Saturday, June 27, 2009

The Guards Of Fascism

There are many different ways to look at the developments in Iran. One perspective that seems to have been ignored is what I regard as the cardinal role of the Revolutionary Guards.

Over the twenty years that Ayatollah Khamenei has been the rahbar or leader, he has allied himself ever more closely with the Revolutionary Guards—to such an extent that it is no longer apparent to me who is leading and who is following. The Revolutionary Guards have been granted extraordinary influence over all functions of the Islamic Republic—military, political, economic and even Islamic. Technically, they take their orders from the leader, but has he ever dared to contradict them? On the contrary, he seems always to court them by granting them ever-greater influence and responsibilities.

This is a formula for the kind of a militarized and nationalist corporate state under a single controlling ideology that is not dissimilar to fascist rule in an earlier day.