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30 August 2009 By Philip Jones
Only blind prejudice can prevent anyone who has gone
to the trouble of studying even a summary of the
contents of the Koran from realizing that the Prophet
Mohammad was a moral genius."
Introduction:
We must now take into consideration the revolutionary
change in the nature and character of imperialism
which occurred in the 20th Century. We shall examine
its repercussions as far as the Islamic Revolution in
Iran is concerned, and (in Part 7) its relationship to
more recent events as witnessed in the brutal and
immoral wars of aggression, being waged against the
peoples of Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, by the `Neocon`
[2]Zionist forces of the Illuminati cabal, which
although acting in the guise of US Imperialism, are in
reality the visible and physical manifestations of a
concerted Luciferian assault against the Umma.
It is now impossible for all but those whose hearts
have been hardened by the evil one, not to discern the
ultimate goal of this aggression as being the complete
destruction of Islam as a comprehensive belief system,
removing from Muslims their moral anchor and compass,
thereby substituting a perverse Satanic mirror image
of what has already happened here in the West in its
stead.
The New Imperialists:
To the uninformed mass of humanity, it appeared as if
a British imperialism which had prevailed in Iran
without interruption since the end of World War I, was
supplanted after the end of World War II by an
American one - or, rather, by one consisting of an
alliance of Rockefeller America and Rothschild Israel.
Indeed, from quite early in the 1950s an
American-Israeli presence was the dominating foreign
influence in Iran; and yet strangely, it was almost
exclusively against the Americans that the hostility
of the Mullahs and the masses was directed,
culminating in the invasion of the US embassy and the
subsequent hostage drama, and it's accompanying media
circus.
However, the reality was very different from the
fiction, for what looked like an American-Israeli
alliance, was in fact only the public picture
presented by the `Hidden Face` of an altogether
different model of imperialism, which had come into
existence, displacing and replacing all the separate
national imperiums. What began quite early in the
twentieth century, and proceeded at a much accelerated
pace after the end of World War II, was the
progressive dismantling of all the separate national
imperiums, including the American, and their
subsequent absorption into something unprecedented in
recorded history -- a global financial imperialism.
Instead of the moral illegitimacy, or political
pathology of parasitical conspiracies of `special
interests` inside the different Western nations,
henceforth, a vast cosmopolitan parasitism of `special
interests` would operate on a global basis, and with
an endgame that was far more ambitious, being nothing
less than a world economic and political imperium; a
New World Order. Nationalist imperialisms were thus
subsumed in a single international imperialism in the
same way as we have seen very large commercial,
industrial and financial enterprises swallowed and
ingested into the concentrated ownership and control
of vastly bigger, mainly financial conglomerates.
The overthrow of the Tsarist regime in Russia in 1917,
along with the dispossession of all the European
powers of their colonial empires, and the setting up
of the United Nations as a world government-in-
waiting, were all part of a power-concentrating
process which began in the nineteenth century and
visibly can be seen to be continuing at an
accelerating pace to this day.
This metamorphosis in the nature of imperialism was
one of the consequences resulting from a radical
change in the realm of high finance, which can briefly
be explained as follows: For a long time after the
beginning of the modern industrial era,
finance-capital (not to be confused with private
enterprise capital) existed almost entirely in
national concentrations: there was a British
finance-capitalism, nominally answerable to a British
government, which was in turn nominally answerable to
an electorate; a German finance-capitalism, a French
one, a Dutch, and so on, each joined to a national
government and each government nominally answerable to
a national electorate.
These nations were, in fact, plutocracies; each one an
instance of what Hobson calls "social pathology,"
capable of maintaining themselves in power with a
public opinion not sought and consulted, as before,
but created as required, by news-media propaganda,
patronage and other rewards of the business world.
Money had become the measure of all things, with a
ruling elite drawn less from the land and more and
more from the factory and the counting-house. From
around about the middle of the nineteenth century and
well into the twentieth, these national concentrations
of financial power were in vigorous competition, a
major example of this being the scramble for colonies
and markets in the so-called underdeveloped world.
What then happened was that the many national vortices
of financial power were drawn into a global vortex of
financial power.
There can be no doubt that a major factor in bringing
about this change in the realm of high finance was the
long-continued existence within the different nations
of Europe of Jewish banking families or dynasties
which had always specialized in transnational
operations. The story of how these financial dynasties
consolidated their power on an international basis is
explained at some length by Prof. Carroll Quigley in
his 1300-page "History of the World in Our Time,"
Tragedy and Hope.[1]
It all began with what Quigley called "the third stage
in the development of capitalism ... of overwhelming
significance in the history of the 20th century, and
its ramifications and influences subterranean and even
occult." He adds:
"Essentially what it did was to take the old
disorganized and localized methods of handling money
and credit and organize them on an international
basis."
But it was in the 1930s that the truly revolutionary
change was to occur, when the control of this
international financial system appeared to essentially
pass out of the hands of those who had visibly created
it -- the likes of J.P. Morgan in America and Montagu
Norman in Britain and at last openly into the hands
of a `cosmopolitan` elite, no longer `high
Episcopalian, Anglophile, and European-culture-
conscious. ` The shift occurred at all levels, says
Dr. Quigley, and was evident in the decline of J.P.
