I have sadly come to realize that there is no principled manner when it comes to what the American left chooses to protest (U.S. power) or stand up for (whoever they deem to be the victim of the day). I often don't understand Yascha how and why you still seem to believe in the left, but I always appreciate your perspective. As a former lifelong democrat (with all of the same personal values I have always held) I keep listening to you and reading to maintain balance of thought and to not allow my disgust at the left to color everything going on these days.
I mean the fact is people on all sides of politics have always had massive blind spots and hypocrisies that have clouded their judgement and made them sound like the preposterous people they are, and while it might be worse now in some cases than in the past (though I’d be curious/skeptical as to whether that’s even true more broadly, given the new composition of the Democratic Party), it’s simply the case that humans are flawed creatures and all we can do is try our best and not let the assholes get us down. Foreign policy has *always* been a major locus of left-wing hypocrisy and confusion; this is not a new phenomenon, distressing though it is to see it on display yet again. But in American politics there’s one grouping that cares about things like a social safety net (or even cares much about public policy generally, outside of cutting taxes and social programs and the like), and it’s the center to center-left, basically (I think the “leftist” left is too interested in their own internecine bullshit to do much about actual politics or policy). Probably some center-right people in there too. But if you care about, for instance, providing public transportation, you only have one party to vote for 99 times out of 100. Or, if you want to stay focused just on this Iran issue, I frankly don’t know if I believe there are many Republicans out there who are invested in the success of Iranian democratic forces either, I’m sorry to say. So while the Corbyns of the world will always be there as an embarrassment to the left, the important thing is to fight them and discredit them and put their moral bankruptcy on display for all to see, as Yascha has done here.
I am a venezuelan and I am greatly grateful for your words. I feel the plight of Iranian women as my own. I feel we are sisters. Although we don't have to wear a veil we face the same totalitarian regimes, torture, repression, families separated and so so much pain. And the left shuns us. Doesn't understand us. Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority. Thank you for being our voice .
Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority.
This perfectly states my personal experience of the left, and im just a middle aged white guy living in the middle of the u.s. The left lost the ability to listen long ago.
Sorry, don't agree. They lost the ability to listen to the less-righteous and less-pure. They still listen to themselves a LOT, and ONLY to themselves, probably because they're the only ones that can begin to understand the gibberish they're talking.
I am an American and I apologize on behalf of Democrats and all other western liberals who completely ignored your plight for the obvious reason that it reflected poorly on their pro-socialist anti-western narrative. I have been following your story closely for decades and I have been shocked and disillusioned by the lack of reporting and attention around what has happened to your wonderful freedom loving people. The persistent decades long dismissive attitude towards your plight, by the liberals of America and their mainstream media, is an utter disgrace and a permanent stain on the institution formerly known as the free press.
All the American liberals who ignored your country and people, and yet are suddenly interested in Venezuela, and are howling in opposition to Trumps actions there--they need to take a good long look at themselves and their so called values.
For the last two days, Iran has been the top news story on there. The problem I've found is that the article is very light on information - it sits there but is rarely updated. Of course, that's due to the lack of information coming out of the country.
Normally these sites like to lead you to live blogs, but the guardian hasn't been doing that - it's had the Iran story positioned above the constant updates around ICE/US politics.
This article feels like a story in search of a reality. Slate and the New Republic are hardly "news" sites; this kind of breaking news with limited information is just not their thing.
And as for the Iranian ministerial op-ed; that was in December - it's a bit misleading to cite it in this article as if it were being posted alongside the violent crackdown.
I've been a professional media analyst, doing work for major corporations, governments, and NGOs, but understanding why the media does what it does isn't the kind of analysis in which I have any experience or deep knowledge. However, I do know about what tends to get covered in the news, and the kinds of coverage it usually gets, and YM is correct that this issue has gotten very little coverage on parts of the left. And, the coverage it has gotten hasn't been very in-depth, and has often omitted relevant information that would make the Iranian regime look bad. For example, these protests are most similar to the big ones in 2022, so it would be relevant to say that the regime killed 500 civilians in those protests, detained 22,000 people, and to note that some of the detainees were raped and/or tortured, but the Guardian left that out.
