Re: [Pen-l] The issue is not "fraud" but freedom

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

ken hanly wrote:
>    Not democratic in any acceptable sense of the word? Who determines what is acceptable? Those with a two party system which manages to arrange it so that for most to have any hope of winning they must basically cater to those who have the real power in the system by running for one of the two parties. Iran has a transparent vetting of candidates whereas Americans are mostly unaware that a similar process happens in the US before the vote.

This is a lame comparison.

Democratic rights does not mean elections. It means the right to publish 
newspapers, hold meetings, demonstrate, etc. The left in the US has all 
sorts of democratic rights that were won by earlier generations of 
fighters, most notably encoded as the Bill of Rights. The people of Iran 
are desperate to open up a space that will permit such freedoms and the 
only way to express it *at this moment* is through the imperfect medium 
of fighting against an electoral system controlled up the unelected.

I hope that this clarifies things, but I fear you are too wedded to this 
pro-Ahmadinejad nonsense to benefit from anybody's arguments.
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