth.
Iran isn’t a leftist or socialist state in any meaningful sense. They’re as draconianly anti-socialist as any Saudi government. That’s a big reason why you have crowds of Iranian civilians gulled into supporting a nepo-baby from Maryland as their US-sponsored savior (which the US secretly backed a return of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a western proxy). This is not a conflict between Western liberals and Eastern socialists. It’s a fight between Western Christian Imperialists and Eastern Muslim Nationalists.
You accuse me of …liberalism when you have swallowed hook line and sinker the romantic nationalism that is the foundation liberalism. I mean this is just out in the open:
The nation is its people. You don’t get to wiggle out by saying “I just hate the government, not the popular movement that formed the government”. Iran isn’t being occupied from the top by an invading army. It’s a super-majority Muslim nation that is governed by a popular clergy and democratically elected bureaucracy.
Ein volk, eh?
There is basically zero marxism in your diatribe. The only thing that has a “red” tint in what you’re saying is the word “imperialism”, but your framework differs extremely little from Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. You use left-wing vocabulary, but the structure of your analysis is nationalist and civilizational rather than class-based.
I don’t see any point in continuing this discussion, we’re using fundamentally different paradigms and value systems here.
Lol, just to clarify, because your American(?) mind probably cannot understand what I wrote, and you respond with “???”:
You think I’m calling you a liberal because you support human rights and NGOs or whatever. I’m calling you a liberal because your basic unit of analysis is the nation. “The nation is its people” is not a Marxist statement. It’s a liberal-nationalist one, romantic nationalist: Mazzini, Fichte, Michelet, Paparigopoulos. Marxists don’t accept the “nation” as the unit of analysis. We ask where are the class antagonisms, political conflicts, and repressed social movements. Where did this go when you collapsed them all into “the nation”? In the “anti-imperialism” dualism, the clash of civilizations. Huntington, nationalism, clash of civilizations and romanticism. That’s the paradigmatic disagreement.
The nation is its people. You don’t get to wiggle out by saying “I just hate the government, not the popular movement that formed the government”. Iran isn’t being occupied from the top by an invading army. It’s a super-majority Muslim nation that is governed by a popular clergy and democratically elected bureaucracy.
The pattern of imperial conquest, ethnic divide-and-conquer governance, and villainization of popular politics isn’t unique to occupied MENA states. What sets Iran apart from Saudi Arabia or Turkiye or Jordan or Egypt is its unaligned status.
What Americans claim they hate about Iran and Yemen but can’t be bothered to care about in Dubai or Kuwait or Azerbaijan is a series of tropes drummed into them by Christian Fascist national media.
Iran isn’t a leftist or socialist state in any meaningful sense. They’re as draconianly anti-socialist as any Saudi government. That’s a big reason why you have crowds of Iranian civilians gulled into supporting a nepo-baby from Maryland as their US-sponsored savior (which the US secretly backed a return of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a western proxy). This is not a conflict between Western liberals and Eastern socialists. It’s a fight between Western Christian Imperialists and Eastern Muslim Nationalists.
Thought-Terminating liberalism at its finest.
You accuse me of …liberalism when you have swallowed hook line and sinker the romantic nationalism that is the foundation liberalism. I mean this is just out in the open:
Ein volk, eh?
There is basically zero marxism in your diatribe. The only thing that has a “red” tint in what you’re saying is the word “imperialism”, but your framework differs extremely little from Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. You use left-wing vocabulary, but the structure of your analysis is nationalist and civilizational rather than class-based.
I don’t see any point in continuing this discussion, we’re using fundamentally different paradigms and value systems here.
???
Scaring yourself by reading words in German will put you out of whole branches of modern political philosophy.
Lol, just to clarify, because your American(?) mind probably cannot understand what I wrote, and you respond with “???”:
You think I’m calling you a liberal because you support human rights and NGOs or whatever. I’m calling you a liberal because your basic unit of analysis is the nation. “The nation is its people” is not a Marxist statement. It’s a liberal-nationalist one, romantic nationalist: Mazzini, Fichte, Michelet, Paparigopoulos. Marxists don’t accept the “nation” as the unit of analysis. We ask where are the class antagonisms, political conflicts, and repressed social movements. Where did this go when you collapsed them all into “the nation”? In the “anti-imperialism” dualism, the clash of civilizations. Huntington, nationalism, clash of civilizations and romanticism. That’s the paradigmatic disagreement.
Bye.