Introduction

What presents as a coordinated campaign of Iranophobia is not merely hostile rhetoric or diplomatic pressure; it is the operational articulation of a project whose terminus is the dissolution of Iran itself. Since the beginning of 2006, Western powers led by the United States have intensified their assault not on a regime but on a civilisation, not on a government but on the very possibility of a country named Iran persisting into the next decade. This is not escalation; this is preparation. And preparation of this order does not conceal its objective; it stages it incrementally, expecting exhaustion to substitute for recognition.

 

The question that follows is not whether foreign actors have increased their assault on the Iranian nation, its identity and its culture. That is now indisputable. The question is whether they are contemplating the erasure of Iran as a territorial and historical entity, thereby obviating any future requirement to account for their actions before an Iranian people who no longer constitute a political subject. Alternatively, and more precisely, the question is whether Iran is already moving along the trajectory of Bernard Lewis's New Middle East plan (Kramer, 1999), a trajectory that does not merely reshape borders but abolishes the very ground upon which Iranian self-recognition has stood for twenty-five centuries. This argument proceeds from a position that will not be obscured: what is unfolding is not a conflict of interests but a conspiracy of eliminations, and to name it otherwise is to participate in its execution.

 

 

The Project of Balkanising Iran Along a Fabricated Ethnic and Linguistic Lines

Bernard Lewis is not merely a proponent of fragmenting Iran; he is the architect whose blueprint has been adopted, refined and operationalised by successive Western and Zionist institutions. Lewis, a British Jewish intellectual formed under the tutelage of Colonel Thomas Lawrence (Kramer, 1999), understood something that his epigones have since turned into doctrine: no external conquest has ever destroyed Iranian culture from the outside, and therefore the destruction must be engineered from within. This is not a paradox; it is a method. What appears as a scholarly observation about Iranian resilience becomes, in Lewis's hands, a strategic instruction for its circumvention.

 

At the Moshe Dayan Centre of Tel Aviv University in January 1999, Lewis acknowledged that over two thousand years no foreign power had fundamentally affected Persian language and culture, which he characterised as evidence of cultural superiority (Kramer, 1999). But this was not praise; it was reconnaissance. Having identified Iranian culture as a threat to Western and Zionist interests, Lewis proceeded at the Bilderberg meeting of April 1979 to specify the only adequate response: destruction through fragmentation. He proposed the balkanisation of Iran along ethnic and linguistic lines, targeting the Arab speakers of Khuzestan, the Baluch, the Kurds and the Azeris (Farrokh, 2005; Dreyfuss and LeMarc, 1980). This is not a set of separate projects; it is a single logic distributed across multiple fronts. The Ahvaz project, the Pashtunistan project, the Greater Kurdistan project, the Greater Azerbaijan project are not alternatives to one another. They are the same operation performed on different territories, each designed to detach a fragment from the whole, each fragment then positioned to compete with the others.

 

Lewis's objective, as documented by Dreyfuss and LeMarc (1980), was to balkanise the Middle East into smaller units and, through the ignition of conflict and the emergence of separatist movements among Kurds, Azeris, Baluch and Arabs, to create nascent statelets that compete with one another. These movements, after secession from Iran, would then pose a threat to Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan and other neighbouring states (Dreyfuss and LeMarc, 1980). This is not a plan for regional stability; it is a plan for perpetual regional exhaustion, in which no state achieves sufficient coherence to resist external direction.

 

In 2006, Colonel Ralph Peters translated Lewis's framework into cartography. His map, published in a United States military journal under the banner of humanity and the defence of oppressed minorities, presented a new Middle East in which Iran no longer appears as a unified territory (Peters, 2006). The Pentagon never formally endorsed this map, but the NATO Defence College incorporated it into training for senior military officers, and the National War College is believed to utilise both the map and Lewis's framework. An institution that trains officers for war does not incorporate speculative cartography for academic purposes. It does so because the map is operational.

 

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In April 2006, Condoleezza Rice and Ehud Olmert announced at a joint press conference the death of the Greater Middle East and the birth of the New Middle East (BBC News, 2006; United States Department of State, 2006). This announcement, made at the height of Israel's occupation of Lebanon with the support of the United States and British governments, carried with it the declaration of a fundamental transformation in the geopolitical map of the region. Rice, visiting Lebanon and meeting Fouad Siniora, referred to the birth pangs of the New Middle East and added: Israel, Lebanon and the international community must be assured that we are moving with full force towards a New Middle East, and there is no turning back to the Middle East of the past (BBC News, 2006). This was not diplomacy; it was notification. The birth of the New Middle East is the consolidation of Western states and Zionism under a single banner to partition the Middle East, particularly Iran, into smaller units. Since that announcement, Iranophobia has intensified across the world and the wider Middle East, not as a spontaneous sentiment but as a manufactured condition.

