The 18 to 20 million people who live in 2700 shanty towns and illegal dwellings, particularly around major capitals, the rampant phenomenon of trafficking of young women and girls to other countries, the rising number of women who post ads on the walls to sell their infants, and the 30 per cent of the population who according to the admissions of the regime’s officials are starving, are but a few examples indicating how the Iranian people’s lives have been destroyed under the repressive rule of the Velayat-e Faqih, Khamenei.
Such devastation coupled with incessant executions and daily arrests of some two to three thousand people comprise the security the mullahs claim they have provided for the people of Iran by engaging in the slaughter of the people of Syria, Iraq and other countries in the region.
Nazanin Fatehi appears to have committed a murder in self-defense as a 17-year-old girl in 2005. The regime initially found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to death by hanging. The human rights community took up her cause and the lunatic processes of what passes for justice in Iran released her (with financial obligations) in 2012. She has disappeared.
Nazanin Afshin-Jam, an Iranian-Canadian possessed of gorgeous looks and multiple talents took up Fatehi’s cause on top of the cause of freedom in Iran and became part of the run-up to the 2009 challenge to the regime. As an advocate for Nazanin Fatehi, she published a book, The Tale of Two Nazanins (2012).
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is today a British citizen held by the regime on secret charges — an affront to British Power, a potential casus belli — and part of an absurd diplomacy involving provocative behaviors (e.g., seizing patrol boats in open waters) that appears to play out between Iran and its western marks with fair regularity.
Posted to YouTube June 3, 2012 (22-minute interview).
Posted to YouTube May 10, 2016.
Posted to YouTube December 19, 2016.
As of July 2012, the whereabouts of Fatehi, age approx. 25, were reported as unknown by individuals in the West with whom she had prior contact, with current contact being only the most sporadic.[2][6][10] A book from Canadian supporter and activist Nazanin Afshin-Jam appeared in 2012 chronicling the divergent lives of these two Iranian Nazanins, whose lives intersected during the period of Fatehi’s trial;[11] media responses to the book were generally positive
In the American high school education of the 1960s, the above were part of the canon taught to all. Any who missed mention of Golding, Huxley, and Orwell or failed to read Animal Farm (or the Cliff Notes) would have had to have missed school altogether. Awareness and fear of absolute obedience before a tyrannical authority; of erasure beneath the wheels of an engineered, mechanical, repeating society; of cynical political manipulation and exploitation; and of savagery itself were built into the imaginations of the young. As our own society could not be the dystopian nightmares observed in reading, we would have to wade back through history or wait for the Islamic Small Wars as they present online to let us know that somewhere our fictions were emblematic of somebody’s political and social reality in situ.
Training a new generation of youth and inoculating them against the Western cultural invasion constitute another mission of the female Basiji, who should make their “children aware of the problems of threats through explaining outcomes and upshots of the soft war.” To achieve this goal, the WSBA established the Babies’ Basij to indoctrinate children before they reach school age. To establish the Babies’ Basij, the WSBO implemented the plan of Quranic kindergarten (mahdha-e mehrab). Under this plan, a WSBO kindergarten was established at each mosque with a WSBO base. Children between the ages of three to five years attend these kindergartens. In addition, the organization designs a curriculum to be used in the home for instructing children who are younger than three years of age. Female Basiji are encouraged to bring their children to Basij activities, in order to socialize with other children and train them for future posts in the Islamic regime (p. 117)
Columbia University Press provided BackChannels with a review copy a month or two ago, and while reading took place post-haste, reviewing has had to wait for the “what to say” about a book whose author, Saeid Golkar, has covered the subject thoroughly and done so in plain textbook prose that makes the telling of the tale — specifically, coverage of the layout and history of the most pervasive organizational element exploited by the Iranian regime to create, reinforce, and sustain a society obedient to its will — on each page all the more chilling.
Although Golkar balances his exploration of the Basij organizations (“Basij is a Persian word meaning “mobilization.” The complete name of the group, Sazeman-e Basij-e Mostazafan, means “Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed”) with this-or-that modules (.e.g, “The Basij: Nongovernmental Organization, Administered Mass Organization, or Militia?”), there are portions focused on the regime’s impositions throughout the land, and as much comes out in subchapter titling: “Penetration in Society: The Organizational Structure of the Basij”; “Mass Membership and Recruitment Training”; “The Mass Indoctrination of Basij Members”; “The Basij and Propaganda”; “The Basij and Moral Control”; “The Basij and Surveillance”; “The Basij and Political Repression”; “The Basij and the Controlling of Families . . . Schools . . . Universities . . . the Economy.” By the time one reaches “Islamic Warriors or Religious Thugs?” the drift in concern has been made abundantly clear.
