[Marxism] Petras on the Iranian Elections: The ‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax

["Politicus E." <epoliticus@xxxxxxxxx>]

The following article by James Petras recently appeared on
Countercurrents.org and GlobalResearch.ca.  I reproduce an extract
below.  The interested reader can find the entire article at
http://bit.ly/13QzLm.
epoliticus

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“Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or
mixed recreation... Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war
than religion.” Financial Times Editorial (15 June 2009)

Introduction

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a
significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate
is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass
media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp
followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in
Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’
in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received
over 53% of the vote.

The recently concluded, June 12, 2009 elections in Iran are a classic
case: The incumbent nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
(MA) received 63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the
leading Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi
(HM) received 34.2% or (13.2 million votes).

Iran’s presidential election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of
the electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812,
in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM did
not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass demonstrations
that turned violent, resulting in the burning and destruction of
automobiles, banks, public building and armed confrontations with the
police and other authorities. Almost the entire spectrum of Western
opinion makers, including all the major electronic and print media,
the major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites,
echoed the opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud.
Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites joined
the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the advance guard
of a democratic revolution. Democrats and Republicans condemned the
incumbent regime, refused to recognize the result of the vote and
praised the demonstrators’ efforts to overturn the electoral outcome.
The New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office
and the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American
Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran and
announced Obama’s proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in the water’.

[...]

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