Iran, and more

Thursday links added at the bottom. Last updated 12:39 Brockley time.

Iran

• I have to say that Richard Seymour's commentary on Iran at Lenin's Tomb (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) hasn't been bad at all, and is getting better (despite links to crypto-con Justin Raimondo). Not least his deconstruction of fellow Tombist Yoshie's absurd and contradictory assertions that we need to leave "both sides" alone to fight it out, that the uprising is nothing but a spat within the ruling elite, and that the Ahmadinejad support base is the salt of the earth proles.
  
• More to my taste: Social Republic.
• Mira asks: why is our trade union ignoring this uprising?
• Please follow the links from my previous posts to get involved in providing solidarity for the people of Iran.
  

Iran tangentially, and the failure of the left

• Two top posts on Greens Engage: on Moishe Postone and on Hal Draper and Israel.
• On a related note, two posts on left antisemitism from Principia Dialectica: Leninist Goebbel-de-gook on Iran and Israel (on Richard Seymour and his Second Campist buddies) and More on Left-wing antisemitism (on ultra-leftist Holocaust deniers, referencing Postone)
• What's wrong with the left? Modernity provided the diagnosis but Andrew suggests the cure: Rules for Agitators.
  

Not about Iran, but some of my favourite recent blog posts.

• Harcamone at Just Opinions on the semiotics of Jimmy Carter's body language. [Plus: commentary from Noga.]
  
• Flesh is Grass for cleaners and cockle-pickers.
• Martin in the Margins on the death of his father-in-law.
• TNC with some lazy summer Sunday music.
• Rosie Bell picks flowers with George Orwell.
• Nickel in the machine on Errol Flynn.
• On A Raised Beach: Down the Mine.
  

Thursday links

• Slavoj Zizek has distributed a guest post on Iran, which you can read at DST4W among other places. It's good, and I'm pasting two extracts here:

"Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.[...]

Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country)."

• Also via Will, Christopher Hitchens: Persian Paranoia.
  
• The Contentious Centrist has some good stuff on Iran: The Palestinian response and the Zen master's wisdom; Is there anybody out there?
• Via Norm, a communication from Iran.
• The Fat Man: Clarity and confusion - taking the Guardian's liberal infoolectuals to task. (See also Norm on the same Peter Beaumont piece, and Norm on another infoolectual/totalitarian fellow traveller, Seamus Milne.)
  
• Brigada Flores Magon: Unspoken Feelings - a lovely, concise piece of writing on the theocracy and resistance to it. (I've also added something unconnected to Iran to the section above this of just good blogging.)
  
• Russell Berman at Telos: The Anatomy of Repression in Iran (and Selective Reporting in the New York Times).