Iran "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei fired a direct salvo against the UK last Friday, Saying that the British Government was "The most evil of them all."
Perhaps he had just finished reading the full expose by the Telegraph on MP’s expenses?
But no, the real significance of Ali Khamenei’s comments and strange accusation against Britain has generally been missed.
A major sign of Iran's underdevelopment is the culture of rumour and paranoia that attributes all ills to the manipulation of various demons and Satan’s. And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion. But you have no idea how deep is the primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons, more even than the Jews who are perceived as the puppet masters of everything that happens in Iran.
Throughout the 70’s and early 80s the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history really took hold, to the point were they even made a fabulously popular Iranian TV series on the subject.
One of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, announced in a nation-wide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, was the “creation” of the British government itself.
This claim made back in 2005 sounds mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard that his favourite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three should be highlighted:
1. There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's foreign affairs. The deep belief that everything especially anything in English is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.
2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.
3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."
That last observation also applies to the US administration. Want to take a non-interventionist position? All right, then, take a non-interventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." But be aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed.
Hint: Don't make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organised coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.
References:
Azar Nafisi - Reading Lolita in Tehran