 

 

Divide and Conquer

This project of territorial reconfiguration, however, requires not only geopolitical pressure but a prior conceptual operation: the reclassification of Iran itself. A state cannot be partitioned unless it is first perceived as divisible. An ethno-nation cannot be fragmented unless it is first reimagined as a multi-ethnic conglomerate (Suren-Pahlav, 1998). The New Middle East blueprint therefore depends upon a specific analytical misdirection: the systematic substitution of civilisational integration for ethnic fragmentation.

 

Iran is not a multi-ethnic state. It is a historically continuous ethno-nation whose linguistic and provincial variations have unfolded within a shared ancestral, cultural and territorial matrix (Suren-Pahlav, 1998; Smith, 1986; Yarshater, 1993). The majority of its languages belong to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. Even where Turkic or Arabic vernaculars have entered the linguistic landscape, they have done so without producing separate myths of origin, territorially anchored claims to sovereign nationhood, or the sustained boundary maintenance that defines a distinct ethnic group (Riggs, 1991; Horwitz, 1985). What exists is differentiation within unity, not a plurality of nations. The portrayal of Iran as a mosaic of discrete ethnic groups awaiting constitutional recognition is therefore not an empirical finding. It is a performative reclassification that converts civilisational variation into territorial vulnerability.

 

The origins of this reclassification are traceable not to Iranian social reality but to external ideological importation. Soviet nationalities doctrine, formalised under Stalin and systematised through administrative demarcation, provided the conceptual template through which linguistic and provincial distinctions were recoded as evidence of separate nations (Martin, 2001; Suny, 1993). The rebranding of Arran as 'Azerbaijan' north of the Aras River exemplified this strategy: a name of Iranian origin, derived from the Achaemenid-era satrap Atropates (Gnoli, 1989), was attached to a newly consolidated Soviet republic, thereby manufacturing the symbolic infrastructure for cross-border ethnic linkage (Swietochowski, 1985). Iranian Marxist circles, most notably the Tudeh party, imported this framework, adapting Soviet 'nationalities' categories to the Iranian setting and reframing provincial variation as suppressed national aspiration (Suren-Pahlav, 2000).

 

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1907, by contrast, articulated sovereignty in the name of a single national community without dividing that community into ethnically defined estates (Afary, 1996; Bayat, 1991). Had corporate ethnic consciousness existed as a politically operative category, that moment would have codified it. It did not. The multi-ethnicity thesis entered Iranian discourse not through indigenous constitutional development but through ideological transplantation.

 

In the contemporary period, this conceptual apparatus has been upgraded rather than abandoned. The age of information has furnished new infrastructures for the circulation and normalisation of identity categories. Wikipedia, with its annual expenditure exceeding twenty-eight million dollars and its pretension to neutrality, has become a global platform through which linguistic and demographic classifications are codified, repeated and rendered authoritative (Wikipedia, 2011). Editorial disputes over the designation of Iranian populations as 'ethnic groups', the demarcation of putative 'homelands', and the quantification of speaker communities are not arcane scholarly debates. They are battles over the classification that precedes political fragmentation. When a digital encyclopaedia consistently presents linguistic variation within Iran as evidence of discrete ethnic nations, it does not describe reality; it constructs it. Other reference works participate in the same process, embedding classificatory schemes that equate language with ethnicity and ethnicity with territorial entitlement (Snow et al., 1998).

 

What the Soviet Union achieved through administrative decree, the digital age achieves through algorithmic repetition and crowd-sourced consensus. The distinction between foreign-origin doctrine and domestic self-understanding is thereby obscured. A framework that entered Iranian political vocabulary as an external imposition, advanced by ideological actors whose strategic interests lay in fragmenting the Iranian nation, is now reproduced as neutral description. This is not scholarship. It is the naturalisation of a geopolitical design. And in this naturalisation, the ethno-nation is systematically erased, replaced by a phantom architecture of 'ethnic' units whose only empirical foundation is the repetition of the claim itself.

