Freelance

The current situation in Iran is dire. Yesterday I wrote,

“A strategically minded “smart” Iran may abandon its entire nuclear program in order to survive as a regime, now completely ruled by the Pasdaran. From the ashes will rise a military dictatorship and police state sans mullahs. So, making things for the populace massively worse.”

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Council may have taken over the Iranian Republic already. The appointed rahbar, or Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public and, despite denial, may actually be incapacitated.

While the situation is much worse than in 2009, after the questioned re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I want to share the epilogue of Hooman Majd’s book of 2010, The Ayatollahs’ Democracy, which I had recently revisited.

Shia concepts of martyrdom, but more important victimhood, concepts deeply imbedded in the Iranian psyche – even in the psyche of non-Shia Iranians – play a bigger role in the culture of politics than is imagined in the West. We are Shia, Iranians say; our sect has long been a victim of greater Sunni oppression in the Muslim world; our original saints, the blood of the prophet in their veins, were victims of cruel and despotic Caliphs a millennia and a half ago, and we still weep for them, on cue and on time, every year. For centuries we have been the victims of foreign imperialist ambitions, then victims of tyrant Shahs who suppressed any democratic movement that would limit their power. Our latest political model, an Islamic Republic we voted for, has been a victim of foreign plots to destroy it, our independence a thorn in the side of every greater power. We were victims of Saddam, much more so than you Westerners, and yet no one wept for us as he gassed our children and rained bombs down on our cities. We are victims of a Western attitude of superiority that deems nuclear technology to be safe in the West’s hands, but unacceptable in the hands of Shia Iranians, even as European man has wreaked more havoc on the planet than any other species.