The (increasingly nervous) supreme leader of Iran speaking on the demonstrations this week in his country:
The ayatollah reached beyond Iran to criticize “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for seeking to portray Iran as divided and accused what he called arrogant Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, of hostile comments, saying they failed to understand Iranian society.
Change a couple of words around and this could be your average moronic fenqing comment on any number of China blogs…
A word on rhetoric for my young FQ friends…mind a bit whose words your own resemble, it says a lot about the quality of thought behind them.
Actually, keep the content pretty much the same and the recently promulgated “Six Whys” are indistinguishable from the average Charles Liu or Bianxiangbianqiao post. Give them a look here:
http://cmp.hku.hk/2009/06/19/1668/
To be fair to the CCP (and the Ayatollah) I think it’s a pretty common tactic for any government, even more so for any nationalist- just blame foreigners for anything bad. In the US, many politicans- from both parties- blame China for at least some of US’s economic woes.
Always nice to see rhetoric without supporting evidence. Amazing how you can use similar words to win any argument simply because one ignores facts.
Chen Xiaomei’s book Occidentalism gets into this kind of rhetoric – and how critics of the state line often end up re-using standard Orientalist trops of the despotic and backwards East – in some interesting ways.
in many ways, tehran 2009 seems to be having a 1989 moment. should be interesting to see how this plays out, esp. WRT reformist clerical factions, and the military as an institution. 89 could have gone a lot of different ways with just a few different upper-level decisions.
I think looking at these situations as specific to anyone country leads to the wrong conversation. I think it might be far more productive to view them as generic power relationships. China, Iran, GB, USA, etc. all reflect a ruling oligarchy (in the US, just look at the inbreeding of our elite families) trying not so much to maintain stability but to maintain power. I think you can do this with just about any hierarchical organization be it empires, nation states, local unions, etc. Further, I suspect that these oligarchies all enjoy being the “big frog in a small pond” (to use a Southern US colloquialism), and hence the conflicts between them at the expense of the citizenry. I also think they pretty much all feel threatened by the power that technology is pushing down to the common man, whether it be modern telecommunications, weapons, microbiology, etc. , all are threat to the status quo.