It seems likely that, in the next week, the Islamic Republic of Iran will meet whatever challenge is posed to it by those who wish to march and express their dissent and discontent. The Revolutionary Guards seem ready to repress the dissenters, whatever it takes, no matter how peaceful and justified those dissenters may be.
They will no doubt be suppressed with a cruelty and violence that the most sinister members of Savak, under the late Shah, could only envy but not dare to emulate. It is likely that all these hopes and dreams for the fall of the regime are seen to be merely projections of those used to the idea that Hollywood Endings are real, that not only does Good Always Triumph, but does so in time for you to leave the theatre and beat the implacable meter maid before she tickets you, or to be safely at home at a reasonable hour, or after the movie go out to dinner, or something else (it's your night out, you decide). That's not the way it happens. The Bolsheviks held a large part of the earth's land mass in thrall for more than seventy years, and that was without many True Believers left after the first few decades. But for the Islamic Republic of Iran, the True Believers are those who believe truly in Islam, and Iran has tens of millions of such people; the hold of Islam is far stronger, reinforced by practically everything in societies suffused with Islam, than Communism ever could have been.
And meanwhile, inexorably, implacably, as fast as it can, the same monstrous regime somehow manages to keep the loyalty of a sufficient number of its scientists to keep the nuclear project full steam ahead. The estimates range from a few months to a year, but no longer....any longer. It may be - who knows? - that the surprise planned for this Thursday might even be the testing of a nuclear weapon somewhere in the Iranian desert. In any case, no sanctions seem likely, no matter how draconian, to be sufficiently damaging. All it takes is for one spoiler, if that spoiler is named China, crossing the international picket line, to undo whatever sanctions the confused, pusillanimous, procrastinating, irresponsible Western world finally, at long last, places -- sanctions that, had they been in place two years ago, might have done the job in time. But now that seems so very unlikely.
But what if these are not merely ordinary sanctions but very special sanctions, the kind the newspapers and political figures like to describe as "crippling" sanctions? Doesn't that epithet give you a good feeling, a feeling that at long last something significant is being done? And you get that good feeling from mere invocation of a word, all because you want so much to believe deeply in the efficacy of those "crippling" sanctions. But when? When? Iran can keep receiving tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues, and furthermore, can smuggle in goods from all over the place, including the former Soviet republics, through Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan, and Iraq. Iran can also have goods flown in by the unstoppable Chinese, who don't care at all about "sanctions" as long as they can have access to oil, and who, furthermore, believe - rightly, I'm afraid - that the West is unwilling to do anything to punish China. (The best way to punish China is for everyone in the West to start boycotting Chinese goods, which deserve boycotting for all kinds of reasons anyway.)
This leaves two possibilities. One is that the West will simply accept the attainment and possession of nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic of Iran. When one looks at the worry over Pakistan's nuclear armory (and the Pakistani generals are far less chiliastic, less crazily willing to sacrifice themselves and their country than the Twelver-Shi'as who run the Islamic Republic of Iran), and how that worry has forced the Americans to keep involved, and to keep plowing men and money, into Pakistan and Afghanistan, because of fears of what might happen "if those weapons fall into the wrong hands," one wonders how - having presumably learned the lesson of its own negligence in the case of A. Q. Khan and Pakistan - the American government would be moving heaven and earth, and earth-moving through bombs away if necessary, if nothing else works, to prevent another Muslim state from acquiring nuclear weapons. For we know that Iran is even more dangerous than Pakistan, and has sponsored terrorist acts as far away as Buenos Aires, and is closely allied with the most dangerous of current terrorist groups - not the Sunni Al Qaeda but the Shi'a Hizballah.
Perhaps, in the end, the Americans hope that Israel will attack, thus sparing the Administration the need to assume its responsibilities as a great power. When Israel attacked Saddam Hussein's Osiraq reactor, it set back by twenty years his nuclear plans, a service to the whole West. When Israel attacked a Syrian nuclear installation - an installation in which both North Korea and Iran were likely involved - this was also a service to the Lebanese, who are opposed to the power of Syria and its Hizballah ally, and Iran, and to the countries of NATO that surely would have been alarmed by Iran and North Korea establishing a nuclear-tipped succursale in Syria.