Morgan, which had hitherto dominated Wall Street.
It can thus be reasonably said that much of what was
to happen in Iran and in many other parts of the world
after the end of World War II had its parallel in the
United States, where the ostensibly episcopalian
Illuminati Bloodline families, [3]found themselves
without the power to control their own universities,
and where their national newspaper, the New York
Herald-Tribune, fell into irreversible decline and
died, like a ring-barked forest giant. The use of
words like America and American in any discussion of
world politics can thus be grossly misleading unless
it is clearly understood that `American power` has
ceased to be essentially American.
The dismantling of what was an essentially British oil
empire in Iran, and its reorganization thereafter, on
an international basis (as was done with Belgium's
copper empire in the Congo in 1960) was therefore to
be expected, having much the same effect as that
produced by supposed `decolonization` in so many other
parts of the world. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC)
had been exploiting the oil fields in Khuzistan since
1901, and the demarcation of those fields, covering an
area of 15,000 square miles, has been set out in a
1933 agreement. This giant company, writes Vincent
Monteil, trained British subjects to take an interest
in Iran's internal affairs, and "took pleasure in
appointing the number of votes in the 'free'
elections." In return -- to take only one year as an
example -- AIOC paid Iran royalties or rent of £10
million in 1949, compared with £28 million paid in tax
on profit alone to the British treasury.
In 1950, following the Shah's visit to the United
States, where he held talks with President Truman and
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the `Americans` began
to display an increased interest in the Iranian oil
industry. A contingent of oil experts, businessmen and
technicians visited Iran, and began to lay the
`powder-trail` for a political explosion which was to
take place less than twelve months later.
By making it widely known how much more generously
they treated their partners in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela
and elsewhere, an incendiary atmosphere was thus
created as AIOC began negotiating for a further
renewal of its contract. In the wildly confusing
situation that ensued, all likelihood suggests, that
it was the British who were initially instrumental in
persuading the Shah to appoint the army
chief-of-staff, Ali Razmara, as prime minister,
charged with the task of handling these negotiations.
However, typically, the British were soon conducting a
furious campaign of character-assassina tion against
Razmara, while at the same time, the Americans sought
to bolster his regime with aid and by upgrading their
own embassy as a visual display of sincerity. This
little drama within a drama ended suddenly, and
murderously when Razmara was assassinated, supposedly
as a warning to any politician who dared to frustrate
the growing demand for nationalization of the oil
industry.
The killing was said to have been carried out by the `Fedayen
of Islam` (Martyrs for Islam), but it was generally
believed, and was undoubtedly the case, that orders
for the assassination had come from the British by way
of one of their former employees. But the question why
begs asking? A draft bill for the renewal of the
agreement with AIOC, introduced by Gen. Razmara, was
defeated and a few weeks later, another bill
introduced by Dr. Mohammad Mussadeq, [4]nationalizing
the oil industry, was passed. Mussadeq was then
appointed prime minister and Iran found itself
involved in a titanic struggle with the ever furtive
and treacherous British at the World Court and the
United Nations. A great British company with many
years of experience in Iran evidently had no intention
of surrendering without a struggle.
Writes Amir Taheri: "That the United States wanted
Mussadeq to succeed was demonstrated by the increase
in American aid from $500,000 in 1950 to nearly $24
million two years later." [19] However, if the
Iranians expected the Americans to help them to
re-establish the oil industry on a national basis,
they were soon to be disappointed, for American policy
was to be dictated by considerations of a kind wholly
inaccessible to the scrutiny of ordinary politicians
and journalists. Whether, therefore, it was the
Rothschild British or the Rockefeller Americans who
were responsible for the small army revolt which
dislodged Mussadeq has continued to this day to be a
debatable question in Iran.
As a sincere nationalist politician enjoying much
support from the religious class, himself being a
practising Muslim, Mussadeq had performed the task
required of him and had now to be removed. The
Americans, therefore, joined willingly enough in the
world-wide champaign, engineered by the British, to
make it impossible for the Iranians to make a go of
their nationalized oil industry. In the ensuing
turmoil the shah hurriedly left the country, and as
quickly returned after order had been established by
the army.
The Point 4 Plan:
The Iranians may have found a key to the riddle of one
of the most troubling periods in their much-troubled
history in something that happened in Washington in
1949. This was a speech by Mr. Truman in Congress
inaugurating his first full term as President, in
which he unveiled a grandiose plan to "save the world
from Communism" (so soon after America had saved the
Soviet Union from Hitler!). This plan proclaimed a
"bold new program for underdeveloped areas," a program
"to greatly increase the industrial activity in other
nations" and "to raise substantially their standards
of living." The executors and agents of this plan,
which came to be known as `Point 4` and Agency for
International Development" or AID, were soon
afterwards pressing for American assistance and advice
on all the so-called `underdeveloped` countries,
including Iran. What President Truman had presented,
as we now can see more clearly, was the prefiguration
of a new global financial imperialism whose primary
purpose would be to dismantle and dislodge all the
national economic imperialisms of the preceding 150
years.
