vildemose

IRI's preocupation with death has led Robert Fisk to call Iran an infantile necrocracy in his essay on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution

Excerpts:

....  crimson tide overflowed the fountain at the great cemetery of Behesht Zahra – close to where the great man himself now lies – and we would later watch corpses coming back by the hundred. I think the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq was final proof of the revolution. Iran did not, as the US hoped, fall to pieces, but it entered a kind of stasis, a sort of childishness from which it never awoke. The French word infantilism may be closest. It was government for and by the dead. Iran had become a necrocracy.

There were many who saw what was happening. Ayatollah Taleghani, for instance, was highly critical of Khomeini's auto-theocracy, arguing that even socialists had suffered martyrs in the revolution, that they, too, should be embraced by the revolution's children. But it was not to be. When Mohammad Khatami, a genuinely good and civil man, tried to change the legacy of the now-dead Khomeini, he was defeated because he would not let his supporters die in the streets of Tehran. And so this week, it is his successor, the childish President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his love for all things nuclear – or maybe not all, we shall see – who represents this great nation, a boy clutching power rather than a titan, prattling on at Holocaust "conferences" and making small talk with children.

The real test for Iran, of course, is how it casts itself adrift from this ghostly regime. It's not that the priests are fools – that was a mistake Carter made – but that running a modern, powerful nation takes more than a degree in Islamic jurisprudence. Foreign affairs is where the Iranian revolution has always failed. It has consistently underestimated – or overestimated –

So, what's the real motivation behind such a childish and vile propaganda? I think Paymaneh Amiri explains in her essay, "Bones Really matter" the best.

IRI Celebrates the dead to silence the living.