Few things are as sad to see as reactionary libertarians attempting to hijack popular movements against oppression, writes Hamid Dabashi* They say when León Trotsky was about to sign the peace treaty between Russia and Germany at the end of World War I at Brest-Litovsk he wrote to his comrade Lenin and said that during the signing ceremony he was required to wear formal dress, and wondered how he could do so as a militant Marxist. "You go there and sign that treaty even if you have to go butt-naked," was the apocryphal response from Lenin. I was recently reminded of that (factual or fictional) story and the frivolous paradox it posits when a conservative outlet in the United States called the Cato Institute gave, of all things, its "Milton Friedman Award for Advancing Liberty" to the prominent Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji. Ganji, knowing only too well my position on such venues and yet quite anxious not to get implicated in the politics of the Cato Institute and its Milton Friedman Award, invited me and my wife, among a handful of other trusted friends, to join him and his wife on this occasion in Washington DC for the award ceremony. To assure me -- not that I needed assurance -- of what he was going to say during his acceptance speech, he even shared with me the text of his speech. In that speech, which he asked me to translate into English for official release, he did not beat around the bush. In no uncertain terms, Ganji denounced the United States in his official speech for its atrocious history around the globe, and more specifically for its support for dictatorial regimes. "When we look at the history of the last century," he said, "we see that Western countries, led by the United States, have brought dictatorial regimes to power and have consistently supported them." He then went around the globe and pointedly singled out US support for Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman's bosom buddy, as a case in point. "Between 1962 and 1975," Ganji told the august gathering on 13 May 2010 in the Washington Hilton Hotel, "some 38 military coups were masterminded, one of the most famous of which was that of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who in collaboration with the American government toppled the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973." The audience, led by the keynote speaker, the prominent conservative pundit George Will, just sat there, chewed on their dessert, and politely nodded their heads. "This was not news for us in Iran," Ganji drove home, "for two decades earlier we had experienced the military coup sponsored and engineered by the American and British governments against the government of Mohamed Mosaddegh." There must have been some 900 top notch American conservatives in that ballroom listening to Akbar Ganji telling them how "the United States and the Western world reaped the first fruit of their own deeds with the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and today they face fully grown and powerful trees of violent fundamentalism, and of course they must remember their own share in planting these trees with shame." Coffee cups on such occasions have a bizarre habit of suddenly getting cold and even frosty. As Nader Hashemi, Ganji's trusted friend, read through the English translation of the speech, and as Ganji and his wife stood behind him on stage with sombre and stoic faces, sporting their green shawl and scarf, a spreading silence overcame the ballroom. All natural noise was sucked out of the air. You could scarcely breathe. I caught a glimpse of George Will at the adjacent table. His boyish face had lost its calculated confidence. Ganji was not merely historical. He drove fast into the heart of Washington's most recent atrocities, in particular the invited Cato guests' favourite president, George W Bush: "Entirely oblivious of the complications of Middle Eastern politics, President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were under the impression that by invading a country and occupying it they can bring democracy to it. In Afghanistan and Iraq all such delusions went up in flames and burnt out in smoke." He was carefully carving a path through the thicket of endemic atrocities that had interwoven the branches and leaves of globalised imperialism and Islamist theocracy and was running -- as if on a yellow brick road -- home on it. As Edward H Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, and his guests sat there politely and listened, Akbar Ganji remained relentless: "The one-sided support of the United States for Israel has exacerbated this situation. The gushing wound of Palestine is the most appropriate site for the worsening of the infection of fundamentalism." If the Cato gathering thought they had heard enough by now, they had another thing coming: "Please allow me now to turn to another American policy in the region regarding nuclear armament that is equally conducive to a fertile ground for fundamentalism. American policies in this regard are at best predicated on double standards. Entirely disregarding Israel's massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, the United States is single-mindedly fixated on the Islamic Republic and preventing it from becoming a nuclear power." As for those cons and/or neocons in Washington who were pushing for a military strike against Iran, Ganji had a few words to say too. "The point," he made it clear, "is not merely that Iran should not be invaded militarily. The point is that even talking of a military strike, especially when predicated on the nuclear issue, is beneficial to the fundamentalists who rule Iran and as such detrimental to the democratic movement in our country, and especially beneficial to those fundamentalists who thrive on the persistence of such double standards." Sitting in the audience was Leo Melamed, chairman emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and CEO of Melamed & Associates, Inc, a global consulting enterprise. To him and the rest of the black-tie dinner gathering, Ganji went on to denounce the idea of economic sanctions too, for, he explained, "it will ipso facto add to the pain and suffering of the working and middle