This article totally fails to mention The long history of both socialism and
communism in Iran going all the way back to The constitutional revolution of
1906.
Sent from my iPhone
On Jun 13, 2016, at 7:26 AM, Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender
"rogerbailey81" for DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2016/8024/802454.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 24 June 20, 2016
Books about working-class politics do well at
Tehran fair
BY PETE CLIFFORD
AND CATHARINA TIRSÉN
TEHRAN, Iran — “Your books are different. They’re engaging and make me
think,” said a visitor to the Pathfinder stand at the 29th Tehran
International Book Fair held May 4-14. The young man, from Yazd in central
Iran, said he returns to the stand each year to get new books.
Books from Pathfinder Press, which publishes titles by communist and other
working-class leaders around the world, have been displayed here since 1992.
The big majority of the more than 200 people who left the booth with books in
hand were first-time Pathfinder readers, leading to the highest sales in at
least ten years.
Tehran-based publisher Talaye Porsoo, which translates and sells many
Pathfinder titles in Farsi, also reported increased sales. Farsi is the
language of a substantial majority in Iran, and is read or spoken by half the
population in neighboring Afghanistan.
The annual cultural event, held this year at a large new trade-fair grounds
south of Tehran, attracts hundreds of thousands looking for textbooks,
novels, poetry, nonfiction and religious books in Farsi and other languages.
In a special area, there were booths representing Algeria, Italy, Japan,
Mexico, Oman, Turkey, and Russia, this year’s country of honor, as well as
the Frankfurt Book Fair and the United Nations.
Participation by publishers from other countries remains limited by the
refusal of major Western banks to process Iranian transactions, part of the
decades-long imperialist economic and financial sanctions squeezing the
people of this country.
Visitors came to the book fair from all corners of Iran. A student from
Mashhad, near the border with Afghanistan, traveled some 600 miles by train.
He was interviewed by Al Jazeera’s Newshour program after purchasing a copy
of Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed at the Pathfinder stand.
Asked by the correspondent why he picked that title, he replied, “All human
beings are born equal.” He returned the next day and bought Malcolm X, Black
Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes, national secretary
of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.S. That book was among Pathfinder’s
best sellers here.
Books on the Cuban revolution
Books on Cuba’s socialist revolution were popular. A woman who stopped at the
Pathfinder booth described what she had learned from The Cuban Five: Who They
Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free, which she had bought at
the fair last year. This time she got Absolved by Solidarity, which opens
with the December 2014 victory of the international campaign to win freedom
for five Cuban revolutionaries, who were framed up and held in U.S. federal
prisons for up to 16 years.
Two young men from Sanandaj, a Kurdish city in northwest Iran, bought the
newest Pathfinder title, The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US
Working Class, which was the top seller. “We want to find out how they came
out of prison stronger,” one of them said, after reading the back cover.
Interest in what lies behind today’s deep-going capitalist economic and
political crisis worldwide was registered in sales of the Marxist magazine
New International, featuring articles such as “US Imperialism Has Lost the
Cold War” and “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” both by Jack Barnes.
Browsing through the latter, an economics student was drawn to two graphs
showing the mounting debt bubbles that led up to the 2007-08 world financial
crisis. Another popular title was Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S.
Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters.
A woman from Saudi Arabia studying in Iran bought the Arabic-language
editions of Is Biology Woman’s Destiny by Evelyn Reed and Voices from Prison:
The Cuban Five. Two men from Egypt bought 11 books, including titles by
Malcolm X and by communist leaders Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon. Other
visitors to the Pathfinder stand included several individuals originally from
Afghanistan, the largest immigrant group in Iran, as well as from Iraq,
including Erbil, capital of the Kurdish Regional Government there.
Pathfinder’s titles in Spanish and French also attracted attention. A
Spanish-language teacher snapped up eight books, saying her students would be
more likely to learn by “reading something that interests them.”
At the Talaye Porsoo stand in the Farsi-language hall, top sellers included
the fourth and final volume of Malcolm X, Black Liberation and the Road to
Workers Power. Another was Two Worlds at Night: The Legacy of Imperialism and
the Road to Social and Cultural Advance by Jack Barnes, which presents a
course to close deep economic and social disparities between oppressed and
oppressor nations as part of the fight for power by revolutionary workers
parties the world over.
As has often been the case, the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels topped Talaye Porsoo’s sales at the book fair, along with
other Marxist classics and titles on women’s emancipation and Cuba’s
socialist revolution. In recent years, Talaye Porsoo titles have gotten
favorable reviews in the Tehran daily newspapers Etemad and Shargh, as well
as by the Iranian Students News Agency and Iran’s Book News Agency.
Golâzin, another Iranian publisher that translates and sells Pathfinder
titles, had a number of these books at its booth, including Woman’s Evolution
by Evelyn Reed and Che Guevara Speaks.
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