Golkar, however, generously covers the contrary view: the Basij are part of the regime’s patronage system, and those who wish to earn some money and make way on their careers may join for the familiar and practical causes known well to western chambers of commerce and numberless academic and civic organizations.
Just don’t forget who’s boss!
Here’s the last paragraph before the appendix:
“With the expansion of the Basij’s involvement in Iran’s social, political, and economic life, the opportunity for the country’s peaceful transition to democracy will decrease dramatically. Because many Basij commanders and members have been co-opted by the IRI, it is not implausible to think that they will resist any serious attempts at government reform that would jeopardize their positions” (p. 196).
In childhood, the kid with the chessboard chooses his opponent. Why not in adulthood? And what if you could not only control you opponent but make the same another rival’s opponent . . . how cool would that be?
That would be so far beyond cool as to have arrived at deliciously evil.
Bashar al-Assad’s best defense, for the realpolitik theatrical “Assad vs The Terrorists” becomes for the general opposition, including NATO opposition to the tyrant’s rule, “Assad or The Terrorists” (mirroring slogan: “Assad, Or We Burn The Country”).
Related to the previous, ISIS becomes the primary military war-on-terror focus for the west, which comes with diplomatic, human, and financial costs to the west.
Incubated by its own enemy, the Assad regime and its backers, ISIS has been positioned in time and space to destroy the revolution once pressed by the Free Syrian Army and serve as a foil to the combined forces of Assad, Khamenei, and Putin, all of whom today may at will attack the same even if preferring other non-ISIS (and still noncombatant) targets.
In ISIS, Khamenei (he may thank Assad and Putin) has chosen a familiar Sunni opposition for Iran’s purchase in Iraq’s Shiite militia community. Once again, Iranian Revolutionary Guard get to get their boots into battle with their old Baathist foes, now serving as generals in Baghdadi’s cause.
Related Teasers, Links, and Reference
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putin—and Barack Obama.
The long-term aim would be to defeat or demoralise the non-Isil opposition, so that Isil became the regime’s only enemy. That would force the West to back President Bashar al-Assad against it. “They want to clean the country of non-Isil rebels, and then the US will work with them as Isil will be the only enemy,” the Damascus source said.
Russia bombed Syria for a third day on Friday, mainly hitting areas held by rival insurgent groups rather than the Islamic State fighters it said it was targeting and drawing an increasingly angry response from the West.
The U.S.-led coalition that is waging its own air war against Islamic State called on the Russians to halt strikes on targets other than Islamic State.
Next came Russia’s move on Syria. The weapons that Russia is sending there are not an attempt to settle the conflict. They are there to protect the Assad regime, which is its cause. Moreover, ISIL does not have warplanes: Russia’s air defense missiles are in Syria for a different purpose.
This became clear on Wednesday, when America was given less than an hour’s warning that the Kremlin was imposing, in effect, a no-fly zone in Syria. With this the Russians not only mounted a direct challenge to American authority. They also ripped up the rulebook of military diplomacy. America was aghast, but had no response.
The Ba’ath regime was strongly anti-American, so it’s not surprising that–despite the unfortunate fate of the Iraqi Communist Party–it was primarily a client of the Soviet Union (not the US), and this relationship continued up until the moment when the Soviet Union collapsed.
That Baathists helped ISIS, before the declaration of the ‘Caliphate,’ to rush into Iraq last year, and assist in the battles for key nodes in Iraq, is indisputable. Even in the Second Battle of Tikrit, just fought in the past few weeks, Baathists were a prominent component of ISIS forces. The very fact that Saddam Hussein’s al-Tikriti tribe was tossed out of their tribal domain certainly bore the hallmarks of the ultimate revenge against the Baathist core.
Moscow’s action were in line with the strategy it had used to defeat the separatist movement in Chechnya, infiltrating the insurgency, driving it into extremism, and facilitating the arrival of al-Qaeda jihadists who displaced the Chechen nationalists. In Syria, Russia’s actions accord with the strategy adopted by the regime and its Iranian masters to present Assad as the last line of defence against a terrorist takeover of Syria and a genocide against the minorities. New evidence has emerged to underline these points.
Testimony from gendarmerie officers in court documents reviewed by Reuters allege that rocket parts, ammunition and semi-finished mortar shells were carried in trucks accompanied by state intelligence agency (MIT) officials more than a year ago to parts of Syria under Islamist control.
