By Michael Parenti
Information Clearing House
August 07, 2012
Information Clearing House
August 07, 2012
Occasionally
individuals complain that I fail to address one subject or another. One
Berkeley denizen got in my face and announced: "You leftists ought to
become aware of the ecological crisis." In fact, I had written a number of
things about the ecological crisis, including one called
"Eco-Apocalypse." His lack of familiarity with my work did not get in
the way of his presumption.
Years
ago when I spoke before the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
in New York, the moderator announced that she could not understand why I had
"remained silent" about the attempt to defund UNESCO. Whatever else I
might have been struggling with, she was convinced I should have joined with
her in trying to save UNESCO (which itself really was a worthy cause).
People
give me marching orders all the time. Among the most furiously insistent are
those fixed on 9/11. Why haven’t I said anything about 9/11? Why am I "a
9/11 denier." In fact, I have written about 9/11 and even spoke at two
9/11 conferences (Santa Cruz and New York), raising questions of my own.
Other
people have been "disappointed" or "astonished" or
"puzzled" that I have failed to pronounce on whatever is the issue du jour. No attention is given
by such complainers to my many books, articles, talks, and interviews that
treat hundreds of subjects pertaining to political economy, culture, ideology,
media, fascism, communism, capitalism, imperialism, media, ecology, political
protest, history, religion, race, gender, homophobia, and other topics far too
numerous to list. (For starters, visit my website: www.michaelparenti.org)
But
one’s own energy, no matter how substantial, is always finite. One must allow
for a division of labor and cannot hope to fight every fight.
Recently
someone asked when was I going to "pay some attention" to Iran.
Actually I have spoken about Iran in a number of interviews and talks ~ not to
satisfy demands made by others but because I myself was moved to do so. In the
last decade, over a five year period, I was repeatedly interviewed by English
Radio Tehran. My concern about Iran goes back many years. Just the other day,
while clearing out some old files, I came across a letter I had published over
33 years ago in the New York Times (10 May 1979), reproduced here exactly as it
appeared in the Times:
To the Editor of the New York Times:
For 25 years the Shah of Iran tortured and murdered many thousands of dissident workers, students, peasants and intellectuals. For the most part, the U.S. press ignored these dreadful happenings and portrayed the Shah as a citadel of stability and an enlightened modernizer.Thousands more were killed by the Shah’s police and military during the popular uprisings of this past year. Yet these casualties received only passing mention even though Iran was front-page news for several months. And from 1953 to 1978 millions of other Iranians suffered the silent oppression of poverty and malnutrition while the Shah, his family, and his generals grew ever richer.Now the furies of revolution have lashed back, thus far executing about 200 of the Shah’s henchmen ~ less than what the Savak would arrest and torture on a slow weekend. And now the U.S. press has suddenly become acutely concerned, keeping a careful account of the "victims," printing photos of firing squads and making repeated references to the "repulsion" and "outrage" felt by anonymous "middle-class" Iranians who apparently are endowed with finer sensibilities than the mass of ordinary people will bore the brunt of the Shah’s repression. At the same time, American commentators are quick to observe that the new regime is merely replacing one repression with another.So it has always been with the recording of revolutions: the mass of nameless innocents victimized by the ancien régime go uncounted and unnoticed, but when the not-so-innocent murderers are brought to revolutionary justice, the business-owned press is suddenly filled with references to "brutality" and "cruelty."That anyone could equate the horrors of the Shah’s regime with the ferment, change and struggle that is going on in Iran today is a tribute to the biases of the U.S. press, a press that has learned to treat the atrocities of the U.S.-supported right-wing regimes with benign neglect while casting a stern self-righteous eye on the popular revolutions that challenge such regimes.Michael Parenti
Washington, D.C.
There
is one glaring omission in this missive: I focused only on the press without
mentioning how the White House and leading members of Congress repeatedly had
hailed the Shah as America’s sturdy ally ~ while U.S. oil companies merrily
plundered Iran’s oil (with a good slice of the spoils going to the Shah and his
henchmen).
A
few years before the 1979 upheaval, I was teaching a graduate course at Cornell
University. There I met several Iranian graduate students who spoke with utter
rage about the Shah and his U.S.-supported Savak secret police. They told of
friends being tortured and disappeared. They could not find enough damning
words to vent their fury. These students came from the kind of well-off Persian
families one would have expected to support the Shah. (You don’t make it from
Tehran to Cornell graduate school without some money in the family.)
All
I knew about the Shah at that time came from the U.S. mainstream media. But
after listening to these students I began to think that this Shah fellow was
not the admirably benign leader and modernizer everyone was portraying in the
news.
.
The
Shah’s subsequent overthrow in the 1979 revolution was something to celebrate.
Unfortunately the revolution soon was betrayed by the theocratic militants who
took hold of events and created their Islamic Republic of Iran. These religious
reactionaries set about to torture and eradicate thousands of young Iranian
radicals. They made war upon secular leftists and "decadent" Western
lifestyles, as they set about establishing a grim and corrupt theocracy.
U.S.
leaders and media had no critical words about the slaughter of leftist
revolutionaries in Iran. If anything, they were quietly pleased. However, they
remained hostile toward the Islamic regime.
Why
so? Regimes that kill revolutionaries and egalitarian reformists do not usually
incite displeasure from the White House. If anything, the CIA and the Pentagon
and the other imperial operatives who make the world safe for the Fortune 500
look most approvingly upon those who torture and murder Marxists and other
leftists. Indeed, such counterrevolutionaries swiftly become the recipients of
generous amounts of U.S. aid.
Why
then did U.S. leaders denounce and threaten Iran and continue to do so to this
day?
