[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[Ramin Parham]

The Miasmal Mist of the Unholy Deceit

Posted on Friday, January 30 @ 00:30:00 EST by ramin
http://www.iraninstitutefordemocracy.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=34

Ramin Parham

www.iraninstitutefordemocracy.org
January 29, 2004
Washington DC

This writing is heavily indebted to an electrician and a novelist.
Two eminent scholars, Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, in a 1997 publication[1], through lengthy computation and sophisticated calculations, attempted to test the “predictive power” of what has come to be known as the “modernization theory”, first laid out by Lipset in 1959 ...
Observing the strong correlation between “affluence” and “democracy”, the researchers asked themselves, if the above theory has any predictive power, then “there must be some level of income at which one can be relatively sure that the country will throw off the dictatorship”. In their concluding remarks, the researchers assert that “one is hard put to find this level”, that “there are no grounds to believe that economic development breeds democracy”; rather, “once established, democracies are likely to die in poor countries and certain to survive in wealthy ones”. Affluence strongly correlates the “survival” of democracy more than it paves the way for its “emergence” …
One eminent electrician, Wei Jingsheng, the most prominent dissident arrested in the brief period of ‘liberalization’ that followed the trial of the “Gang of Four” in communist China, wrote a series of political essays in 1978-1979, the most famous of which entitled the “Fifth Modernization”[2]. There, commenting the communist government’s policy of “four modernizations”, Wei argues that “modernization of any country, whether in the West or in the East, could not occur without democracy”. For this and other writings, Wei was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
25 years have past since the events that marked what has come to be known as the revival of revolutionary Islam: the so-called “Islamic Revolution” of Iran, paramount of “identity regression” and “self-reclusion into the purity of the selfhood of the self”! 25 years have past during which slogans have come, turn by turn, to fulfill their only purpose, that of deception, before waning away in yet another wave of slogans. From the early ones of “classless society” to that of the “cultural revolution”, to those of the “import substitution era” of the “managers of reconstruction”, onto “religious democracy”, slogans have left but vast social spans of poverty, drug addiction, and prostitution in a national context of clinical depression striving for a livelihood in near complete international suspicion if not isolation. Chinese communist did just the same. They even invented “people’s democratic dictatorship” and “thought reform”[3] before they came up, à la Khatami’s “religious democracy”, with “socialist democracy”. The latter comprising three aspects, “democracy within the Communist Party; democracy within the workers and peasants [classes]; and, democracy within the United Patriotic Front”[4]!! The components are democratic while the sum is brutal dictatorship. Eastern algebra! That, the blue-eyed naïve does not apprehend!
“What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us?” asked Aleksandr Solzhenistyn days after his expulsion from the “motherland of socialism” on February the 18th 1974. “Gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home …things have reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children”. “Is there any way out”, he asked his countrymen in a Washington Post article[5].
Our country’s recent history is full of paths not to follow. They are signaled by the “Rex Theatre” in Abadan and the Music stores in Tehran, still fuming, remembrance of times past in inflamed ignorance. “Islamic Republic, not a word less, not a word more”[6], “I will no longer read this paper, Ayandegan”[7], “I am coming, and I will break your pen”[8] …Thus barked Ayatollah Ahab[9] forcing out the monster, forceps in hands. “The Iranian nation, even at a time when part of the country was under the enemy’s occupation and bombings, held the elections firmly and calmly”, paraded a lesser prestidigitator[10] amidst pavane and dancing courtesans. Infamy breeds infamy.
Is the circle closed in damnation? “Maybe something will happen by itself”, wondered the free man through his pen, divine instrument of truth, mortal enemy of deceit. “It will never happen” he warned. Not as long as we, on a daily basis, “acknowledge, extol, and strengthen …the most perceptible of its aspects: lies”[11].
Growing frail and grayish, lies born out of violence, loosing self-confidence, they summon treachery and gluttony as their ally. Effusively rapturous, mediocrity the world around would close rank in ecstasy and enshrine falsehood as “relative truth”. “Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom? Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash”[12]. “Iran generally is more democratic than most of its Arab neighbors, given its relatively smooth presidential and parliamentary elections”[13] …These cattle have more grazing pasture than the ones next door … Thus vomits mediocrity.
But, what is the lifeline of lies? What makes them reproduce and survive where “light”, supposedly, “is”. How can lies camouflage themselves so well? We humans, Iranians and else, are the blood in the veins of lies. “Obedience to lies and daily participation in lies”[14] make lies alive. Blood droplets of lies, stop circulating, and lies will die.
We sewed the rotten cloth of governmental robes and turbans. We glued the blasphemy of “holy slaughter”. We assembled the idiocy of “Gnostic equality as a way of oil-government”. We manufactured the incestuous consent of “non-alignment”, fallacy in falsehood. We dug the abysmal hole of the “world of Islam”, the melting pot of misery. We kneeled in obedience in the face of heresy: “This movement is a movement of the type of the Prophets’ movements, stemming from self-awareness or God-in-self-awareness”[15]. We stripped ourselves to dress the naked lie.
Yesterday is history and tomorrow is mystery. But the moment in which we read these lines is life’s “gift”, the “present” in which we can and must frame tomorrow so “that which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world”[16].

