Category: Sunday

• The problems and prospects of theocracy

Persia, or ancient Iran, the land of oriental splendor, of magnificent plumes and fineries, bewitching riches and wonderful poetry, has been in some posthumous turmoil of late. At its zenith, the Persian civilization was a landmark of learning and enlightenment; a beacon of great possibilities for the human race. But that was a long time ago. The world has since moved on. Civilizations come and go, leaving in their wake glittering monuments to human ingenuity as well as massive convulsions which take time to work out.

Last week, a helicopter carrying the Iranian president and his entourage including the Foreign Minister, disappeared in the remote and mountainous region bordering Azerbaijan. It was after the presidents of the two countries had commissioned a dam for the benefit of the Shi’ite neighbors. It will be recalled that Azerbaijan, of Turkish provenance, has been at loggerheads with its Armenian neighbors over some disputed territories. It has only recently managed to turn the tide of defeat with some rousing victories.

At first information was sketchy, in the tradition of closed and paranoid systems. But you must give it to the Iranians. Their management of information was superb and well-choreographed, like all people of empire who have to control the dissemination of news to the populace in order to avert panic and a security meltdown, this time under theocratic thralldom.

It was first given out that the presidential helicopter which was travelling in a convoy was missing as a result of fog and possible miscommunication. Much later, it was admitted that the plane had actually had a hard landing. The passengers could be at some risk. Only those well-schooled in aviation gobbledygook or in the cloak and dagger lingo of international diplomacy could understand what that meant.

Surely, if they knew that the helicopter had come down, they also ought to know where and how to locate its wreckage? That was not forthcoming. At that point, seasoned experts concluded that the worst fate imaginable had overtaken the Iranian president and that the authorities knew too but were only trying to prepare the public for the announcement while putting in place security measures to contain the situation.

The announcement came eventually. Despite their effective management of information for the local populace, what the Iranian authorities were trying to hide was in full public purview. Despite its much vaunted claims to military superstardom, Iran lacks the capacity for self-surveillance and the ability to impose its will on its own territory. It took an unmanned Turkish drone to locate the charred wreckage of the presidential helicopter. Only God knows what the Americans and the Israelis knew at that point.

In the event, Iran has been thrown into deep mourning. But the tears are not entirely for Ebrahim Raisi, the fallen president, who was not a particularly well-liked or venerated public figure in the capital. Many Iranians see him as an illiterate thug and brutal enforcer who must bear responsibility for the death of thousands of civil rights protesters and many others who accuse the ruling elite of massive corruption and cronyism. Well-schooled Iranians point at Raisi’s garbled syntax as evidence of a lack of formal schooling and the absence of familiarity with classical Persian grammar.

Iranians could not understand how their country has fallen so low and how the glorious promise of the Islamic Revolution of forty five years earlier with its war-cry of political equity and social justice had come such a sad cropper. Many who were not born then cling to the romantic and starry-eyed notions of that epochal uprising against the old Shah and the ancien regime.

Every government, whether secular and democratic or whether otherworldly and theocratic, must find a way of rejuvenating itself through its own internal mechanism and of renewing the faith of the people through its own exertions and exhortations. The theocratic monarchies of the Middle East and of Morocco and Brunei have proved particularly adept at this ritual of self-reproduction.

Succession being non-hereditary, the failure of the Iranian Shi’ite revolutionists in this department may be due to the paradox of success leading to eventual failure. As products of a genuinely popular revolt against a moribund and corrupt system, their naturally authoritarian leaders saw no need to level with the people beyond a reliance on the harsh brutalities of mullah thugs and other enforcers who believe their job is simply to deal with enemies of the state with exemplary violence.

This is always the problem with embattled theocracies operating under the cloak of secrecy and oath of furtive silence. Forty five years into the Iranian revolution, it is obvious from the unremarkable string of mediocrities it has thrown up as leaders that the fascist clerisy ruling Iran lacks the capacity for internal self-renewal as well as the ability to connect with the people. Increasingly disillusioned, the Iranian people have been voting with their feet. The election that brought Raisi recorded a miserable thirty percent turnout.

The Iranian tragedy has been compounded by the fact that despite the country’s limited success in the field of nuclear development, it has suffered a series of reversals and humiliation in the military theatre which has put a question mark on its capacity to defend itself not to talk of project itself as a potential Islamic superpower.

The summary execution by the Americans of Major General Quasim Soleiman, arguably Iran’s best loved general and deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards while he was on recce in Iraq, the attack by the Israelis on its Damascus Embassy Annex which eliminated some key officials and the tame responses these acts of coordinated escalation have drawn from Iran have sown the seeds of doubts about the ability of the Iranian leadership to protect the country from unprovoked aggression.

