>I'm afraid that most US leftists won't even study what's happening in
>and to Iran in time, though they ought to be studying it and
>clarifying it to the general public. They must do so objectively,
>without defending the indefensible (e.g., flirtations with Holocaust
>revisionism).
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/iran-d30.shtml>
Historical and political issues behind Iranian president's anti-Semitic campaign By Justus Leicht and Stephan Steinberg 30 December 2005
In recent months, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly gone public with anti-Semitic declarations. He has described the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews during the Second World War as a "myth" concocted to justify the existence of Israel, refused to accept the claim that "Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews," called for the state of Israel to be "wiped off the map" and demanded that Jews currently living in Israel be moved to Canada or Alaska.
Against the background of a growing social crisis and divisions within the ruling elite in Iran, Ahmadinejad's remarks are aimed at dividing working people along national and religious lines, mobilising reactionary political elements, and diverting social tensions into chauvinist channels. It is the response of a tiny but enormously wealthy ruling elite seeking to maintain control of a society wracked by profound internal conflict.
Behind Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic remarks and his threats against Israel is a calculated attempt to create an atmosphere of siege, where any form of social or political opposition can be prosecuted as high treason and violently suppressed. Far from opposing imperialism and the oppressive policies of the Israeli government, Ahmadinejad's outbursts are directed fundamentally against the Iranian working class.
In particular, they are a direct threat to the small community of Jews living in Iran, numbering some 30,000, whose origins go back to the sixth century B.C. With increasing frequency, the Iranian leadership has sought to mobilise anti-Jewish sentiment in order to obscure the political bankruptcy of the ruling clerical elite.
At the same time, Ahmadinejad's anti-Semitic remarks play into the hands of the most reactionary forces worldwide. In America, President George W. Bush used the comments by the Iranian president to revive his claim that Iran was part of an "axis of evil," together with Iraq and North Korea. The Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, responded with a veiled threat, declaring,"The combination of fanatical ideology, a warped sense of reality and nuclear weapons is one that nobody in the international community can accept." According to an article in the British Sunday Times, Israel has developed detailed plans for an attack on Iranian uranium enrichment facilities by the end of March.
The role of the Iranian bourgeoisie
Ahmadinejad, a former mayor of Tehran, is a right-wing demagogue who presents himself as a representative of the poor while loyally supporting the religious hard-liners, who have little credibility among the population but control large parts of the economy, the state apparatus, the judiciary and national television.
He began his political career as an officer in the Pasdaran, the paramilitary wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard established by Ayatollah Khomeini. Ahmadinejad was also an instructor in the basij, the militia that enforces Iran's extreme Islamist code of moral conduct. In keeping with his role as a basij instructor, he used his powers as Teheran's mayor to curb social and cultural liberties.
Since his installation as president, Ahmadinejad has systematically filled government posts, the state-run media, the diplomatic corps and the state's financial institutions with his own supporters. Many of them are associated with the Pasdaran, and many entered politics in the course of the 1980-1988 war between Iraq and Iran. In short, Ahmadinejad bases himself a group of religious reactionaries and nationalists who have no hesitation in launching bloody confrontations and pogroms against other ethnic and religious groups.
Notwithstanding the divisions and vicious infighting among the Iranian elite, the ascent of such a right-wing figure to the highest office of the Iranian state and his resort to open anti-Semitism are expressions of the crisis and political impasse facing the entire Iranian bourgeoisie, and that of the Middle East as a whole. This social elite is organically incapable of establishing democratic conditions at home or waging a consistent and serious struggle against imperialism internationally.
The resort to various forms of communalist politics, with all of its reactionary implications, is a phenomenon that increasingly characterises the national bourgeoisie in countries throughout the so-called "Third World." The period when bourgeois nationalist movements and left nationalist regimes in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America could present themselves as the leadership of anti-imperialist "national liberation movements" of the oppressed masses of the world, often adopting a socialist coloration, is long past. It ended definitively with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, upon which the bourgeois nationalists relied as a counterweight to US imperialism. The breakup of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European client states, with their autarkic economies, was itself bound up with the growing globalisation of production and the intensified conflict between world economy and the nation state system.
The rise of Ahmadinejad ultimately expresses the character of the social forces that were able to take the leadership of the 1979 revolution, a mass uprising that brought down the despised and brutal dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi, the main pillar of US dominance in the region. While the revolution was based on a popular mass movement, the working class remained subordinated to the dissident faction of the national bourgeoisie represented by clerical figures and led by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.
