In just the past few days during which Iran has seen
anti-government protests, much has been written and said about Iranians’ desire
for freedom, mixed with speculation about whether or not the ayatollahs’
Islamic republic is in danger of collapse.
The following
is not another such analysis. Rather, this is an attempt to address the
underlying assumptions of most of the sage pronouncements to which we are
treated – assumptions that are as lacking in substance as they are ubiquitous.
Three of these myths are noted below.
Spontaneous popular uprising – not
“Arise ye
pris’ners of starvation, Arise ye wretched of the earth!” The stirring words
of the socialist and communist anthem, The Internationale, encapsulate the sense most
people have of revolution as the result of unbearably oppressive conditions. At
some point “The People” can stand no more, and in noble wrath they rise up as
one against their tormenters!
There’s just
one little problem. That has never happened, it isn’t happening now, and it
never will happen.
Revolts and
revolutions (see below) almost always occur when things are getting better but
expectations have outpaced performance. Or when things had been getting better
but there’s been a setback, either economically (like in Iran today, where
President Rouhani’s neoliberal economic reforms have cut consumer
subsidies paid under his predecessor, Ahmadinejad) or in 1917
Russia (problems with the conduct with the war and the economy).
Even then,
revolts and revolutions don’t take place unless other conditions are present.
One of them is relative freedom to protest and even, in some cases, to engage
in subversive activities. For example, why did revolt “spontaneously” break out
in Russia in 1917 but not in the Soviet Union in 1941, when,
in the latter case, the losses on the war front were far greater in terms
of men and territory and the privations of the home population far more severe? Because,
Tsar Nicholas did not impose all-pervasive wartime discipline on the home front
or even in the army, allowing anti-war agitators to operate within the ranks.
Where would that have got you with Stalin in 1941? Or in North Korea or Saudi
Arabia today?
“The People”
don’t all of one accord suddenly decide to shift direction like a flock of
birds or a school of fish. Movements by human beings need to be planned, led,
and incited. Consider the role of the Masonic lodges in revolutionary France,
the Bolsheviks in Russia, the religious establishment in Iran that in 1979
brought the mullahs to power in the first place, and the Muslim Brotherhood and
other Salafist groups in the so-called “Arab Spring” starting in 2011.
The Iranian
government says the disorders are instigated from the outside. They would say that even if it
weren’t true, but public support from President Donald Trump, Ambassador Nikki Haley,
and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu adds credence to the charge. So does news
of a Trump-Netanyahu “strategic work plan” to counter Iran following a December 12
White House meeting. So does the appointment earlier this year of the “Dark
Prince,” “Ayatollah Mike,” the “Undertaker” and convert to Islam Michael D’Andrea to run the CIA’s Iran operation. (One Langley
insider’s simple comment on the D’Andrea appointment: “All I can say is that
war with Iran is in the cards.”)
“Freedom!” – but for whom?
Well-wishers
of the Iranian demonstrators laud their quest for: Freedom! For
most of the world, that word usually implies a set of related values: political
freedom, democracy, the rule of law (versus the rule of the ayatollahs and
their security services); economic freedom (Stefan Molyneux has spoken eloquently about the venerable
Persian civilization whose creative potential had been stultified under the
Islamic republic); and social and personal freedom (the image of the woman holding her hijab aloft, “Tiananmen-Square-style.”)
One is
reminded of the idealistic, cosmopolitan, pro-“democracy” young ladies who in
1979 voluntarily donned hijab or chador in “solidarity” with Islamic protests
against the “repressive, corrupt, and pro-American regime” of Reza Shah
Pahlavi – and who then found themselves confined in such garb for the rest of
their lives. An inconvenient truth for many advocates of “freedom” in Iran is
that while in non-Islamic countries there is generally a congruency between
democracy and liberal social liberties, in Muslim societies there is an inherent
and underlying conflict.
Here’s the
tradeoff. You can push for more “democracy” – and end up with an illiberal,
Sharia-ruled state that oppresses women and non-Muslims. Or you can have an
enlightened autocrat or military caste that imposes a secular order in which
women can run about with uncovered hair and minorities are equal citizens. The
mid-20th century saw various movements and regimes that enforced the latter:
Kemalism in Turkey, Baathism in Iraq and Syria, Nasserite pan-Arabism in Egypt,
military rule in a number of countries (Algeria, Pakistan (until Zia-ul-Haq’s
imposition of Sharia), and Egypt today after a brief run of Islamist
“democracy”).
Certainly
there are many, many people in Iran who would like to see the restoration of
the socially liberal state that existed under the Shah – and maybe restoration
of the monarchy itself. But no one should imagine such a restoration would be
particularly democratic.
(Maybe some of those no-longer-young girls stuck in their hijabs for almost
four decades may have reconsidered their priorities.) To survive, such a
restoration, even if it commands the support of a majority of the population
would have to contend with a very substantial portion of the population for
whom secularism and liberalism are not just wrong but shirk (idolatry)
and ridda (apostasy)
– and are prepared to act accordingly.
Revolt or Revolution?
“Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason? Why, if it prosper, none
dare call it treason.”The self-evident observation of John Harington
(also famed as the inventor of the flush toilet) is that if a
revolt succeeds, it is no longer just a revolt. Those who launched it are no
longer traitors, those who opposed the revolution are.
The
conversion from revolt to revolution almost never happens unless there is a
split in l’ancien
régime to create what Alexander Shtromas called “the second pivot,” a second source of official power. This
happens not when “The People” rise up but when some part of the ruling
establishment defects to the revolt and becomes the new conferrer of
legitimacy. There are obvious historical examples: Parliament in the English
Civil War, the Third Estate’s declaring itself the National Assembly of France,
the Petrograd Soviet’s coup against the Provisional Government, Boris Yeltsin’s
Russian government when Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet government was under threat
of the State Committee on the State of Emergency (itself an aspiring second
pivot that failed), and the communist cabals in the various Warsaw Pact
countries that ousted little Brezhnevs and installed little Gorbachevs.
In Iran
today, the question isn’t whether “The People” will topple “the regime.” It’s
whether, when, and where a split might occur in the ruling establishment to
create a rival point of authority. If that doesn’t happen, a revolt it will
remain, either being suppressed or dying out on its own.
Ironically,
in Iran’s 1979 revolution, the Islamic establishment itself may be regarded as
having been a kind of second pivot. Keep in mind that in 1953, the Islamic
clergy – most prominently Ayatollah
Abol-Ghasem Kashani, friend and mentor to Ruhollah Khomeini, the
future Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic – was allied with the Shah in the
CIA-sponsored overthrow of the left-leaning Mohammad Mosaddegh. Without such
support it’s unlikely the Shah would have succeeded.
Most of the
mullahs were content to stay in their well-paid government sinecures under
royal authority, even after 1963, when the Shah launched his “White Revolution”
modernization program of land reform, privatization, and most controversially
women’s rights and legal equality of non-Muslims. But Khomeini, forced into
exile, led the denunciation that the reforms were an “an attack on Islam.” From
his place of exile in Paris, Khomeini inveighed against the threat to Islam and
eventually became the second pivot that brought down the Shah.