The Iranians’ weak responses might have prompted some military cynics to insist that the embattled leadership must have informed both its tormentors well ahead and probably how far and deep its missiles would go. There is something to be commended about the political realism and calm rationality of the ruling theocrats of Iran. They knew they were in the anaconda hug of an implacable enemy that would punish them severely for the slightest infraction.

But to have crumbled in despair and look away as if nothing happened would have further lowered their esteem in the eyes of a restive populace. The people had already called them out for their inability to improve their material condition and stem the rising tide of hunger and misery in the society. To now discover in addition that the Islamic clerisy is also totally incapable of defending them against external aggression is to invite an apocalyptic meltdown.

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The perpetual tension between theocracy and a secular vision of the world as encapsulated in the tenets of liberal democracy and the nation-state paradigm has been brought home once again in Tehran. Historically speaking, this latest round commenced when the Ottoman Turks were finally overwhelmed outside the gates of Vienna in September, 1683. 

It will be recalled that as a result of the ascendancy of the Turks in the Islamic military sweepstakes with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the new flag bearers of Islam stuck to the original manual of conquering the world by force and military fiat while their secular competitors intuited their way through science and philosophical revolution which opened the eyes of humanity to hitherto unimaginable vistas. Artillery of knowledge is always superior to the knowledge of artillery.

As a result of that fateful turn, never has the gap between the secular vision and the Islamic world been wider and never has the military and economic superiority and dominance of the secular west over theocratic empires more emphatic. For example, it was given out last week that the helicopters carrying the Iranian president and his entourage were already flight-rusty due to lack of spare parts and adequate maintenance. This was due principally to American sanctions.

Unhappy and endangered is the country that has to rely on its principal enemy for the supply of spare parts to maintain its fleet and military arsenal. It is a promissory note for self-liquidation. Surely, those who know the spare parts must also know the coordinates and communication channels of the fleet. It is very curious that without any prompting, the Americans and the Israelis began shouting from the rooftop that they knew nothing about the tragedy. The mind goes back to Samora Michel, the adulated and widely revered Mozambican leader and apartheid South Africa.

The best outcome Iran can hope for to dispel the unremitting fog of tragedy and adversity is to pray for a quick resolution of the Gaza debacle. Thereafter, it must embark on a house-cleaning exercise that will lead to a rejuvenating and rejigging of the system before it tumbles into an apocalyptic nightmare.

Unfortunately, the odds are not in favour of an internal reorganization in Iran. It will take another revolution for the system to open up. This is because unlike secular revolutions which are always open-ended and subject to rerouting, Islamic revolutions are driven by and often in thrall to a Master Text which cannot be queried or revised.

Despite the arbitrary and vicious tyrannies imposed on them by despotic revolutionists, the French, Russian and Chinese societies were lands of a thousand philosophers and writers that could throw up contrarian figures that could modify the revolution while retaining broad fidelity to its ideological ideals like Deng Xiaoping or jettison it altogether as Napoleon and Gorbachev did. This is a theoretical and practical impossibility in Iran because Islamic societies are powered by totally different dynamics.

Secularization has a way of producing its own deviants. In the US, Donald Trump has just issued what may go down as the most despotic Encyclical in the democratic history of Western civilization. According to the disturbed sicko, he was going to rule like a dictator over a unified American Reich.

If the idea of a dictator ruling over the world’s most durable democracy is not disturbing enough, the echoes of Hitler and his doomed Reich ought to set off the alarm signals in the most patriotic of American citizens and all the global sympathizers of the most successful country the world has seen. A confrontation of hegemonic blocs of all hues and shapes now appear to be inevitable in America. If Donald Trump prevails, that will be the end of America as we know it.

So despite the setbacks for Iran, there is still a lot to play for. But it will not be the outcome conventionally expected. It is precisely at the point when global attention is diverted by principal gladiators that a third party emerges to steal the thunder from both parties. Who would have thought that the centuries old contestation and struggle for supremacy between the dominant faiths of modern civilization will end up as a struggle for who can deliver greater material satisfaction and protection for their people?

But while we are still at it, it is possible that other “faiths” lurking in the shadows especially in oriental and Scandinavian societies may step forward to offer their people even greater material satisfaction or superior capacity for forceful self-projection. All that is solid melts into thin air. Given human capacity for diffusion, dispersal, re-absorption and eventual dilution, it will in future be impossible to divulge the ethnic ancestry of these emergent societies just as it has proved impossible in the case of ancient Egyptian and Roman civilizations.