This really put flesh on the bones of my own belief that you can get some insight into the nature of the Islamic Republic by reviewing the histories of the Stalinist Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. I don’t say that it’s an exact comparison, but the parallels are striking. For instance, the IRGC. Its mission as guardian of the regime and bearer of its ideology mirrors that of the SS. In general, I think it’s correct to describe the Islamic Republic’s organizing principle as a totalitarian ideology, both politically and, so to speak, as a totalizing world view.
Progressive journalists, talking heads and politicians lie to your face when it achieves violence against the US and Israel. In their quasi-religion of progressivism a genocide and ethnic cleansing of 7.7 million Israeli Jews is as important as it is for the Islamist kooks of Hamas. If Europe and the US are also threatened by the deranged messianic Islamist terrorism of Iran, well even better for these democracy hating sociopaths.
I suspect the solution will be a long occupation to “pacify” the Shia threat after a war which, to be politically and regionally effective, will require Israeli, Saudi and Gulf state combat troops in a serious coalition with the US. Anyone see this happening? Also, how historically quickly we have forgotten the Khmer Rouge.
I feel like this essay, to some extent, is the fruit of an attempt to understand the Khomeinist outlook. But in the end it is a polemical work arguing that it's a regime of religious fanatics eager to end the world, and that means that it minimizes other dimensions that are more understandable to an outside audience.
For example, Iran's view of regional politics is that Israel is a modern creation, the American military has no business being in the region, it is justice to fight against these foreign impositions, and any local regime that doesn't is compromised. This is the part that the left can understand and agree with, whether that's the Iranian left of 1978 or the American left of 2026.
The part that is more of a stumbling block for secular idealists is the religious veto over everything, the gender essentialism and impositions on women, and everything they do to their own people that is genuinely barbarous. The first two seem within the scope of the extreme wing of the new Christian nationalism, but the third seems to require either a genuinely medieval mentality and/or an authoritarian/totalitarian mentality, both of which are fortunately still foreign to the contemporary West.
One part of the revolutionary Islamist psychology which I think might be more accessible than you'd expect, to today's westerners, is the Shiite passion for revolutionary justice. The personalities and historical reference points (Ali, Karbala) might be alien to those who don't know Islam, but the idea that the world is ruled by injustice, by a ruling class who exploit us and lie to us and commit monstrous acts, is pervasive in certain social strata.
Some miscellaneous comments:
One further feature of the missile billboard that I spotted, at the lower right, is the Palestinian cartoon figure "Handala". Also, the hashtag #نه_به_ظلم has actually seen use on X, by diaspora opponents of the regime. So its appearance on the missile is not just an attack on western social-media activism, it is specifically targeting the foreign opposition.
There seems to be no material evidence of the "keys to paradise". Someone on reddit put together a list of claims and counterclaims, mostly from 1980s news media:
Regarding Iran's dalliance with Nazi Germany, that occurred *during the Pahlavi dynasty* and mostly involved racial ideas, not religious ones. The only evidence we are given of "Hitler as imam" is a communication by a German diplomat who tells his bosses back in Berlin that it's happening. The author who dug up that message, Matthias Küntzel, can't even read Farsi, he's associated with a research center in Israel, and his work is being promoted by enemies of Iran. There is such a thing as scholarly propaganda (e.g. Adrian Zenz on the Uighurs, and Frank Dikötter's revisionism on opium in China, seem to be works of this nature), and to me what Küntzel is doing looks like another example.
On the other hand, the idea that the USSR was trying to bring about a communist revolution in Iran seems obvious to me, and is part of a larger picture described by some "scholarly propaganda" which I do endorse, e.g. works by Selig Harrison on how the USSR wanted an independent Baluchistan in order to have a land corridor to the Persian Gulf, via Afghanistan. I think this was the Plan B after Plan A, communism in Iran, failed.
