The Bankruptcy of External Threat Argument
The External Threat Argument
I don't envy the Islamic regime's apologists and lobbyists, for although they have a lot of funds at their disposal, from Iranian government or the oil giants, they have a tall order. Islamic Republic is a religious dictatorship, where the rights of a citizen are determined by their religion or more accurately by their adherence to the state's interpretation of Shiite theology. Pure and simple, Islamic Republic is evil and wrong.
So how do these lobbyists and apologists cope with such a difficult task of window dressing the Islamic Republic? First of all they rely on the 'useful idiots' in the West. The same ones who tried to glamorise the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao.
'Useful idiots' are very active, and they seem to have a lot of time for activism. They are also experts in getting grants and funding. The army of 'useful idiots' as well as the funds at their disposal is their strength.
The Achilles heel of the IR apologists and lobbyists is their bankrupt arguments. One really has to scrape the bottom of the barrel to come up with a viable argument to defend the Islamic Republic.
One of the pivotal arguments they have been posing is that while Iran is under external threat, the human rights abuses and all the other wrongs in the Islamic Republic should not be highlighted and we should all concentrate on fighting this external threat first and foremost. See CASMII's protest at a mild petition put up by Znet that mildly criticised the human rights abuses in Iran. Now lets examine one of CASMII's leading members, Abbas Edalat.
He was educated in the US after having received a scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation, i.e. from the Shah's regime. Yet this receiver of the scholarship from the Pahlavi Foundation did not hesitate to campaign against the Shah's regime as a student.
Under the Shah, Iran was definitely under the external threat from two of its immediate neighbours, the Soviet Union and Iraq. The Russian ambitions to reach the warm waters of the Persian Gulf go back to Peter the Great's will and after the second World War, the Soviets tried to break up Iran by supporting and promoting a separatist movement in Azerbijan, North West Iran.After their failure in Azerbijan, the Soviets continued their desires to turn Iran into a Russian satellite by supporting and funding the puppet pro-Soviet Tudeh Party and other insurgencies.Programs by the Peyk Radio of the Tudeh Party, broadcast from Eastern Europe, continued to disseminate Soviet propaganda against the Shah’s regime.
Iraq's ambition on breaking away Khuzestan province from Iran was aided by Egypt's other Pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdul-Nasser, who referred to Iranian Khuzestan as Arabestan. Iraq also disputed the river borders of Arvand-rood, and on several occasions Saddam's forces attacked Iranian border posts only to be pushed back by the well organised Iranian army at the time.
So Iran was definitely under external threat at the time, yet students like Abbas Edalat studying abroad on a government grant, never considered that they should stop their activities against the Shah to combat the external threats. In fact many of them directly collaborated with the governments that posed that very external threat.
These students would be educated in US and Western European countries but for some peculiar reason then wanted an Albanian, Chinese, Algerian or some other tin-pot dictatorship styles for Iran! Patriotism to them was either a dirty word and just was not found in their vocabulary.But all of a sudden now, their 'patriotism' is preventing them from criticising the Islamic Republic.
The fact is that the Islamic Republic feels threatened even by its own shadow, and will always create an 'external threat' and an 'external enemy'. Islamic Republic craves and lives on crisis as a way of extending its shelf life. After 28 years however, most Iranian people are seeing through these gimmicks and bluffs of the clerical state.
They rightly demand their rights to a decent standard of living, their right to have a say in how they are governed, and their right to personal freedoms. I can not imagine how for example, Iranian teachers, who only demand the enactment of the Islamic Assembly bill for public workers, and nothing more, can be regarded as colluding with the 'external threat'?!
Nor indeed how Iranian women who want justice in state gender laws, nor the workers who demand their unpaid wages, nor any other stream of the Iranian pro-democracy movement, in any way are colluding with any external threats. The argument to suppress home grown dissent because of external threats has been used by just about all dictatorships. If such an argument had any shred of consistency, Israel should be the most brutal dictatorship against its own citizens because of all the external threats it faces.
Yet even during the missile attacks on Israel by the Hezbollah, some Israeli citizens felt free enough to demonstrate against the war and criticise their government. Imagine what would have happened if a group of Iranians protested in Iran, during the war with Iraq, and demanded that the Islamic Republic accepted the peace treaty that was on offer after the Iraqi aggressors had retreated from our borders.
