I have a hard time taking random violence, but sometimes random praise hits me even harder. An Athens taxi driver, a Nazi sympathizer, recently told me: "I vote for Golden Dawn, but I admire you." It would have been better if he had punched me in the stomach. I felt the same nausea the other day while reading Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's proposals for peace in Ukraine - similar to those I have been proposing since the beginning of Putin's invasion. I felt miserable, as if Orbán had personally praised me.
For years, I have suffered great discomfort when people whose analyzes partially match my own turn out to be fascist anti-Semites, unreformed Stalinists, small-minded libertarians, or Trump fans. Good analyzes of bank frauds turn into vile attacks on Jews, criticism of the golden age of early financialized capitalism in the slovenly United States, and forensic analysis of the tendency of central banks to gamble with our money ends with crazy proposals for the introduction of some cryptocurrency, in line with the dangerous libertarian with the idea of apolitical money. This is where perfectly reasonable criticisms of liberal imperialism and the liberal establishment's contempt for workers turn into proposals to build border walls, hunt people of color, or invade Congress.
The sacred duty of exposing the transition of humanism to misanthropy was brilliantly fulfilled by Sergei Eisenstein in the film Cruiser Potemkin from 1925. During fierce demonstrations against the brutality of the imperial army, Eisenstein portrays an agitator who tries to turn the anger of the demonstrators against the Jews - but he is unanimously overruled and silenced. If only it were so easy in life!
In 2011, I made sure of that. During the magnificent demonstrations in Athens, when tens of thousands of Greek citizens gathered at the Syntagma for 72 nights to protest the impoverishment of Greece imposed by the infamous Troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), there were fascists lurking among us . Like the provocateurs in an Eisenstein film, they incited the crowd by calling for the hanging of members of parliament and by showing Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform.
Although the left distanced itself from the fascists by gathering at the bottom of the Syntagma, I regret that we never dealt with the fascists decisively, like the protesters in Eisenstein's film. Worse, the repeated defeats suffered by the left international over decades have led many leftists to embrace the disgusting logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
In 1981, I took part in a small London demonstration against Saddam Hussein, the darling of the West at the time, whose regime had invaded Iran. After a short detention, I was met with criticism from my friends on the left. They told me that I was naive because I did not see that supporting Iraq, which is the only one in the region to oppose Israel, is an integral part of our support for the Palestinians. Twenty-two years later, after protesting the US invasion of Iraq, another group of leftists criticized me for opposing the invasion. For them, it was not possible to simultaneously condemn the bloodthirsty Saddam and the disastrous invasion.
The breakup of Yugoslavia put me in a similar gap. In 1999, during the war in Kosovo, the left split into two camps, equally repugnant to me. Some fell into the trap of supporting the regime of Slobodan Milošević as the last defense against American imperialism and German economic expansionism in the Balkans. Others understood the NATO bombing of the FRY as a liberal intervention, necessary for the introduction of democracy in the Balkans. Those were lonely days for those who opposed Milosevic's fascism and the illegal NATO bombing of Serbian civilians with the same zeal.
For me, the most difficult such moment occurred in 2001, during a meeting of the faculty board at the University of Athens, when a proposal was on the agenda to award Vladimir Putin an honorary doctorate, in exchange for a similar honor that Moscow State University would award to our president. I was the only one who voted against, with the argument that Putin has the blood of 200.000 Chechens on his hands. Learned colleagues on the left later chastised me for not realizing that supporting an autocratic pseudo-czar in Russia was a small price to pay to stop the spread of American power in Eastern Europe. Today, my Eastern European comrades call me Putin's useful idiot because I do not believe that endless war will lead to the democratization of Russia.
For years I have despaired of these blind spots of the international left, which wastes precious time because of it. That's how it was until now. But the new Iranian revolution offers us a new chance. The women, students and workers protesting across Iran are indomitable: they are not falling for the fascism behind the regime's attempt to present itself as anti-imperialist, they are not handing over their country to the hegemony of the United States, nor their economy to financialized capital. They learn the hard way how to reject false binary opposites (neoliberalism-statism, imperialism-autocracy, patriarchy-consumerism). I hope and believe that they will teach us that too. Another reason to support their fight.
(Project Syndicate; Peščanik.net; translation: S. Miletić)
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