smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
‘We want the mullahs gone’: economic crisis sparks biggest protests in Iran since 2022
Demonstrations against deteriorating living conditions have widened to include criticism of how Iran is governed
www.theguardian.com
Some of us are old enough to remember how the leftists' embrace of Islamists played out in Iran. I was 24, in the military, and fully understood the import and the impact of the Iranian revolution.
Leading up to 1979, leftist groups consisting of trade unions members, university students and left-wing progressives allied with Islamist factions to overthrow Mohammad Reza Pahlavim the Shah of Iran. This came to be known as the "unholy alliance" and with good reason. The groups were mainly drawn together due to a shared opposition to the Shah's rule, his pro-Western policies, and the misguided perception that Iran was under foreign domination. At the core of this alliance was anti-Western and anti-imperialist belief systems The leftists viewed the Shah as a puppet of the US government, and they saw Ayatollah Khomeini's position as compatible with their own. What they didn't realize is that the Islamists' reasons for their stance were vastly different from theirs - they did not realize (or if they did, they did not understand) that Khomeini's plan for the post-Shah government was a theocracy based on what Arabs know as "velayat-e faqih" meaning "Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist" . This is a Shi'a Islamic political theory, created by Khomeini, which requires that a qualified cleric should rule, resulting in a theocratic government where a Supreme Leader holds ultimate religious and political authority. In such a theocracy, there is no room for dissent, or trade unions, or education for women. These facts did not become clear to those leftists until it was too late. This was the "◊◊◊◊ Around" stage....
Then in 1979, came the "Find Out" stage - the Revolution took place, and its aftermath was utterly brutal. Once the Shah was overthrown, the Islamists ended the alliance almost immediately, and they turned on the leftists. Khomeini and his loyalists quickly consolidated power and systematically purged their former allies. The leftist leaders, trade unionists, members of the Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen and the People's Mujahedin of Iran - groups that had supported the Islamists cause, were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Women who refused to comply with Islamic laws regarding things such as only ever going out in public with a male family member, or refusing to cover their faces would, be summarily (and publicly) executed either by being shot or beheaded. The new Islamic Republic suppressed any and all dissent, being particlarly brutal on women, and banning all democratic and secular parties.
Then Khomeini and his loyal clerics established the Islamic Revolutionary Guard to enforce the theocratic government and crush any opposition. In the end, they established a system that was a leftist's worse nightmare... certainly far worse for them that was ever the case under the Shah.
Pre-1979, Iran was never a Muslim country in the first place - its history was based in Persian Zoroastrianism - and in many ways that made it a sort of natural ally to Israel. This is the reason why you see so many flags of the Imperial State of Iran (or Imperial State of Persia) at pro-Israel marches....
What happened in Iran in 1979 should be a huge red flag for everyone. The far left are ignoring this red flag. Like the far-right, they have embraced anti-Semitism (for different reasons of course) and the left in particular have taken the side of the Palestinians and their terrorist leaders, uncritically accepting their word on everything that is happening in Gaza - the hugely inflated casualty and death statistics, the bogus claims of genocide, the exaggerated claims of the levels children starving.
I sincerely hope the mullahs fall, and if they do, it will dramatically change the geopolitical picture in the Middle East. Iran has one of the highest GDPs and one of the largest economies in the Middle East. This size is due to its large population and many resources. While its GDP per capita is low (which is why a majority of its peole are dirt poor, its overall (gross) GDP is around US$4.5 billion. This allows Iran to do whjat it does better than anythong else other than Qatar - fund terrorism. A huge part of their GDP goes towards groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, and Ansar Allah (a Houthi group in Yemen), Iraqi Shia Militias, the Al-Ashtar Brigades and Saraya al-Mukhtar (Bahrain), the Fatemiyoun Division (Afghanistan) and the Zaynabiyoun Brigade (Pakistan) that are currently fighting in Syria. The fall of Iran would be a hammer blow for Islamists around the world, and would dramatically cut the money supply for terrorists in the Middle East.
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