http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/960/focus.htm
13 - 19 August 2009
Issue No. 960
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875
Iran is self-destructing
The point of no return has been passed: Iran's violent theocratic tyranny is
now facing the people, and it will lose, writes Hamid Dabashi*
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Ma bi-shomarim / We are countless
-- Slogan of the Green Movement in Iran
Within minutes of the picture of a frail and fragile Mohammad Ali Abtahi
appearing on the Internet, the blogosphere was flooded with split images of him
before and after his predicament. Having lost some 20 kilos since his
incarceration in late June, his handsome, always smiling and endearing, face
thinned beyond recognition, disrobed of his clerical habit, his turban lost,
and clad in unseemly prison pajamas, the former vice president under President
Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), a leading reformist, and particularly popular
with bloggers because of his own weblog, Abtahi's case was particularly heart-
wrenching to his young admirers.
The belligerent custodians of the Islamic Republic had forced him to confess to
crimes that would make a dead chicken laugh, as we say in Persian, and as an
oppositional figure quickly pointed out. This is a velvet revolution, he was
made to say, plotted by the reformists, supported by the "Enemy," and there was
nothing wrong with Ahmadinejad's landslide victory. Instead of sadness and
disappointment, the blogosphere was abuzz with love and admiration for Abtahi.
He was instantly declared a national hero. "For the first time," said one
blogger, "I learned to love a cleric -- and then I looked again; he had no
clerical robe anymore." Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the leading Iranian filmmaker now
active in support of the Green Movement, delivered the most memorable punch
line in support of Abtahi and dismissing his forced confessions. "If Khamenei
were to be treated like Abtahi in jail, the Supreme Guide would come to
national television belly dancing!"
Every state is founded on force, Max Weber believed early in the 20th century.
What Weber termed "legitimate violence," as the defining apparatus of any
state, is predicated on what he called "external means" and "inner
justification": the more a state has to resort to external means (use of
violence), the less its claim on inner justification (constitutional mandates)
on its citizens. The massively orchestrated and naked violence that the Islamic
Republic has launched against its own citizens (young and old, men and women,
rich and poor) has not only delegitimised its claim to the notion of a
"republic", it has, ipso facto, discredited any claim to "Islam" that it may
have while bordering on discrediting Islam itself, which is the reason why so
many prominent, high-ranking, Shia clerics are coming out so forcefully and
categorically denouncing the violent crackdown of peaceful demonstrations, in
both juridical and rational terms. There were many Iranians who doubted the
accuracy of the June presidential election results, and there were those who
thought they were perfectly accurate. But the vicious, blatantly criminal,
activities of people in positions of power in the Islamic Republic have now
assumed a reality sui generis, beyond anything that any critic of this election
had ever uttered. The Islamic Republic of Iran is self-destructing.
Over the last two months, scores of innocent young Iranians have been
cold-bloodedly murdered, either in the streets or else under torture in the
dungeons of the Islamic Republic. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, three different and
autonomous human rights organisations, have independently documented and
condemned atrocious acts of human rights abuse -- of arbitrary arrests,
kidnappings, illegal incarceration, indiscriminate beating and torture, and
cold-blooded murder of ordinary citizens. To the haunted names of Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airbase, and even the Gulags now has to be added the
dreaded names of Kahrizak and Evin as sites of appalling atrocities perpetrated
by the security apparatus of a self-consciously illegitimate tyranny. Never
will any official of the Islamic Republic be able to utter a word about the
criminal behaviours of the US army in Iraq or the equally atrocious acts of the
Israeli army in Palestine with a straight face and without ipso facto
implicating their own atrocities against their own innocent citizens. Mehdi
Karrubi, a leading oppositional figure, recently said even the Zionists
(proverbial for their brutalities against the Palestinians) behave with more
self-restraint in Gaza than the Iranian security apparatus does against Iranian
citizens. The horrors of the Islamic Republic do not whitewash the terrors that
the Jewish state perpetrates against Palestinians in their own homeland. They
underline them. Ahmadinejad is no moral voice to point a finger at Israel. The
dead bodies of Neda Aqa-Soltan, Sohrab Arabi, and scores of other young
Iranians murdered in the prime of their lives are.