A Washington report at the time said that American
officials Concerned with President Truman's "Point 4"
were working to the principle of "a new type of
benevolent imperialism designed to spread prosperity
without exacerbating political nationalism. " Put more
simply; if the project was initiated, "American
nationals will serve on the governmental as well as
the technical level in the politically independent
countries concerned." Although seen in many quarters
as being a disturbing innovation with regards to Asia
and Africa, in Washington, it was to be regarded as
only an extension of a system which was already in
operation in Latin America.
Following President Truman's speech, former London
Times foreign correspondent Douglas Reed wrote that he
had a strong feeling that he had read it all before
somewhere. And so it turned out he had, in a book by
Earl Browder, leader of the American Communist Party,
entitled ` Tehran, Our Path in War and Peace.` In
Browder's words: "Our government can create a series
of giant industrial development corporations, each in
partnership with some other government or group of
governments, and set them to work upon large-scale
plans of rail-road and highway building, agricultural
and industrial development, and all-round
modernization in all the devastated and undeveloped
areas of the world. Closely related socially,
economically and politically with Africa are the Near
Eastern countries of Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria,
Lebanon, Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Here also a broad
program of economic development is called for."
Significantly, it was a capitalist America and not a
Communist Soviet Union which the Communist Party boss
called on to undertake this ambitious program of
financial and economic imperialism. Douglas Reed could
only marvel: "There must be in America under President
Truman, as under President Roosevelt, some group or
force strong or persuasive enough to sell Communist
aims to political leaders and simultaneously to
convince them that these will stop Communism."
And it is to the same `hidden` source must be traced
the true intentions of the architects of American
state policy both during and after WWII, as being
entirely distinct from that policy as publicly stated;
namely, the promotion of two causes that were never
publicly declared, but simply came to pass: the
unhindered advance of the Red Army into the heartland
of Europe and to the Pacific coast of Asia, and the
continuous pouring of billions of financial aid every
year into the then-new state of Israel.
Grand Design and Counter-Revolution:
The Ayatollah Khomeini's [5]`angry young men` who
seized the American embassy after the revolution, did
not fail to notice that many of the most telling
policy directives from the State Department in
Washington failed to tally with reports and
interpretations from those men on the spot, who
afterwards had to bear the full impassioned brunt of
Iranian animosity. Members of the American embassy in
Tehran, says Taheri, were led to understand that they
should not report what they saw but, rather what
Washington wanted them to report. What this meant was
that a grand strategy and system of tactics were being
implemented to which only a small inner core of
policy-makers at the top were privy, creating an
environment in which deeply clandestine purposes were
heavily masked with an ostentation of innocent and
benevolent intentions. The effect was an utterly
baffling mélange of contradictory utterances and
actions. As Taheri put it:
"The behind-the-scenes drama enacted over more than
eight years in Tehran, Washington, Jerusalem, London,
Cairo and a dozen other cities reflected the realities
of a secret world which obeyed few rules either of
international conduct or of individual morality. It is
in this broader context that the Iran-gate fiasco
might be properly understood."
This `viper's nest` of intrigue outside Iran had its
own parallels inside the country. In the aftermath of
the Revolution, all Free-masonic Lodges in Iran were
closed, and their archives seized, confirming what
many had suspected. Many of them were controlled by
Jews or Baha'is[6] of Jewish origin, providing another
channel of secret communication with Israel and
Zionism in general.
So, how did the American Communist Party leader come
to present in broad outline an ambitious program for
Third World development, to be undertaken later at
great cost by the United States and a wide network of
international agencies? Another question: How did it
happen, and how was it possible, for Armand Hammer,
son of Julius Hammer, one of the founders of the
American Communist Party, to proceed to Russia
immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and begin
at once to organize a massive transfer of finance,
industrial equipment and technology from the
capitalist West to its supposed enemy, the Communist
East?
The short answer to both questions will be found in
what the German historian Oswald Spengler wrote
immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution: "There is
no proletarian movement, not even a Communist one,
which does not operate in the interest of money, in
the direction indicated by money and for the period
permitted by money, and all this without the idealist
in its ranks having the slightest suspicion of the
fact."
Those who have penetrated the mystery of the strangely
ambivalent relationship of high finance and Communism
will not be surprised to learn that the Soviet Union
supported the Shah to the end, and that articles in
Pravda about events in Iran were almost exactly the
same in tone and content as those in the New York
Times.
If the unfolding history of our century can be said to
be the product of an alliance of money and intellect,
in the service of `Magical Forces.` (The Luciferian
Conspiracy), it was the role of Earl Browder and very
many of his kind, only a few of them to be identified
as Communists, to take care of the intellectual half
of this alliance. Writes Professor Hamid Algar:
"The return of the shah in 1953 inaugurated the
intense period of a quarter of a century of
unprecedented massacre and oppression, the intensive
exploitation of the resources of the Iranian people by
the imperialism of the East and West, the Western camp
being headed then by the United States rather than
Britain."
This then was the new imperialism, `American` and
Israeli in appearance but international and
`cosmopolitan` in character, drawing into its orbit
power-wielding elements from all the previous national
imperialisms, financial, political and intellectual.