Mystery is pregnant. We conceive it.

References & Notes:
[1] Modernization: Theories and Facts. By Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi. World Politics 49; January 1997, 155-183. Analyzing the impact of the “development” variable, and “deliberately ignoring factors such as religion, colonial legacy …” the authors “reconstruct two alternative views of the relation between development and democracy, both put forth by Lipset”. The latter, observed in 1959 that “democracy is related to economic development”. Paraphrased by yet another scholar, Lipset’s thesis is summarized in the following hypothesis: “if other countries become as rich as the economically advanced nations, it is highly probable that they will become political democracies”. To check the validity of the hypothesis, the authors conducted a series of statistical tests calculating the probabilities of “transition to democracy” and/or the reverse process of “transition to authoritarianism”, taking into account such variables as “the level of GNP/cap in 1985 PPP USD”. Their data set encompassed available information from 135 countries, including Iran, between 1950 and 1990. Altogether, 224 regimes were observed, 101 democratic and another 123 authoritarian. No intermediate, grey-zone regime was taken into consideration. The disparity between the total number of countries and that of observed regimes is explained by the fact that, during the observation period, the “convoluted” path of some countries, such as Argentina, traversed ups and downs between democracy and dictatorship. Finally, both the “endogenous” and the “exogenous” variants of the theory were examined. The endogenous path, also referred to as “modernization”, assumes that democracy is but the final stage of an authoritarian process characterized by a “specific causal chain” leading from industrialization, to urbanization, education, communication, mobilization, and political incorporation, or the “progressive accumulation of social changes that ready a society to proceed to its culmination, democratization”. While South Korea, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, and Greece are given as examples of the endogenous path, the exogenous emergence of democracy, on the other hand, catalyzed by such factors as geopolitical ruptures and wars, is exemplified by post-Malvinas Argentina, post-Franco Spain, Taiwan and else.
[2] The Democracy Reader, edited by Diane Ravitch and Abigail Thernstrom. HarperCollins Publishers, NY 1992, page 261-263.
[3] item
[4] La CCPPC, Radio Chine Internationale Français http://web12.cri.com.cn/france/2002/Nov/94739.htm
[5] “Live not by lies”. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, ref. 3 page 207
[6] Khomeini’s fatwa-like injunction on the eve of the founding ‘referendum’ of the Islamic Republic in 1979
[7] The fatwa-like injunction of Khomeini led to the immediate closure of Ayandegan, a progressive daily, the first of a long series …
[8] khomeini’s injunction to a delegation of Iran’s writers association
[9] the one-legged commander of the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Ahab is a “madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself”. Penguin Classics edition of Moby Dick.
[10] Khatami, Tehran, January 27th, IRNA
[11] Solzhenitsyn, cf. ref. 5
[12] item
[13] Editorial of Asahi Shimbun http://www.asahi.com/english/opinion/TKY200401270114.html
[14] Solzhenitsyn, cf. ref. 5
[15] Ayatollah Mottahary speaking of the “Decadays of Fadjr”, celebrating the advent of the Islamic Revolution. http://www.noornet.net/Gallery/Negar/ayyam.htm
[16] reference 4