Exactly. Mounk is trolling. The Guardian is at this point THE left wing site. No one on the left reads Slate and TNR is focused on domestic events, which is its prerogative. On BlueSky, which the right likes to characterize as lefty, I see tons of coverage of Iran, all anti Mullah and pro-protester. Honestly, anyone who is still calling the BBC leftwing at this point is out of touch.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The default setting of most legacy media outlets is Blairite centre-leftism. Centre-right on economics, Left on culture, which is the only concession to the progressive Left they will allow. It's the reverse of what most citizens actually want on these two axes. Most people in the UK and the US want a reset on culture to where gay marriage is legal but kids aren't transed, and racial equality is essentially anti-discriminatory, but not jury-rigged to produce 'equity (and inherently discriminatory), but are willing to see some bold moves in specific areas in economics, particularly when it comes to funding healthcare.
The corporate Centre-Left has been censoring both conservatives and progressives for years. Sometimes it's just algorithmic and a matter of shadow-banning, but in other instances it's been outright bans.
The BBC has a narrower Overton Window than the UK. It ranges from David Cameron to Blairite Labour politicians but no further. Those who point to the overrepresentation of Reform in broadcasts should note two thing- first, they are the most popular with the electorate at the moment, and gaining ground with women, who now acknowledge in polls they feel less safe in public due to migration (other than Green party members), and second although the BBC routinely hosts Reform representatives, they are almost always attacking their positions.
But here's the thing- they did exactly the same thing to Jeremy Corbyn!
The BBC is not a Left or Right outlet, it's an establishment status quo outlet. The only genuinely Left politician the BBC seems to like is Zack Polanski, to whom they've been genuinely sympathetic. But then their coverage on climate change has been shown to be biased. The science predicts climate change is neither an existential threat or a civilisation ender, although it will likely cause major economic and social problems in future.
The most realistic projections of temperature change by 2100 (including all warming to date) predict around a 3°C in temperature, or slightly higher. That's bad, but not existential. Once one accounts for heat resistant GMO and shifts in crops planted the worst impact will likely be a 20-30% reduction in yields in the tropical zone in C4 crops. Climate change to date has only slowed the rate at which yields increase in the tropical zone. It hasn't reduced yields. Plus, a recent climate science paper by mainstream climate scientists, with no ties to scepticism, emphatically stated that while permafrost melt and methane hydrate release was an important feedback, critical to climate change processes, it didn't represent a feasible scenario for a runaway climate effect. In other words, permafrost melt is not the potential Black Swan so popular in science fiction novels.
The "Left" which is a bit of a fuzzy term seems to practice what I call disproportionate outrage depending on the victims of bad deeds. the Uighers? Silence Sudan? Silence. 8-90 million Iranians? Silence. the "Palestinians" or even Hamas? 100 decibels! Why? I do not get it. The interesting thing is that the Left in the US, UK, Ireland are more concerned about the Palestinians than anyone who actually lives in the Middle East. and while everyone is fervidly recognizing a Palestinian state, no one anywhere, especially in the ME will accept passports or identity documentation from the PA. Many of these people use Egyptian or Jordanian credentials.
You were not listening very hard if you think the left was silent about Uyghers and Sudan. Students at my very liberal university protested our own bowl game over the atrocities in Xinjiang. There are dozens of oppressed peoples around the world, and in most of these cases, the left contains the ONLY people in our politics who draw attention to their plight.
Palestine animates us especially because it is the United States funding and arming the violence against a powerless group. We have deontological streaks in our moral codes that make killing *done in our name* bother us especially much. There's no contradiction in a political community focusing on how to improve the behavior of its own violent, corrupt, and authoritarian government before they focus on how to fix other places.
Let’s make a deal. i will not attack your hearing and you will not attack mine?