But circumstances now are different. Iran's nuclear project does not consist of one reactor or one plant. The many different plants that constitute that project are spread out, widely. And some of them have been built underground, protected by very thick walls themselves deep-delved. While Israel has asked for, it has apparently not received, those bombs called bunker busters that are in the American, but not the Israeli, armory.
There can be little doubt that pound for pound, the Israeli military may be the best in the world. But it is a military that is fielded by a country that is so tiny it is scarcely discernible on a world map. It has only a very few airfields. It has a handful of submarines. It has nothing like the long-range missiles or the thousands of aircraft, dispersed all over the world, that can come from every direction - and can certainly fly over Iraqi air space without asking for a by-your-leave. The Americans have airbases everywhere, and aircraft on ships right in the Gulf. They have bases too far away for the Iranians to retaliate against. In fact, whether Israel or the United States bombed the Islamic Republic of Iran's nuclear plants, retaliation would be directed almost certainly at Israel. And therefore the Israelis have to worry, and have to hold back, cannot attack as they might otherwise, because they do not know what Hizballah, with its tens of thousands of rockets now hidden all over Lebanon, even far from the border with Israel, will do. And the Israelis cannot know exactly what Hamas or for that matter Fatah will do, in case of Israeli preoccupation with Iran. Israel will be attacking Iran under worrisome conditions that surely must affect the thinking of the Israeli military.
Furthermore, while Israel is rightly alarmed, it is also clear that the Iranian nuclear project threatens the Arab states of the Gulf or, more exactly, threatens their ability to pump oil. That is why, right now, the Americans are sending missile batteries and other defensive equipment to those sheiklets, as well as to Saudi Arabia - not because these are our "allies" but because right now, for the moment, we do not wish to see the oil wells of the Gulf damaged. No doubt these oil states would love to have Iran and Israel damage each other. But the Western world has a stake, the American government has a stake, in there not being permanent damage done to how Iranians -- not those who support the Islamic Republic of Iran, but those who are Iranian nationalists, those who have always hated, or who have come to hate, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and furthermore, are more and more receptive to the idea that Islam itself - the "gift of the Arabs" - explains the political despotism, and the moral and intellectual collapse, that Iranians have had to endure. This doesn't mean that Iran will cease to be Muslim, but the more Iranians can come to view Islam - and many things in Iranian cultural history will support this idea - as a vehicle for Arab supremacism, and lose their taste for Islam, the better for Iranians, and for the entire non-Muslim world.
Under the Shah, there was some cooperation with Israel. Attention has been given to military cooperation, because they shared the same enemies. But there is another sort of cooperation, a civilisational cooperation. The most advanced Iranians, even those of Muslim background, often demonstrate their independence from Islam through their stance toward Israel, or rather, toward the Jews. They are keenly aware that in the pre-Islamic past of Iran, Jews were part of the national narrative, and the memories of certain connections between Persian kings and "the Jews" are not irrelevant today, in a part of the world that is history-haunted and where national narratives are important.
