more Harman
You gotta wonder how much Iran’s lust for The Bomb is for domestic
consumption, as a distraction from the regime’s economic problems.
The Islamists have long relied on anti-imperialism to consolidate
their rule:
http://www.marxisme.dk/arkiv/harman/1994/prophet/ch08.htm
It was because they depended on balancing between the major social
classes to advance their own control over the state and a section of
capital that the Khomeini group had to hit first at the left
organisation and then at the established bourgeois organisations
(Bazargan etc) before being able to consolidate their own power. In
1979 this meant working with Bazargan against the left to subdue the
revolutionary wave, and then making certain gestures to the left at
the time of the seizure of the US Embassy to isolate the established
bourgeoisie. During the 1980s it meant another zigzag, allowing
another Islamic figure linked to the established bourgeoisie, Bani
Sadr, to take the presidency and then working with him to smash the
bastion of the left, the universities. When the IRP suggested sending
the Islamic gangs, the Hizbollah, into the universities to purge them
of ‘anti-Islamic elements’, Bani Sadr was happy to comply:
Both the IRP leaders and the liberals agreed to the idea of cultural
revolution through direct action by the people who were mobilised to
march on university campuses… For the liberals it was a means to
get rid of the leftist agitators in the public institutions, the
factories and the rural areas, so that economic and political
stability could be restored to the country…
The gangs of the Hizbollah invaded the universities, injured and
killed members of the political groups who were resisting the
cultural revolution, and burned books and papers thought to be ‘un-
Islamic’. The government closed all universities and colleges for
three years, during which university curricula were rewritten. [106]
Yet even at this time the Khomeiniites continued to preserve part of
their own ‘left’ image, using anti-imperialist language to justify
what they were doing. They insisted the fight to impose ‘Islamic
values’ was essential in the struggle against ‘cultural imperialism’,
and that, because the left resisted this, it was in reality working
for imperialism.
External events helped them to get away with these arguments. These
were the months of the abortive US attempt to recapture the embassy
by sending in armed helicopters (which crashed into each other in the
desert), of Shiite demonstrations against the government of Bahrin,
of pro-Khomeini riots in the oil rich Saudi province of Hasa, of the
seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by armed Sunni Islamists, and of
the attempt by Saddam Hussein of Iraq to ingratiate himself with the
US and the Arab Gulf sheikdoms by launching an invasion of Iran. The
Khomeiniites could proclaim, rightly, that the revolution was under
attack from forces allied to imperialism, and, wrongly, that they
alone could defend it. No wonder Khomeini himself referred to the
attack as a ‘godsend’. The need for all out mobilisation against the
invading forces in the winter of 1980-1 allowed his supporters to
justify increasing their control, at the expense of both the left and
the Bani Sadr group, until in June-July 1981 they were able to crush
both, establishing a near totalitarian structure.