[Marxism] 2 views on the Iran election

[Louis Proyect]

Jacob Levich wrote:
> This is absolutely correct. Events in Iran are precisely following the 
> "color revolution" playbook, as developed by the State Department, the NED, 
> and a variety of Soros-funded NGOs -- doubtless with the enthusiastic 
> participation of the CIA. These attempts to create "peaceful" regime change 
> are _always_ kicked off by charges of a stolen election; the opposition 
> (typically led by affluent college students and disgruntled sectors of the 
> business class) is always supplied with lavish funds, media-friendly 
> scripts, branding in the form of a distinctive color (Rose in Georgia, 
> Orange in the Ukraine, et al.) , and so on.

As many of you know from my blog and from Michael Barker's reporting, 
one of the main instruments of a privateer contra NGO is the Albert 
Einstein Institute on Nonviolence, funded by Bruce Ackerman, a corporate 
raider who somehow eluded arrest when he was working closely with 
Michael Milken at Drexel-Burnham.

One of the academics associated with the institute is Stephen Zunes, who 
has a fairly good record as a critic of Zionism and other US foreign 
policy abuses but who insists on the right of people like Ackerman and 
Soros to use their millions to meddle in the internal affairs of other 
countries.

Here is Zunes's rather tortured justification for his behavior on Alternet:


In an effort to head off such a popular uprising and discredit 
pro-democracy leaders and their supporters, Iran's reactionary 
leadership has been making false claims, aired in detail in a series of 
television broadcasts beginning in 2007, that certain Western 
nongovernmental organizations that have given workshops and offered 
seminars for Iranian pro-democracy activists on the theory and history 
of strategic nonviolent struggle are actually plotting with the U.S. 
government to overthrow the regime. On several occasions, Iranian 
authorities have arrested and tortured these activists, forcing them to 
sign phony confessions allegedly confirming these allegations.

Some Western bloggers and other writers, understandably skeptical of 
U.S. intervention in oil-producing nations in the name of "democracy," 
have actually bought into these claims by Iran's hardline clerics that 
prominent nonviolent activists from Europe and the United States -- most 
of whom happen to be highly critical of U.S. policy toward Iran -- are 
somehow working as U.S. agents. These conspiracy theories have in turn 
been picked up by some progressive websites and periodicals, which 
repeat them as fact. Unfortunately, such accusations do little more than 
strengthen the hand of Iran's repressive regime, weaken democratic 
forces inside the country, and strengthen the argument of U.S. 
neoconservatives that only U.S. intervention -- and not nonviolent 
struggle by the Iranian people themselves -- is capable of freeing the 
county.

full: 
http://www.alternet.org/world/140639/iran%27s_stolen_election_has_sparked_an_uprising_--_what_should_the_u.s._do/