class; and as such it will not only deprive the Green Movement of its strongest supporters but will in fact alter the social agenda of people altogether, and the struggle for daily sustenance, and to make ends meet, will replace the struggle for liberty." What Akbar Ganji took away from that Cato event was not just $500,000 to help him fight the tyranny he is determined to dismantle. He looked Washington straight in the eyes and gave it a litany of the horrors it has perpetrated upon the world -- and some 900 conservative Washingtonians just sat there and listened. There was just no way to run or turn away and pretend you were not listening. But what did the Cato Institute get from this transaction? The immoral, bankrupt, and outright criminal disposition of a mode of economic and social thinking and practice that comfortably and even naturally placed the late Milton Friedman in the company of a murderous dictator like Augusto Pinochet now looks around the globe like a hungry shark smelling the fresh blood of emerging liberation movements to distort and claim for its own, in systemic disregard for human decency. The story of Akbar Ganji -- from the battlefields of what turned out violently to become an Islamic revolution, to the Revolutionary Guards, to political dissidents in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic to the Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Award -- is the story of the initial trust, subsequent betrayal, and ultimate defiant will of a people in, of, and against a religious tyranny. Born and raised in a poor and pious family, Ganji joined the ranks of the Islamist revolutionaries at a very young age, and joined force with the triumphant Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic. From revolting against a corrupt power, the young revolutionary soon realised he was sliding into the traps of another corrupt power. Soon he broke ranks with the Islamic Republic, became a diligent investigative journalist, exposed its criminal atrocities, and served some seven years of his life in its dungeons, and finally went on a 80-day long hunger strike that took him to the brink of death and back. After his release from jail in 2006, it took Akbar Ganji a while to find his bearings in his new habitat, initially in Europe and subsequently the United States. He had his nativist period, laser-beaming on the atrocities of the Islamic Republic without any evident sign of seeing their organic links to even more atrocious horrors around the globe. In his rush to touch base with leading American intellectual icons without any cultivated connection to their politics or ideas, he had his share of falls into the traps of native informers and expatriate comprador intellectuals who managed to abuse him to push forward their own agendas. His story, however, is also the story of the gradual but organic transmutation of a nativist cause into a global context, first and foremost by trusting his own activist instincts and also by relying on the advice of a few close and trusted friends that he has known for a long time since his days in Iran. Without achieving and coming to terms with that global context, the legitimate cause of dissidents from Vaclav Havel to Akbar Ganji becomes easy prey for morally bankrupt and intellectually defunct projects in the United States, preying on other peoples' legitimate causes to lend legitimacy to themselves. But this necessary caution is not a one shot operation. It demands and exacts constant vigilance. In solidarity with the democratic movement in Iran, people like Akbar Ganji are always in danger of being co-opted by those who think by throwing half a million dollars at a dissident or a cause they can buy or at least confuse or distort it. The Green Movement is already a suspicious appearance on the global scene and among progressive forces and observers, and rightly so. The potential and actual abuses of the Green Movement as an open-ended civil rights uprising is -- and will continue to be -- a clear and present danger. Duplicitous American politicians and equally opportunist expatriate reformists are determined to reduce this multi-layered, variegated, and above all open-ended, movement to a figment of their own very limited imaginations. Be that as it may, something at the core of this civil rights movement remains healthy and robust, legitimate and liberating, grassroots and democratic; a free and floating signifier in dire need for alternative takes on the shade of green we see shimmering in the air. To stay the course, there will never be a more accurate barometer for the veracity of the Green Movement than for it to remain in uncompromising solidarity with liberation movements around the globe, and constitutionally committed to the protection of the working class and disenfranchised communities at home and aboard. There are no national interests outside regional interests, and the interests of the Green Movement are as much charged against totalitarian fanaticism from within as against predatory imperialism from without. On the evening of 13 May 2010, my wife and I sat at the same table with Akbar Ganji, his wife, and his other trusted friends, listening to some of the vilest defences of the unbridled greed at the heart of globalised capitalism that causes unfathomable misery around the globe. We did not blend in well. Ganji had done well for the cause he championed that night with his green shawl, and evidently there must have been those in the Cato Institute who perhaps even regreted their choice altogether. Linking the Green Movement to all other regional and global liberation movements, and against predatory imperialism and the neoliberal economics it violently imposes around the globe, is the only way we may hope to mark this seminal event of our time. Keeping Ganji company, just like Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk, we were sticking our necks out in the beehive of free market ball- rooming in Washington DC, and doing the little we could to help keep a focus on the fragility of the precious water lily that is growing on the sinking swamp the Cato Institute calls "Advancing Liberty". * The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.