The Iranian oil industry, hitherto a British monopoly,
was thus `internationalized, ` the nominal national
ownership of it left intact but its management
entrusted to a consortium owned by AIOC, renamed
British Petroleum (40 per cent), eight United States
oil trusts (40 per cent), Shell (14 per cent) and
French Petroleum (6 per cent).
The Great Satan:
We must now try to make some sense out of the
phantasmagoria of confused and seemingly contradictory
facts which emerged in the struggle between the Shah
and his people that was to ensue.
The thrust of the Iranian struggle following World War
II can be seen in the broadest terms as being a
confrontation of mutually antagonistic hierarchies of
ideas, values and vortices of power, actual or
potential, the one belonging to the West and the other
to the East, the one having modern America as its
grand symbol of human progress and welfare, and the
other regarding America as the arch-symbol of
political illegitimacy, `The Great Satan.` And the
Shah, because he was unable imagine any form of future
for Iran except one modelled on the industrialized
West, and because he, too, regarded his country's
religious class as the great obstacle to progress in
that direction, allowed himself to become, in every
way, the puppet of the foreign powers being amassed by
the Illuminists.
An assortment of ideological forces came into
existence after 1953 intended to combat the
dictatorship of the Shah and his subservience to the
foreign powers; but behind all of them, a religious
influence was increasingly becoming discernible; so
much so, that even socialism, a secular ideology
borrowed from the West, reappeared in Iran as "The
Movement of God-fearing Socialists." This increase in
religious influence came to a `head` in 1963 with the
sudden emergence of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was to
play a role in the revolution resembling I some
ways,if only superficially that of the Prophet
Muhammad (SAW) in the seventh century, combining in a
remarkable way the functions of a religious and
secular leader.
The Shah's increasing determination to enforce his
will on the Iranian population, was met with a
corresponding increase in the power and influence of a
religious class which symbolized the will and instinct
of the mass of the people. The Shah's power to enforce
his will was enormously increased by:
1) an increase in the amount of money at his disposal
as oil production was resumed, and again as the price
of oil rocketed;
And;
2) close cooperation with the external power,
especially with its Israeli component, in the
sophisticated use of secret police and prisons as
instruments of terror and compulsion.
After 1963, even moderate opposition would result in
either forced exile, imprisonment, torture and even
murder, and the army was utilized to crush mass
demonstrations mounted by the Ulama[7] in Tehran and
other cities, when thousands of people were killed. In
1975 the director of Amnesty Internationals British
section described Iran as the "world leader" in
torture, executions after sham trials, and widespread
political imprisonment. The cutting edge of the power
which the Shah was able to bring to exert on his
internal opponents was almost entirely provided by the
United States and Israel; these were in reality
however, never really separate entities in this
regard, but only two aspects of one and the same
world-revolutionary force.
The facts prove that American and Israeli influence
were at all times inseparable. Prof. Algar says that
after the coup of 1953, which ousted Mussadeq, there
was cooperation at all levels, especially in
intelligence and security work. He adds:
"After a certain point it appears that the task of
staffing the Savak was taken over by Mossad, the
Israeli security, from the CIA although the CIA always
retained the right of supervision over the operations
of Savak. I know of many people who report having been
interrogated and tortured by Israelis while in the
custody of Savak." Algar continues: "There was
overwhelming similarity between the two of utter
dependence on the United States. Israel is hardly
independent of the United States-or, rather, the
matters are the reverse, Israel certainly commands
more votes in the Senate than does the White House."
Corrupting Power: "Lie In Peace Cyrus For We Are
Awake."
The career of Shah Mohammad Reza [8]illustrates to
perfection Lord Acton's maxim that "power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely." Through the
process of unrestrained personal ambition the Shah
became wholly separated from his own people- the
corruption of leadership in its ultimate form. He
believed in what he was doing, enjoyed the support of
the greatest concentration of power outside his own
country, and was able to draw from his oil industry so
much wealth that he needed nothing from his people
except their utter submission.
From 1970 he was even able to expand his influence
abroad by giving away vast quantities of money, having
raised his own country to a position of power and
influence unprecedented in centuries. Writes Taheri:
"Between 1968 and 1978 Iran earned more than $100,000
million from oil exports. More than 10 percent of that
was used in the form of loans or outright gifts to
friendly countries. The United Kingdom received from
$1,200 million in loans ... In West Germany Iran
purchased substantial shares in Krupps and Benz as a
means of saving them from financial difficulties. ..
More than seven hundred "key personalities" in some 30
countries were on the secret Iranian payroll from 1979
onwards."
Iran's huge arms expenditure in the wake of the
1973-74 oil-price rise helped Western economies to
avoid recession. At the same time, under the
Nixon-Kissinger doctrine [9], Iran was seen as the
regional power that would defend Western interests and
act as policeman in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
The Shah had assigned to himself a role in history
comparable, in his imagination, only with that of the
founder of the Persian Empire in 600 BC. Of this he
informed the world in October 1971 when, flanked by
his generals, he presented himself before the tomb of
that great monarch, now little more than a pile of
stones in a vast arid plain, and ceremoniously read a
eulogy which began with the words: "Lie in peace,
Cyrus, for we are awake!" This was followed by a party
among the grandiose ruins at Persepolis attended by
more than five hundred dignitaries, including kings,
presidents and prime ministers from sixty countries.
