انتشار کتاب همسرم: آموزش دموکراسی رادیکال

امروز آخرین کتاب همسرم، سارا امسلر، با عنوان <آموزش دموکراسی رادیکال> منتشر شد.  بسیار امیدوارم به فارسی ترجمه شود از جمله به این دلیل که تهدید و تحدید علم و آزادی های آکادمیک در دانشگاه ها به علت غلبه روز افزون ایدئولوژی نئو لبیرال و در نتیجه، بازاری شدن و بوروکراتیزه شده و مدیریت زده شدن دانشگاه ها(برای مثال در انگلستان تعداد مدیران در دانشگاه ها از تعداد اساتید بیشتر شده است.) در غرب را به نمایش گذاشته است و نیز روشهایی استفاده حداکثری از حداقل فضاها برای تفکر انتقادی از طریق تواناییهای انسان که از طریق تفکر انتقادی حاصل می شود و نیز از طریق از بین رفتن ترسهای فردی از طریق کار جمعی را به بحث گذاشته است. 

این تحقیق که از طریق بکار گیری عمیق و گسترده از فلاسفه، جامعه شناسان و پداگوژهای مکاتب انتقادی و اثر گذار و بر آن افزودن و تئوری ها ونظرات و پیشنهادهای جدیدی را طرح کردن از چند جهت برای هم میهنان نیز بسیار مهم است.  از جمله:

- واقعیت دانشگاه های غرب و اثرات منفی بازاری کردن علم و اندیشه را بنمایش می گذارد.

- روشهای مقابله با تهدید و تحدید آزادی ها از طریق عمیق کردن آزادی ها و آزاد کردن اندیشه برای رشد را پیشنهاد و در اختیار خواننده می گذارد.

- استفاده خلاقانه و فعالانه از مکاتب انتقادی و بر غنای آن افزودن را عرضه می کند.

-...و

دوست عزیزم آقای رضا پرچیزاده لطف کردند پاراگرافی از کتاب را ترجمه ای دقیق و وزین کردند که در پایین می بینید و در اینجا از ایشان تشکر می کنم:

 

"بنیادی ترین درسهایی که برای ساختنِ انسانِ امروزی لازم اند، چنانکه آنهایی که تجربهای طولانی در نبردهای ضدِهژمونیک و دموکراتیک در زمانها و مکانهای دیگر داشته اند   و بارها به ما یادآوری کرده اند، را نمیتوان تنها از طریق مطالعه آموخت. اگر ما شرایطِ بیشمار برای شکوفا کردنِ یک رابطه ی دموکراتیکِ رادیکالِ بسیار خوشبینانه با خودمان، دیگران، زمان و مکان، ممکنات و آینده را برای خودمان ایجاد نکنیم، آنها خود به خود به وجود نخواهند آمد. چنانکه بلاخ گفته: «انسان را کاری که میکند به طور مداوم تغییر میدهد. او مدام از خطهای مقدمی که دیگر خط مقدم نیستند – چون او پیشاپیش از آنها عبور کرده است – جلو میزند و آنها را درمی نوردد.» روشِ «خطِ مقدم»ی راه و رسمِ ممکنات است، و به طورِ ذاتی پراکسیسی آموزشی است. در روزگاری که هر چیزی که با خط مقدم ارتباط دارد تا بدین حد سیاسی شده، برخی حرکاتِ در ظاهر نه چندان سیاسی خود به طرز شاخصی سیاسی به حساب میآیند.

اینها حرکاتی هستند که اهمیتِ فعالیت بر روی پدیده های نوظهور و ممکناتِ هنوز در وجود نیامده را روشن میکنند؛ که تمایلات نهفته را به صدا درآورده و به تصویر میکشند؛ که «کورسوهای نامطمئن، سوسوزننده، و اغلب کم رمق را» زیر ذره بین میگذارند و روشناییشان را دوچندان میکنند، همان کورسوهایی که اغلب به بهانه ی میرا و نامانا بودن مورد بی توجهی قرار میگیرند، اما در اصل میتوانند تنها پیش درخششی باشند بر ممکناتِ حقیقیِ آینده؛ که فضاهایی را برای مردم باز میکنند تا در آن تفکرِ انتقادی و با هم بودن را تمرین کنند؛ که ناظر هستند به ناهنجاریهای اجتماعی و احساسیِ پراکسیسِ مقابلهایِ سیستماتیکِ کانترکالچرالِ دموکراتیک، و به تبدیلِ هراسِ فردی به شجاعتِ جمعی؛ که با کشیدنِ خطی میانِ دو نقطه ی تقدیر و امکان، آن دو نقطه را به هم وصل میکنند، تا بدین ترتیب شکلِ ویرانه ی ناامیدیها و به دنبالش طرحِ خانه ی امیدواریها را بکشند.