I know nothing about you or your unnamed “very liberal” university. why not name? why bother characterize it as very liberal? who cares about the labels.
but i think you miss my point. I am glad that your people protested and were not silent about the Uyghers and the Sudanese etc. It sure did not make it on the newsfeed. My point is about proportionality and disproportionality. it is a numbers thing, a math thing. I assert that there is not a proportionate reaction to the mass tragedies of these other peoples. Take Syria as an example. Assad probably killed 1 million of his own people and drove millions to flee. He was a butcher. people disappeared, were tortured and killed. Did your very liberal university do anything about Syria and the Syrian people?
I largely agree with your broader argument about moral asymmetry on parts of the left, and I think the underlying concern is real. That said, I was a bit surprised—and frankly disappointed—by how thin the methodological case is here. A snapshot homepage search at a single moment during an unusually crowded news cycle feels like too narrow a lens to support such a sweeping conclusion about “the left” as a whole. I don’t doubt there are real blind spots and selective silences, especially in activist and campus spaces, but that’s precisely why a more rigorous, time-based or comparative approach would have strengthened the argument rather than weakened it. The point is important enough to deserve sturdier evidence.
My friend, Stephen Zunes, spoke about the protests, and very positively. Otherwise, your point is spot on. The "useful idiots" of the left are especially misguided on Russia and Ukraine, as their hatred of the West makes them allies of a semi-fascist nationalist regime. But, heck, they support Hamas, etc. Regimes and movements which, if in power, would first of all execute all the leftists.
Well on paper yes - but that has hardly translated to anything concrete across the board. I have been shouting out Ukraine since the war began but it is barely mentioned by any of my progressive friends, especially after October 7th.
I am talking about the "anti-imperialist left": Chomsky, Stone, Benjamin and Davies in their monograph on the war, Vijay Prashad, etc are all apologists for Russia. The list can go on. More centrist left is absolutely against Russia, and you are correct in this respect.
Some of this is the Chomskyist strain on the left where only the US and the West can be critiqued. The rest of the world are victims or merely acting in response to the power of the West.
It's also the Noble Omission in terms of not wanting to write anything that could be "weaponized" (perhaps literally in this case). Since the Tehran regime is terrible, better to say nothing rather than foment a war is probably the thought
Nicolás Maduro was a terrible COMMUNIST dictator. There are plenty of terrible dictators on the right, but Maduro seems to have some sympathy from American progressives because of his ideology. This makes no sense to the families of the people he tortured and killed or the millions of economic refugees who had to leave Argentina. The left, as always, has blinkers on, or is willfully blind.
Where's your "unscripted moderate" when we need him/her? Where's our "moral compass"? With NO help from the press, what hope for Iran and for our better selves? Liberals seem to have forgotten their raison d'être. WAKE UP!!
The point is made here that "For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil." -- Speaking as someone from the Leftist/Progressivist fold, I, too, have long been frustrated by the widespread refusal in our circle to criticize or act against many of the world's travesties that have not been committed by Westerners/Americans/Whites (or Israel). But it is not my experience that there is no Leftist/Progressive "attachment to principal or aspiration for the world". On the contrary, the widespread orientation in this circle is both to principle (in their own telling) AND to attacks against the West and company, considered the culprits in the story in question. The principles are often hawked when the West and company are guilty of travesties--but then disappear from concern when the culprits are someone else.
But that is only "step one" of a certain mental process and political orientation. There is a second step that occurs (possibly not consciously or planned) which was noted long ago, sarcastically, by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay "The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed". It is not enough to stand up for the oppressed and attack their oppressors (step one) but to assign to the oppressed of the moment a superior moral stance (step 2)--this when clearly that is rarely the case for whole societies outside the West/America/Whites/Israel and would be obvious to anyone who bothers to look. So why is that? Is that only the result of hatred of one's own society?