Regarding the quietism of Shiite politics, there are historical precedents for "active" Shiism, it's just that the Shia go back to waiting for the Mahdi after their attempts to create the just world fail. I find the story of Shiism in Iran somewhat strange because it's a modern thing, before 1500 or so the country was Sunni. As best I understand, Sunni Iran was occupied for about 800 years by Arab, Mongol, and Turkic dynasties, and then a Turkified Persian dynasty arose which also converted the country to Shiism, partly by claiming that the last princess of pre-Islamic Iran married one of the Shiite imams. So the revolutionary justice of Shiism helped the Iranians overthrow foreign occupation after centuries, and then after further centuries, in our own era it gave birth to this unique theocratic version of revolutionary Third-World anti-imperialism.
Khomeinism does also contains a response to the modern Iranian movement for democracy, which goes back to the final days of the Qajar dynasty. The Islamic Republic has elections, it's just that the clerics have a veto. The clerics even vote on who the supreme leader should be. When this novel system was introduced, perhaps it had a claim to being an indigenous form of democracy, "democracy with Iranian characteristics", but evidently it has long worn out its welcome and turned into an IRGC dictatorship.
I read a book by Mesbah-Yazdi once. It was a philosophy textbook hosted on his website. A lot of it was describing modern western philosophy, and responding from an Islamic perspective. Part of the difference is that western philosophy is irreligious whereas Mesbah-Yazdi assumes Islam, but there was also a distinct intellectual framework combining Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy transmitted by the Arabs, and the Iranian "illuminationist" metaphysics (the Ishraqi school mentioned by Khomeini in his message to Gorbachev).
Very interesting read. It is certainly a new point of view for me. The letter from Khomeini to Gorbachev was fascinating and goes a long way to support your thesis (at least for me).
Based on your essay, if I put myself into the shoes of Iran's leadership, I would destroy as much of the oil & gas infrastructure in the Middle East as I could, severely denting the world's economy, and bait the US to come get me on the ground. I hope I'm wrong, but with the current players in charge in the US, and with the ideology you describe for Iran, it would not surprise me. It's pretty clear the US did not game out this scenario (or if we did, it never made it to the top).
So much here...I have to stop halfway through and save the rest for tomorrow.
What jumps out at me is the parallels between the eschatology of Shi'a and the eschatology of the Christian sects that want to bring about the return of Christ by having some bigass war against Muslims.
Hegseth and the ayatollah both believe they are on a mission from God.
Wow! What a tour de force. This one post is well worth the price of a yearly subscription. One would hope that journalists and pundits read this essay and grapple with it. Of course they won’t. Just as the Shia have an ideology they are wedded to, the chattering classes in the West have an ideology they are wedded to and that ideology forbids taking the content of Claire’s essay seriously.
One quibble; Claire wonders why Western analysts during the Cold War understood the ramifications of Marxist ideology while the media today is reluctant to come to grips with the ramifications of Shia ideology and how it impacts the current conflict. I think the answer is that Marxism is a Western heresy. During the Cold War, everyone understood its origins and its aspirations. Many who opposed the Soviet Union were at least somewhat sympathetic to Marxist tenets. That distinguishes it from an ability to understand and willingness to confront Shia ideology and its Khomeinist manifestation.
Claire doesn’t mention it but her essay explains why a revolution is unlikely to prevail in Iran. Somewhere between a large minority and a small majority of the Iranian population either share the ideology of Khomeinism or are sympathetic to it. In an internal conflict between the young and educated who aspire to Western values and passionate religious Shia who view struggle and the respect for martyrs as a paramount value, those who want to overthrow the regime almost certainly don’t stand a chance.
What is to be done then? I’m afraid that the West no longer understands how to win a war though Israelis do. The only way to survive is to decimate your enemies and destroy their will to continue. In this context several natural questions arise: should the West bomb Iran’s infrastructure to rubble even though this would be awful for the millions of Iranians who wish nothing more than to be free of the Mullahs? Can the West successfully combat the Shia ideology described by Claire without bombing Khomani’s tomb as well as most of the religious infrastructure in Qom. Should the Great Mosque in Isfahan be reduced to rubble to send an unmistakable message do the ardent partisans of Khomaneinism?
International law and current Western customs find all of this highly objectionable but to fight the ideology that Claire so eloquently describes, isnt confronting that ideology with unmistakable and unmatched vigor a key ingredient for success? Haven’t we arrived at the “clash of civilizations” described by Samuel Huntington? Is the West prepared to do what’s required to win?
