In this case, it’s regarding the ever changing situation in Iran. The battle ground in question is the comment area at Common Dreams, a usually progressive left news site. It was a wholly satisfying experiment. I learned a lot about a lot about the nature of comment areas, their addicting qualities and how quickly the conversation sort of descends into self-parody. I learned something about myself: According to these people I must work for the Mossad or CIA.

Caveat: I should qualify “my own kind.” I mean other lefties. And if I may pidgeon-hole the entire lot for a moment, I mean the sort of folks likely to read Counterpunch or check in with Democracy Now on occasion, join the incidental protest march now and again, likely own a copy of The People’s History of the United States, sought out a kaffiya not made in a sweat shop and sold on High Street, and so on. I don’t actually know these comment writers. And after the week or so I think I’ve better figured out who my kind is and is not.

So why the instant twitchy paranoia? There is a sordid history involving the U.S. Doing bad things in Iran. It’s now well documented and we need not retell the tale in this post.

Some links that cover it here:

• Interview with Iranian filmmaker Kouross Esmaeli contains a good rundown of western “meddling” in Iran going back 200 years.
• BBC history rundown is mostly complete

But the history has created a certain kind of Orthodoxy among certain lefty circles, left to stew in it’s own juices far too long and resulting in some very strange leaps of logic. It’s essentially that: any protest against the ruling regime in Iran, even for minor change, is automatically pro-western anti-revolutionary and some how always the work of the CIA. I’m not the only one to notice it:

“Virtually identical to those neoconservatives on the right are some on the left who do not celebrate that the Iranian regime teeters. What do they have in common? It is a nostalgia for the Cold War and an inability to break out of its dualist mode of thought: one in which the world is divided between two ideological poles (the dinosaur left and the neocon right disagree only on which pole is “good” and which is “evil” but the rest of their analyses line up seamlessly together).” —  Al Giordano at CounterPunch

“Maybe the biggest shame is that most of those disseminating these theories are not paranoid fringe radicals, but well-meaning individuals harboring legitimate — if misplaced — concerns. The neoconservative years of Bush/Cheney’s ‘democracy promotion’ understandably have turned otherwise sane people skeptical. But to quote my friend Stephen Zunes, ‘the beauty of strategic nonviolent action is that it cannot succeed in threatening any government’s rule unless the regime has lost its legitimacy with the people (i.e., Pinochet in Chile, Marcos in the Philippines, Milosevic in Serbia, etc.) and the opposition has widespread popular support.” — Cynthia Boaz, via Huffington Post

“Conspiranoids and freedom-haters of the left and right alike are rushing to betray the Iranian protest movement. On the supposed “left,” the retro-Stalinist Workers World and its International Action Center as well as (disappointingly) Monthly Review and the World Socialist Website have weighed in for Ahmadinejad and dissed the protesters as dupes or pawns of US imperialism. How interesting to see these supposed “leftists” making common cause with right-wing cheerleaders for authoritarian regimes.” — The WorldWar4Report

“Last night, just before I went to sleep, I saw a Facebook group (with hundreds of supporters) pledging support for Ahmadinajad. It mostly set up and supported by Arabs, some of whom are on my Facebook list of friends. I was naturally annoyed. I mean, supporting Ahmadinajad on sunny days is objectionable but supporting him now is rather most disturbing if not disgusting. When they support Ahmadinajad now, are they not supporting the shooting at demonstrators? I worry that this issue is really going to create a rift between not only Arab left and Iranian left but between Iranians and Arabs generally.” — The Angry Arab News Service

“As outside observers, we have two obligations now. First, we need to keep our own states from using the events in Iran to advance imperialist stratagems. But we also need to show solidarity with the struggle for greater freedom in Iran.” — Jews sans frontieres

There have been other similar statements since. I was glad to see those voices eventually come along as it seemed a little lonely for a while. It was amid the tit-for-tat that happens in comment areas on the website commondreams.org that i sw the phenomenon unfold, of leftists who in every other place espoused fair play, human rights, etc, here were calling the demonstrators CIA dupes or on the payroll of the Mossad, and other associated nonsense.Not bothering to cite a source as they demanded to know where information was coming from in anything else they disparaged. Now, comment areas are messy places and mostly to be ignored. But the problem here, at niche sites such as this, is that the comments often reflect an opinion held by large swaths of the population in general.

On Friday, June 12, I accompanied my wife and our boy of 15 months to the Iranian consulate here in London so she could cast her vote in the Iranian election. Initially she had been inclined to skip it, wondering if it would be of any use. In the end she decided it was worth a shot. On Saturday, as the news of “irregularities” emerged, we were back in Knightsbridge out front the embassy this time as part of the protest. And we’ve been back several days since. Our son has enjoyed the chance to wave his arms around and shout a lot. Demonstrations can offer a healthy outlet for kids.

Obviously during this time we’ve been a little preoccupied with the news. we channel surf for the latest and obsessively check google news and blog feeds as well as the social network pages. Getting reliable news out of Iran during g this situation has not been as difficult as discerning what is happening inside a black hole, but it’s not far off. Over the past few days information has emerged, though, in English and in Farsi. On websites, in video and during the chance phone call when the lines work. And from it we can begin to put a picture together. One of the scads of websites I check in with now and again is Common Dreams, which offers a modest mix of syndicated coverage and original analysis that ranges in degrees of informed comment, but overall good stuff. It was late the Saturday following the voting that I decided to see what was going on in the comments, though, and what a weird experience it was.