 

 

Institutional Complicity: From Mossad to Wikipedia

What WikiLeaks disclosed in 2010 confirms what Lewis proposed in 1979. A confidential meeting between Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, and Nicholas Burns, the United States Under Secretary of State, in August 2007 produced a proposal: exacerbate ethnic tensions within Iran, particularly among Kurdish, Persian, Azeri and Baluchi populations, and support extremist groups such as the People's Mujahedin of Iran to generate internal conflict (The Guardian, 2010; Van Wilgenburg, 2010). Senator Jeanne Hermann reiterated this proposal at a 2009 meeting organised by Jewish lobbies in the United States (Iranian.com, 2009). This is not a convergence of independent actors; it is a division of labour. Mossad proposes; Washington considers; lobbies amplify. The distinction between foreign and domestic, between state and non-state, collapses into a single apparatus whose target is Iranian cohesion.

 

But the most insidious front of this project is not military or diplomatic; it is epistemological. A United States-based and pan-European foundation has been quietly engaged in fomenting discord and exacerbating divisions among Iranians, and that institution is the Wikipedia encyclopaedia, particularly its English-language section. With an annual expenditure exceeding twenty-eight million dollars (Wikipedia, 2011) and the voluntary contribution of sixteen and a half million editors and fourteen hundred administrators since 2006, Wikipedia has inflicted significant damage on the cohesion and unity of Iranians. This is not collateral damage; it is structural design.

 

The principal administrators of the English-language section comprise a structure associated with Eurocentrism, pan-Turks and pan-Arabs. These three groups are responsible for encroaching upon and undermining Iranian achievements, from Cyrus the Great and Babak Khorramdin to Rumi and Nezami, as well as Iranian history and the Persian language (Farrokh, 2011). Writings concerning ancient Iranian history and the origins of Iranian identity are largely under the influence of Eurocentrism, whereas post-Islamic history and the Persian language are shaped by pan-Turks and pan-Arabs. Matters relating to the Islamic regime are managed by administrators aligned with the clerical establishment. This is not a neutral encyclopaedia; it is a contested territory in which Iranian self-representation has been displaced by the representations of those who stand to benefit from Iran's fragmentation.

 

One individual, a Dutch national pseudo-historian named Jona Lendering, has since 2006 been responsible for editing and intervening in Iranian cultural content. Identified as a pan-European but argued by some to act as an agent of the Islamic regime (Safavi-Zadeh and Djakashvili-Bloehm, 2009), Lendering who runs a website called Livius, has focused his interventions on historical figures such as Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenids. Like the leaders of the Islamic regime and their affiliates, Lendering maintains that everything written in historical accounts about Cyrus the Great is falsehood, alleging a historical conspiracy orchestrated by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. This convergence between a pan-European editor and the clerical regime is not an accident; it is an alliance of convenience against a common enemy, and that common enemy is Iranian national memory.

 

 

The Foreign Apparatus of Fragmentation

The project of balkanising Iran, also known as the Iranistan project, is not theoretical. It is operational across multiple fronts simultaneously.

 

First, active American and Zionist forces are present in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey, Nakhchivan and Arran, now the Republic of Azerbaijan, and the Israeli intelligence organisation, Mossad, has established and operates the Voice of Southern Azerbaijan radio station (Farrokh, 2005). A radio station broadcasting separatist content from foreign territory is not media; it is a weapon.

 

Second, pan-Turk or pan-wolf groups, supported financially on a large scale by the governments of Baku and Ankara as well as Washington and Tel Aviv, are engaged in a conspiratorial effort to detach Azerbaijan from Iran (Farrokh, 2005). The convergence of Turkish, Azerbaijani, American and Israeli funding for a single separatist project is not a coincidence of interests; it is a coalition of adversaries.

 

Third, the terrorist activities of the Jundallah group in Sistan and Baluchestan province are carried out with direct financial and military support from the Israeli government (Perry, 2012). A group that kills Iranian citizens does not sustain itself; it is sustained.

 

Fourth, Israeli cultural-terrorist activities in southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, conducted in cooperation with the United States, promote narratives and historical reconstructions presenting the Pashtuns, who are of Iranian origin and belong to the eastern Iranian ethno-linguistic group, as one of the lost tribes of Israel (Ben-Zvi, 1963; Halevi, 1991; McCarthy, 2010). This same strategy applies to the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. To claim that an Iranian people are not Iranian but Israelite is not scholarship; it is expropriation.

 

Fifth, the terrorist activities of the Ahwaz group are centred on and supported by the British government under the leadership of an Englishman named Daniel Brett (SourceWatch, 2009; Abedin and Farrokh, 2005). British support for the fragmentation of Iran is not a departure from British policy; it is a continuation of a century of British intervention designed to prevent the emergence of a coherent Iranian state.

