Photograph Source: FreCha – CC BY-SA 4.0
I was recently honored to appear in a news segment, “Trump Beats Hasty Retreat After Iran Counter-Revolution Attempts Fail.” for Iran’s Press TV, interviewed by my friend Ramin Mazaheri (whose brilliant-if-vexing books I can recommend, having read all three long before he first phoned me). Last October he shared my wishful-prediction that Trump would end his brutal assault on Venezuela with the regime still in place, before absurdly demanding a Nobel Peace Prize: thank God I was correct. But this visit, I was forced to admit that thousands of Iranian deaths the West is laying at the feet of Iran’s government were instead the deed of assets (in the segment I mis-said, “agents”) of our own intelligence services and those of Israel and Great Britain. They were killed, in other words, by us.
We should note that.
Footage of the paramilitaries prepping to burn scores of hospitals and mosques (some historic) while gunning down countless civilians (and police in triple figures), has been recovered, along with copious armament and strategically distributed Starlink terminals, all smuggled in over months as preparation. It was reportedly once Iran’s allies Russia and China began jamming the terminals (and also pinpointing their locations) that the violence rapidly abated, quickly giving way to massive pro-regime rallies, demonstrating how mercenary the terrorism had been, and how coordinated.
Iran’s currency, the Rial, had suffered an also-coordinated attack, “shorted” in Dubai currency markets to quickly halve it in value and provoke the one day of peaceful, police-abetted protests by shopkeepers demanding stopgap financial aid, before Trump’s and Bibi’s – before _our_ terror attack began killing Iranians in quadruple figures, framing also-murdered police for the violence. Hearing from journalists like Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald, from the academic circles of John Mearsheimer and Glenn Diesen, from CIA vets like Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson and from the more-warred-against-than-warring Iranian government itself, it’s hard to reject the regime’s narrative, predictably absent from legacy Western media, of a murderous Western attack on the people of Iran.
Much more than the unforgivable Venezuela massacre which, over months, murdered some 250 people to remove just one member of Venezuela’s government, this attack resembled, in miniature, the business-as-usual shock-and-awe of previous U.S. administrations intent on driving inconvenient nations to societal collapse. It is a tragic irony that all three aggressor nations in the recent attacks are themselves risking societal collapse in what seem the last years of the affluence that an evanescing global dominance will allow them to enjoy.
Reading Mr. Mazaheri’s books, it’s not hard to gather that his overwhelming ideological concern is with a very pro-democracy ideal of socialism, with nations getting the most democratic, meaning most materially equitable but also most dignity-affrording systems it is possible for them to maintain in the current world order: the type of governments, in other words, that their people mostly want. In Iran’s case, an “Islamic” socialism with a “Guidance Council” in place of a Supreme Court, beset by real abuses not nearly matching, in their horror, our continuing worldwide sponsorship of genocide and war: an illiberal democracy.
Many Western academics sadly hold to the absurd theory that liberal democracies “don’t go to war with each other:” a theory falsified by multiple historic conflicts for which the definition of “liberal democracy” can’t easily be shifted to exclude those countries the liberal West prefers to attack. Generally it is far more economical for rich countries to purchase the elections of poorer ones, or else to rent insurrectionary mobs within them like those that deposed Iran’s Mossadegh in 1953 or the Bitcoin-hired paramilitaries which we seem, this past month, to have set to work preparing our next regime change war.
The same with Russia, in which Bill Clinton, in the 1990’s, boasted of having bought Russian premier Boris Yeltsin his second term, and thereby completed the West-imposed fire-sale of Russia’s economy which dropped life expectancy there – this can’t be sufficiently stressed (or indeed properly imagined) – by a full ten years. That was a coup as well, and Russian preparations against it ever recurring bar Russia from being considered among “the liberal democracies.”
The domestically unpopular, Neo-Nazi-assisted coup we imposed upon Ukraine in 2014 to make it our battlefield and disposable weapon against Russia is, because it succeeded, reported in the West as Ukraine’s admission to the liberal, hence democratic world. Elections in Ukraine have been cancelled since it became apparent that they would result in a negotiated end to liberal NATO’s war.
When a country hardens its system against purchase by Western oligarchs, it can sustain the overwhelming domestic popularity of the landslide-elected Putin regime in Russia, and of Iran’s fragile, revolutionary independence from Western control . That is when a country becomes “an authoritarian regime” the West is duty-bound to topple, bombing women out from under its headscarves and resistance to genocide from its thoughts. Perhaps this lets us define “liberal” democracies as profoundly unpopular (because oligarch-bought) regimes; with public approval for any viable party hanging near the bottom quintile, as in all core NATO member states pushing loudest for a nuclear-brinskman victory in Ukraine.
Does democracy really mean the world’s most affluent whites declaring that they’d sure hate to live with the poverty hence the societal constraints endured by nearly all of our species? Should the liberal democracies deplatform (with extreme prejudice) most of a very illiberal planet precisely for failing to enjoy (as they will forever fail to enjoy) our own stolen wealth and license?
Iranians deserve a more democratic country than they have: even the imperial populations of conquering, colonial NATO have some claim to raise bloodcaked hands in the occasional vote. But infinite resources – an earthly Paradise of abundance unimagined by the wildest fundamentalist preacher – would be required to spread liberalism far beyond the borders of elite Western urban centers or very far into the future even there. A consolidation of power by climate-aware liberal technocrats would surely further accelerate ecocidal elite hyperconsumption instead of remediating it. The least democratic outcome imaginable would be the forcible conquest of the world specifically by _this_ religion, for which, if for anything, the West risks the whole species’ extinction pursuing Eurasian wars.
It’s not worth killing for. The economic liberalism of Ayn Rand, forced by Pinochet upon an unwilling Chile, or any laissez-faire innovation of cultural liberalism we demand of East Europe or West Asia, can’t fail to profit a cherrypicked few if instilled through violence, while remaining an immeasurable crime against democracy. Liberal tyranny has never been preferable to illiberal democracy. Democracy doesn’t need a modifier like “liberal” to dignify it, and we are all obliged to consider the voices, not just of our friends, our countries’ elites, but of a very conservative, very impoverished planet around us, when presuming to drive humankind, in its hour of greatest and probably final danger, on an accelerated path into nuclear winter, employing, for our purpose, the incomparable tyranny of war.
The post Illiberal Democracy and the Tyranny Facing Iran appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sean Reynolds.