I get my information from a few different places. It includes U.S. and UK media, sure, but I’m also hearing the stuff my wife is translating to me from Farsi blogs, Facebook pages, twitter accounts and so forth. But reading the comments at Common Dreams was like jumping into a time warp back to an age before the internet was on home computers yet: Here the CIA was behind it all. The millions of Iranians upset about this were all dupes by a vast western conspiracy and there was no way that Iranian people would have voted to replace the United State’s current most favorite bad guy.

I’m not going rehash them all here. If you want to get a sample of what has been (and currently is) said by people, just head to the site and look at the comments area under any article about Iran. To get a solid idea of where some leftists come in, check out the discussion after these posts: The Iranian Uprising is Home Grown, and Must Stay That Way, Iranians Flex the Power of Nonviolence, Iran’s Power Struggle, Still Marching, Iran Arrests and Rallies, Iran Ups Media Crackdown as Reformers Plan Rally, Iran: Might Meets Right, The Iranian People Speak, Iran Agrees to Partial Recount of Disputed Ballots, Not the Change They Expected, and Dashing Fabricated Hopes: The Meaning of Ahmadinejad’s Victory. There are a few more of these. For my part in these exchanges, I was petty, trite, sarcastic, vindictive, and sometimes displayed even more lax spelling and grammer standardss than even this site even allows for. In other word, I played at level. But my contentions remained these:

• A) There is no credible evidence to indicate that street protests in Iran are being driven by foreign governments.
• B) There is credible evidence that election rigging may have taken place.
• C) There is no contradiction in supporting people demonstrating for greater freedom in Iran and maintaining support for movements in Palestine, Iraq, Burma, and where ever else you think the U.S. or the military-industrial complex are up to bad things.

There is no need to make supportive statements of Ahmadinijad unless or the theocratic regime of the Islamic Republic unless you actually believe that a system in which people can be hanged or stoned to death for essentially being themselves or speaking their mind is something you can really get behind. If you oppose what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians, what the U.S. is doing to Iraqis, then there is no way you could actually support what the Iranian government does to a good number of people in Iran. One of the quotes that occasionally rotates in this blog’s sidebar was uttered by the journalist Johann Hari: “No more bogus ‘respect’ for fundamentalism within open societies. If you literally follow an ancient Holy Text – whether it’s the Koran, the Bible or the Torah – you will hold disgusting views about women, and you should expect to have them criticized and mocked.” to this we could add gays, other races, ethnic groups, and on and on.

So, for these fairly tepid claims, this site’s two or three visitors plus the  occasional trolls from the anti-ISM group that has me listed on their “rogues gallery” page, this may be sort of humorous; According to a good amount of Common Dreams commenters, based on the above assertions, I am a zionist, on the payroll of either the Mossad or the CIA and possibly writing from within Israel, that I am against arabs or persions (which would really thin out my Facebook friends list if it were the case and would likely make my wife and child a little nervous).

That I cited actual statistical sources proved their case to them. Depending on the so-called progressive credibility of the sources I cited, I was accused of either siding with the establishment or unwitting dupes. If I made the case by citing CounterPunch or Democracy Now, it was ignored. If I cited Norman Finkelstein, someone laughably asked if he was a zionist. The history professor Juan Cole, whose writing helped kick off one of the biggest Gaza relief campaigns of the last year was labeled a neocon stooge for his support of Iran demonstrations.

My favorite was the person who claimed that there was obviously a conspiracy, because all Iranians were organizing on Twitter in English. As evidence, they said Twitter doesn’t allow Farsi. When I responded with a link to Farsi posts on Twitter (there are many), the person responded with a reprimand for not paying enough attention to the current unfolding situation in Peru.

If I asked someone to cite one of their sources for information, they responded, saying there was no need to as I wouldn’t take them seriously anyway. The people who did cite sources, employed ones they’d dub dubious on nearly any other issue. new-right D.C. lobby gorups like Terror Free Tomorrow and former Reagan advisor turned bunker-inhabiting xenophobe made the list.

If all else failed, they’d ask why I didn’t focus on other issues like the massacre in Peru. Why was I not railing against our own election theft in 2000 (“and 2004″ someone else would add) Any images that ran with the articles being commented on were suspect. Any sources mentioned in the articles that didn’t jive with what was “known” were dismissed. The use of English by Iranians was seen as definitive proof. The use of Twitter or Facebook by demonstrators showed western capitalist interests had to be behind it all. That the Mousavi campaign used the color green proved that they were being paid by the CIA. A girl dies on video and it’s immediately suspected that she’s a Mossad-paid actress. Chris Hedges became a dupe for daring to suggest the demonstrators had a point. Robert Fisk became journalist non grata for his reporting.

On it goes.

To people who have ever taken part in supporting the Palestinian cause, a lot of the above tactics should ring familiar. The name calling, deflection, asking why you don’t look into some other thing, it’s all there. It was interesting to see such unoriignal tactics repeated here. The logic was sort along the lines of the “enemy of your enemy…” in which because Ahmhadinijad “challenged” the west, it was natural that the people there loved him and the U.S. was trying to unseat him by running a Shah-style plot. There was no consideration of the internal goings on in Iran or that the people there may not be happy with things, and actually may not be considering U.S. interests at all in their protesting.

All this may not be surprising to many people. This could just be the nature of comment sections. But again, in niche communities, comment sections often represent good-sized swathes of a community. To anti-war and other lefty campaign organizers, I say you should look at this as a warning sign. There are signs here and elsewhere (as cited by the authors quoted above) of a serious lack of critical thinking going on. Rejectionism is reflexive as opposed to thoughtful, which is another symptom of blind, orthodox belief. The problem of orthodox beleif is that it allows for no new information. No new details. Progressive organizers should look out for this, and challenge it. Because should they find any new compelling information that runs counter to the popular orthodoxy, their crowd may well just turn on them.