Notes on Iran VI
Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1900-1989)
“One of the first actions (President) Carter took when he assumed office in January 1977” Robert Dreyfuss writes “was to dispatch Vice-President Walter Mondale to France and West Germany to tell the leaders of those two nations that the United States would henceforth oppose the sale of nuclear energy technology to the Third World. West Germany’s nuclear deal with Brazil and France’s promise to sell nuclear technology to Pakistan came under heavy attack. In Iran, whose Shah had pledged to bring Iran into the ranks of the world’s top ten industrial nations by the year 2000, a comprehensive nuclear program, primarily backed by France and West Germany, was already underway.”
“Today (1981) the Shah’s nuclear cooling towers are used as silos for grain, and “Iranization” has become a blackmail threat against every Third World government seeking to industrialize.”[1]
For Dreyfuss the real cause for the revolution in Iran was the wish on the part of the ruling, diabolical, kleptocratic oligarchs to prevent industrialization in the “Third World”.
“Since the era of Charlemagne, when humanity began pulling itself out of the mud of the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, the gravest danger to Europe’s noble families has been posed by the nation-state with a leadership committed to the development of its citizenry and its economy. As the American Revolution proved, an educated population will not tolerate the rule of the oligarchy and its regimen of enforced backwardness…”
“It is efficient here to quote Lord Bertrand Russell whose Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation did so much to bring Khomeini to power, to give the reader a glimpse of the kind of mind we are talking about. Writing in his 1951 ‘Impact of Science on Society’, Russell speaks of the future:
‘At present the population the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars…War…has thitherto been disappointing in this respect…but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full…The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s…The present urban and industrial centers will have become derelict, and their inhabitants, if still alive, will have reverted to the peasant hardships of their medieval ancestors.’”
“For the oligarchy, the Khomeini regime – which has leveled the Iranian economy and turned its potential citizens into rampaging mobs – is the ‘shape of things to come.’ The destruction of Iran’s cities, the forced reversion of Iran to an agricultural rather than an industrially developing nation, the cancellation of Iran’s nuclear energy program by Khomeini have been praised by representatives of Britain’s ruling class not only as a model for the underdeveloped sector but for the Western industrial nations as well.”[2]
“It is one of the finer ironies of history that the man responsible for bringing down the Shah in 1979 was a paid agent of the monarchist forces twenty-five years earlier…”
“To begin with, his name is not really Khomeini; he selected the name ‘Ruhollah Khomeini’ for himself sometime in the 1930s. Because his grandfather was born in Kashmir, India and the family was originally of Indian Muslim origin, one of Khomeini’s brothers chose the name ‘Hindi,’ reportedly because of his business dealings with India. Some reports say that Khomeini himself was not even born in Iran, but in India, and migrated to Iran in his early youth.”
“Some sixty years ago, during the upheavals in Iran in the early 1920s, when the late Shah’s father Reza Khan Pahlavi was in the process of seizing power, young Khomeini received his first political battle-scars. At the time, the young Reza Pahlavi conferred with the leader of the republican revolution in Turkey, the famous Ataturk. Ataturk urged the brash young military officer to follow his example and to establish a constitutional republic in Persia, urging Pahlavi to reject the concept of a monarchy as too rigid and confining, inappropriate for a modernizing nation. Initially, Reza considered the idea – until violent uprisings of the Iranian clergy forced him to decide in favor of a monarchy. And so, he became Reza Shah. Khomeini, then in his teens and reportedly bearing a grudge against Reza for having somehow been involved in the death of his father, joined the mullahs’ protest.”[3]
“Concerning Khomeini, the ‘Free Voice of Iran’ reports that ‘since the days he was a religious student, he received rations from the British, und under the label of ‘monthly tuition’ from the proceeds of the Indian ‘awqaf’ (religious affairs department), received monthly payments from British agents and was in constant contact with his masters.”[4]
“When he was exiled, Khomeini…fled first to Izmir, Turkey, site of the NTAO installation, where he stayed for a period; he then traveled to Baghdad, Iraq, where he contacted the networks around General Bakhtiar.”
“Together, Khomeini, Bakhtiar, and British intelligence continued to stir up trouble in Iran. During the rest of the 1960s Bakhtiar was involved in several conspiracies, including the 1965 assassination of Prime Minister Ali Mansour and a botched assassination attempt against the Shah.”[5]
“Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, 1979, marked the end of a years’ long British campaign to destabilize Iran. Not for a moment during his exile was Khomeini out of the control of the British intelligence service.”[6]
“Today (1981) Khomeini is a character out of a Kipling novel. According to those who have known him, he is a vegetable, and is said to sleep up to twenty-two hours a day, awaking only for a dazed excursion into the real world for a few hours. He is rarely rational. His son Ahmad Khomeini told ‘Le Figaro’ magazine that his father is usually ‘in another world’ and that he doesn’t pay attention anymore to what is happening around him.’”
“Khomeini resembles nothing so much as the fictional Wizard of Oz, a puffed-up puppet whose controls are operated from behind the scenes. For the most part, his declarations and pompous pronouncements are statements issued in his name, or statements written for him by his intimate circle of advisers.”[7]
[1] pp. 15-16 Hostage to Khomeini, Robert Dreyfuss
[2] pp.9-11 Ibid
[3] pp.81-82 Ibid
[4] p.88 Ibid
[5] pp.89-90 Ibid
[6] p.90
[7] p.91 Ibid