و در روزگاری که همه آن آروزها اینچنین دور از دسترس به نظر میرسند، دیگر الگوهای آموزشی، برای ثبت در جُنگِ «هنوز نشده ها» و «در حالِ شدنها»، برای مهارتهای دریافتیِ دموکراتیک، برای عاداتِ همکاری، برای فرآیندهای پیشدرآمدی، برای هنرهای پیشبینی، و برای روشهایِ به کارگیریِ همه اینها در کارِ ساختنِ مواد اولیه برای تغییرهای اجتماعی حیاتی تلقی میشوند".

‘[T]the most fundamental lessons that are required for humanization today, as we are reminded by those with long experiences of counter-hegemonic and radically democratic struggle in other places and times, cannot be learned through study alone. Methods for cultivating a radically democratic and militantly optimistic relationship with ourselves, other people, time and space, possibility and the future do not pre-exist our development of these methods for our own situation. As Bloch argued, ‘man [and woman] . . . is repeatedly transformed in his [or her] work and by it. [S]/he repeatedly stands ahead on frontiers which are no longer such because s/he perceives them, s/he ventures beyond them’ (1995, p. 246). Frontier politics, which is the politics of possibility, is an inherently educative praxis. In a moment where the Front is itself so politicized, certain kinds of practices become particularly important – practices that clarify work on emerging and not-yet possibilities; that visualize and make audible latent tendencies; that intensify and magnify the ‘uncertain, flickering, and often weak lights’ which are dismissed as ephemeral but which may in fact foreshine real possibility; that open up spaces for people to practise critical thinking and being together; that attend to the social and emotional discomforts of radically democratic, counter-cultural and systemically oppositional practice, and to the transformation of individualized fear into common courage; that connect the dots of both foreclosure and possibility in order to construct maps of the apparatuses of hopelessness and models of the architectures of hope. And, in a moment where even these practices are out of reach, other kinds of education – in the ontology of the unfi nished and the becoming; in the skills of democratic receptivity; in habits of co-operation, in processes of prefi guration; in the arts of anticipation; and in methods for incorporating these into the political work of constructing material and social conditions for such activities – become critical as well.’

http://www.amazon.com/Education-Radical-Democracy-Routledge-Research/dp/0415702631

Abuse of Freedom of Expression by Pretenders to It By Reza Parchizadeh

Freedom of expression is virtually nonexistent in Iran. According to Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 Press Freedom Index, Iran stands at the 174^th place – the 6^th from the bottom – among the 179 countries assessed with regard to freedom of expression or lack thereof. That is why The UN Refugee Agency has dubbed Iran the “Middle East’s biggest prison for journalists.”

In the absence of freedom of expression in Iran, power has been concentrated in the hands of the Islamic Republic and its functionaries who hold a strict monopoly on the media. As such, they don’t allow others to freely express their opinions on political, social, cultural, environmental, etc. issues and problems, which has largely contributed to the creation of a monophonous and monolithic state in Iran.

This in turn has forced many Iranian writers, journalists, critics, dissidents, and… to seek freedom of expression elsewhere, usually at a high price, in the face of many adversities and even at risk of losing their lives. In fact, it can be said that virtually all the Iranian public platforms that in one way or another oppose or criticize the regime in Iran are based overseas, especially in Europe and the United States.

Among these platforms, the link-sharing websites, due to their giving the users more authority in determining the content of the website – a rather “democratic” feature obviously absent from the mainstream Iranian media, have been very popular. One of the more successful websites in that trend has been Balatarin. According to its Wikipedia page, “Balatarin (Persian: بالاترین, lit., highest) is a Persian language social and political link-sharing website aimed primarily at Iranian audiences. Balatarin does not generate news in-house but provides a hub where users can post links to webpages of their choice, vote on their relevance or significance, and post comments.”

