[Marxism] Petras on election fraud "hoax" and comments by Tom B. and Fred F.

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Following are three items from a discussion on the Trotsky Conference list.
The first is a piece by James Petras, in which exposes the claim that the
elections were rigged as a 'hoax.'" 

Of course, this claim has been blown into a cocked hat by the initial
revelation by the Guardian Council that the vote count in 39 cities were
more than the votes cast--affecting an up to 3 million votes. And anyone who
knows bourgeois politics knows that this kind of thing is not the end, but
the tip of the iceberg. 

Petras' thesis is that everything that is going wrong now for
Khamenei-Ahmadinejad is a Zionist-US plot. (He puts Zionist first because he
holds the "Zionists" are the political bosses of the United States.)

See, the protestors talk about "green" a lot (the color symbolizing Islam)
and therefore it is a Zionist-US controlled "color revolution." He seems to
be arguing, following the official figures, that 38 percent of Iranians cast
ballots for the Zionist-US ticket. This seems a tad high for what I know
about Iran, and a high price to exact for the fact that the opposition has
committed such supposedly reactionary sins as rejecting Ahmadinejad's
legitimization of holocaust denial as a humiliation of Iran. (Another
democratic-rights issue that came up in the campaign.)

This kind of color-revolution theorizing may even be predominant today on
the US far left, where Iran is concerned, although more often directed at
the CIA and with less of Petras' anti-"Zionist" twist. 

The argument for this rarely covers much genuine factual ground. Since the
Iranian government has many conflicts with the US and Israel, any unrest
there must be a product of US-Israeli manipulation, and cannot have any
progressive characteristics. The Iranian protesters and the various
opposition political forces are simply puppets in the hands of their
Israeli-US controllers. 

This is about as wrong-headed and downright assessment that could possibly
made of Iran's political history down to the present.
Fred Feldman

 

1. Iranian Elections: The ?Stolen Elections? Hoax

By Prof. James Petras  Global Research

      ?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, June 15 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 demonstrator s? 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?.

The Electoral Fraud Hoax

Western leaders rejected the results because they ?knew? that their
reformist candidate could not lose?For months they published daily
interviews, editorials and reports from the field ?detailing? the failures
of Ahmadinejad?s administration; they cited the support from clerics, former
officials, merchants in the bazaar and above all women and young urbanites
fluent in English, to prove that Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory.
A victory for Mousavi was described as a victory for the ?voices of
moderation?, at least the White House?s version of that vacuous cliché.
Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was fraudulent because
the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in his own ethnic enclave among the
Azeris. Other academics claimed that the ?youth vote? ? based on their
interviews with upper and middle-class university students from the
neighborhoods of Northern Tehran were overw helmingly for the ?reformist?
candidate.

What is astonishing about the West?s universal condemnation of the electoral
outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either
written or observational form has been presented either before or a week
after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no credible (or
even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised. As long as the Western
media believed their own propaganda of an immanent victory for their
candidate, the electoral process was described as highly competitive, with
heated public debates and unprecedented levels of public activity and
unhindered by public proselytizing. The belief in a free and open election
was so strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that their
favored candidate would win. 

The Western media relied on its reporters covering the mass demonstrations
of opposition supporters, ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for
Ahmadinejad. Worse still, the Western media ignored the class composition of
the competing demonstrations ? the fact that the incumbent candidate was
drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant,
artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition
demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business
and professional class.

Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and reporters based in Tehran
extrapolated their projections from their observations in the capital ? few
venture into the provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where
Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the opposition?s
supporters were an activist minority of students easily mobilized for street
activities, while Ahmadinejad?s support drew on the majority of working
youth and household women workers who would express their views at the
ballot box and had little time or inclination to engage in street politics. 

A number of newspaper pundits, including Gideon Rachman of the Financial
Times, claim as evidence of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won
63% of the vote in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi,
an ethnic Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity or
belonging to a linguistic group is the only possible explanation of voting
behavior rather than other social or class interests. 

A closer look at the voting pattern in the East-Azerbaijan region of Iran
reveals that Mousavi won only in the city of Shabestar among the upper and
the middle classes (and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly
defeated in the larger rural areas, where the re-distributive policies of
the Ahmadinejad government had helped the ethnic Azeris write off debt,
obtain cheap credits and easy loans for the farmers. Mousavi did win in the
West-Azerbaijan region, using his ethnic ties to win over the urban voters.
In the highly populated Tehran province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the
urban centers of Tehran and Shemiranat by gaining the vote of the middle and
upper class districts, whereas he lost badly in the adjoining working class
suburbs, small towns and rural areas. 

The careless and distorted emphasis on ?ethnic voting? cited by writers from
the Financial Times and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad ?s
victory a ?stolen vote? is matched by the media?s willful and deliberate
refusal to acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public opinion poll conducted
by two US experts just three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad
leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin ? even larger than his electoral
victory on June 12. This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad
was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class
interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of
the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009). The poll also
demonstrated how class issues, within age groups, were more influential in
shaping political preferences than ?generational life style?. According to
this poll, over two-thirds of Iranian youth were too  poor to have access to
a computer and the 18-24 year olds ?comprised the strongest voting bloc for
Ahmadinejad of all groups? (Washington Porst June 15, 2009).
The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university
students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The
?youth vote?, which the Western media praised as ?pro-reformist?, was a
clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and
largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their
overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been
referred to as the ?North Tehran Syndrome?, for the comfortable upper class
enclave from which many of these students come. While they may be
articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted
in the secrecy of the ballot box.