The answer is: Iran’s Islamic Republic has other features that did not sit well with the western imperialists. Iran was ~ and still is ~ a "dangerously" independent nation, unwilling to become a satellite to the U.S. global empire, unlike more compliant countries.
Like
Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, with boundless audacity, gave every impression
of wanting to use its land, labor, markets, and capital as it saw fit. Like
Iraq ~ and Libya and Syria ~ Iran was committing the sin of economic
nationalism. And like Iraq, Iran remained unwilling to establish cozy relations
with Israel.
But
this isn’t what we ordinary Americans are told. When talking to us, a different
tact is taken by U.S. opinion-makers and policymakers.
To strike enough fear into the public, our leaders tell us that, like Iraq, Iran "might" develop weapons of mass destruction.And like Iraq, Iran is lead by people who hate America and want to destroy us and Israel.And like Iraq, Iran "might" develop into a regional power leading other nations in the Middle East down the "Hate America" path.
So
our leaders conclude for us: it might be necessary to destroy Iran in an
all-out aerial war.
It
was President George W. Bush who in January 2002 cited Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea as an "axis of evil." Iran exports terrorism and
"pursues" weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later this axis
would have to be dealt with in the severest way, Bush insisted.
These
official threats and jeremiads are intended to leave us with the impression
that Iran is not ruled by "good Muslims." The "good
Muslims" ~ as defined by the White House and the State Department ~ are
the reactionary extremists and feudal tyrants who ride high in Saudi Arabia,
Qatar, United Arab Emirate, Bahrain, and other countries that provide the
United States with military bases, buy large shipments of U.S. arms, vote as
Washington wants in the United Nations, enter free trade agreements with the
Western capitalist nations, and propagate a wide-open deregulated free-market
economy.
The
"good Muslims" invite the IMF and the western corporations to come in
and help themselves to the country’s land, labor, markets, industry, natural
resources and anything else the international plutocracy might desire.
Unlike
the "good Muslims," the "bad Muslims" of Iran take an
anti-imperialist stance. They try to get out from under the clutches of the
U.S. global imperium. For this, Iran may yet pay a heavy price.
Think
of what has been happening to Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. For its unwillingness
to throw itself open to Western corporate pillage, Iran is already being
subjected to heavy sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies.
Sanctions
hurt the ordinary population most of all. Unemployment and poverty increase.
The government is unable to maintain human services. The public infrastructure
begins to deteriorate and evaporate: privatization by attrition.
Iran
has pursued an enriched uranium program, same as any nation has the right to
do. The enrichment has been low-level for peaceful use, not the kind necessary
for nuclear bombs. Iranian leaders, both secular and theocratic have been
explicit about the useless horrors of nuclear weaponry and nuclear war.
Appearing
on the Charlie Rose show when he was visiting the USA, Iranian president
Ahmadinejad pointed out that nuclear weapons have never saved anyone.
The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons; was it saved? he asked.India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons; have they found peace and security?Israel has nuclear weapons: has it found peace and security?And the United States itself has nuclear weapons and nuclear fleets patrolling the world and it seems obsessively preoccupied with being targeted by real or imagined enemies.
Ahmadinejad,
the wicked one, sounded so much more rational and humane than Hillary Clinton
snarling her tough-guy threats at this or that noncompliant nation.
(Parenthetically,
we should note that the Iranians possibly might try to develop a nuclear strike
force ~ not to engage in a nuclear war that would destroy Iran but to develop a
deterrent against aerial destruction from the west. The Iranians, like the
North Koreans, know that the western nuclear powers have never attacked any
country that is armed with nuclear weapons.)
I
once heard some Russian commentators say that Iran is twice as large as Iraq,
both in geography and in population; it would take hundreds of thousands of
NATO troops and great cost in casualties and enormous sums of money to invade
and try to subdue such a large country, an impossible task and certain disaster
for the United States.
But
the plan is not to invade, just to destroy the country and its infrastructure
through aerial warfare. The U.S. Air Force eagerly announced that it has 10,000
targets in Iran pinpointed for attack and destruction.
Yugoslavia
is cited as an example of a nation that was destroyed by unanswerable aerial
attacks, without the loss of a single U.S. soldier. I saw the destruction in
Serbia shortly after the NATO bombings stopped: bridges, utilities, rail
depots, factories, schools, television and radio stations, government-built
hotels, hospitals, and housing projects ~ a destruction carried out with utter
impunity, all this against a social democracy that refused to submit to a
free-market capitalist takeover.
The
message is clear.
It has already been delivered to Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, and many other countries around the world: overthrow your reform-minded, independent, communitarian government; become a satellite to the global corporate free-market system, or we will pound you to death and reduce you to a severe level of privatization and poverty.
Not
all the U.S. military is of one mind regarding war with Iran. While the Air
Force can hardly contain itself, the Army and Navy seem lukewarm. Former Chair
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, actually denounced the idea
of waging destruction upon "80 million Iranians, all different
individuals."
The
future does not look good for Iran. That country is slated for an attack of
serious dimensions, supposedly in the name of democracy, "humanitarian
war," the struggle against terrorism, and the need to protect America and
Israel from some future nuclear threat.
.
Sometimes
it seems as if U.S. ruling interests perpetrate crimes and deceptions of all
sorts with a frequency greater than we can document and expose.
So
if I don’t write or speak about one or another issue, keep in mind, it may be
because I am occupied with other things, or I simply have neither the energy
nor the resources.
Sometimes
too, I think, it is because I get too heavy of heart.
Michael Parenti is an internationally
known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading
progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books
and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad. http://www.michaelparenti.org/
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