I don't think it accidental that Aziz Nafisi, when she was in Iran, chose to write her thesis on a topic that most Americans would find unusual: the American Michael Gold, who in the 1930s wrote "Without Money." Nor does it any longer surprise me to find Iranians abroad, who left when the Shah fell, or who have managed to get out subsequently, who seem interested in Israel, even exhibit a sympathetic understanding of it, in a way that no Arab Muslims - I'm not including apostates such as Nonie Darwish and Wafa Sultan or undeclared apostates such as Fouad Ajami - have. In a way, Israel is a token, a token of their break with the mind-forged manacles of Islam. Israel, then, is not only itself, but also a symbol - a symbol, among other things, that the Middle East does not belong to Islam, that there are peoples other than Muslims who were, and are, still here. I have sometimes wondered aloud at this site that, since the peoples of the Middle East appear to need, more than we in the West do, some identity, some name, to affix to themselves, then if they wish in Iran to jettison Islam, they are likely to do so not for the unclassifiable non-belief that is the choice of many of those who leave whatever religion they were born into in the non-Muslim West, but for another identity. And the obvious choice, in Iran, is Zoroastrianism. This doesn't mean people really have to believe it, but only that they have to decide to call themselves, out of an impulse not to be distinguished from Iranian nationalism, "Zoroastrians." Whenever I allude to this, I get emails of two distinctly different kinds from Iranians in Europe and America. Some say that I am off, that this could never happen, though they indicate that they wish it could. And others say that I am, in fact, on to something, and that they have heard of a renewed interest in Iran, among those disaffected, and unlikely to re-embrace Islam, with Zoroastrianism.
Where does Israel, or "the Jews" (seen as a Middle Eastern people, who once lived, in great numbers, in Persia, before those interlopers the Arabs arrived, and are part of the Persian pre-Islamic national narrative) fit in? Israel could be, for a resurrected Iran, an ally, not only in military matters, but more importantly, in cultural matters, in the matter of re-defining the Iranian national identity so that it no longer is overwhelmed by, or at least made coterminous with, Islam, as Khomeini and his epigones desired when they re-fashioned the country to their own dismal and soul-killing commandments. Just as in Egypt where Taha Hussein (Husain) in the 1920s envisioned what he called "Pharaonism" - that is, an emphasis on Egypt's pre-Islamic past and on Egypt as a country apart, one that did not consider Egyptians to be Arabs or part of the Arab world, but should emphasize its separate, Egyptian, and by implication not completely Islamic, identity. Whether Taha Hussein, the most impressive Egyptian thinker of the last century, will ultimately prevail, is unclear, though he deserves to be republished and his line of thought revived and made fashionable. But in Iran, the elements are there, and Israel is part of that pre-Islamic narrative.
It would be a pity if the Americans, by signaling that they will not themselves act against the nuclear facilities of the Islamic Republic, force Israel to conclude, reluctantly, that it must do so. Great powers should assume their responsibilities. The United States, for all of its follies and the incompetence of so many in public life, remains the leader of what, in the Cold War days, used to be called the Free World. In the age of permanent Jihad, the Free World should be called merely the Non-Muslim world, the world of all polities and peoples threatened by Islam and its adherents, conducting Jihad in many different ways. And as that leader, it should think about the future of Iran. That future, possibly involving a move away from Islam among at least its elite (and it is the elite who have to move first, and then to enact measures that will bring more of the primitive masses along with them), should usefully include a sympathetic understanding of Israel (and even nurture the belief in pre-Islamic Iran's help to ancient Israel).
There is a chance, in puncturing the nuclear balloon of the Islamic Republic of Iran, of so weakening it that it will fall -- to be replaced, one hopes, by those immunized against the siren-song of Islam. And there is a further chance (much greater if Israel is not the one who will have to do the imperfect puncturing) that, after all the dust settles and the Islamic Republic is gone for good, that the most farseeing Iranians (in exile and in Iran) can encourage friendship with Israel, as part of a long-term effort to move Iran away from the Camp of Islam and back to something like what those Iranians who composed the 1906 Constitution had in mind.
In deciding whether or not to act itself, the American government should think carefully about where, ideally, it would like Iran to be -- not next year, but ten years or twenty years from now (as we work furiously to diminish the value of Middle Eastern oil, and thus to deprive the worldwide Jihad of the Money Weapon. The American government should consider how, ideally, it wishes to pursue what it now must pursue: the weakening, everywhere, of the Camp of Islam. Israel could perform the immediate service to the entire West of attacking the Iranian nuclear project. But if it does so, it may not be as effective as an American effort would certainly be. And what is still more important, Israel might lose the chance, and the most advanced Iranians too might lose the chance, to re-establish some sort of connection between Israel and Iran that, in the end, would be of enormous benefit not only to both countries immediately involved, but also to the United States and to the entire non-Islamic world.