Demanding justice at home not only does not promote external threats, but a perception of being able to campaign freely for justice and bring one's government to accountability actually strengthens one's resolve to defend the system against external threats.
The 'external threat' argument is so old, repetitive, bankrupt and baseless that only 'useful idiots' will be convinced by it. Any sane person can realise that the motivation for such arguments is more suspect than it appears on the surface and there is another agenda behind it.
ABF, for the promotion of human rights and democracy in Iran
2 comments:
The fun thing with the 'external threat' is that it often engenders the thing it has displaced. In this case Islamism has supplanted Pan-Arabism of the Nasser sort, which was more of an ethnic cohesion concept that never played out becuase Arabs are a broad number of Peoples only with loose genetic affiliation and with high Tribal and Familial affiliation. Look at the Germanic Princedoms of the 15th-19th century in Europe and you can see that there was a more or less 'German' concept there, but there were stark differences between Prussians, Saxons, Bavarians... and they fought bloody wars over them! By and large those were *also* wars of religion, too. The slow uniting of these small Principalities only began after the State was no longer given purview over the religion of the people inside it. That was the Westphalian Peace of 1648, which did not *end* religious wars, but became the guiding doctrine for the Nation State concept. When unification took place the Germanic Peoples were often at odds with each other, had falling outs but slowly came to grips with the fact that their lands would be a central battlefront between: France, Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia. At times one part or another of these areas would be ascendant and Germany was often quipped as 'being an Army with a Nation attached to it'.
In the Middle East, however, the breakdown of Empires and the poor post-war Treaties, especially of WWI although other conflicts and such in the region come to mind, like the Greek Civil War to separate from the Ottoman Empire. Americans tried, early on, to establish religious institutions and failed. Then put in schools and hospitals and universities with religious affiliation, but were open non-denominationally: anyone could attend on merit, not religious basis. The first generation of Arab Nationalists would come from American Universities and schools in Syria, Ottoman Empire, Egypt.... and that then turned into Nationalist uprisings that would end colonialism after WWII. Nasser saw himself as a sort of Frederick III, as witness trying to form a Nation with Syria. What happened in the Middle East was a reversal from Nationalism to religion.
Here the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and immediate affiliates in places like Sudan, were an anti-Nationalist factor, but not well funded. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia joined at the hip with the Wahabbi outlook, funded and co-opted the Muslim Brotherhood to use that against Nasser. That anti-Nationalist idea turned into an anti-Nation State ideal with Radical Islam as its basis. In Iran the splits within the Nation, politically, existed prior to the Shah and date back all the way to the 19th century, and the overthrow of the Shah was co-opted by the Ayatollahs. Due to religious differences which are basic inside of Islam, there was no way to reconcile their revolution with the growing anti-Nation State terrorism. Both broke with the Westphalian compact and put religion of the Peoples under them into State control. While these different outlooks on Islam can cooperate against common foes, they also recognize that is a temporary thing and a day of reckoning will come.
Iran, after having decades of Westphalian concepts under the Shah, has a population that understands that and the liberties it is missing. The other Middle Eastern Nations are loathe to give up control to Radical Islamists, as they understand that no matter how bad the tyranny is *now* what they face is worse. That is the battlefront drawn between Radical Islam of both major types and the West: the ability of people to worship freely without State interference. The Radical forms of Islam do not abide by that and so must bring down the Nationalist system regardless of its place or outlook.
That is the *other* for them, their great Anathema: letting people have sanctity of self to *choose* religious outlook and not have the State decide for them.
Look at the bloody history of the Germanic Principalities on that issue and one can see the world that this would bring about. It is sad to think that nearly 360 years from Westphalia the world is now to be plunged into that cauldron *again*. That is what the threat is because this Other... this freedom of personal decision and sanctity in it, is so abominable to those wanting religious tyranny, that they cannot abide by it. And if we who enjoy Freedom of Religious Choice cannot fight this, then the death toll will be astronimically high compared to all the 20th century wars *combined*. We can fight and limit that carnage... or succumb to it and be back just where the world was those centuries ago.
You don't need useful idiots, or lobbyists or apologists. If Iran wasn't so paranoid and pretends to like the U.S. for a little while it could hire a D.C. public relations firm.
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