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