... The imposition of death and destruction on the targeted population is framed by the global media and establishments of the sanction-sending countries as a tool to prevent the potential death of people in the West. This framing produces a sharp division between people under sanctions and those protected from a future threat. Moreover, it constitutes the imposition of destruction on the targeted population as the only solution to protect the lives in the West against a future threat, despite the egalitarian resolution of global disarmament offered by numerous Iranian and American groups, activists and scholars. This interpretation of conditions, through restricting the political imaginations and division of lives, posits the lives of the targeted population as obstacles to the lives in the West. One could ask the question why the imprisonment of Iranian citizens for political issues by their state is legitimately considered an act of violence committed by the state throughout the world, yet the removal of food, medicine, 1224 deaths within eleven years due to the airplane crashes, and considerable deterioration of living conditions by the economic sanctions are merely mentioned as violence, and often justified for various political goals. The equation of economic sanctions with the weakening of the targeted state and the ruination of the living conditions of the targeted population with that of the protection of the lives in the West, regulate the affect for the audience of the global media in a way that the violence of sanctions becomes seen as legitimate or unavoidable. Moreover, the targeted population is often othered to a point that its suffered pain, injuries and vulnerabilities are outside the responsibility of the citizens of the sanction sending countries. To resist against this policy of imposition of destruction therefore, is to oppose the reality, or in this case fantasy, produced by the framing[14] of the policy makers of the economic sanctions sending countries and emphasize the reality that is left outside their frame and dominant interpretations. There is an ongoing political struggle in Iran in which some of its conductors are currently imprisoned and many others are exiled. Iran’s prisons are a major site of political resistance and a space for hope, transformative criticism, and imagination of what-is-not-here-yet. The voices from Iran’s prisons are under attack from both Iran’s state and the sanction-sending countries. News of prisoners’ hunger strikes, analyses of econo-political conditions, and statements in condemnation of maltreatments of Iran’s political dissidents and prisoners come out of Iran’s prisons almost on a weekly basis. Economic sanctions and the threats of war are marginalizing these voices and their causes in favor of the state’s discourse of national reconciliation for gathering all (i.e. the ruling class, state-elites, and the people from different econo-political backgrounds) over protecting Iran against foreign interventions. The only hope is a stop to the economic sanctions and the threats of war against Iran that can result in a shift of focus from the conflicts of establishments to Iranians’ political dreams, demands, and imagination of the not-yet-here.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Jul 2013 18:15:28 +0000
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