From: "George Pennefather" <poseidon-AT-eircom.net>
Subject: AUT: Iran and reform
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2000 09:33:50 +0100


There are interesting lessons to be drawn from recent developments in Iran.

An overtly reactionary Muslin theocracy has been in power in Iran . There
presently exists a growing reform movement that seeks to transform Iran in a
secular
direction. At the same time the theocratic authorities have been chipping
away at the reform movement by  a strategy of repression such as imprisoning
many of its influential figures and closing down its print media  etc. The
movement for reform has its base in
growing popular antagonism against the clerical regime. The reform movement
constitutes an attempt to prevent this popular opposition from becoming
stronger and increasingly radicalised. The reforming leadership represents
an attempt to exploit and limit mounting popular opposition to establish a
more clearly bourgeois regime while limiting the opposition.

At the same time the clerical authorities, by seeking to limit and weaken
the
reform movement with a strategy that entails direct repression, hope to
moderate the secularising character of  programme of reform --hoping to
moderate the extent
to which Iran produces a secular state. The clerical authorities' strategy
is
not one of completely destroying the reform movement. It accepts its
inability to crush reform without resorting to bloody and savage civil war
in which the
clergy could loose everything. It has instead confined itself to limiting
the power of the reform movement to introduce reforms. In a sense this suits
the
moderate wing of the reform movement. There is then, in a sense, a de facto
unspoken alliance between the clerical authorities and the more moderate
wing of the reform movement

Comradely regards
George

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