Something to think about.
I am a supporter of the EDL here in England. I have been to four demos. You can see my various accounts of the EDL in my website below.
This is a response to an article by Martin Smith of Unite Against Fascism, who violently oppose the EDL. Martin Smith is the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.
http://islamthefarleftandmisc.blogspot.com/
Martin Smith, ‘The BNP and the EDL’, Socialist Review, March 2010,
http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11183
Contents:
i) What’s wrong with football fans, Mr Smith?
ii) Martin Smith’s Account of the Stoke Demo
iii) The Far Left Loves the Far Right Really
iv) Racism?
v) Martin ‘Runs With Muslims’ Smith the Street Fighter
vi) Gramsci and Mr Smith
vii) Revolution?
What’s wrong with football fans, Mr Smith?
Citizen Smith doesn’t seem to like football supporters. They are too British for him. Too patriotic. Worst of all, they haven’t read Trotsky or even Lenin. Bastards! Martin Smith seems to find it hard to make a distinction between ‘football hooligans’ and ‘football fans’. Does Citizen Smith know that one out of every two British males is a football fan? Fancy being against so many people. Then again, this is Citizen Smith and the UAF/SWP we are talking about. If you’re not brown, or a student, or a Muslim, then they don’t have much time for you. The vast majority of British people just aren’t Marxist or Islamist enough for Citizen Smith. All we can do is laugh when Smith says, conspiratorially, that so-and-so ‘had already begun to build alliances with football supporters’. Shock horror! What next, alliances with, uh, working class white people? Never!
I love Smith’s little excursion into Marxist ‘class analysis’. Smith thinks that the media portrays EDL as ‘working class yobs’. He thinks that the media is wrong. Apparently, ‘many [EDL] come from “petty bourgeois” professions – the classic base of fascism’. Well, I never! I didn’t know that I was ‘petty bourgeois’ and the EDL members I have talked to are petty bourgeois. Doesn’t it show what a sad little train spotter Smith really is when he resurrects terms like ‘petty bourgeois’ from the dustbin of Communist and Trotskyist history. Anyone who uses these quaint little pseudo-technical terms must be a complete arse. These words are dead today. In any case, the SWP/UAF Alliance is full of middle class people. Alex Callinicos, of the Central Committee (yes, Central Committee) and a few others, are upper middle class. Actually, Callinicos is from an aristocratic background. But they are not ‘bourgeois’! Why is that? Because they are Marxists. A Marxist may be middle class, but he can’t be bourgeois. In fact no Marxist can be bourgeois, no matter how rich he is. How neat. And how tidy.
Yes, I too talk about class. Specifically the middle class and professional/student basis of the UAF/SWP Alliance. That is not because I’m against the middle class. I’m not. What I am against is middle class people who pretend they are not middle class. Or middle class people who speak out against what they call ‘the middle class’. As well as those Marxists middle-class SWP-ers who class right-wing middle class people as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petty bourgeois’. It’s not the middle class I’m against. It’s middle class far-leftist hypocrites.
You see the EDL can’t win. If it were full of working class members it would be accused of being full of ‘yobs’. Now Smith is saying it is full of, or run by, the ‘petty bourgeois’. In any case, this petty-bourgeois fixation is simply a result of Smith and co. reading too many books about the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 30s. He is trying very hard indeed to fit the EDL and its actions into his own potted history of fascism – the things he has read about again and again in the vast and boring corpus of Marxist history and theory. But the cap doesn’t fit, Smith. This is Britain in the year 2010. It’s not Germany or Italy in the 1920s or 30s. The situations are completely different. The British have always despised Nazis and Trots equally. Extremism doesn’t sit that well in England, unlike in Europe. That’s why far right and Trot groups still do better on the Continent. That’s why the British hate the SWP and the far right.
