Re: On Islamic radicalism and the left by Don Hamerquist
On Aug 17, 2006, at 1:12 PM, Eric Beck wrote:
I’m always fascinated by the artful ways in which certain western
leftists are able to excise the religious content of the resistance
groups they favor, as if the latter’s reactionary-theocratic
politics is just an undesirable superstructure easily erased from
an exemplary anti-imperialist base. Which is to say, such leftists
never fail to encourage subaltern populations to live under
theocratic regimes they would never accept themselves.
That’s true of a lot of the left’s reaction to the Iranian revolution
in 1979 (both the Iranian and Western left) - Val Moghadam’s 1987
article in New Left Review goes into this in detail. The point with
Hezbollah, though, is that they’re not Khomeini, and they’re not
about to take over the Lebanese state. At least according to people
who live in Lebanon.
Doug