MILANI

Uncle Joe's children

The Stalinist left, as little as they matter, are in turmoil. Their brand of leftist rhetoric is long dismissed as ineffective and out of touch with the needs of today's competitive world of free enterprise. Even the Moaist Chinese have discovered this fact and are hard at work catching up with the the free nations of the world. But not uncle Joe's children, or grand children, if you will. To them truth is not worthy of being sought. Indeed there is no truth at all. In their vocabulary there is no entry for truth. Instead of truth they use another term: debate! Let's debate everything, they say. But this is no debate as you and I know it. They determine the rules of this debate. The principal rule of thier debate is to move the goal post when the ball is closing in and there is a threat of a goal being scored. You face the Stalinists of Iran with facts as accepted by the majority and they say: let us debate what constitutes as fact. let us debate what is meant by acceptance and let us debate who are the majority. And when you think you have convincingly debated all the three questions, they say: the issue we were debating was a different one!

Such is the arguemnt put forward by Zarafshan, uncle Joe's proud grand child and all his comrades in arms. When dealing with the Stalinist left, you must redefine everything and I mean everything, most importantly, the truth.

Ayval Zarafshan!!!

Hamid: First of all, Zarafshan has answered all your points in his article. It is quite amazing for an article to be written so well that it can cover all corners of the argument and leaves no room for punching holes in it. Zarafshan’s argument is so compelling and covers all grounds that trying to work against it with such weak, superficial counter points presented here is pure stupidity and only works in Zarafshan’s favor. I think zarafshan has done an immense service to our people and intellectuals by showing the true face of Mr. Milani and his philosophy. We could care less about the individual and what he has done, but the ideas being portrayed as progressive and modern are extremely damaging and as usual appealing to the stupid masses. Somebody finally has stepped forward to a give firm and compelling response. Thank you Mr Zarafshan for doing that. One important point to contemplate though, a point Mr zarafshan have not made in his article (you can guess why), but any intelligent mind should be able to infer from the trend in the past and the behavior now is if Milani cooperated with previous regime, what prevents him from cooperating with current one as his actions in present time suggest. Think about it!!

Jahansha: I think Dr Zarafshan’s letter should be published on Iranian.com with or without his permissions. Obviously we know why he may not be able to acknowledge giving permission for his article being published here!

Zarafshan's letter

Amou Jan,

I don't remember receiving Dr. Zarafshan's letter. Even if I had, I could not publish without his permission.

I would have had no problem publishing it.

j

Aadam-a Zendeh o Vakeel Vassi

Mr. Farkhondeh,

I guess I'm not privileged enough to know either yourself or Dr. Zar-Afshaan. But for calendar reasons and having been a university (Tehran, Oloom) student at the time, I know of Dr. Milaani, rather well. His acquaintance and cooperation with Cyrus Nahaavandi is common knowledge of the time.

With that introduction, I have two basic questions and one comment about your presented opinion (yaar-keshi rather):

• This is not actually a question, but a declaration. I personally sent Dr. Zar-Afshaan’s article to Mr. Javid of this webzine on 08/27/2007, for the exact reason that it was about one of the more frequent (read favored) opinions on this site. Why was not that article published and yours is? Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t you written this piece in response to Dr. Zar-Afshaan’s? Is “sacred”ness relative? You have, indeed, presented a link to a 2nd-hand source of that article. But you know better than anybody, that there’s a mighty good chance that a majority of readers would not bother to copy & paste that lengthy address and rather take your word for it. Clever.
• We have a saying in Farsi, that “aadam-a zendeh vakeel vassi nemikhaad”. Dr. Milaani is both alive and capable of standing up for himself. He also has a good command of Farsi and a relatively fair command of English. Why did he not reply? Or are you his retained (or self-appointed) council? Clarify if you care.

Have you really (I mean honest) read Dr. Zar-Afshaan’s article yourself? If so, why don’t you try to refute his arguments instead of muddying the water? He has presented a series of events fortified with evidence, dates and valid inquiries. Just address his queries. When he asks: “which theories this well-known theoretician has founded…?” What can you say? If you know, just share it with me (see I don’t need to appeal to other readers. No yaar-keshi here). What do you have to say about his noted inaccuracies in Dr. Milaani’s translations? You say irrelevant? I say my foot.

Do you also honestly think that Dr. Milaani should be awarded for cooperating with SAVAK when there were other brave men and women who refused to do so and died for it? I think not. At a minimum, he should come out, state the fact that he’s a not a very brave man and atone for it. He instead attacks the entire Iranian (and the world’s) left movement. His critique of the likes of Hedaayat, and his gondeh-goozis about art and culture do not warrant responding to (Dr. Zar-Afshaan has said enough on those.) At best, you’ve fallen in the exact same trap as the one you are accusing Dr. Zar-Afshaan of.

There once was a Shayyaad, a Teacher and a Maar………

Àmõùsðññÿ

Unfortunately for Milani

Mr. Milani had sold himself long ago, now he is part of the conservative think tank and has lost his credit....