The security apparatus of the Islamic Republic behaves like a wild beast,
chasing after its own tail, maiming and murdering anyone in its way. Innocent
citizens are arbitrarily arrested, or more accurately kidnapped off the streets
(like the prominent human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr), incarcerated in their
hundreds, at times viciously tortured, or even cold-bloodedly murdered, and
their bodies given to their families on the obscene condition that they utter
no word of protest and bury their loved ones quietly. Leading public
intellectuals, political activists, reformist journalists, university
professors, and political analysts are arrested, charged with treason, forced
to confess to outlandish charges, and then paraded in front of national
television in kangaroo courts to humiliate and break them in the public eye.
Anyone with an ounce of intelligence, a caring intellect, a moral fibre in her
or his being is suspect.
It took 30 years of an Islamic Republic to cleanse it of its innate banalities
and to produce a leading cadre of public intellectuals who deeply care about
their people, love their country, abide by the law of their land, and with a
perfectly legitimate range of positions and opinions on social and economic
matters wish to work for a better future. And it took exactly that many years
for yet another generation of opportunist charlatans to gather around Ali
Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to kill (like a number of public intellectuals
in the late 1990s), paralyze (like the chief reformist strategist Said
Hajjarian), force into exile (like Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Akbar
Ganji, Mohsen Makhmalbaf or Ata Mohajerani), or incarcerate, torture,
humiliate, discredit or kill (too numerous to name) anyone who dares to speak
truth to power. That intellectual elite is systematically eradicated, murdered,
incarcerated, discredited, forced into exile in order to pave the ignominious
path of a medieval banality codenamed welayat-e-faqih, a keyword for the rule
of fear and fanaticism, structural ignorance and religious fascism.
Farhang-e-nokhbeh-koshi, the "culture of eliticide" is what one perceptive
Iranian analyst has called this dark age of tyranny.
Meanwhile, whatever has survived of this eliticide and gathered around an
innocuous but hopeful green colour to codify an unprecedented civil rights
movement is now the target of even harsher attacks by a certain quixotic side
of the expatriate "opposition" that discredits anyone who might harbour a
glimpse of hope for the future. They do nothing but malign any public figure
that this movement has chosen as a leader. They point to shadows in the past of
people like Mousavi, Soroush, Ganji or Makhmalbaf, and by discrediting them
wish to discredit the entire Green Movement. Much legitimate anger lingers in
their prose, degenerating though into an illegitimate malignancy of moral
retardation and political impotence. What they offer instead is the mouldy
residues of old clichés, arrested in their mind and soul in some Neanderthal
age of convictions, without an iota of critical or creative intelligence about
them. They are a sorry and sad scene: much coarsened convictions and yet not an
iota of hope, of trust, of crossing the psychological barrier of getting
muddied with the nuts and bolts of a magnificent civil rights movement that
belongs to no one in particular and is in need of every ounce of creative
intelligence that comes to its aid.
These parasitical noises notwithstanding, the central volume of the movement is
crystal clear and rising. The Green Movement does not belong to anyone, from
Mir-Hossein Mousavi inside Iran to Reza Pahlavi and Masoud Rajavi of the
Mojahedin-e Khalq outside. But in and of itself it moves like a beautiful
river, self- propelling, like the Hudson or Karun, now thunderous and
dangerous, now calm and quiet. Fortunately no charismatic rabble-rouser has any
legitimate claim to it. The most significant dimension of this movement is its
historic transvaluation of values, its categorical denunciation of aggression
in face of ungodly violence that seeks to put an end to it. It will not end.
The belligerent custodians of the Islamic Republic capture and torture Mohammad
Abtahi, and force him to confess to bogus charges on national television, and
yet within hours masses of emails and weblogs shower him with love and
forgiveness, understanding and tolerance, hope and happiness. The Islamic
Republic wants to humiliate Abtahi, but the people turn him into a national
hero and publish thousands of "confessions" of a similar sort to make him feel
better and to express their love and solidarity with him.
Putting their lives and liberties on the line are not just ordinary citizens in
extraordinary courage and imagination. The most learned juridical authorities
of the land, and high-ranking Shia clerics from Ayatollah Montazeri to
Ayatollah Sanei, to Hojjat Al-Islam Mohsen Kadivar, reminiscent in their
courage and conviction of the best that the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-
1911 produced, have gone public denouncing these naked brutalities of the
Islamic Republic. One of the most distinguished Shia scholars of the land,
Seyyed Mostafa Mohaqqeq Damad, in an open letter to Ayatollah Hashemi
Shahroudi, the Head of the Judiciary, denounced the absurd kangaroo courts that
have robbed innocent citizens of their rights; he speaks to the highest
juridical authority of the land not as a jurist but "as a citizen". These are
groundbreaking moments in modern Iranian history, and no stone will be left
unturned.
