What if the Iran vote was not rigged? The counter-argument is here. This echoes my argument that Iran and US are awfully similar. Recall that Al Gore lost Tennessee in 2000, and John Kerry won the urban areas but lost out in the rural ones. For the record, I am not saying the elections were not rigged, I am saying I don’t know and no one really does. Were the US elections in 2000 and 2004 fair? Not if you ask Florida and Ohio, respectively. Anyway, some of James Petras’ points below:
- There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.
- What is astonishing about the West’s universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is that not a single shred of evidence in either written or observational form has been presented either before or a week after the vote count.
- This poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15, 2009).
- the fact that the incumbent candidate was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper and middle class students, business and professional class.
- The only group, which consistently favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’, which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged, vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which many of these students come. While they may be articulate, well dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of the ballot box.
- The open attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the ‘market’, which represented wealth, power, privilege and corruption.
- Recent events suggest that political leaders in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The White House has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise, the 27 nation European Union expressed ‘serious concern about violence’ and called for the “aspirations of the Iranian people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16, 2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has questioned the outcome of the voting.
Read more.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo NewsletterIn 2000, Al Gore was believed to have won the Elections, but Florida proved otherwise and George W. Bush was chosen as the winner by the Supreme Court in what was a political decision to maintain peace and order.
In 2004, John Kerry was expected to defeat the allegedly unpopular George Bush, but surprising to many and shocking to foreigners, Bush retained the Presidency.
In 2008, change was the theme, and leveraging technology, Barack Obama was swept into power.
Reading the post mortems in US and British media, you cannot help but realize that there is
- a brewing hatred for the sitting President in the respective periods (Ahmedinehad in Iran and Bush in USA)
- a power struggle going on amongst the clericals (who basically represent the neoconservatives in American politics).
I think this just reiterates the role of religion in politics. During Bush’s regime, the US swayed towards right wing religion, Iran did the same thing at the government level even though the population sought more secularism and democracy. What is happening now is the friction between the forces of religion and secularism. America had its own struggle in the 2008 elections, Iran tried to in 2009, to no avail… but don’t expect those lingering issues simply disappear.
PLAY