All this, as the shah remarked at the time, was
intended to mark "the rebirth of the Persian Empire
and Iran's return to the forefront of human
experience."
Other products of the Shah's megalomania were the
proposed 1,200-acre Shahestan-e- Pahlavi architectural
extravaganza at Tehran and 20 planned nuclear power
plants. This kind of development favoured Western
economics and Western contractors who shared the
pickings with a new class of Iranian monopolists and
technocrats, but did little or nothing for the Iranian
economy as a whole. Carried away by this dream of
national greatness, what the Shah seemed unable to
understand was that the role he had assigned to
himself was wholly subordinate to another which had
been assigned to him by those who were encouraging him
in his ambitions. In other words, that the Iranian
national drama, so impressive when viewed separately,
was intended to be no more than an episode in a vastly
bigger world-historical drama.
So, it is the motivational system of the likes of
Henry Kissinger - during most of the 1970s the Shah's
warmest `friend` and most trusted adviser -- that
calls for some consideration. How and for what purpose
were these powerful individuals trying to use the
Shah? A short but inadequate answer is that the new
international cosmopolitan imperialism, spearheaded by
Israel, had come to regard the Arab world and its
Islamic religions as being by far the greatest
hindrance to the attainment of its great objective, a
one-world government which it could control at all
levels; and Iran, with its considerable non-Arabic
population and huge oil wealth, was seen as a possible
countervailing force which could be used against the
Arab world.
The first step was to make Israel virtually synonymous
with America in terms of foreign support in all
fields, and then, by steady progression, provide the
Shah with a means of suppressing all internal
opposition. In fact, the Shah's security forces were
virtually taken over by the Israelis and reinforced
with non-Islamic personnel, largely recruited from
non-Muslim population elements, especially the Bahais,
largely people of Jewish descent no longer practising
the Jewish religion. This gave the Shah an instrument
which could be used with the utmost ruthlessness
against the population and against the religious class
in particular.
The commanding importance attached to Iran as a piece
on the chequerboard of global power politics was
emphasized shortly after the fall of the Shah when
support from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain
was given to Iraq, and when the most flagrant
violations of international law by Iraq, including the
first attacks on neutral shipping, and even the use of
poison gas, were disregarded or excused. The external
powers, the USSR included, also doggedly refused to
name Iraq as the aggressor. Then when it had become
clear that Iraq could not win, the combined efforts of
the external powers had to be used to prevent an
Iranian victory -- an exercise which eventually called
for direct American military action in the Persian
gulf.
The `Mind`field:
The Iranian struggle was won and lost on the
battleground of the mind. All the ideas which the Shah
could muster in favour of the visible benefits of the
Western social model, supported with a maximum
application of force and terror, proved to be no match
for a system of ideas, promoted by the Mullahs, which
united the people as never before and infused them
with death-defying courage. This was something the
Shah could never understand: an invincible unity of
the people which embraced old and young, uneducated
and educated, including even those who had received
their schooling in the West. Thus, we learn that the
Shah's last visit to Washington at the invitation of
President Carter in November 1977, was marred by
unprecedented demonstrations by Iranian students, and
that the tear-gas used by the police drifted across
the White House lawns and caused the Shah to shed a
few tears.
For the purpose of study and discussion, this
victorious system of ideas can be considered under two
headings: populism and religion. The use of the word
populism, however, calls for an explanatory note: it
means what democracy used to mean and is still assumed
to mean -- namely, government by the people, direct or
representative. However, since the word democracy is
now almost universally applied to states which are not
democracies as defined in the dictionaries, it can
only be said to have ceased to be "legal tender."
The nations of the West are, in fact, plutocracies, or
special-interest oligarchies, wearing many of the
trappings of democracy -- political parties, the
ballot box, etc. As Thomas Jefferson is quoted as
having said, "Democracy; two wolves and a sheep
discussing what's for dinner."
All populist movements have their origin in a deeply
rooted instinct, a social or political instinct, which
prompts people to react negatively to any rule which,
judged by the results produced, they do not feel to be
truly their own. Primitive societies which have
endured down the ages can be regarded as models of
legitimate rule and an example to the huge
sophisticated societies of the modern world, in which
the factor of legitimacy has become wholly absent. The
actual system matters very little: it could be a
monarchy, or a dictatorship, or an oligarchy or a
conventional democracy; there is no system of rule
which has not been known to work to the satisfaction
of those ruled; any system acceptable provided that it
is implemented by those who can be regarded as the
legitimate nominees of those ruled, leaders who are
sensitive to the feelings, values, beliefs and group
memories of the ruled.
Amir Taheri, a West-oriented Iranian journalist and no
friend of the mullahs, says of the shah in 1976: "He
did not need the people for their votes in a general
election. He was there by divine right and
parliamentary elections, organized every four years,
were little more than ritualistic exercises in
futility." And the Shah had long since abandoned the
practice of travelling around the country to make
direct contact with his people.