Here is an excerpt from Russell's essay:
One of the persistent delusions of mankind is thatsome sections of the human race are morally betteror worse than others...A rather curious form of this admiration forgroups to which the admirer does not belong is thebelief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subjectnations, the poor, women, and children...Nationalism introduced, in the nineteenth century...the patriotof an oppressed nation. The Greeks until they hadachieved liberation from the Turks, the Hungariansuntil the Ausgleich of 1867, the Italians until 1870, andthe Poles until after the 1914-18 war were regardedromantically as gifted poetic races, too idealistic tosucceed in this wicked world. The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a specialcharm and mystical insight until 1921, when it wasfound that the expense of continuing to eppress them would be prohibitive. One by one these variousnations rose to independence, and were found to bejust like everybody else; but the experience of thosealready liberated did nothing to destroy thc illusionas regards those who were still struggling. Englishold ladies still sentimentalize about the "wisdoin ofthe East" and Amercan intellectuals about the"earth consciousness" of the negro.
From: The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed in Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell (first published in the 1920s) -- https://russell-j.com/cool/UE_1950.pdf -- (the link is to the whole book).
Being half-Hungarian (the oppressed) and half-British (the oppressing) I can sympathise or not, depending upon which foot I'm standing on.
Yascha's current comment is all very well, but he has probably not been in Tehran in late 1979, when he hears a loud commotion, getting louder. I was. I poked a head outside to find the wide road covered by a sea of chanting WOMEN, in full chadors, demonstrating FOR Khomeini and against the "devil Americans", and advancing down the street.
It's completely delusional that the Iranian Revolution didn't have massive majority support when it first took control. That this support has waned is also out of the question. The recent act of war by Trump/the US against Iran has probably pushed back the opposition to theocratic rule by a significant amount. I don't think that the Shah's son has ANY chance of gaining power: they know that family too well.
I have sadly come to realize that there is no principled manner when it comes to what the American left chooses to protest (U.S. power) or stand up for (whoever they deem to be the victim of the day). I often don't understand Yascha how and why you still seem to believe in the left, but I always appreciate your perspective. As a former lifelong democrat (with all of the same personal values I have always held) I keep listening to you and reading to maintain balance of thought and to not allow my disgust at the left to color everything going on these days.
I mean the fact is people on all sides of politics have always had massive blind spots and hypocrisies that have clouded their judgement and made them sound like the preposterous people they are, and while it might be worse now in some cases than in the past (though I’d be curious/skeptical as to whether that’s even true more broadly, given the new composition of the Democratic Party), it’s simply the case that humans are flawed creatures and all we can do is try our best and not let the assholes get us down. Foreign policy has *always* been a major locus of left-wing hypocrisy and confusion; this is not a new phenomenon, distressing though it is to see it on display yet again. But in American politics there’s one grouping that cares about things like a social safety net (or even cares much about public policy generally, outside of cutting taxes and social programs and the like), and it’s the center to center-left, basically (I think the “leftist” left is too interested in their own internecine bullshit to do much about actual politics or policy). Probably some center-right people in there too. But if you care about, for instance, providing public transportation, you only have one party to vote for 99 times out of 100. Or, if you want to stay focused just on this Iran issue, I frankly don’t know if I believe there are many Republicans out there who are invested in the success of Iranian democratic forces either, I’m sorry to say. So while the Corbyns of the world will always be there as an embarrassment to the left, the important thing is to fight them and discredit them and put their moral bankruptcy on display for all to see, as Yascha has done here.
I feel exactly the same
You have described my sentiments exactly, which is why I quit the parties a decade ago and consider myself a bleeding-heart moderate.
Amen to that.
I am a venezuelan and I am greatly grateful for your words. I feel the plight of Iranian women as my own. I feel we are sisters. Although we don't have to wear a veil we face the same totalitarian regimes, torture, repression, families separated and so so much pain. And the left shuns us. Doesn't understand us. Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority. Thank you for being our voice .
Explains our countries and our plights to us. And worst, from a supposed moral superiority.
This perfectly states my personal experience of the left, and im just a middle aged white guy living in the middle of the u.s. The left lost the ability to listen long ago.
Sorry, don't agree. They lost the ability to listen to the less-righteous and less-pure. They still listen to themselves a LOT, and ONLY to themselves, probably because they're the only ones that can begin to understand the gibberish they're talking.
