NM's blog

“Iran’s current economic and political crisis is often narrated as the cumulative outcome of international sanctions or authoritarian governance alone.  Such accounts, however, obscure the deeper political-economic transformations that have unfolded since the early 1990s.”

No collapse of the Soviet union, no China, no capitalism and American nationalism. All what has happened since 1991 happened without a global context and international and regional power relations, or class realignment.  A liberal analysis by Patrick Wintour Related America's long war in the Middle East

A very brief summary as a reply to one of the common comments. Comment: “you get what you vote for. can't recall a single example in trump's long fat life where he ever cleaned up one of his many messes.” Harperium My reply: Does that mean had more Americans voted for a different contender, Biden or Harris, things would have been different? You are ignoring Israel's influence and that both Biden and Harris supported a genocidal war on the Palestinians. You ignore that the situation has to be contextualised within the political-economy of the US vis-a-vis China and how the US is trying to regain its capitalist hegemony by weakening China. Both Venezuela and Iran are two proxies. And the more the US declines, the more violent it becomes.

'Changing regime behaviour rather than the regime itself', writes Gilbert Achcar .

“Anger directed at high levels of economic corruption and mismanagement in the regime often target the  aghazadeh , a pejorative used to describe children of the elite accused of amassing great wealth thanks to the political connections of their relatives.”

An in-depth analysis Rethinking anti-imperialist politics in the Middle East

“Deep political-economic transformations created the context for the events of this month …” What is  their meaning for the future of the Iranian regime? “Roiled from within and menaced from without, what are its chances of survival?”

by Siyǎvash Shahabi Just look at the size of this crowd. These are people who came out fully aware of the risks—live bullets, arrest, even death. This presence is not random, not emotional, and not the result of some outside call. It is a conscious decision by people who feel they have nothing left to lose except humiliation and silence. Anyone who reduces the anger and uprising of Iranians to “foreign interference” or to “Pahlavi” is either not stupid but knowingly lying, or is a racist who does not want Iranians to deserve freedom, dignity, and the right to decide their own future. Or worse, they are someone cheering from afar, treating the clash between East and West like a Colosseum spectacle—applauding a gladiator fight while real people’s lives, futures, and deaths mean nothing to them. Our lives as Iranians cannot be reduced to this naive and stupid “East versus West” binary. We are not pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, and we are not tools for settling power struggles. The p...

An view by Sirantos Fotopoulos The protests now convulsing Iran are the inevitable revolt of a working-class pushed beyond the limits of survival. Inflation has shredded wages, the rial’s collapse has turned food, fuel, and medicine into luxuries, and millions of people who once lived precariously now find themselves unable to make a living at all. Shopkeepers, bazaar merchants, transport workers, students, and casual laborers are protesting the daily violence of an economy organized to extract obedience through deprivation. When bread becomes unaffordable, dissent is the first step towards survival. The Iranian state’s response has been brutally consistent — repression first, reform never. Security forces have met demonstrations with live ammunition, mass arrests, beatings, and intimidation. Internet blackouts attempt to sever workers from one another, isolating struggles city by city. The message is unmistakable: survival is conditional on silent obedience. To demand wages that keep ...

This was published about three months before the ongoing protests.  An article available in 4 languages “ The present crisis is the combined result of past political choices, climate constraints, and economic pressures exacerbated by international sanctions and regional tensions, to which is now added the very real threat of military escalation. For much of the population, this everyday life fuels a feeling of injustice and the constant bitterness of a future with no prospects. Are the absence of ambitious structural reforms and the persistence of external tensions not liable to threaten the country’s internal security and trigger a major internal crisis   ?”

A chapter by Jospeh Daher  in  The Future of the Occupation of the Palestinians Territories After Gaza

“How can the Islamic Republic justify such strict enforcement of mandatory veiling when even the Quran does not explicitly require women to cover their hair?” —  Sedigheh Vasmaghi The “broad spectrum of civil disobedience—from women’s public unveiling to the drafting of charters and statements of solidarity in the post-Jina era—reflects a significant shift in public consciousness and a growing commitment to radical democratic change, despite an unyielding state. Many protesters hope that these cumulative acts of resistance will continue to gain momentum , ultimately paving the way for transformative change.”

A long, but a coherent and encompassing analysis

 

“ Haji Agha  is not merely the name of a fictional character —it is a title that embodies a social type deeply rooted in Iran’s historical class structure…  a kind of historical alliance emerges between religion,  the bazaar , violence, and the state apparatus, whose goal is to suppress public awareness, preserve class hierarchy, and sustain exploitation.”

A long [6400 words] but good summary and analysis by Adam Shatz . Here is a selection: – The United States has given its imprimatur to Israel’s regional hegemony. – When Trump made plain that he wanted Israel to stop bombing [Iran], Netanyahu had little choice but to acquiesce. – Israel also appears to be pursuing a long-range plan to weaken, if not to render defenceless, the other states in the region, so that none is in a position to challenge it. The instability and precariousness of such an order are evident to American and European politicians, but they prefer to remain discreet about them for fear of being accused of sympathy for Hamas or antisemitism. – For all Trump’s triumphalism, the ‘twelve-day war’, far from having ended Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon, may accelerate it. – Israel now has control of the airspace over Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria – almost boundless room for manoeuvre – and has always favoured unilateral military assertion over diplomacy. – Netanyahu ...

“On one hand, we have the symbolic violence of intellectual gatekeeping, where certain voices—usually elite, often Western—decide which suffering is legitimate and which resistance is ‘too Western’, ‘too liberal’, or ‘not authentic enough’. On the other, we have the remnants of Orientalism living on in reverse: an unwillingness to confront tyranny when it wears traditional clothes or speaks the language of anti-imperialism. “Bourdieu showed us how elites define what counts as legitimate knowledge. Said exposed how empire produces false knowledge in order to rule. But what neither could have fully foreseen is this third form: where knowledge cloaked in anti-imperialist jargon becomes a tool to delegitimize resistance .” Here is an example: Tariq Ali cannot being himself to go beyond 'geopolitics' to sociology . There is not a single mention of the Iranian society, power relations, repression, etc., and how all that is related to 'geopolitics'. 

What response is possible for society when politics has been erased? Today, Iran is trapped between two silences —the one forced from within by the regime, and the one from outside, as the world turns away from what’s happening.”

According to Al-Jazeera