One final point; why does Israel understand what victory requires when most of the West and especially Europeans don’t? A partial answer is that a very large percentage of Israeli Jews survived the Holocaust or are children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Israelis understand what fashionable Westerners no longer do. If the allies fought the Axis Powers, especially the Germans, the way the West fights its wars today, Hitler would have won and there would be no Israel and no Jews alive anywhere.
What you said about somewhere between a large minority and small majority supporting Khomaneism is highly contestable. Sort of feels like you’re burying your central claim. What’s your basis for it? I’ve seen estimates of under 20%. Though I suppose nobody can really know exactly.
I hope you’re right. Large crowds seem to turn out for the funerals of regime leaders. Regardless of the actual number of regime supporters, in a confrontation between religious zealots and idealistic and secular students, I don’t think I would bet on the students to prevail.
The juxtaposition of the Minab girls with the “Epstein Island Victim Girls” is quite theologically precise: For Khomeneists, America isn’t merely the great usurper, it’s also the great corruptor, the emblem of sexual licence and moral subversion. The Epstein saga is proof of this. There is an implicit argument here: “They exploit their girls. We avenge ours.”
I could be wrong here but wouldn't you say child marriage and the beating, rape and torture of Iranian women for not wearing a hijab really in the same vein as Epstein? Therefore aren't they just ignoring the own plank (or in this case massive tree trunk) in their own eye? Can they not see this or is it completely masked to them by their own beliefs?
From their perspective, I imagine that punishing a supposed floozie with corrective rape seems nearly opposite from what Epstein did.
Epstein groomed girls for sexual exploitation. On a spectrum between pure seduction, which entices others to freely choose their own corruption, and pure coercion, which is not at all enticing, sexual grooming typically sits in an uncomfortable middle, with both seductive and coercive aspects. Epstein apparently committed both forcible assaults as well as statutory rape, but if the biggest problem with what Epstein did isn't the the abuse and coercion, and is instead the corruption of womanhood, then corrective sexual violence imposed to punish womanhood that has already supposedly proven itself "corrupt" in some way can style itself as a bold stance *against* the corruption of womanhood, as Epstein's "opposite".
I can imagine a perspective from which teaching girls how to be (more) worthy of rape is evil, but raping one already "worthy of rape" is no big deal, just taking what any man's already entitled to have from any floozie.
Thank you for this. Sadly, I suspect too few will notice it, much less change their thinking because of it, though it ought to do that. One quibble. In 1991 I spent a morning with the top theoreticians of the Higher Party School in Moscow. They were under no illusions about the unMarxian nature of "the project" as you put it. What the Iranians and the Soviets had/have in common is putting off paradise because. In any case "Marxism-Leninism" was by its very name a distortion of Marx. That said, the thrust of your argument is all too true and it is all too tragic that so-called progressives in the west don't get it. Donald Trump is foolish and it seems embarked on this adventure without thinking that the Iranians were prepared for war, but now may be forced into doing what he promised to do at the outset. For me regime change is the *only* justification. Regional stability is simply not possible otherwise. There were other ways to achieve this, possibly but the er "die is cast". Trump is such a fool however that if there is a way for him to fuck things up, he'll find it. It's his special "stable genius" at work.
"By uniting against Trump’s war, the Democratic Party and the liberal press have demonstrated an irrational faith in the power of diplomacy and inspections even when experience shows that these approaches stand no chance of success. Eloquent about the dangers and costs of war, the Democrats are unable to consider the foreseeable costs of inaction. Once an Iranian dictatorship driven by religious fanaticism actually acquires nuclear weapons, the logic of rationality that has allowed it to reach multiple accords of nuclear deterrence—however ineffective—with its bitter enemies over the past eight decades will no longer apply." (CB)
Bravo, Claire.
This really put flesh on the bones of my own belief that you can get some insight into the nature of the Islamic Republic by reviewing the histories of the Stalinist Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. I don’t say that it’s an exact comparison, but the parallels are striking. For instance, the IRGC. Its mission as guardian of the regime and bearer of its ideology mirrors that of the SS. In general, I think it’s correct to describe the Islamic Republic’s organizing principle as a totalitarian ideology, both politically and, so to speak, as a totalizing world view.
