LONG KNIVES IN TEHRAN

It’s convenient and facile to think of the Iranian election dispute as being between the good guy reformist Mousavi and the bad guy hard liner Ahmadinejad. It’s convenient to see this youth led struggle as one of a long line of liberation struggles starting from Hungary’s 1956 anti Soviet riot to the Ukrainian orange revolution. The chanting students and other intellectuals want freedom, modernity and rationality. The opposition goons want obedience, piety and power.

There may be another way to view this struggle however, one that has a historical parallel going back 75 years to another theocracy…Nazi Germany. The exact time, 1934. In that year Ernst Rohm’s SA minions long the iron fist of the party were over two million strong. This powerful force threatened Hitler. Himmler, Goering and even Goebbels were threatened too. The SA was so plentiful that they even outnumbered the regular Army.

In June of 1934 an orgy of arrests, intimidation and violence authorized by Hitler, commenced against the SA by the smaller SS. Hundreds of SA leaders were executed by pistol shots to their heads and others simply bludgeoned to death. It was all over by July. The army and the SS were now permanently joined and all rivals eliminated. With a foretaste of Nazi brutality, the path was cleared for Hitler and his inner circle to grab all power. The rest is history.

Viewed this way, the events in Iran make more sense. You have an individual who rules the country “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who like Hitler is answerable to no one but perhaps God. He is in power forever by “the will of the people.” He now has an appointed second in command Mr. Ahmadinejad, who felt he needed the veneer of an election; perhaps for the same reasons Stalin felt he needed his purge trials to be open, a sort of Iranian “show election.”

Unfortunately, and I mean this with no disrespect to the hundreds of thousands of well-intentioned protesters, but they are only shadows of an infighting clique that has its own agenda. Like the SA/SS battle, charges of treason and disloyalty have been hurled by and against both Mousavi and Ahmadinejad. The parallels continue, the goon squad of Basij militia play the role the brown shirts played in Nazi Germany, politically favored ideological force that can beat the opposition into submission while appearing to be separate from the state police apparatus. The Iranian revolution is complete. It has devolved into an Islamic fascist state instead of the prior Pahlavi fascist state.

The late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi must be laughing in his grave at this turn of events…Many in the world hope protesters in the streets will have the same effect that they did in 1979 and bring this corrupt military dictatorship to an end.