Echo chamber syndrome
I am an American and I apologize on behalf of Democrats and all other western liberals who completely ignored your plight for the obvious reason that it reflected poorly on their pro-socialist anti-western narrative. I have been following your story closely for decades and I have been shocked and disillusioned by the lack of reporting and attention around what has happened to your wonderful freedom loving people. The persistent decades long dismissive attitude towards your plight, by the liberals of America and their mainstream media, is an utter disgrace and a permanent stain on the institution formerly known as the free press.
All the American liberals who ignored your country and people, and yet are suddenly interested in Venezuela, and are howling in opposition to Trumps actions there--they need to take a good long look at themselves and their so called values.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPVo_QyS0Hw
I just don't think this article is very convincing. My default is https://www.theguardian.com/international
For the last two days, Iran has been the top news story on there. The problem I've found is that the article is very light on information - it sits there but is rarely updated. Of course, that's due to the lack of information coming out of the country.
Normally these sites like to lead you to live blogs, but the guardian hasn't been doing that - it's had the Iran story positioned above the constant updates around ICE/US politics.
This article feels like a story in search of a reality. Slate and the New Republic are hardly "news" sites; this kind of breaking news with limited information is just not their thing.
And as for the Iranian ministerial op-ed; that was in December - it's a bit misleading to cite it in this article as if it were being posted alongside the violent crackdown.
I've been a professional media analyst, doing work for major corporations, governments, and NGOs, but understanding why the media does what it does isn't the kind of analysis in which I have any experience or deep knowledge. However, I do know about what tends to get covered in the news, and the kinds of coverage it usually gets, and YM is correct that this issue has gotten very little coverage on parts of the left. And, the coverage it has gotten hasn't been very in-depth, and has often omitted relevant information that would make the Iranian regime look bad. For example, these protests are most similar to the big ones in 2022, so it would be relevant to say that the regime killed 500 civilians in those protests, detained 22,000 people, and to note that some of the detainees were raped and/or tortured, but the Guardian left that out.
Exactly. Mounk is trolling. The Guardian is at this point THE left wing site. No one on the left reads Slate and TNR is focused on domestic events, which is its prerogative. On BlueSky, which the right likes to characterize as lefty, I see tons of coverage of Iran, all anti Mullah and pro-protester. Honestly, anyone who is still calling the BBC leftwing at this point is out of touch.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The default setting of most legacy media outlets is Blairite centre-leftism. Centre-right on economics, Left on culture, which is the only concession to the progressive Left they will allow. It's the reverse of what most citizens actually want on these two axes. Most people in the UK and the US want a reset on culture to where gay marriage is legal but kids aren't transed, and racial equality is essentially anti-discriminatory, but not jury-rigged to produce 'equity (and inherently discriminatory), but are willing to see some bold moves in specific areas in economics, particularly when it comes to funding healthcare.
The corporate Centre-Left has been censoring both conservatives and progressives for years. Sometimes it's just algorithmic and a matter of shadow-banning, but in other instances it's been outright bans.
The BBC has a narrower Overton Window than the UK. It ranges from David Cameron to Blairite Labour politicians but no further. Those who point to the overrepresentation of Reform in broadcasts should note two thing- first, they are the most popular with the electorate at the moment, and gaining ground with women, who now acknowledge in polls they feel less safe in public due to migration (other than Green party members), and second although the BBC routinely hosts Reform representatives, they are almost always attacking their positions.
But here's the thing- they did exactly the same thing to Jeremy Corbyn!
The BBC is not a Left or Right outlet, it's an establishment status quo outlet. The only genuinely Left politician the BBC seems to like is Zack Polanski, to whom they've been genuinely sympathetic. But then their coverage on climate change has been shown to be biased. The science predicts climate change is neither an existential threat or a civilisation ender, although it will likely cause major economic and social problems in future.
The most realistic projections of temperature change by 2100 (including all warming to date) predict around a 3°C in temperature, or slightly higher. That's bad, but not existential. Once one accounts for heat resistant GMO and shifts in crops planted the worst impact will likely be a 20-30% reduction in yields in the tropical zone in C4 crops. Climate change to date has only slowed the rate at which yields increase in the tropical zone. It hasn't reduced yields. Plus, a recent climate science paper by mainstream climate scientists, with no ties to scepticism, emphatically stated that while permafrost melt and methane hydrate release was an important feedback, critical to climate change processes, it didn't represent a feasible scenario for a runaway climate effect. In other words, permafrost melt is not the potential Black Swan so popular in science fiction novels.
