Votes, Lies and Ahmadinejad

As I write this, rioters are storming the streets of Tehran, doing battle with the armed storm troopers of their religious dictatorship. Brave people, those protesters. I admire them. Not so long ago, here on American soil, we made folks like that into heros, calling them Minute Men and such. Brave people, mostly young, idealistic, and willing to risk life and limb to fight for freedom.

But as the battle unfolds, I can’t help but feel that it is hopeless, that cruelty and power, and vote manipulation and religious fanaticism, will win out, for now. I guess I’ve been in a hopeful mood, with Obama getting elected and working on health care, saying he’ll wind things up in Iraq, really doing something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. Now I am asking myself why I ever thought there would be anything like a fair election in Iran. The religious zealots are in ultimate control, they know it, and they aren’t going to give it up.

Ahmadinejad is their point man, attack dog, lightning rod. The Iranian people can, most of the time, largely be distracted from their broad dissatisfactions—the evidence of which is playing out on street corners in Tehran at this moment—by constantly being refocused on the bugaboo Satans their leaders have created, most notably Israel and the United States. By denying the Holocaust and calling for the destruction of Israel Ahmadinejad wins points among the militant and fanatical elements across the Middle East, inflaming them to take Iranian money, build bombs, blow themselves up, and generally make whatever trouble they can while, by the way, killing all the Jews they can, among others. So then, like many other dictatorial leaders across the Middle East (Israel is the only thing approaching a genuine democracy, although there are those who would even argue that), the speeches and the fixed, fake elections help to squelch any outcry about poverty, economic stagnation, poor schooling, poor health care, heavy-handed repression, and last but not least, the subjugation of women.

So in the end the Ayatollah needs Ahmadinejad. I’m not easily given to hate, but I do hate the bigmouth troublemaker for what he says, what he is, and what he represents. Because he is the poster boy for all that is wrong in the Middle East among those who oppose Israel. On the world stage now, he epitomizes the arrogance, the hate, the unwillingness to listen to reason, the eagerness to ignore history, the clinging to some distorted version of religion that encourages the senseless murder of innocents and the pointless hatred of nations.

One small step up from Nazism only because of the absence of a powerful, efficient and effective machine of mass death, this whole philosophy represented and promoted by Ahmadinejad and others like him is the reason the Middle East stays stuck, represents the worst of human nature, and poses a threat, ultimately, to us all. Iran is moving quickly toward having useable (I think the experts say “deliverable”) nuclear weapons. When they have those, even the machine of mass death—or at least some of its most deadly tools--will be in place.