[Marxism] CSM: Iran debate: Who owns the revolution?

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Last night I saw a wonderful movie about Iran called PERSEPOLIS.
Can't recommend it more highly. An animated feature film based on
the life of a young Iranian woman just before, during and after
the triumph of the Iranian revolution, at which time she was a
teenager. Her parents were politically progressive, with at least
some Marxism in their political formation. The oppression of the
left and women was so much that her parents send her to Europe
where she has further coming-of-age experiences and then decides
to return to Iran, where life remains very difficult for women
of her sensibilities. Fascinating. Shows powerfully the role of
the Iran-Iraq war on the country. Read reviews of the movie:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808417/

My sense is we don't know a great deal about the internal life of
Iran and a film like this helps us to learn more about that which
we all need to know as the country is under such ferocious attack
by Washington. How and why the country has been able to maintain
itself in the face of a blockade almost as intense as the one the
US maintains against Cuba - though without a travel ban - is what
people in the US and elsewhere need to better understand.
===================================================================

from the March 07, 2008 edition - 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0307/p01s02-wogn.html

Iran debate: Who owns the revolution?

Hard-liners play tough to prevent reformist gains in March 14 vote.
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
 
Qom and Tehran, Iran

Rival factions contesting Iran's parliamentary elections next week
are breaking longstanding taboos and using once-sacred icons to
challenge opponents in a vote that is likely to set the tone for the
presidential contest in 2009.

All sides say they revere Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution and are
devoted to the ideals of its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. 
But who truly carries that revolutionary torch is the focus of vicious
debate in which rivals accuse one another of being "enemies" of the
regime bent on deliberately destroying it.

Iran's conservative camp, known as "principlists" and including
allies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is deeply divided but likely
to keep its majority in the 290-seat parliament, or majlis, in the
March 14 vote. The number of reformist candidates - relative liberals
who want to ease social restrictions and end isolation from the West
- has been limited, as hard-liners aim to prevent their political
comeback.

The discourse shows the profound confidence of Iran's most radical
right-wing factions, analysts say. But their unbridled effort to keep
hold of every lever of power in Iran is also causing them to break
many long-held rules.

"In 29 years, they didn't have the courage to talk this way," says
Grand Ayatollah Saanei, a high-ranking cleric, speaking in the
religious center of Qom. "But now [hard-liners] have full control and
they have no competitors inside or outside Iran."

Regime confidence has also been inadvertently boosted by Washington,
which published in December a US National Intelligence Estimate that
determined that Iran had halted work on a nuclear weapons program in
2003. Suddenly the belief that "war was just around the corner"
disappeared, says Iraj Jamshidi, political editor of the reformist
Etemaad newspaper in Tehran.

"The conservatives feel a very strong sense of power in themselves,
especially after the NIE report .they feel the chance of war against
them is gone," says Mr. Jamshidi. "The reality is that the Islamic
Republic feels itself at the peak of its power since the revolution,
and the foreign threat does not exist anymore."

Indeed, Mr. Ahmadinejad has kept up his anti-West rhetoric, this week
dismissing as "worthless" a third round of UN Security Council
sanctions for Iran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment. He recently
claimed that Iran's nuclear defiance has "brought all big powers to
their knees"; and decried opponents in Iran for helping "materialize
the plans of the enemies."

"Everybody has understood that Iran is the No. 1 power in the world,"
the president said last week. "Today the name of Iran means a firm
punch in the teeth of the powerful.. Today the message of your
revolution is being heard [around the world] and even in the United
States itself."

Such confidence is translating into tough political infighting at
home, where hard-liners have violated rules laid down by Ayatollah
Khomeini himself against the military playing any role in politics,
and against criticizing Khomeini's family.

"To follow the path of the Islamic revolution, support for the
principlists is necessary, inevitable, and a divine duty of all
revolutionary groups," the Revolutionary Guards commander, Gen.
Mohammad Ali Jafari, said last month.