The "Left" which is a bit of a fuzzy term seems to practice what I call disproportionate outrage depending on the victims of bad deeds. the Uighers? Silence Sudan? Silence. 8-90 million Iranians? Silence. the "Palestinians" or even Hamas? 100 decibels! Why? I do not get it. The interesting thing is that the Left in the US, UK, Ireland are more concerned about the Palestinians than anyone who actually lives in the Middle East. and while everyone is fervidly recognizing a Palestinian state, no one anywhere, especially in the ME will accept passports or identity documentation from the PA. Many of these people use Egyptian or Jordanian credentials.
You were not listening very hard if you think the left was silent about Uyghers and Sudan. Students at my very liberal university protested our own bowl game over the atrocities in Xinjiang. There are dozens of oppressed peoples around the world, and in most of these cases, the left contains the ONLY people in our politics who draw attention to their plight.
Palestine animates us especially because it is the United States funding and arming the violence against a powerless group. We have deontological streaks in our moral codes that make killing *done in our name* bother us especially much. There's no contradiction in a political community focusing on how to improve the behavior of its own violent, corrupt, and authoritarian government before they focus on how to fix other places.
Let’s make a deal. i will not attack your hearing and you will not attack mine?
I know nothing about you or your unnamed “very liberal” university. why not name? why bother characterize it as very liberal? who cares about the labels.
but i think you miss my point. I am glad that your people protested and were not silent about the Uyghers and the Sudanese etc. It sure did not make it on the newsfeed. My point is about proportionality and disproportionality. it is a numbers thing, a math thing. I assert that there is not a proportionate reaction to the mass tragedies of these other peoples. Take Syria as an example. Assad probably killed 1 million of his own people and drove millions to flee. He was a butcher. people disappeared, were tortured and killed. Did your very liberal university do anything about Syria and the Syrian people?
It’s almost like there was a giant incident in the US or something at the same and you’re just looking to confirm your priors
I largely agree with your broader argument about moral asymmetry on parts of the left, and I think the underlying concern is real. That said, I was a bit surprised—and frankly disappointed—by how thin the methodological case is here. A snapshot homepage search at a single moment during an unusually crowded news cycle feels like too narrow a lens to support such a sweeping conclusion about “the left” as a whole. I don’t doubt there are real blind spots and selective silences, especially in activist and campus spaces, but that’s precisely why a more rigorous, time-based or comparative approach would have strengthened the argument rather than weakened it. The point is important enough to deserve sturdier evidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEe96RBX2QM&t=26s
Thanks for the link. I have mixed feelings about the triggernometers, but they're providing a useful service in this case.
PBS did a feature length discussion on the Iran protests last night
I suspect it is fear of appearing Islamophobic. I know this makes no sense whatsoever, but I suspect it is the true motivation.
You can paint the campus Palestinian protests with the same brush - bigger in scale than the Vietnam war protests, but for Iran, nothing yet.
My friend, Stephen Zunes, spoke about the protests, and very positively. Otherwise, your point is spot on. The "useful idiots" of the left are especially misguided on Russia and Ukraine, as their hatred of the West makes them allies of a semi-fascist nationalist regime. But, heck, they support Hamas, etc. Regimes and movements which, if in power, would first of all execute all the leftists.
You realize that the left is the side relatively more in support of Ukraine than the right, yes?
Well on paper yes - but that has hardly translated to anything concrete across the board. I have been shouting out Ukraine since the war began but it is barely mentioned by any of my progressive friends, especially after October 7th.
I am talking about the "anti-imperialist left": Chomsky, Stone, Benjamin and Davies in their monograph on the war, Vijay Prashad, etc are all apologists for Russia. The list can go on. More centrist left is absolutely against Russia, and you are correct in this respect.