Again, congratulations on a great piece of work.
Thanks very much. Yes, the parallels are striking.
Claire, this is ::really:: good.
Thank you, Rachel. Means a lot to me from you.
Progressive journalists, talking heads and politicians lie to your face when it achieves violence against the US and Israel. In their quasi-religion of progressivism a genocide and ethnic cleansing of 7.7 million Israeli Jews is as important as it is for the Islamist kooks of Hamas. If Europe and the US are also threatened by the deranged messianic Islamist terrorism of Iran, well even better for these democracy hating sociopaths.
I suspect the solution will be a long occupation to “pacify” the Shia threat after a war which, to be politically and regionally effective, will require Israeli, Saudi and Gulf state combat troops in a serious coalition with the US. Anyone see this happening? Also, how historically quickly we have forgotten the Khmer Rouge.
I feel like this essay, to some extent, is the fruit of an attempt to understand the Khomeinist outlook. But in the end it is a polemical work arguing that it's a regime of religious fanatics eager to end the world, and that means that it minimizes other dimensions that are more understandable to an outside audience.
For example, Iran's view of regional politics is that Israel is a modern creation, the American military has no business being in the region, it is justice to fight against these foreign impositions, and any local regime that doesn't is compromised. This is the part that the left can understand and agree with, whether that's the Iranian left of 1978 or the American left of 2026.
The part that is more of a stumbling block for secular idealists is the religious veto over everything, the gender essentialism and impositions on women, and everything they do to their own people that is genuinely barbarous. The first two seem within the scope of the extreme wing of the new Christian nationalism, but the third seems to require either a genuinely medieval mentality and/or an authoritarian/totalitarian mentality, both of which are fortunately still foreign to the contemporary West.
One part of the revolutionary Islamist psychology which I think might be more accessible than you'd expect, to today's westerners, is the Shiite passion for revolutionary justice. The personalities and historical reference points (Ali, Karbala) might be alien to those who don't know Islam, but the idea that the world is ruled by injustice, by a ruling class who exploit us and lie to us and commit monstrous acts, is pervasive in certain social strata.
Some miscellaneous comments:
One further feature of the missile billboard that I spotted, at the lower right, is the Palestinian cartoon figure "Handala". Also, the hashtag #نه_به_ظلم has actually seen use on X, by diaspora opponents of the regime. So its appearance on the missile is not just an attack on western social-media activism, it is specifically targeting the foreign opposition.
There seems to be no material evidence of the "keys to paradise". Someone on reddit put together a list of claims and counterclaims, mostly from 1980s news media:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1rjno8z/iraniraq_war_is_the_keys_to_paradise_story_true/
Regarding Iran's dalliance with Nazi Germany, that occurred *during the Pahlavi dynasty* and mostly involved racial ideas, not religious ones. The only evidence we are given of "Hitler as imam" is a communication by a German diplomat who tells his bosses back in Berlin that it's happening. The author who dug up that message, Matthias Küntzel, can't even read Farsi, he's associated with a research center in Israel, and his work is being promoted by enemies of Iran. There is such a thing as scholarly propaganda (e.g. Adrian Zenz on the Uighurs, and Frank Dikötter's revisionism on opium in China, seem to be works of this nature), and to me what Küntzel is doing looks like another example.
On the other hand, the idea that the USSR was trying to bring about a communist revolution in Iran seems obvious to me, and is part of a larger picture described by some "scholarly propaganda" which I do endorse, e.g. works by Selig Harrison on how the USSR wanted an independent Baluchistan in order to have a land corridor to the Persian Gulf, via Afghanistan. I think this was the Plan B after Plan A, communism in Iran, failed.
