Ledeen’s theme is as simple as it is incontestable: the theocratic regime ushered in by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s ascendancy in 1979 is not a conventional government motivated by and ruled in accordance with familiar interests and protocols. It is, instead, a revolutionary movement, It tames its increasingly unhappy subjects with a sophisticated brand of barbarity — unlike Nazi and Soviet torturers, the mullahs tend to furlough their victims back into the general population so all can bare witness to the wages of resistance. And, as tyrants must, it has its bogeymen — the United States, the West generally, and, of course, Israel — to fuel its revolutionary ardor despite a cratering economy and the oppression that hangs ever more heavily on its citizens, in particular, its women, who, in the model of Khomeini, a misogynist of the first order, are reduced to chadored chattel: subjected to official second-class status, child-marriages, polygamy, and systematic ignorance. |
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