Re: [A-List] (Fwd) Re: Clash of Sexual Civilizations (was Re: ahma

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/25/07, Néstor Gorojovsky <nmgoro@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> While I usually tend to agree with Yoshie, I am afraid that this is
> not the case. The struggle for "personal rights" is not just a
> "cultural" issue.
>
> Socialist revolutionaries of course have to FIRST AND FOREMOST support
> the administrations or regimes in the Third World,that are under
> imperialist harassment.But they must also pick up the "economic", so
> to say, issues of personal rights, because if we don't then they will
> become a weapon against those administrations or regimes, playing in
> the hands of imperialists. In "What is to be done", Lenin did not
> attack the right of workers to economic struggle, but their
> confinement into such a struggle. Same runs for what could be termed
> as "political unionism of discriminated sectors".
>
> It is one of our duties to link the best, emancipatory, heir of the
> European revolutionary cycle to the current turmoil of an embattled
> Third World. No one said it was easy. But it has to be done. And the
> reason is quite simple.
>
> If this revolutionary Left, a Left that takes on these "personal
> rights" issues from _within_ the national liberation movement in the
> Third World even though the issue might be unpopular for the time
> being, if this kind of Left does not exist, then imperialism as a
> system will invent a "Left" that will further imperialist interests
> based on the limits of the contesting regimes in the Third World  I am
> not suggesting that struggle in Iran or around Iran must be centered
> around the issue of homosexuality. I am suggesting that "unheard
> clamors" must be broached by us, because if we don't then there will
> appear some sepoy that broaches them. And that though not as the main
> point of any programme, these issues must be included in any programme
> against imperialism.
>
> We can, of course, decide to evict homosexuals from the struggle. It
> would be certainly a pity, because we might be evicting some hundreds
> of Spartans...
>
> And this, this will be a bad contribution to the general movement.

Personal rights and freedoms concerning sexuality may be achieved in
other ways than one based on the idea of sexual orientations, though
certainly the one based on that idea is the hegemonic one.  I'll leave
it to the Iranians which path they will choose for their struggle.
-- 
Yoshie