Regarding the quietism of Shiite politics, there are historical precedents for "active" Shiism, it's just that the Shia go back to waiting for the Mahdi after their attempts to create the just world fail. I find the story of Shiism in Iran somewhat strange because it's a modern thing, before 1500 or so the country was Sunni. As best I understand, Sunni Iran was occupied for about 800 years by Arab, Mongol, and Turkic dynasties, and then a Turkified Persian dynasty arose which also converted the country to Shiism, partly by claiming that the last princess of pre-Islamic Iran married one of the Shiite imams. So the revolutionary justice of Shiism helped the Iranians overthrow foreign occupation after centuries, and then after further centuries, in our own era it gave birth to this unique theocratic version of revolutionary Third-World anti-imperialism.
Khomeinism does also contains a response to the modern Iranian movement for democracy, which goes back to the final days of the Qajar dynasty. The Islamic Republic has elections, it's just that the clerics have a veto. The clerics even vote on who the supreme leader should be. When this novel system was introduced, perhaps it had a claim to being an indigenous form of democracy, "democracy with Iranian characteristics", but evidently it has long worn out its welcome and turned into an IRGC dictatorship.
I read a book by Mesbah-Yazdi once. It was a philosophy textbook hosted on his website. A lot of it was describing modern western philosophy, and responding from an Islamic perspective. Part of the difference is that western philosophy is irreligious whereas Mesbah-Yazdi assumes Islam, but there was also a distinct intellectual framework combining Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy transmitted by the Arabs, and the Iranian "illuminationist" metaphysics (the Ishraqi school mentioned by Khomeini in his message to Gorbachev).
Very interesting read. It is certainly a new point of view for me. The letter from Khomeini to Gorbachev was fascinating and goes a long way to support your thesis (at least for me).
Based on your essay, if I put myself into the shoes of Iran's leadership, I would destroy as much of the oil & gas infrastructure in the Middle East as I could, severely denting the world's economy, and bait the US to come get me on the ground. I hope I'm wrong, but with the current players in charge in the US, and with the ideology you describe for Iran, it would not surprise me. It's pretty clear the US did not game out this scenario (or if we did, it never made it to the top).
So much here...I have to stop halfway through and save the rest for tomorrow.
What jumps out at me is the parallels between the eschatology of Shi'a and the eschatology of the Christian sects that want to bring about the return of Christ by having some bigass war against Muslims.
Hegseth and the ayatollah both believe they are on a mission from God.
As if we could do anything to convince God to be at our beck and call! ::headdesk::
Wow! What a tour de force. This one post is well worth the price of a yearly subscription. One would hope that journalists and pundits read this essay and grapple with it. Of course they won’t. Just as the Shia have an ideology they are wedded to, the chattering classes in the West have an ideology they are wedded to and that ideology forbids taking the content of Claire’s essay seriously.
One quibble; Claire wonders why Western analysts during the Cold War understood the ramifications of Marxist ideology while the media today is reluctant to come to grips with the ramifications of Shia ideology and how it impacts the current conflict. I think the answer is that Marxism is a Western heresy. During the Cold War, everyone understood its origins and its aspirations. Many who opposed the Soviet Union were at least somewhat sympathetic to Marxist tenets. That distinguishes it from an ability to understand and willingness to confront Shia ideology and its Khomeinist manifestation.
Claire doesn’t mention it but her essay explains why a revolution is unlikely to prevail in Iran. Somewhere between a large minority and a small majority of the Iranian population either share the ideology of Khomeinism or are sympathetic to it. In an internal conflict between the young and educated who aspire to Western values and passionate religious Shia who view struggle and the respect for martyrs as a paramount value, those who want to overthrow the regime almost certainly don’t stand a chance.
What is to be done then? I’m afraid that the West no longer understands how to win a war though Israelis do. The only way to survive is to decimate your enemies and destroy their will to continue. In this context several natural questions arise: should the West bomb Iran’s infrastructure to rubble even though this would be awful for the millions of Iranians who wish nothing more than to be free of the Mullahs? Can the West successfully combat the Shia ideology described by Claire without bombing Khomani’s tomb as well as most of the religious infrastructure in Qom. Should the Great Mosque in Isfahan be reduced to rubble to send an unmistakable message do the ardent partisans of Khomaneinism?
