Iran and Nazi Germany – lessons from the past

The League of Nation during the 1920s and 1930s refused to act to secure liberty and peace through the use of judicious force and pre-emption against the fascist powers. The result? 70 million dead during World War II including 6 million Jews and 28 million Russians. During the Cold War only the US stood against the evil and global destabilizing threat of Soviet Russia. Today we witness the League’s successor the United [or more appropriately Useless] Nations Organization [UNO] doing little to eliminate the rise of a nuclear Iran, fascist Islam’s assault on civilization; and terrorist atrocity across the world including the barbarity inside Iraq which the UN fled from in August 2004.  including over 15 years the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Christians (no one cares about that); sex slaves and piles of dead Moslems and non-Moslems.

Since 1945 internationalism, embodied in the UNO; extreme feminism; all manners of ‘caring and concern’; and endless twaddle about ‘rights’ and ‘dialogue’, has created a nervous, ninny culture in the West, so terrified, corrupted and childish that a bold fascism yelling into its collective face is completely ignored. Much like the League did with Nazi Germany, we have the UNO and the chattering post-modern EU-socialist elite determined to do nothing against Iran. If no pre-emptive action is instigated against Iran we will witness another bloody Middle East war, one perhaps waged using nuclear weapons. Indeed Iran is quite similar to the fascist powers that rose up during the 1920s and 1930s.

As a happy hobbyist of history, and investigator [amongst other issues] of fascism, I would suggest that there exist 10 key elements that define a fascist state. Iran fits them all perfectly, as did of course the Nazi and Soviet states.

1. Mysticism as a religion:
The first pillar is the enthronement of power in an executive with ultimately mystical justifications for its rule. Whether the executive is singular, as with the Nazis, or plural, as in the USSR after Stalin and Iran after Khomeini, is irrelevant. The justification for its rule is some set of propositions, be they Marxist theory, Nazi mythology, or Islamic theology, that are by their nature not subject to empirical verification or falsification. In contrast, a democratic leader claims to rule because he enjoys the support of the people, and a monarch because he is the heir of the dynasty, both verifiable facts that can potentially be disproved.

2. Ideology as the only reality
The second pillar is the proclamation that the regime embodies the absolute good as such, and that its ideology is the only possible fundamental truth. The ideology is hermetic, and anyone who doesn't believe it, doesn't not simply because they are mistaken, but because they are a bad person: a non-Aryan, a bourgeois, an infidel. All totalitarian states claim their ideology is world-applicable and gives them the right to subdue others. Iran has tried to export its ideology to other Moslem countries, but with the exception of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, whose loyalty is bought with a gravy train of guns, it has failed. It has tried to weld together Moslem fundamentalists in other countries into a worldwide fundamentalist movement, but as Stalin found with Tito and Mao, totalitarian ideologies make weak glue. It does not even get along with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which should be its ideological soul mate.

3. Jihad and War
The third pillar is war. War follows from the demand to export ideology. It provides the excuse to regiment society to the degree totalitarianism requires. It enables the regime to equate loyalty to the nation with obedience to the regime. It justifies the regime's inevitable failure to deliver on its promised domestic agenda. Iran has been promoting world wide jihad against the US and civilization. It funds, arms, and abets terror across the globe distributing all manners of aid to further the view of fascist Islam and the establishment of a world wide caliphate, with its capital centered of course in Teheran.

4. A terror state
The fourth pillar is terror. In Iran, this has taken the form of what are called "chain assassinations" of dissident intellectuals and other opposition figures. Those who are not killed are jailed or exiled. Iran has a plethora of bodies exercising terror, including the Islamic Guard Corps, the Ministry of Information, and the Secret Police.

5. Co-opting Democracy
The fifth pillar is the attempt to milk democratic legitimacy without actually sharing any power. Naturally, this is impossible, but the totalitarian mind always believes that force can square the circle. Democracy is such a strong idea that even totalitarian states must somehow at least co-opt the democratic impulse. It is little known, but the Soviet Union had regular and meaningless elections. The entire Nazi state was legally based on the Enabling Law passed by the democratically-elected Reichstag in 1933. The mullahs have always allowed a certain amount of democracy, which they would like to be the sheep-like expression of agreement by a docile populace. However the President and his religious council wield all the power and do as they please.