The Islamic Republic may die a quick death or else suffer ignominy through a
languorous demise -- that will be determined not by its unending brutalities,
but by the grace and pace of a civil rights movement that is changing the moral
map of this godforsaken term we inherited from our colonial past, the "Middle
East". The rise and demise of the Islamic Republic follows the simple law of
diminishing returns: there is only so much abuse that a people can take, or
that an outdated idea can exercise. After that, the more abuse you heap on a
people the less effective it becomes. For 30 years, the Islamic Republic
violently distorted a multifaceted cosmopolitan political culture and crudely
cut and shoved its limbs inside a medieval juridical apothecary box, and to
suppress and silence its own people assumed a warring posture against regional
atrocities of entirely different origin and destination. If Iraq is in
shambles, Palestine is brutalised, Afghanistan is marred by highway bandits and
supersonic bombers, none of those calamities justifies the banalities of an
Islamic Republic that has abused them for far too long to be able to continue
to justify its parasitical persistence.
Today, the Islamic Republic has finally outsmarted itself and hit the plateau
of decline, where its opportunist warring postures in the region can no longer
hide the horrors of its own criminal theocracy. This point of diminishing
returns is where all tyrannies ultimately end. It is not just the Islamic
Republic that has finally outsmarted itself and is beginning to self- destruct.
The same fate awaited George W Bush and the Christian Empire he sought to
build, and where the US military and material wherewithal could not afford such
imperial largesse and began to unravel in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The
Islamic Republic is self-destructing because it played its transparent hand for
too long, and too clumsily, precisely the same way that the Jewish state has
played its victimhood for too long and too clumsily. Nobody could defeat
Zionism, so Zionism defeated itself, by being too arrogant, too indulgent, and
too brazen in its disregard for basic human decency, thinking it could just
wipe Palestine and Palestinians off the face of the world. Well, Palestinians
were not wiped off. They are still there, and they are fighting back -- tall,
towering, and upstanding. But belligerent Zionism, just like militant Islamism,
and just like Christian and Hindu fundamentalism, has run morally aground. The
2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the 2008-2009 massacre of Palestinians in
Gaza were the ultimate signs of its moral and military meltdown, its naked
brutalities exposing the fact that it, too, just like its Islamist counterpart
in Iran, has hit the point of diminishing returns, where people no longer buy
its outworn commodification of victimhood, as best documented and argued by
Norman Finkelstein.
The dawn of a new beginning is brightly upon us, not just in Iran but also in
the entire region. The non-violent civil rights movement in Iran is changing
the moral map of the region, its normative vocabulary, its visions, vistas, and
prospects of itself. It crosses over any Sunni-Shia divide, Arab-Persian
racism, Arab-Israeli conflict, religious-secular chasm, and bridges over much
troubled and muddied water. To mark my point, here is a passage from a young
Iranian blogger that I quote to salute my distinguished Israeli detractor who
calls me typically "Persian and emotional":
In the history books of the 21st century, the first chapter will be about us.
In the introduction, they might write that important events have happened
before us, events like 9/11 and war on Iraq and Afghanistan, but those were the
remnants of the previous century, with an outdated language and with 20th
century tools: airplanes, bombs and bullets. And then they will write that the
first chapter is dedicated to us because we have been the true children of our
time ... They will write that we were the first social movement of which all of
us were its leader and all of us were its organiser ... They may make a
subsection to describe how a movement without a command centre was acting so
well- orchestrated. How its ideas, desires and slogans were suggested,
criticised, and completed so well, and then one day they were expressed in such
a harmony as if all these millions had practiced them together for years ... In
the same chapter they will write that we lived the last days of guns and
bullets and we showed that where awareness, information and channels of
communication for human connection exist, bullets are pointless. They may put a
picture of a single bullet somewhere in our Freedom Museum and write for its
caption "the last bullet that was ever pulled out of a magazine." _
* The writer is Hagop Kevorkian professor of Iranian studies and comparative
literature at Columbia University and author of Iran: A People Interrupted .
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