Those words brought stinging rebuke from across the political
spectrum, even from fellow hard-liners such as the editor of the
hard-line newspaper Kayhan, who called it a "faulty declaration" that
is "against the clear guidelines."

Among reformist critics was the respected grandson of the late
leader. "If a soldier wants to enter into politics, he needs to
forget the military and the presence of a gun in politics means the
end of all dialogue," said Sayed Hassan Khomeini, a mid-ranking
cleric in charge of his grandfather's mausoleum, in a rare public
comment.

"Those who claim to be loyal to [Khomeini] should be very sensitive
to this order, which was directly given by him," Mr. Khomeini said.
Noting that the revolution's leader put great store in the vote of
the people, he criticized the initial disqualification of some 2,200
reformist candidates (850 of whom have been reinstated) including
another Khomeini grandson. "No one can prevent the people from
deciding their future," he said.

But the hard-line counterattack was swift and unprecedented. 
A website close to the president's office went after the Khomeini
family itself - a target long off-limits. Under the headline, 
"The Secret of the Red Cheeks of Sayed Hassam Khomeini," the Nosazi
website wrote that Khomeini had received a $75,000 BMW and lived in
luxury in north Tehran, where he would "never leave" his steam sauna
but "have the luck to see the problems of the poor and needy with
[his] red cheeks."

The backlash to that was just as fierce. Fellow conservatives warned
that allies of Ahmadinejad had gone too far. Kayhan's influential
editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, told the president in print: 
"Beware of infiltrators and enemies [reformists], but mostly [beware]
ignorant friends that are more dangerous ... pretending to support
you and your government."

Some argue the real problem is rule by one faction, the
conservatives, that leaves little room for dissent. "Different views
should go to the parliament, [so] we have a clash of ideas and the
best one comes out," says Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri,
Iran's leading dissident cleric and once Khomeini's heir apparent, 
in an interview in Qom. But hard-liners "want the government and
parliament to be all the same, the people to be one with them, and
they put others aside.. They weaken the revolution and they weaken
Islam."

Iranians often blame the clergy for not fulfilling the promises of
the revolution. A common 1979 slogan demanded independence, freedom,
and an Islamic republic, with explicit expectations of prosperity and
a popular vote.

"The owners of the country are not four or five people. The
[authoritarian, pro-West] Shah [toppled in 1979] made the same
mistake, now they are making this mistake again," said Mr. Montazeri.
"Because people saw the opposite of the promises.all this eventually
turned to dust."

As the election nears, the former two-time president Hashemi
Rafsanjani warned congregants at Friday prayers in Tehran that some
"unnatural" factions "directed from outside of the country" were
trying "to create division between [Khomeini] and the people."

Anger over the insults to Khomeini's grandson was blamed for the
sudden death of Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Tavassoli, the former head of
Khomeini's office, who fell dead while making an impassioned speech
about it in front of the Expediency Council. The Kargozaran newspaper
praised him with the headline: "Defending the Imam until the very
last moment." It quoed Mr. Rafsanjani's brother as saying that the
ayatollah had died attacking those with "fossilized minds."

"In a democracy, everyone should have a voice, and what is happening
to reformists now is not democratic," says Mohammadtaghi Fazel
Maybudi, a religious scholar at Mofid University in Qom. "Some of
these [hard-liners] are moving against the flow of the world, which
is toward democracy."

"At the beginning of the revolution, we went a little too fast, with
too many executions, and could have had relations with the US in
another way," says Mr. Maybudi. "Now the conservatives are continuing
those extremist moves again. I think they will have a negative effect
on the nation."

For some clerics, the bitter politicking itself is a betrayal of the
revolution.

"The political scene today is becoming polluted with unethical
things," says Mohsen Gharavian, a mid-ranking cleric and religious
scholar in Qom who studied under a hard-line ayatollah revered by
Ahmadinejad. "When a cleric wants to become an MP, he should be ready
to have his reputation played with."








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WALTER LIPPMANN, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
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