Now, don't bother watching this video if you don't want. For what it's worth, it's actually somewhat more interesting than usual, at least for Dabashi. Still, on the flip-side, it's not exactly a first-class primer on how to use the English language [alert, Dabashi: "coagulate" and "coalesce" are both long, impressive-sounding words that begin with "coa" and end with "e," but they mean different things]. Anyway, several points. Dabashi is now speaking of the extent to which the Iranian regime is embedded in society. He also slithers and dances around the existence-or-not of fraud, having dropped the rhetoric of "social facts." [Compare to this article, and responses here, and more generally my fuego here]. He's also dropped the claim of 70 percent unemployment among those under the age of 30. I kind of think someone forwarded him my essays: "Over the last 2 months, I have tried to control my own critical ego and listen carefully. I have been going and reading web-blogs and web-sites and so forth that I didn't know existed." He suggests that he's talking about Persian-blogs, not English-blogs, but doesn't say so explicitly.
What's my stake in all this? The following. The government in Iran is a repressive one and there's no question about that. It's also deeply interwoven in society--as a rentier state, oil money burbles and gushes about, and one way to use it is to pay citizens to be members of security forces. There are also state subsidies that flow to the working-class or the informal proletariat. This is a strong state. US-Israeli assault, unlikely but not impossible, will reduce non-state-based sources of income and social support, increasing reliance on the state, not reducing. Likewise with sanctions, the absurd cosmopolitan euphemism for economic warfare. And guess who supports sanctions, if a diplomatic track fails. No? Guess again. AIPAC? For sure, but we knew that already. And who else? Despite the hedges, qualifications, and verbal feints, J Street.
New Jewish Lobby? New Israel Lobby.
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