In any case, what point is Smith actually making by stressing the ‘petty bourgeois’ fan base of the EDL? Is it really the simple point that historically the petty bourgeois were the backbone of the Nazi Party? Is that what he is getting at? Eddie Hitler was also an artist and a vegetarian. Perhaps some sociologist should do a study of the EDL and see how many artists or vegetarians there are.
Martin Smith become even more pathetic than, well, Martin Smith when, in hushed tones, he tells us that the ‘leading figures behind the Luton protest [were] a self-employed carpenter and another runs his own internet company’. Really! Now I’m definitely not going to vote for the EDL. I mean, carpenters – they’re all Nazis, especially Jesus! What the EDL should be full of, instead, are lecturers from the London School of Economics or from the Embrace Diversity Department at Staines University. Oh, and one STIOE member is an ’American student’! Which bit of that description don’t you like, Citizen Smith? It can’t be the ‘student’ part (the SWP is entirely made up of students, except for its ex-student leaders). So it must be the ‘American’ part.
Smith’s Account of the Stoke Demo
Citizen Smith is not very keen on either facts or the truth. Not if the facts and the truth get in the way of a good story or, more importantly, in the way of the Revolution or the leftist radicalisation of young British Muslims. He claims that the EDL, after the Stoke demo of 23rd January, ‘directed their anger on the Asian community, smashing up shops and attacking Asian people’. Everything is right about that account except for the facts. Firstly, within half an hour of the demo ending the city centre streets were more or less clear of EDL demonstrators. Secondly, which ‘Asian community’ is he talking about? There is no Asian community near the city centre of Stoke so how could EDL members ‘smash’ their shops? Finally, not a single riot van was overturned, unless it was overturned only in Smith’s head. I also doubt that a single Asian was ‘attacked’. I saw very few Asians in the city centre that day. I saw lots of black people. Some of them joined the EDL demo, I’m sorry to say, Mr Smith. And why not? The EDL has more in common with the average black person that the middle-class Trots who run the SWP/UAF Alliance.
What exactly does Smith mean by ‘anti-Muslim riot’ when there were no Muslims there to riot against? Or does this just sound good on paper? Perhaps it will give a few middle-class Trot/SWP students a sense of excitement and their first taste of a scrap.
The Far Left Loves the Far Right Really
If Smith uses the words ‘racist’, ‘thugs’, ‘Nazis’ enough times, he thinks he will be able to persuade all and sundry that the EDL really is full of racists, thugs and Nazis. Repeat a lie enough times and many people will believe it. I think some Nazi once said that. And Smith is himself a red fascist; so he should know… Oh, I forget. Socialist Worker recently argued that it was a big mistake to conflate the far right with the far left. Well, the SWP would say that, wouldn’t it? After all, it is far left. Not only that, but it justifies and defines itself almost exclusively by its opposition to the far right. What a nice little club the far right and far left belong to. They love each other really. They certainly need each other.
Racism?
Smith mentions the ‘terrifying rise in anti-Muslim racism since 9/11’. Apart from the fact that there has been no ‘terrifying’ rise in anti-Muslim attacks, what about the real rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Britain and Europe? You won’t hear much about that from Smith and his friends because many of them are anti-Semites. Oh, no, they are ‘anti-Zionists’. Their monomania and neurotic obsession with Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with the one thousand five hundred years of European anti-Semitism. It is a complete coincidence that Trots go to bed at night thinking about Israeli ‘crimes’ and the sad, sad Palestinians. They don’t worry that much about the plight of the southern Sudanese black Christians or animists, or the Kurds. No. It the behaviour of the Jews in Israel that really gets to them. After all, Israel is the ‘front line of America’.