Other populist resistance movements in Iran since
before the turn of the century, some of them modelled
on similar movements in the West, were all influenced
in some degree by the religious class, but the one
that finally triumphed was religious to its core,
inspired by a great religious leader and organized and
managed throughout by the Ulama. From all of which it
would seem to follow that for the West, with all its
illusionary democracies and its Christian church
fallen into disarray and demoralization, there should
be much to learn from the role of religion as a
mobilizer of mass political action, and about politics
in general. However, any consideration. Religion:
Religion can be said to have two main aspects:
personal and social. Religion can be a strictly
personal phenomenon, joined to or wholly independent
of any prevailing orthodoxy or doctrine. A sound
attitude towards the totality of existence, a
submission of the will to a system of cosmic law
external to and superior to the intellect, no matter
how such an attitude may have been acquired, is all
that is needed for what C.G. Jung describes as "a
religious attitude to life," or state of psychic
well-being. For most people at all times, a taught
religion has provided the easiest access to such an
attitude, for which the only proof needed is that it
works.
Religion can, therefore, also be a social phenomenon,
a system of consensus belief having its origin in some
prophet and offering spiritual security and some
measure of creative release to an entire community,
even to an epoch. Consensus religions, like all other
human artefacts, are exposed to the vicissitudes of
time and change and thus are liable to lose some of
their pristine efficacy, their power to fulfil the
purpose for which they came into existence.
So, what is the purpose of a consensus religion, if
any, apart from that of helping the individual to find
psychic orientation?
One simple but of course insufficient answer is that a
consensus religion serves as a repository of values
and a system of tested knowledge in respect of what is
`right` and `wrong` in human relations. This implies
that certain cosmic laws which are relative to what
people do, or what is done to them, are somewhere
encoded in human nature, not as ready-made ideas, but
only as instinctual intimations which must then be
conceptualized and verbalized as ideas capable of
being communicated and discussed. These we categorize
as being `moral` or `metaphysical` laws of a most
volatile and elusive kind which are easily lost and
are continually having to be rediscovered reinforced,
consolidated and verbalized anew. And it is precisely
these laws which if observed and applied in whatever
form, keep a society as it were `on course,`
preserving it against disintegration and disorder;
more simply put, providing it's moral compass.
Islam And Christianity:
Only blind prejudice can prevent anyone who has gone
to the trouble of studying even a summary of the
contents of the Quran[11]from realising that the
Prophet Muhammad (SAW) [10]was a moral genius. A man
who, under pressure of a personal crisis of the mind,
gained a quite extraordinary insight into those
metaphysical laws, so hard to grasp, which prevail
inexorably inside the human mind and in human
relations. And it was the circumstances then
prevailing that made it possible, even inevitable,
that one man's breakthrough to a rare state of
enlightenment via divine revelation, would expand
quickly into a consensus religion destined to spread
very quickly over most of the then known world.
Muhammad (SAW), like Jesus Christ (SAW) about 600
years earlier, was living in what can be described as
`end times` -- much like conditions present in the
Western world today -- when civilisations, no longer
sufficiently in `tune` with the unalterable realities
of human nature, have begun to disintegrate. Social
existence degenerates into a frantic scramble for
personal survival and advantage as people cease to
find in their social group a sense of shared security
and mutual obligation and duty, and very many begin to
suffer within the recesses of their minds.
What is most significant is that the Church in the
West is disintegrating along with everything else,
compounding rather than counteracting the process of
decline in the West. Here a clear distinction must be
drawn between two aspects of Christianity as a
consensus religion: the Church Extant and the Church
Invisible; the church as a great property-owning and
power-oriented institution and the church in its
nascent form as a message of personal deliverance.
Both Christianity and Islam spring from the same
insights and share with Judaism the same even more
ancient monotheistic symbolism. The Quran says: "Jesus
the Messiah, the son of Mary, was a Messenger of God,
His word which He placed in Mary, and His spirit"
(IV.171). There was, and remains therefore, no
fundamental antagonism between Islam and Christianity.
The major difference between the two religions is that
Islam did not create a church or its equivalent, and
that the Christian Church, obedient to the laws of
worldly growth, was everywhere inclined to make common
cause with centres of worldly power. The failure of
the church in the West is summed up in Balzac's
trenchant remark that "there can be no universal
application of Christianity until the money problem
has been solved." Alas, the church has never been at
odds for long with "Caesar" in the ultimate form as
concentrated financial power.
It is mainly for this reason that Islam, with its
determined prohibition of usury, is now seen as a
major threat to the Illuminati structure of power in
the West, challenging the very moral foundations on
which it has been raised. The code of conduct, both
for rulers and ruled, explicit in Islam's Sharia, was
once largely implicit in Christianity' s basic
teaching ("Do unto others as you would be done by").
The main difference between the two faiths arose out
of the fact that Muhammad (SAW) was compelled by the
circumstances of his time to become a political
leader, administrator and soldier, as well as
religious leader. The meanings belonging to "a kingdom
not of this world" were thus brought into close
relationship with meanings more directly relevant to
the unavoidable actualities of "this world."