In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the oil and chemical producing
provinces. This may have be a reflection of the oil workers? opposition to
the ?reformist? program, which included proposals to ?privatize? public
enterprises. Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the border
provinces because of his emphasis on strengthening national security from US
and Israeli threats in light of an escalation of US-sponsored cross-border
terrorist attacks from Pakistan and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi
Kurdistan, which have killed scores of Iranian citizens. Sponsorship and
massive funding of the groups behind these attacks is an official policy of
the US from the Bush Administration, which has not been repudiated by
President Obama; in fact it has escalated in the lead-up to the elections.

What Western commentators and their Iranian protégés have ignored is the
powerful impact which the devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan had on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad?s strong position on
defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense posture of
many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.

The great majority of voters for the incumbent probably felt that national
security interests, the integrity of the country and the social welfare
system, with all of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and
improved with Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats supported by
Western-oriented privileged youth who prize individual life styles over
community values and solidarity.

The demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high
income, free market oriented, capitalist individualists against working
class, low income, community based supporters of a ?moral economy? in which
usury and profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open attacks
by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and
heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the
majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as
the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the ?market?, which
represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption. The Opposition?s attack
on the regime?s ?intransigent? foreign policy and positions ?alienating? the
West only resonated with the liberal university students and import-export
business groups. To many Iranians, the regime?s military buildup was seen as
having prevented  a US or Israeli attack.

The scale of the opposition?s electoral deficit should tell us is how out of
touch it is with its own people?s vital concerns. It should remind them that
by moving closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the
everyday interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized food prices
that make life tolerable for those living below the middle class and outside
the privileged gates of Tehran University.

Amhadinejad?s electoral success, seen in historical comparative perspective
should not be a surprise. In similar electoral contests between
nationalist-populists against pro-Western liberals, the populists have won.
Past examples include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of
Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in Brazil, all of
whom have demonstrated an ability to secure close to or even greater than
60% of the vote in free elections. The voting majorities in these countries
prefer social welfare over unrestrained markets, national security over
alignments with military empires. 

The consequences of the electoral victory of Ahmadinejad are open to debate.
The US may conclude that continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated,
minority has few prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment
and an abandonment of Iran?s support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A realistic
approach would be to open a wide-ranging discussion with Iran, and
acknowledging, as Senator Kerry recently pointed out, that enriching uranium
is not an existential threat to anyone. This approach would sharply differ
from the approach of American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who
follow Israel?s lead of pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use the
specious argument that no negotiations are possible with an ?illegitimate?
government in Tehran which ?stole an election?.

Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in
Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ?stolen elections?.
The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly
re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the
opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation
European Union expressed ?serious concern about violence? and called for the
?aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and
that freedom of expression be respected? (Financial Times June 16, 2009
p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome
of the voting.

The wild card in the aftermath of the elections is the Israeli response:
Netanyahu has signaled to his American Zionist followers that they should
use the hoax of ?electoral fraud? to exert maximum pressure on the Obama
regime to end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected Ahmadinejad
regime.

Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right and center) who bought into the
electoral fraud hoax are inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American
followers with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious
wars, we see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial
destabilization.

2. Response by Tom Bias
I would have accepted Petras's arguments had I not seen the information
coming from Iran from non-Western media sources. The information provided by
comrade Evan Siegel, who reads Farsi and has access to a number of sources,
in addition to Iranian socialists posting information on the web, has
convinced me that the conventional wisdom echoed by Petras is in fact wrong
this time.



This simplistic "imperialism vs. anti-imperialism" notion, so typical of the
Marcyite tendency, is completely inadequate for understanding world
politics, as it always has been, ever since their support to the Soviets'
crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The Iranian anti-government
demonstrators have raised six demands: (1) freedom for all political
prisoners; (2) prosecution of those responsible for killing demonstrators;
(3) abolition of capital punishment; (4) an end to compulsory veiling of
women; (5) unlimited freedom of speech, assembly, and the right to strike,
and (6) a minimum wage of a million tomans a month (I'm sorry, I can't give
you the dollar exchange rate). In my opinion, these demands are reasonable
and just, and I support them. I think we all should.


Tom


3. Response by Fred Feldman




I agree with Thomas? position on today?s struggle, even though our agreement
about today probably covers a lot of disagreements on the past.

 

What is wrong with the Workers World approach is that it sees
anti-imperialism as arising from governments and bureaucracies who have to
keep the incipiently reactionary masses in check. (Hence support for Tien an
Men slaughter, etc.)

 

Anti-imperialism is a product of the class struggle, and arises
fundamentally in countries like Iran from deep in the masses. To the extent
that Iranian governments have leaned on this, THIS IS THE SOURCE OF IRAN?s
anti-imperialism. Of course, there are also conflicts of practical interest
between the Iranian bourgeoisie and the imperialist bourgeoisies, but
without the intervention of the masses, the Iranian bourgeoisie would not be
able to accomplish much on this line, and they fear the masses even more
than they fear or hate imperialism, though they may try to gain advantage
from their activity and sentiments at times.



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