 

Sixth, Israeli cultural-terrorist activities in Iraqi Kurdistan promote narratives and historical reconstructions presenting Kurds, who are of Iranian origin, as one of the lost tribes of Israel, the same strategy applied to Pashtuns in Afghanistan. The repetition of the pattern across different populations confirms that the pattern is not improvised; it is doctrinal.

 

Seventh, the military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that alongside Iran are regarded as playing principal roles in the implementation of this plan, provides the physical infrastructure for fragmentation. An occupation is not an end; it is a precondition.

 

Eighth, the intensification of divisions between Iranians and Arabs and the fuelling of tensions in the Middle East through the distortion of the name of the Persian Gulf serves the same function: to estrange Iran from its geography, its history and its neighbours.

 

Ninth, the Wikipedia encyclopaedia, portrayed as a neutral repository of knowledge, is in practice an apparatus for fomenting discord, intensifying divisions among Iranians, and calling into question Iranian culture through attacks on the historical figure Cyrus the Great.

The Trojan Horse: Why External Destruction Requires Internal Complicity

 

Foreign actors hostile to Iran understand what Lewis understood: the balkanisation and destruction of Iran cannot be achieved from the outside alone. No external force is capable of destroying Iranian identity and culture; therefore, it must also be undermined from within. This is not a secondary strategy; it is the primary condition of the strategy's possibility.

 

Miss Lambton, one of the leading experts on Iran, Islam and the Arab world, and a prominent British intelligence figure who understood Iran better than many Iranians themselves, held that the principal factors sustaining Iranian culture and identity are threefold: the Persian language, ethical commitments, and Iranian patriotism. Without these three elements, Iran would be unable to continue its existence. Lambton, a close associate of Bernard Lewis, is also credited with having first advanced the doctrine of velayat-e faqih in 1964 and with anticipating the establishment of an Islamic government in Iran. In a co-authored article with Lewis entitled The Twelver Shi'i Jurist in an Islamic Government, published in 1964 in Islamic Studies, one year prior to Ruhollah Khomeini's exile to Turkey, they wrote: the aspiration to establish God's government on earth, if brought to fruition through persistence, will inevitably culminate either in political silence awaiting the Mahdi or in violent revolution (Lambton, 1964).

 

Six years after the publication of Lambton and Lewis's joint article, Ruhollah Khomeini presented the theory of velayat-e faqih and the establishment of an Islamic government as his own. This is not a coincidence; it is a transmission. And the regime that resulted is not an Iranian phenomenon; it is a foreign implantation designed to perform from within what foreign armies could not accomplish from without. The clerical regime is the Trojan horse. Its function is not to govern Iran but to dismantle it, piece by piece, identity layer by identity layer, until nothing remains that can be called Iranian.

 

 

The Destruction of Iranian Identity and Culture from Within

What constitutes national identity and culture? Research by Goganon has demonstrated that national identity is a direct outcome of a historical point of origin grounded in a nation's shared cultural framework, comprising a synthesis of symbols, language, history, customs, traditions, religion, culture, art and related elements. Over centuries, national identity and culture initially form as a core, to which successive layers are added over time, gradually expanding until they assume a structured form, after which further additions resemble accretions analogous to clothing that changes over time without directly altering the core of identity.

 

The cultivation or destruction of a national identity and culture may be compared to a massive vessel of several hundred thousand tonnes. The construction of such a vessel, from the assembly of its structural framework to the smallest component, requires years of labour, effort, planning and the integration of millions of large and small parts. Once built, its appearance may change over time; one day it may be painted red, another day blue, or its interior decor, captain and crew may be replaced, yet its structural framework and foundations remain intact. By contrast, if one were to seek its destruction, meticulous planning, months of sustained effort, and the fragmentation of the vessel into transportable pieces would be required. National identity and culture, having been formed over centuries, must likewise be dismantled piece by piece if they are to be destroyed. The Islamic regime, since its establishment with Western support, has been engaged in precisely this process: the fragmentation of Iranian identity and culture.

 

From the very first day of assuming power in Iran, the clerical regime began its confrontation with Iranian identity and culture. Strikingly, the Islamic government launched and has continued its assault to this day against precisely those features that Miss Lambton identified as the foundations of the survival of Iran and Iranian identity: the Persian language, ethical commitments, and Iranian patriotism.