Perhaps the most important aspect of all, when taken
in the context of the present world situation, is that
Islam presents in clear outline the moral
configuration of Economic Man: worker, owner, dealer
in the products of labour, his duties, obligations and
rights. The injunction on the subject of usury may not
have seemed all that important at the time when few,
if any, of the Prophet's followers might have been
interested in the lending of money. But, today, usury
is the linchpin without which the greatest
concentration of diabolical worldly power ever seen
would simply collapse, and therein lies our only hope
for earthly salvation.
Centuries of antagonism between the Christian and
Muslim worlds can be traced to a great variety of
causes, but one of its main effects, as we can now see
more plainly, was that of preventing the people of the
West from recognizing and getting to grips with a
corrupting principle which had been planted in their
midst; USURY!
The Shia:
For an explanation of the Iranian Revolution, it is
not Islam in general but a particular version of it
called Shi'ism [12]that needs to be more closely
examined, a kind of fundamentalism which, besides
setting Iran fiercely at odds with the Western world,
has had the effect of driving Iran into isolation,
separated also from the rest of the Islamic world.
Professor Algar writes:
"The revolution in Iran and the foundation of the
Islamic Republic is the culmination of a series of
events that began in the sixteenth century of the
Christian era with the adherence of the majority of
the Iranian people to the Shi'i school of thought in
Islam. Indeed, one of the important factors that sets
the Iranian Revolution apart from all the other
revolutionary upheavals of the present century is its
deep roots in the historical past."
What has happened can be stated in a few words:
Shi'ism has presented in sharper and clearer outlines
the religious configurations of what we might call
`Political Man.` This has entailed the politicization
of the Ulama and its involvement in public affairs to
a degree unequalled anywhere outside Iran. The secular
leaders of the other Islamic states, many in thrall to
the same Luciferian forces, at work here in the West,
view what happened in Iran as a usurpation by the
religious class that could place their own corrupted
regimes in danger. But this involvement in politics by
the Muslim clerics has deep roots in history and is
supported with considerable scholarship. Writes Prod
Algar:
"With the hindsight provided by the Islamic
Revolution, it will be more appropriate to write the
Iranian history of the past three or four centuries
not so much in terms of dynasties as in terms of the
development of the class of Iranian ulama. Dynasties
have come and gone, leaving in many cases little more
than a few artefacts behind to account for their
existence. but there has been a continuing development
of the class of Shi'i Ulama in Iran which has been
totally without parallel elsewhere in the Islamic
world."
Prof. Algar explains briefly how the burdens of state
came to be placed on the shoulders of the religious
scholars and how they learned to cope:
"With the decline of the Safavid dynasty in 1724, a
period of anarchy began in Iran. At one point within
the 18th century we find no fewer than 13 different
contestants for the throne doing battle with each
other. The total disintegration of the political
authority accelerated the process of divorce between
the religious institution and the monarchy. We can say
that in the absence of an effective centralized
monarchy throughout the 18th century the ulama came in
a practical fashion ... to assume the role of local
governors, arbitrators of disputes, executors at law
and so forth."
This experience over an extended time period produced
a change in Shi'ism; for there had to be some change
in theory and scholarship to accommodate an expanded
range of duty and mental activity. And so a great
debate arose about the duties of the religious
scholar, whether he should confine himself to the
sifting of the teachings of the Prophet and its
interpretations, or whether it was permissible for him
to engage in independent reasoning in respect of legal
questions. The first position acquired the Arabic name
akhbari and the other the usuli.
It would be difficult indeed to exaggerate the
profundity and far-ranging implication of this debate;
the question at issue is whether a consensus religion
can be a `total way of life` for any society unless
its scholars and teachers are also experts in
jurisprudence and other affairs of state and have been
trained to exercise their intellects in secular as
well as religious matters, thereby acquiring
competence to monitor the performance of the rulers.
Were it not for the triumph of the usuli position in
the 18th century, the religious scholars would have
been reduced to an extremely marginal position in
society and the Iranian Revolution of 1978 would have
been impossible. The whole significance of the
Ayatollah Khomeini arises from the fact that he was
the living embodiment of this activist tradition, the
fruition of long years of political, spiritual and
intellectual development.
As the mass of the Iranian population was
instinctively repelled by the conditions of existence
created in the name of Westernisation and progress,
and after the failure of many attempts by various
popular movements, like Mussadeq's National Front, to
place some curbs on the Shah's dictatorial power, all
turned to the Ulama and accepted it unreservedly as
the sole legitimate authority and thereafter responded
unquestioningly to its commands. Khomeini could,
therefore, feel secure in the knowledge that he had
the mass of the population firmly behind him when
early in 1963 he virtually launched the revolution
with a series of public declarations at Qum, in which
he accused the Shah of having violated the
constitution and the oath he took when enthroned that
he would protect Islam.
He further attacked the Shah for his subordination to
foreign powers, naming the United States and Israel,
whom he associated with political and imperialist
Zionism. The secret police `Savak` had permitted some
qualified criticism of America but had always
rigorously enforced the rule that not even the name of
Israel must ever be mentioned in public discussion.