Anyway. ‘Anti-Muslim racism’? What does that mean? That’s like, ‘anti-Tory homophobia’. It doesn’t even make sense. After all, people like Smith himself keep on telling us that Muslims don’t constitute a single race. That doesn’t matter to a Trot. As long as the phrase ‘ant-Muslim racism’ helps him recruit a few young naïve Muslims and a few naïve middle class students. He doesn’t really care how he recruits them. If lies, distortions, alliances with reactionaries (Muslims), etc. work, they he’ll do it. He will do anything to further the Revolution and increase militancy amongst young Muslims and non-Muslim students. Anything.
Martin ‘Runs With Muslims’ Smith the Street Fighter
Smith cleverly tells us about the ‘electoral and a street fighting wing’ of fascist organisations. Does that include red fascist organisations like the SWP and UAF? They certainly have a ‘street fighting wing’ and a nice wing (the good cops) which dupes members of the leading parties into joining the UAF.
The SWP can’t be electoral because it is against parliamentary democracy. However, that didn’t stop Smith from accusing the BNP of not believing in democracy and the vote. But that’s for far- right reasons, which are bad, not far-left reasons, which are good. Indeed Martin Smith himself is a street fighter. He is called ‘Martin “runs with Muslims” Smith’. There are photos of him running with Muslims, attacking two Birmingham shoppers, teasing a police dog, and haranguing a Birmingham shop keeper. He was also arrested for street fighting outside the BBC. In addition, he was reported to West Midland Police for attacking shoppers in Birmingham. So Smith is in favour of far-left street fighting, but against far-right street fighting. This is something everyone knows already.
Gramsci and Mr Smith
Smith mentions his hero, the ‘socialist’ Antonia Gramsci. Gramsci’s main thesis was simple. He knew that the revolution would not happen, at least not in the immediate future. So what to do? Gramsci suggested taking over, infiltrating and being entryists in important institutions, from the universities and colleges, to the media and even the church and police. The tactic was, basically, to take over these institutions and groups and make them ideologically communist or Trotskyist in nature. It has worked in the UK. The far left has ‘won the culture war, but lost the economic war’. But instead of out-and-out Trotskyism, which the British would never swallow, what we have instead is the Politically Correct Cultural Revolution. This is a nicer form of far leftism.
Martin Smith is the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He has heeded Gramsci’s words and he and the SWP have formed UAF. Smith also runs the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) show. He is certainly doing his bit for Gramsci and the Revolution. Martin ‘runs with Muslims’ Smith has even created his own version of Mussolini’s squadre d’azione. You can see him in action in a few photos and videos. I think his boot boys are called ‘Red and Green Action’. The ‘red’ stands for ‘red fascism’ (Trotskyism) and the ‘green’ stand for ‘Islamofascism’. I bet Smith’s red ‘sword’ is nine inches long when folded in half!
Revolution?
Smith indulges in some classic Trotskyite scare-mongering. In one breath he tells us that ‘the BNP gained 17 percent’ of the vote in Barking in 2005. That’s only 17% in one constituency. From this meagre evidence he then tells us in the next breath that ‘the Nazis are making serious breakthroughs at the ballot box’. Apart from 17% not really being a ‘breakthrough’, this vote involved a lot of protest votes from the electorate. And why is that? Because people like Smith and the middle class professionals who run the UAF/SWP Alliance, and the universities and much of the media, gave up on the white working class years ago. Smith and his mates now ‘run with Muslims’. They embrace other kinds of diversity – any kind of diversity, as long as it is not the white working class. For example, Martin writes that EDL members ‘talked about the fear of losing their jobs or businesses’. He doesn’t show any compassion for their plight or even an analysis of why things are the way they are. The only thing that he concludes from this is that such people become attracted to ‘typical… fascist/ultra right wing nationalist movements’. This just shows us why some people are doing precisely that, Mr Smith. Because you don’t give a shit about anyone except middle class students and Muslims. That is, anyone who will be fodder for the Trot Revolution, which the working class refuse to be. And that’s why the SWP gave up on the working class. It just wasn’t into the Revolution. Never mind. Let’s try the Muslims and Islamists instead.