 

Ruhollah Khomeini, one of the most prominent figures of the modern world whose past remains obscure and little understood, with the guidance of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Intelligence Service (Jones, 2009), and with the assistance of BBC Persian popularly dubbed Ayatollah BBC, was able within less than a year to bring down the imperial government in Iran after twenty-five centuries. Without exaggeration, the 1979 sedition in Iran may also be described as a BBC coup (Jones, 2009). Khomeini laid the groundwork for the Iranistan project from the very day of his arrival in Iran. His hostility towards the Persian language and Ferdowsi, towards national symbols such as Nowruz, Sadeh, Mehregan and Chaharshanbeh Suri, towards figures such as Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great, the plundering, sale and destruction of the country's ancient artefacts, the removal of ancient Iranian history from school curricula, and the campaign against Iranian names including personal names, place names, street names and even the smallest alleyways across the country, replacing them with Arabic names, have all continued to this day.

 

Before his return to Iran, in a speech for a group of Iranians residing abroad in Neauphle-le-Chateau in October 1978, Khomeini expressed his aversion to ancient Iranian history: they wanted to turn the page back to the time before the Noble Prophet, to the time of oppressive, murderous pagan kings, and to act in that manner, maintaining the same order, promoting pan-Iranism and Iranian identity (Jamarān, 1979). After seizing power, in a meeting with the family of Musa Sadr at Jamaran in August and September 1979, he openly attacked Iranian identity and nationality: these calculations that people make, that we are Iranian and must do something for Iran, are not valid. This issue, which is perhaps spoken of everywhere, that one should concern oneself with the nation and nationality, is baseless (Jamarān, 1979). During the World Quds Congress at Jamaran in February 1981, he declared: how much more must we be struck by this nationalism? This nationalism is a scheme devised by colonialists. Those who speak of nationality should be dismissed (Jamarān, 1979). Later, during a meeting with the regime's President Ali Khamenei and foreign guests for the celebration of Ten Days of Fajr on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the Islamic Revolution at Jamaran in February 1986, he went further and brazenly denied the very existence of a country called Iran: we fundamentally do not recognise a country by the name of Iran (Jamarān, 1979).

 

Sadegh Khalkhali, one of Khomeini's close associates whom modern Iranian history has dubbed ‘the butcher of the revolution’, in his book titled ‘The False and Criminal Cyrus’, not only insulted Cyrus the Great but also described Iranians as a barbaric people (Khalkhali, 1981). He subsequently altered his stance, declaring that Cyrus never existed and, reportedly, attempted to destroy Persepolis using bulldozers, an act most likely carried out with Khomeini's awareness and approval (Sciolino, 2000). Had it not been for the heroic resistance of local communities, this architectural monument of Iranian pride and grandeur would have been lost. Khalkhali's plans extended, after the destruction of Persepolis, to the tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae (Molavi, 2005) and subsequently to the mausoleum of Ferdowsi in Tus (Suren-Pahlav, 2006), but the regime was compelled to retreat.

 

Following popular resistance at Persepolis, the clerical establishment adopted a new policy for the destruction of the country's ancient monuments: dismantling them under the guise of preservation, as well as through development and infrastructural projects, including the construction of eighty dams across the country whose artificial reservoirs have submerged hundreds of archaeological sites, the most notorious being the Sivand Dam in Fars province; the construction of chemical factories including in the Bisotun area; railway construction near Naqsh-e Rustam; the building of hotels including in Susa and the destruction of thousands of square metres of Parthian-Sasanian cemeteries; road construction passing through Sasanian chahartaq structures; mining beneath ancient monuments including gypsum mining under the Sasanian palace of Mother and Daughter; the establishment of livestock farms and grain silos, Basij military exercises in the city of Ardashir Khurreh, and hundreds of other examples (Suren-Pahlav, 2002).

 

Morteza Motahhari, a cleric and close associate of Khomeini, expressed such hostility towards Iranian national celebrations that he resorted to invective: many families, which I must say are foolish families, light fires and burn wood, and fully grown individuals with such physiques leap over the fire chanting O fire, take my pallor, give me your redness. How much stupidity is this? Why do they do such things? They say our ancestors did so, and so we do the same. If your ancestors did so and you see that it is foolish, evidence of their ignorance, then conceal it. Why do you renew this annual testimony to folly? (First Congress of Poetry and Literature of Students from Across the Country, 1984)

 

Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister and purported leader of the Green movement (which the regime itself cultivated as a ‘controlled opposition’, not an authentic challenge to its authority, (Suren-Pahlav, 2011)), and a figure whose public record reveals not reformist conviction but a persistent and patient detestation of Iranian patriotism and pre-Islamic civilisation, stated: colonial powers sought to detach our nation from its Islamic identity. This process was implemented in an organised manner in our country and left destructive consequences. However, it was not merely a policy of de-Islamisation that was pursued; calculations were also made in relation to nationalism. Reviving the decayed bones and values upon which the state system was considered eternal was among the matters that colonial powers invested considerable effort in promoting in our country. It reached a point where, in the realm of culture and the arts, including architecture, we were expected to model ourselves on Achaemenid-era architecture (First Congress of Poetry and Literature of Students from Across the Country, 1984). He went further, stating with regard to Iranian symbols: reliance on the value system of pre-Islamic Iran, that is, emphasis on Achaemenid and Sasanian history and the imperial systems that existed in Iran before Islam, was an import from the West intended to de-Islamise. Emphasis was placed on nationalist values and on elements such as blood and soil, among others associated with nationalism. At the same time that, in Iran, through archaeology, the ruins of Persepolis were excavated to construct a historical narrative upon which the nation was compelled to take pride, that history, entirely foreign to Islam, had long since been dead, yet was being revived anew. Iranian artists spoke of Iranian arts and literature, yet not a single word of their works referred to the story of Karbala (Honar va nasyonalism, 1982).

 

Mousavi does not regard the story of Karbala, which belongs to the country's religious culture and has no direct connection to national history and culture, as reviving decayed bones, whereas the commemoration of Ferdowsi and the promotion of Iranian culture and civilisation, which constitute a substantial part of Iranian national identity and culture, are characterised by him as a catastrophe and reviving decayed bones. He goes so far as to describe Iranian patriotism as a catastrophe and, in turn, expresses gratitude towards those who devoted their lives to the struggle against and destruction of Iranian culture: in order to overcome this catastrophe, we have sacrificed Martyr Motahhari, Martyr Mofatteh, Martyr Beheshti, Martyr Bahonar and others (First Congress of Poetry and Literature of Students from Across the Country, 1984). Some compatriots, much like their forebears who devieved by Khomeini, naively also believe that Mousavi is a reformist and assume that he will bring freedom to the country (Suren-Pahlav, 2009), unaware that Mousavi himself was one of the principal architects of this infernal system and a contributor to the present condition of the country.

 

 

The Assault on the Persian Language

The campaign to dismantle the Persian language began in the earliest days of the clerical regime's rise to power, and its leaders have persistently pursued its erosion and replacement with Arabic (Suren-Pahlav, 2009). Khomeini stated: do not say that the Arabic language is not ours. The Arabic language belongs to Islam, and Islam belongs to all. Unless our writers extricate themselves from this trap, and our books are purged of Persian vocabulary, and the names of our streets are changed, we cannot become independent (Dar didār bā gorūhī az maqāmāt-e elmi va dāneshgāhi, 1979; Jamarān, 1979). Mohammad Hossein Hosseini Tehrani, an associate and close confidant of Khomeini today honoured by the clerical establishment with the title Allameh Tehrani, implicitly called for the eradication of the Persian language from society and its replacement with Arabic: in these discussions we have established that it is incumbent upon Muslims to preserve the Arabic language, for it is the language of the Qur'an; its vitality depends on its expansion in everyday communication, in speech and conversation, in the writing of books and letters, and in its formal and rigorous teaching in schools, indeed even in kindergartens and within families, and in speaking with mothers. The more Arabic vocabulary is incorporated into their language, the closer their tongue becomes to the language of the Qur'an; and the more non-Arabic words, whether from their ancient heritage or foreign languages, are introduced, the further they move away from that state (Husayni Tehrani, n.d.).

 

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani followed this line of thought, declaring in a Friday prayer sermon the demise of the Persian language: we believe that the language of the future is Arabic, not Persian, and the day a global Islamic state is established, there will be no place for any language other than Arabic (Paul, 1999). He foretold the fate of the Persian language and Iranian nationality in these terms: in the future both must be eliminated (Paul, 1999). If Iranians still retain the ability to speak in their national language rather than Arabic, and if today they can take pride in the achievements of their ancestors, it is because the chain linking them to their ancient forebears has not been severed, a continuity preserved through the efforts and sacrifice of one great figure: Ferdowsi.

 

Sayyid Mohammad Hossein Tehrani: all this commotion surrounding the greatness of Ferdowsi, the festivals, the millennium celebrations, the construction of his mausoleum, and the invitation of foreigners from all countries to revive the Shahnameh, and the veneration and honour bestowed upon this impoverished and ultimately unsuccessful man, what is it for? It is because, in opposition to the vocabulary of the Qur'an and the Arabic language, which is the language of Islam and of the Messenger of God, he squandered thirty years of his life in pursuit of the dinars of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and compiled the mythical Shahnameh. Ferdowsi, through his mythical Shahnameh, which is a work of poetry, that is, imagination and poetic conjecture, sought to raise falsehood against the Qur'an and to establish illusion in place of certainty. God has already meted out his due punishment in this world (Husayni Tehrani, n.d.).