After one of these addresses, Khomeini's centre at Qum
was stormed by paratroopers and Savak members, a
number of people were killed and the Ayatollah
arrested. Released a few days later, he continued to
attack the Shah, with the result that there followed
on June 5th 1963 a vast uprising in many Iranian
cities. This was repressed with great force and it was
estimated that within a few days at least 15,000
people were killed in the shooting ordered by the
shah. Khomeini was arrested again and sent into exile
in Turkey, whence he moved later to Iraq and then to
Paris.
Two features of the ensuing revolution which
culminated in the final explosion of public anger
towards the end of 1978 call for special notice. The
more important of these was the factor of martyrdom,
that is resistance of a kind undeterred by the fear of
death. The other was the communications factor, the
apparent ease with which the leader of the revolution,
even from distant Paris, could reach a widely
distributed population with information and
instruction.
The communications factor is more easily explained:
the Ulama represented a nationwide communications
network with its mosques and Madrassas (religious
schools), its Mullahs and its students, vastly
expanded and expedited by two products of modern
technology, the telephone and the tape recorder. A
declaration by the ayatollah, spoken into a telephone
in Paris, would be recorded in Tehran or some other
Iranian city, copied and transcribed and retransmitted
to other parts of the country, where the process would
be repeated until within a few hours it would have
reached even small and widely separated villages.
All this was made possible however, only by reason of
the accumulated learning and preparatory work of four
centuries which had equipped the Ulama for such a
role, so that all knew exactly what they were expected
to do and why, a rare condition in any society. This
communications system, wholly dependent on the zealous
participation of thousands of individuals, proved in
the end to be more than a match for a powerful press,
radio and television, all vehemently supportive of the
Shah's regime. All that needs to be said about the
highly abstruse martyrdom factor is that in Shi'ism
the concept has been more thoroughly elaborated as a
main component of the Islamic faith. It is something
ever present in the consciousness of the Iranians.
Hence the Shi'i maxim: "Every day is Ashura and every
place is Karbala" - referring to the martyrdom of the
Imam Hussain.
It was this factor that gave to mass political action
in Iran, especially throughout 1978, a
`diamond-hardness` that was proof against all the
ruthless and sophisticated physical force which the
Shah and his close Israeli ally could mount against
it. During the first days of December 1978, a large
number of people appeared in the streets of Tehran and
other cities wearing their shrouds, prepared for
martyrdom and advancing unarmed on the rows of machine
guns ready to be used to deadly effect.
Notwithstanding the part in the drama played by the
intelligence agencies of the `western` powers, and the
massive, if hidden, and apparently prejudicial (to
their own interests) financing by the International
Bankers, (as was the case with the Russian revolution)
by no other means could the people of Iran have
overthrown one of the 20th century's most powerful and
ruthless tyrants.
In Part Seven, we will follow the `money trail` up to
the present day and hopefully show that a solution to
our planet's woes is possible, if people of good heart
and true faith will renounce petty doctrinal
differences, come together and cease to give, give,
give to the great force of evil which stalks our
world, everything it wants to swallow.
Comments to: http://righteousall iance.blogspot. com/
Reference Notes:
1] http://sandiego. indymedia. org/media/
2006/10/119975. pdf Tragedy And Hope
2] http://www.oldameri cancentury. org/pnac. htm
3] FrtizSpringmeier : http://www.bibliote capleyades.
net/bloodlines/ index.htm
4] http://www.mohammad mossadegh. com/biography/
5] http://www.irancham ber.com/history/ rkhomeini/
ayatollah_ khomeini. php
6] http://www.bahai. org/
7] http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Ulema
8] http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Mohammad_
Reza_Pahlavi
9] By the last years of the Nixon administration, it
had become clear that it was the Third World that
remained the most volatile and dangerous source of
world instability. Central to the Nixon-Kissinger
policy toward the Third World was the effort to
maintain a stable status quo without involving the
United States too deeply in local disputes. In 1969
and 1970, in response to the height of the Vietnam
War, the President laid out the elements of what
became known as the Nixon Doctrine, by which the
United States would "participate in the defense and
development of allies and friends" but would leave the
"basic responsibility" for the future of those
"friends" to the nations themselves. The Nixon
Doctrine signified a growing contempt by the U.S.
government for the United Nations, where
underdeveloped nations were gaining influence through
their sheer numbers, and increasing support to
authoritarian regimes attempting to withstand popular
challenges from within. In the 1970s, for example, the
CIA poured substantial funds into Chile to help
support the established government against a Marxist
challenge. When the Marxist candidate for president,
Salvador Allende, came to power through free
elections, the United States began funneling more
money to opposition forces to help "destabilize" the
new government. In 1973, a U.S.-backed military junta
seized power from Allende. The new, repressive regime
of General Augusto Pinochet received warm approval and
increased military and economic assistance from the
United States as an anti-Communist ally. Democracy was
finally re-established in Chile in 1989.
10] http://www.islamweb .net/ver2/ archive/index2.
php?vPart= 74&startno= 1&thelang= E
11] http://www.quranexp lorer.com/ quran/
12] http://www.islamfor today.com/ shia.htm
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