Re: Iran’s once active campuses falling silent
On Nov 11, 2006, at 9:37 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
More generally, though, student and other protests during the Khatami era were never simply about civil liberties, which are at or near the bottom of people’s concerns in Iran, the US, or any other country for that matter (most people’s top priority is economy, and only wars like the Iraq War can rival that), and they were swelled by the Khatami administration’s liberal economic policy, including tuition hikes, as, for instance, reported by the Asia Times in this story:
After the 2004 elections, when it seemed like the American people
wanted fundamentalism, holy imperial war, and domestic repression, we
should have just shrugged and said that’s what the people want? Is
that your idea of politics? The masses are always right (leaving
aside whether this would have been a correct reading of the masses’
feelings, or whether your interpretation of what Iranians want is
correct)? This would be a very odd position for the editor of a
socialist webzine based in the U.S. to take, since Americans
certainly have no interest in socialism. Why not turn MRZine into a
center-left organ? It’s what the American people want!
Doug