Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran
Scott McLemee has a great interview with Danny Postel, Senior Editor at openDemocracy.
“In hundreds of conversations I’ve had with Iranian intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists in recent years, I invariably encounter exasperation,” writes Danny Postel in Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, a recent addition to the Prickly Paradigm pamphlet series distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “Why, they ask, is the American Left so indifferent to the struggle taking place in Iran? Why can’t the Iranian movement get the attention of so-called progressives and solidarity activists here? Why is it mainly neoconservatives who express interest in the Iranian struggle?”Postel, a senior editor of the online magazine openDemocracy, sees the Iranian situation as a crucial test of whether soi-disant American “progressives” can think outside the logic that treats solidarity as something one extends only to people being hurt by client-states of the U.S. government.
Danny Postel has been very helpful in promoting a book we published 15 months ago— We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. We got zero traction with the progressive radio and websites, but we did get calls from Fox News, Voice of America, and the American Enterprise Institute. It was deeply depressing for an avowedly progressive publisher like ourselves to find us in this situation...
Let me add also, that we've had about 5000 downloads of the sample chapter, orders of magnitude greater than any other sample chapter we've ever posted. Based on various links I've seen, a good deal of that downloading is happening within Iran.
It could just be an artifact of not growing up in the U.S.—I was born and spent for the first 18 years of my life in Ireland—and it may sound heretical coming from Soft Skull but I can't help but feel that the most valuable area in which progressives could practice self-criticism is in the arena of reflexive anti-Americanism. Progressives seem to practice a peculiar kind of American Exceptionalism wherein America is the exception to the rule that not everything a given country does is intrinsically awful. Or, alternatively, a sociological expression of that quasi-narcissistic psychological formation that D.W. Winnicott talked about where an infant fails to be able to distinguish between itself an the world and takes on a form of omnipotence that presumes that it is a hurting machine, that everything it does is wrong, a situation as likely to produce fucked-up behavior (on an individual or imperial level) as the omnipotence that thinks that everything it does is right.
Alright, enough out of me...