International law and current Western customs find all of this highly objectionable but to fight the ideology that Claire so eloquently describes, isnt confronting that ideology with unmistakable and unmatched vigor a key ingredient for success? Haven’t we arrived at the “clash of civilizations” described by Samuel Huntington? Is the West prepared to do what’s required to win?
One final point; why does Israel understand what victory requires when most of the West and especially Europeans don’t? A partial answer is that a very large percentage of Israeli Jews survived the Holocaust or are children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Israelis understand what fashionable Westerners no longer do. If the allies fought the Axis Powers, especially the Germans, the way the West fights its wars today, Hitler would have won and there would be no Israel and no Jews alive anywhere.
What you said about somewhere between a large minority and small majority supporting Khomaneism is highly contestable. Sort of feels like you’re burying your central claim. What’s your basis for it? I’ve seen estimates of under 20%. Though I suppose nobody can really know exactly.
I hope you’re right. Large crowds seem to turn out for the funerals of regime leaders. Regardless of the actual number of regime supporters, in a confrontation between religious zealots and idealistic and secular students, I don’t think I would bet on the students to prevail.
The juxtaposition of the Minab girls with the “Epstein Island Victim Girls” is quite theologically precise: For Khomeneists, America isn’t merely the great usurper, it’s also the great corruptor, the emblem of sexual licence and moral subversion. The Epstein saga is proof of this. There is an implicit argument here: “They exploit their girls. We avenge ours.”
I could be wrong here but wouldn't you say child marriage and the beating, rape and torture of Iranian women for not wearing a hijab really in the same vein as Epstein? Therefore aren't they just ignoring the own plank (or in this case massive tree trunk) in their own eye? Can they not see this or is it completely masked to them by their own beliefs?
From their perspective, I imagine that punishing a supposed floozie with corrective rape seems nearly opposite from what Epstein did.
Epstein groomed girls for sexual exploitation. On a spectrum between pure seduction, which entices others to freely choose their own corruption, and pure coercion, which is not at all enticing, sexual grooming typically sits in an uncomfortable middle, with both seductive and coercive aspects. Epstein apparently committed both forcible assaults as well as statutory rape, but if the biggest problem with what Epstein did isn't the the abuse and coercion, and is instead the corruption of womanhood, then corrective sexual violence imposed to punish womanhood that has already supposedly proven itself "corrupt" in some way can style itself as a bold stance *against* the corruption of womanhood, as Epstein's "opposite".
I can imagine a perspective from which teaching girls how to be (more) worthy of rape is evil, but raping one already "worthy of rape" is no big deal, just taking what any man's already entitled to have from any floozie.
I think this is the right interpretation.
Thank you for this. Sadly, I suspect too few will notice it, much less change their thinking because of it, though it ought to do that. One quibble. In 1991 I spent a morning with the top theoreticians of the Higher Party School in Moscow. They were under no illusions about the unMarxian nature of "the project" as you put it. What the Iranians and the Soviets had/have in common is putting off paradise because. In any case "Marxism-Leninism" was by its very name a distortion of Marx. That said, the thrust of your argument is all too true and it is all too tragic that so-called progressives in the west don't get it. Donald Trump is foolish and it seems embarked on this adventure without thinking that the Iranians were prepared for war, but now may be forced into doing what he promised to do at the outset. For me regime change is the *only* justification. Regional stability is simply not possible otherwise. There were other ways to achieve this, possibly but the er "die is cast". Trump is such a fool however that if there is a way for him to fuck things up, he'll find it. It's his special "stable genius" at work.
Schrodinger’s Imam lol.
Fantastic, in the best sense of the term...........
"By uniting against Trump’s war, the Democratic Party and the liberal press have demonstrated an irrational faith in the power of diplomacy and inspections even when experience shows that these approaches stand no chance of success. Eloquent about the dangers and costs of war, the Democrats are unable to consider the foreseeable costs of inaction. Once an Iranian dictatorship driven by religious fanaticism actually acquires nuclear weapons, the logic of rationality that has allowed it to reach multiple accords of nuclear deterrence—however ineffective—with its bitter enemies over the past eight decades will no longer apply." (CB)
Not me. Jeffrey Herf. But I agree with him.