 

Mir-Hossein Mousavi: the celebration of Ferdowsi's millennium in 1934 and the purification of the Persian language from Arabic words, carried out on the basis of nationalism, was a conspiracy by Western powers to destroy Islam (Honar va nasyonalism, 1982). The Islamic regime, in pursuit of this objective of undermining the Persian language, established an institution entitled the Academy of Persian Language and Literature in 1990. This institution was ostensibly created to purify Persian of its Iranian lexical heritage. Its current head is Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, and aside from a handful of individuals, most of those who administer the academy lack even the equivalent of a secondary school education in Persian (Jonidi, 2010). Since its establishment, the proportion of Persian vocabulary has reportedly declined from eighty-five per cent to below forty per cent. Even the academy's building, designed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was constructed with inspiration drawn from Umayyad and Andalusian architectural styles (Suren-Pahlav, 2009).

 

 

The Destruction of Ethics and Iranian Social Norms

Since the rise to power of what is termed the rule of falsehood in Iran, Iranian society has experienced a regressive decline in moral and social commitments, a condition attributed to poverty, systemic injustice, and the climate of repression prevailing in the country. To document the extent of corruption and falsehood in contemporary Iran would require the composition of a dedicated volume. The individual described as the founder and as corrupt on earth, a designation reportedly attributed by Khomeini to others, is portrayed as having, in practice, embodied the same condition, promoting corruption and falsehood as necessary instruments for the preservation of the clerical order. He is quoted as stating: for the preservation of Islam and for the preservation of Muslim lives, corruption is obligatory; lying is also obligatory; even drinking alcohol is obligatory (Khomeini, no date, p. 101).

 

According to global corruption data published by Transparency International, Iran ranks one hundred and seventy-second among one hundred and eighty countries, with Somalia, ranked one hundred and eightieth, identified as the most corrupt state in the world (Bland, 2009; The Independent, 2009). Moral corruption and falsehood are described as having become so widespread in Iranian society that even officials within the system have acknowledged the problem. Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, then Mayor of Tehran, is quoted as stating: a climate of backbiting, slander and lying, which is destructive and undermines households, exists in our society (Aftab News, 1390). Hossein Ansarian, a cleric from the seminary in Qom, is further cited: in a society of seventy million people in Iran, how many lies and instances of backbiting occur daily? The ugliness of lying has diminished to the extent that husbands and wives, men and women, easily lie to one another. How much backbiting, swearing, humiliation, mockery and slander exists in our country? Is there sufficient trust among people for you to register your house and property in someone else's name and retrieve it after one year? Consider how many unlawful hands appear on paper against others, how many signatures are forged unjustly, how many hands commit theft, embezzlement and bribery. How many falsify documents and steal billions in broad daylight. How many hands strike people unjustly and beat them. How many manipulate goods and commit under-selling? They lie to the public in their reporting, and they also lie in their promises (Bamdad News, 1390).

 

The answer to the question of why the demon of falsehood appears to prevail in contemporary Iran is to be found in the statements of Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the system described as the rule of falsehood. Neither my personal inclination nor my physical condition allows me, after the fall of the current regime, to play any personal role in the administration of the country (Khomeini, 1978a). I do not wish to be the leader of the future Islamic regime. I do not intend to take power or govern (Khomeini, 1978b). After the Shah leaves, I will neither become president nor assume any other leadership position (Khomeini, 1978c). In the Islamic regime, the clergy will not govern themselves; they will merely supervise and guide affairs. I myself will hold no position of leadership and will return to my teaching position in Qom (Khomeini, 1978c). In the Islamic regime, women will have completely equal rights with men (Khomeini, 1978d). In the Islamic regime, women will be free in every respect. They will be free in education and in other spheres of activity (Khomeini, 1978e). In an Islamic government, radio, television and the press will be entirely free, and the state will have no authority to supervise them (Khomeini, 1978f). In their logic, freedom means imprisoning opponents, censoring the press, and running propaganda apparatuses. In their logic, civilisation and progress mean subordinating all the arteries of the country, its culture, economy, armed forces, legislative, judicial and executive institutions, to a single centre. We will abolish all of this (Khomeini, 1978g). Full freedom will be granted to all religious minorities, and everyone will be able to express their own views (Khomeini, 1978h). Our Islamic government will be a democratic government in the true sense. Within this government, I will have no personal activity (Khomeini, 1979).