Some of this is the Chomskyist strain on the left where only the US and the West can be critiqued. The rest of the world are victims or merely acting in response to the power of the West.
It's also the Noble Omission in terms of not wanting to write anything that could be "weaponized" (perhaps literally in this case). Since the Tehran regime is terrible, better to say nothing rather than foment a war is probably the thought
Chomsky, who got his marching orders from Jeffrey Epstein
Nicolás Maduro was a terrible COMMUNIST dictator. There are plenty of terrible dictators on the right, but Maduro seems to have some sympathy from American progressives because of his ideology. This makes no sense to the families of the people he tortured and killed or the millions of economic refugees who had to leave Argentina. The left, as always, has blinkers on, or is willfully blind.
Where's your "unscripted moderate" when we need him/her? Where's our "moral compass"? With NO help from the press, what hope for Iran and for our better selves? Liberals seem to have forgotten their raison d'être. WAKE UP!!
“By choice”, or selective silence. Very well said!
The point is made here that "For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil. For far too many progressives and leftists, their founding commitment is not to some principle or aspiration for the world. It is to believing that their own countries and societies are at the root of profound evil." -- Speaking as someone from the Leftist/Progressivist fold, I, too, have long been frustrated by the widespread refusal in our circle to criticize or act against many of the world's travesties that have not been committed by Westerners/Americans/Whites (or Israel). But it is not my experience that there is no Leftist/Progressive "attachment to principal or aspiration for the world". On the contrary, the widespread orientation in this circle is both to principle (in their own telling) AND to attacks against the West and company, considered the culprits in the story in question. The principles are often hawked when the West and company are guilty of travesties--but then disappear from concern when the culprits are someone else.
But that is only "step one" of a certain mental process and political orientation. There is a second step that occurs (possibly not consciously or planned) which was noted long ago, sarcastically, by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay "The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed". It is not enough to stand up for the oppressed and attack their oppressors (step one) but to assign to the oppressed of the moment a superior moral stance (step 2)--this when clearly that is rarely the case for whole societies outside the West/America/Whites/Israel and would be obvious to anyone who bothers to look. So why is that? Is that only the result of hatred of one's own society?
Here is an excerpt from Russell's essay:
One of the persistent delusions of mankind is thatsome sections of the human race are morally betteror worse than others...A rather curious form of this admiration forgroups to which the admirer does not belong is thebelief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subjectnations, the poor, women, and children...Nationalism introduced, in the nineteenth century...the patriotof an oppressed nation. The Greeks until they hadachieved liberation from the Turks, the Hungariansuntil the Ausgleich of 1867, the Italians until 1870, andthe Poles until after the 1914-18 war were regardedromantically as gifted poetic races, too idealistic tosucceed in this wicked world. The Irish were regarded by the English as possessed of a specialcharm and mystical insight until 1921, when it wasfound that the expense of continuing to eppress them would be prohibitive. One by one these variousnations rose to independence, and were found to bejust like everybody else; but the experience of thosealready liberated did nothing to destroy thc illusionas regards those who were still struggling. Englishold ladies still sentimentalize about the "wisdoin ofthe East" and Amercan intellectuals about the"earth consciousness" of the negro.
From: The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed in Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell (first published in the 1920s) -- https://russell-j.com/cool/UE_1950.pdf -- (the link is to the whole book).
Russell had a ready wit!
Being half-Hungarian (the oppressed) and half-British (the oppressing) I can sympathise or not, depending upon which foot I'm standing on.
Yascha's current comment is all very well, but he has probably not been in Tehran in late 1979, when he hears a loud commotion, getting louder. I was. I poked a head outside to find the wide road covered by a sea of chanting WOMEN, in full chadors, demonstrating FOR Khomeini and against the "devil Americans", and advancing down the street.
It's completely delusional that the Iranian Revolution didn't have massive majority support when it first took control. That this support has waned is also out of the question. The recent act of war by Trump/the US against Iran has probably pushed back the opposition to theocratic rule by a significant amount. I don't think that the Shah's son has ANY chance of gaining power: they know that family too well.