6. Economic control/autarky
The sixth pillar is control of the economy. The Soviets were communist, the Nazis had private ownership with state control, and Iran has heavily interventionist crony capitalism, plus an odd grab-bag of specifically Islamic economic regulations, such as the employment of women and the charging of interest. Everyone who makes serious money there makes it because of a relationship with the state. Per-capita GNP is less than half what it was under the Shah, despite having had 40 years to grow. A truly independent economic sector that can oppose and defy government power, as in the US, has not been permitted. Control of the economy also includes the pseudo-mobilization of the poor. The mullahs took power with vast promises to the poor of their country, and in the first years of the revolution could use the mob as a battering ram against anything that stood in their way. They have, of course, never delivered on these promises. Hitler and Lenin did similar things, even if people forget the heavy proletarian emphasis of early Nazism.

7. Racism
The seventh pillar is the cultivation of imaginary enemies, which the public must be kept obsessed with. Hitler had the Jews. The Soviets had a demonology ranging from saboteurs to kulaks to American spies. Iran has America and Israel, both countries that were Iranian allies under the Shah and have never done Iran any harm. Indeed Iran denies the existence of the holocaust and has made the elimination of the Anglo-Saxon nations and Israel its major objective.

8. No rights
The eighth pillar is the absence of the rule of law. In non-totalitarian societies, be they democratic or traditionalist monarchies, established law serves as a restraint on those in power. In totalitarian societies, there is in its place the rule of clique, power-play, corruption and brute force.

9. Propaganda
The ninth pillar is indoctrination. Everyone is constantly lectured, by every available means, on how great the regime is. The Nazis, with their sick brilliance and lumpen-populist instincts, were the best at it. The Soviets and the Mullahs have been very unsuccessful in selling to their own people. The mullahs exercise heavy control over Iranian media. They let a little steam out, but they also arrest and kill those who go too far. They can't entirely muzzle the press only because the public is attached to it. As with their use of democracy, their dream is the appearance of openness without the reality. Indoctrination also includes the corruption of education. The Nazis destroyed the finest university system in the world. The Soviet Union accomplished absolutely zero in 70 years of intellectual life outside the hard sciences. The Iranian regime has driven out scholars who wouldn't toe the line, debauched admissions standards to favor pious mediocrities, and gutted curriculums to stuff them with Islamic theology that is about as useful to its students as endless readings from Marx and Engels were at Moscow U.

10. Party domination
The tenth pillar is a parallel state-party apparatus. In democracies, political parties are wispishly insubstantial organizations by the standards of government or corporations. This is because real power is vested in open institutions of government that really wield it and are subject to the restraints imposed by democratic legitimacy. In totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or fundamentalist Iran, they are massive organizations, because the party is the real power and the state its servant. In the Iranian case, the equivalent of the party apparatus includes a vast array of religious institutions and foundations.

I have written that all fascisms eventually fail due to 4 inter-related factors. First the immorality of the regime ensures that the society in question will be internally corrupted. Eventually the people will rise up against an immoral regime and one that militates against life; liberty; and the pursuit of individual self worth. What these people need is help to understand the power of representative governance. Second the economy eventually fails. You cannot ignore supply and demand and price points in any market segment; and certainly not throughout an entire economy. It will simply collapse. Iran is unique in that it holds oil. However the long term price of oil will decline and other supplies are being brought on stream. Third, with a sick economy or one dependent on one commodity, the military will be far weaker than it looks on paper. In Iran’s case they rely, as the Soviets did on Western technology transfer to sustain their armed forces. We should end that immediately. Eventually the dysfunctional Iranian economy will prove to be its military’s undoing.

The fourth factor in fascism’s decline is however the most important. Fascism fails when it is confronted. Its internal failings and inconsistencies will ensure its collapse but you have to fight it. The West needs to confront Iran NOW and not wait until it has a nuclear weapon. After all, can you imagine how history would have changed if Hitler had developed the atomic bomb?