 

When a system is founded upon falsehood, deception and duplicity, the population inevitably mirrors these practices in order to survive, resorting to forms of double-dealing and conformism aligned with the prevailing order. An anonymous Iranian blogger articulates this dynamic: when the expression of one's thoughts and behaviours is suppressed, and individuals lack the courage to articulate their views or act according to their preferences, they are compelled to behave in ways they do not desire or approve of, and to present themselves as something they are not. The lack of alignment between inner dispositions and externally imposed social norms increases the gap between individual and social identity, generating another vice known as hypocrisy. In such societies, individuals put on a mask each morning contrary to their true selves, and perform roles throughout the day that contradict their inner dispositions.

 

Addiction is another mechanism contributing to social paralysis and the erosion of future generations. According to official statistics of the governing authorities, the number of drug users in Iran exceeded two million in 2003 (Payvand News, 2003), placing the country at the top globally in this regard (BBC Persian, 2008). By 2009, the figure had risen to four million (Deutsche Welle, 2009). According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2009 more than three billion dollars' worth of narcotics were sold in Iran for personal consumption, and approximately one million Iranians between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four had lost their lives as a result of addiction (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2011). Although official authorities have since withheld precise statistics and attempted to present figures below one million, the number of addicts today lies between five and six million, with an unknown proportion affected by HIV and AIDS. With an estimated annual increase of around one hundred and thirty thousand new cases (Kalantari, 2009), particularly among adolescents and young adults described as the future of the nation, without timely intervention Iranian society faces the prospect of internal disintegration.

 

 

Conclusion: The Future and the Repetition of History

The achievements of thirty-one years of totalitarian-theocratic rule in Iran encompass corruption, immorality, addiction, depression, mourning, underdevelopment, killing, torture, rape, theft, bribery, irreligion, betrayal, nepotism, abuse of power and general misery (Kashani, 1985). This system will persist in its anti-Iranian and anti-human conduct to such an extent that neither a country called Iran nor a people identified as Iranians will remain in the world. Whether the clerical establishment is acting as an agent or proxy of foreign powers is irrelevant within this temporal frame; history will ultimately clarify this question. What matters is the nature of the system itself. From its inception, it has consistently worked against national interests, pouring water into the mill of the enemy and the foreign other. Its leadership has accumulated wealth in European and American bank accounts derived from the misappropriation of public funds (Suren-Pahlav, 2010), while binding the country and its people in a condition of subjugation.

 

The Islamic regime continues along the same trajectory as in previous decades, perpetuating policies characterised as anti-Iranian. It is a worm that gradually corrodes a mighty tree from within, steadily eroding Iranian identity and distancing the population from its essence and origins. External actors are likely to engineer conflict between Iran and its neighbouring states. Under the pretext of peace and humanity, these actors would then justify intervention and proceed to occupy Iran in a manner comparable to Iraq and Afghanistan. Subsequently, with the assistance of separatist groups, Iran would be fragmented into smaller territorial units, transforming the country into a disintegrated entity and relegating Iranian identity to the fate of vanished civilisations such as Assyria and Babylon.

 

The only viable path to the liberation of the Iranian nation is sustained and comprehensive opposition to the system and to its domestic collaborators. Until the overthrow of this system and its replacement by a national system grounded in deliberative democracy, in which all citizens participate directly in major national decision-making processes, such resistance must continue. It is the responsibility of all Iranians to cultivate and promote the three foundational elements that the Islamic regime is undermining: the Persian language, ethical norms and patriotism. Vigilance is required against the activities of agents and fifth column elements who seek to sow division within national ranks. Any complacency, neglect or failure to take such threats seriously contributes, in effect, to the advancement of opposing forces, with the ultimate outcome envisaged as the disintegration of the Iranian nation.

 

The thought of George Santayana is invoked: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Iranians should recall that, over a period of less than one hundred and fifty-three years, Iran's territorial extent declined from approximately four million square kilometres to one million six hundred and forty-eight thousand five hundred and ninety-one square kilometres, from the accession of Fath-Ali Shah to the end of the Qajar dynasty under Ahmad Shah. The territorial expanse of Iran was effectively halved. If contemporary Iranians, like their predecessors during the Qajar period, remain passive and fail to act, history will repeat itself, and the Islamic regime will squander what remains of Greater Iran.

 

 

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