Four trucks were searched in the southern province of Adana in raids by police and gendarmerie, one in November 2013 and the three others in January 2014, on the orders of prosecutors acting on tip-offs that they were carrying weapons, according to testimony from the prosecutors, who now themselves face trial.
While the first truck was seized, the three others were allowed to continue their journey after MIT officials accompanying the cargo threatened police and physically resisted the search, according to the testimony and prosecutor’s report.
The 2005–06 documents reveal that Iran offered bounties for the murder of NATO soldiers and members of the elected Afghan government. Later reports indicated that this policy continued into 2009, when Iran was working in tandem with al-Qaeda to spread the Taliban’s reach in southern Afghanistan. This should hardly come as a surprise: The 9/11 Commission reported that Iran began training al-Qaeda jihadists through Hezbollah in 1992 and collaborated with al-Qaeda on the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. To this day Iran maintains an al-Qaeda network on its territory, which supplies weapons, money, and fighters to Jabhat an-Nusra in Syria.
I relay some conservative thought, as in the above video, with hesitation as it doesn’t represent my thoughts, but my thoughts . . . egads! smile emoticon
I think issues associated with any aspect of the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term) are by nature intergenerational and likely to be longer-lived than any single American presidential term. Therefore, the prism through which these events and processes are viewed must be wider than the instance in which they occur.
While it’s true that the Obama Administration appears to have done as much as possible to accommodate a tyrannical regime that has refused all compromise on its barbaric, lethal, and piratical agendas — outside Iran and within — it’s also true that there will be another American Administration in about a year, that other and alternative games (political and military), ideas, and plans developed and out of sight are going to be “forwarded” into that administration. While the future has yet to be written, Iran will have a new generation of professional, about 50 percent or more of it female, graduating from its colleges in the same period; it will have within whatever influence has been brought to its elites and “masses” (I hate the term, but it suits) by Internet, relationships, and by new trade; if the regime gets its money back (from sanctions), it may have issues with avarice and greed at the highest levels.
I believe Time is with the west, not the medievalists, but it takes some tolerance of threat and related patience to get through time, and, granted, the Obama Administration has embarked on a long-term but still perilous course.
The question for the medievalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei: how well have you done, really? Extended in Yemen, stalled in Ukraine, one-third of Syria beyond state control — and each situation appears stalemated at best?
This is a long video, but it may help some readers align with the observations and thoughts of more specialized intelligentsia.
The Iranian regime is known for its aggressiveness, anti-Semitism, duplicity, egoism, and piratical character.
It is also known to be ageing.
Persians know too their greater history — and none among the educated have forgotten Cyrus.
A little offstage: the effects of the history of state police forces, from the czars to the Soviet and KGB to today’s FSB in Russia and VEVAK in Iran. At about 25:15 in the above video, Professor Milani invokes the modern update term on feudalism: “state capitalism”. Oligarchy. (The URL trope to insert here: Reuters “Assets of the Ayatollah” — and so done).
Whatever one might wish to call such dictatorships operated by state mafia or theocracy, I believe the form still feudal and formed around the concentration of political power and access to wealth in one human demagogue.
In any case, the demagogue in Tehran has at hand a latent nuclear weapons making capability, in state or beyond (who knows?), and the worth of any agreement with the same has no basis in experience or earlier history (save that scandal with the illicit arms trade and even perhaps rougher politics).
Still, time is time, and the more time floats around and past the dictator, the more cultural evolution may temper the excesses of the malignant personality. Where The Great Leader will not, or cannot, change, the Greater Society may.
” . . . the Safavid dynasty was not Iranian, it was a Turkish tribe from Lebanon who conquered Iran in 1499. Until then, Iran had no national religion dating back to the human rights proclamation of the Cyrus the Great and freedom of the Jews from Babylonian slavery, in 539 BCE. The Safavids were Shia, and upon their occupation they imported a group of Shia clerics, olima, from Lebanon — hence the connection of Iranian Shia establishment with the Hizb’allah — including the infamous Mohammad Baghir Madjlesi, the author of the rule of Jurisprudents, meaning the god-given rule of clerics, that Khomeini adopted 300 years later and implemented in Iran again in 1979.
The imported Shiite establishment overrode the Iranian culture and civilization of human rights, equal rights of women, freedom of worship and respect for all, dismissing it as pagan and enforcing a new culture of Islamic Sharia laws written by Madjlesi.”
BackChannels 