Though established long before that, Balatarin came to light since the fraudulent presidential elections of 2009 in Iran due to its independent citizen and journalist users’ sharing the news of and the announcements for the demonstrations against the election results. However, as time went by and as the website gathered momentum and attracted lots of attention, Balatarin itself began to demonstrate repressive tendencies. In waves of purges, well-known and prestigious users (or rather, IDs) were first denied the ability to create the so-called “hot-topic” strands and then their accounts were suspended by the management, and the website in general took a more conservative turn with respect to allowing for any kind of content opposing the Islamic Republic.

As such, these days links with substantial content against or in criticism of the regime hardly get a chance to become visible on the website, and the bulk of the content is now inclined towards supporting a particular faction of the regime called “The Reformists” who have long penetrated the media in the West by mass-migrating to the Western countries. As a matter of fact, a great host of users have been complaining about harsh censorship and slanted presentation of content in favor of the so-called Reformists, even in breach of Balatarin’s own internal regulations.

As a result, it has been many times claimed that Balatarin, though receiving aid from organizations worldwide that have a concern for freedom of expression and democracy, and also benefitting from Google service in order to seemingly protect itself from the cyber-attacks by the Islamic Republic, in effect toes the line of the Islamic Republic (or at least a faction of it), the very political entity that it became known for opposing in the first place.

Recently, an old user and a well-known political activist, Abbas Khosravi Farsani, has claimed that Balatarin sells or in whatever manner puts the users’ information at the disposal of the Islamic Republic. He has claimed that it was in fact his own incognito activities in Balatarin that led to his arrest by the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Intelligence a couple of years ago.

Khosravi, who by that time was one of the top doctoral students in Western Philosophy at University of Isfahan in Iran, used to be a prolific blogger and a political activist who worked incognito, using fake but well-known IDs. He was later forced to flee Iran as he was about to face a heavy sentence, and has since been living abroad as a political refugee. He says that when the agents of the Ministry raided his house, they even had his IP (Internet Protocol) with them, and showed it to him on the spot.

As Balatarin was the only website that – as a mandatory feature – had access to Khosravi’s IP, and as some of the IDs that were then intimately in touch with him now appear to have top moderating responsibilities with strong pro-regime tendencies in Balatarin, Khosravi claims that he is certain it was Balatarin that sold his information to the Intelligence Ministry, and that he sees this as his inalienable right to bring charges against Balatarin at an impartial court of justice in due time.

Whether Khosravi’s claim is substantiated or not, this is only one among the many rather well-documented charges brought against Balatarin in recent times that claim this website works in the sphere of the Islamic Republic. These include “Balatarin Miracles: Are the policy-makers for the defense of democracy in Washington aware of the dramatic changes in the trends of Balatarin?”, “Censorship in Balatarin: this time omitting the hot topic on the Persian section of Voice of America”, “Imam Yahyanejad and Omitting Seven Hot Topics on the Persian Section of Voice of America”, “The ‘Where-Is-My-Link?’ Movement: a real fiction”, “Populating Balatarin with +18 Links”, “Are the Pictures of Jenifer Lopez and Lindsay Lohan More Important than the [Political] Analyses by Knodnevis?!”, “Where Art Thou, O Orwell?! Balatarin and 1984”, “A Fatwa to Forbid Balatarin”, “Balatarin and the Links that Are Not ‘Hot’ Anymore”, and “A Proposal for Creating a Better Link-Sharing Website than Balatarin”.

Nevertheless, the Balatarin management, though in charge of a public platform benefitting from humanitarian aid for propagating freedom of expression and democracy, has never shown any hint of public responsibility as to publicly and officially answer the charges brought against it. As a result, this piece has been penned in order to issue a warning to all those who care for the freedom of expression anywhere around the world and especially in Iran, and also to demonstrate that how public resources meant for good intentions can be used in achieving dubious ends when there is no informed and responsible supervision.

*P.S. As soon as this article appeared on Iranian.com, the article referencing Abbas Khosravi Farsani’s claims immediately disappeared from the cyberspace. Fortunately, I had already frozen the entire article into a PDF file, and have uploaded it here and – just in case – here so that the readers can have free access to it.