Joshua Robert Gold, Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, died on June 3, 2009, at the age of 38.
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Via BBC Farsi. Watch who wins at the end. Remember the streets filled with demonstrators to protest the Iraq War? Or the outrage over Gaza? Today, in the face of the repression in Iran, that camp is silent: no solidarity with democrats, no enormous gatherings in London or Paris or New York. There is a terrible calculation at stake. To support the democracy movement in Iran might imply that there is something deeply wrong with the regime in Tehran—as a previous regime in Washington understood. And that line of thought would upset the applecart of appeasement. As Iran approaches its Tiananmen moment, the righteous and politically correct are silent. The rights of people are sacrificed to the logic of diplomacy, in Iran as much as in Korea (as if they were part of an axis). I was not even eighteen years old when I was forced to flee my own country. Against all the hopes of those of us who participated in the Islamic revolution, the revolution enacted a system of political violence that created an unprecedented flood of political refugees and led to the murder of thousands by a regime that claimed to liberate them from tyranny. In the 1980s, thousands of Iranians who fought with you against the Shah were executed, convicted by revolutionary tribunals, without legal representation, with no official charge. Among those killed were two members of my own family. One is buried in a mass grave. In 1988, in the space of a few weeks, thousands of political prisoners were given a summary hearing, slain and thrown into anonymous graves on the orders of Imam Khomeini. The protests against election fraud and the regime in Tehran recall the uprising in East Berlin, 56 years ago today. Bertolt Brecht, whose relationship to democracy was far from clear, pinpointed the hypocrisy of dictatorship in a poem worth rereading with regard to Iran. Do we face a new rule of lawlessness? On the high seas, in matters of international law and human rights, and even in domestic prosecutorial practices, any grounds to place one’s trust in the lawfulness of order seem increasingly elusive. The New World Order appears to be no order at all; the century of secular universalisms leaves us in the state of a general and all-encompassing nihilism. Still, rather than signaling a dead end rife with global despair, the collapse of everything that went under the name of the New World Order could be a harbinger of ample opportunities for imagining new and competing forms of legitimacy. Such would be the event of legitimacy in the eclipse of legality. |
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