Khomeini's main social base was among the more traditional bourgeois layers, especially the bazaar merchants, who were antagonised by the Shah and his close economic ties to Western imperialism. The Khomeini regime massacred thousands of left-wing militants, quashed every independent movement of the working class, and brutally suppressed any attempt by the Kurds to win national rights.
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Iran's social problems
Already, in the early years of the Islamic Republic, there were violent disagreements within the ruling elite over economic policies, the role of the state in the economy, and the opening up of the country to foreign investment.
In accordance with the interests of his social base amongst the bazaar merchants, Khomeini tried to curb the impact of the world market on the Iranian economy by nationalising the banks and key industries, including the oil industry. However, within the framework of the increasing globalisation of the capitalist world economy, it was impossible to sustain economic development on a purely national basis.
The Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) bled the country white and further deepened its economic problems. In the war, the US generally supported Iraq but at times tilted towards Iran, encouraging the mutual bloodletting so as to weaken both regimes. In spite of the propaganda against the United States and Israel, the Iranian leadership secretly collaborated with the United States and Israel, as was disclosed in the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan White House secretly organised arms shipments to Iran, using the revenue to finance the dirty war of the Contras against Nicaragua.
In the 1990s, the Tudeh Party set its hopes on the so-called "reformist" wing of the Iranian regime, led by Mohammed Khatami and supported by the various organisations making up the Islamic Iran Participation Front. Khatami was elected president in 1997.
But the Khatami camp was unwilling to mount any significant defence of democratic rights. Whenever the new government felt threatened by a mass movement from below, Khatami and his reformist supporters closed ranks with their hard-line opponents to suppress workers and students, while hectoring against the dangers of "extremism of the left and right." Even when reformist journalists, intellectuals and politicians were persecuted, jailed or killed, Khatami did nothing other than urge calm and moderation.
Khatami pursued a pro-imperialist and neo-liberal policy hostile to the interests of the broad masses of the population. He was looking for improved relations with Europe und the US even as the Bush administration invaded and occupied the neighbouring countries of Afghanistan and Iraq and issued open threats of military intervention against Iran.
As a result, the Khatami camp, which had originally aroused considerable illusions amongst young people and opponents of the Mullah regime, was utterly discredited and no longer able to keep the mounting social and political contradictions under control. It was under these conditions that the Mullah regime advanced Ahmadinejad as Khatami's successor.
While Ahmadinejad assumed the presidency on the basis of combating an ill-defined "mafia" and establishing a certain degree of social justice, his recourse to chauvinism and anti-Semitism is a sure sign that he and his supporters have no solutions to Iran's enormous social problems. Although Iran is rich in oil reserves and has been able to profit somewhat from rising oil prices, the infrastructure of its oil industry is thoroughly dilapidated and huge investment is necessary to continue the flow of oil revenues.
The official unemployment rate in Iran is currently pegged at 16 percent, but many observers say it is closer to 30 or 35 percent. Among those under 25, the jobless rate is placed at 42 percent. Under conditions where millions of young people are coming onto the job market every year, this percentage is bound to increase. Forty percent of the country's population, according to unofficial estimates, lives below the poverty line. Strikes and other forms of labor unrest against poor conditions and low wages are commonplace.
On the other hand, a small layer of mullahs and businessmen has amassed enormous wealth by plundering the country's resources, in particular, its oil reserves. This process of enrichment is broadly seen to be personified in the figure of Ayatollah Rafsanjani, Armadinejad's major competitor in the presidential election, who is said to command a personal fortune of more than $1 billion.
Such social contradictions are taking an increasingly violent form. Armadinejad's first half-year in office has already been marked by incarcerations, executions and bloody clashes between protestors and security forces in Iranian Kurdistan. Earlier this month, a member of the personal bodyguard of the Iranian president was reported to have been killed under yet-to-be-explained circumstances in southeastern Iran.
For their part, the Bush administration and the Israeli regime have used the provocations of Ahmadinejad to step up their own preparations for a military strike against Iran. The logic of chauvinism and religious fanaticism employed by the Iranian elite to control its domestic political and social crisis inevitably raises the threat of the balkanisation of the entire region and war in the Middle East.
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