Mick Hartley

An important essay from Claire Berlinski, on the eschatological beliefs that really drive the Iranian theocracy:

“Down with Israel” has a specific theological significance. For Khomeneists, Israel’s destruction is an eschatological goal, not just a geopolitical one, because Israel’s destruction is the precondition for the Mahdi’s return…..

No one in the West pays this kind of thing the slightest bit of attention, and this the strangest aspect of our long conflict with the Islamic Republic. For 47 years, it has made its beliefs and its goals unambiguous. What’s more, the behavior of the regime has been consistent with what it claims to believe. But the West just refuses to take any of this seriously. In all of the reporting you’ve seen on this war, have you seen even one article discussing the Mahdi? I haven’t.

It’s as if, during the Cold War, we simply refused to believe that our adversaries were communists, refused to read a word of Marx, and never once considered that Soviet leaders might be serious about building a socioeconomic order based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Imagine trying to figure out what Stalin was doing without understanding the concepts of historical materialism, class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard party, or the laws of revolutionary development. Imagine insisting that Bolshevism was just a decorative vocabulary draped over ordinary Russian nationalism, or a kind of theatrical language no one was meant to take literally.

We never talked ourselves into such stupidity. We understood that Marxism-Leninism was not incidental to the Soviet project; it was the project. You didn’t have to think that Marx was right to grasp that the men in the Kremlin believed he was, and to grasp that this was essential to understanding their behavior.

But this is exactly the error the West keeps making with the Islamic Republic. We strain to explain its conduct in the terms modern Western elites find respectable: deterrence, regime survival, Realpolitik. Yes, all of those things matter. Iran isn’t exempt from strategic calculation. But the leaders at the core of the Islamic Republic are fused to something else: a theology of history, a cult of redemptive suffering, a metaphysical understanding of injustice, and a set of eschatological expectations that aren’t peripheral to their behavior, but the motivation for everything they do.…

Americans are having a noisy debate about the conduct and wisdom of our war in Iran, and rightly so. But the solipsistic and impoverished quality of this debate is disheartening. We seem to think the regime’s theology is irrelevant and its propaganda is some kind of kitsch. The Islamic Republic’s ideology should be central to our analysis. Because it is not, we insist on negotiating with its leading figures as though they were technocrats from Brussels. Then, absurdly, we’re surprised when they do exactly what they’ve been saying—slowly, loudly, and for nearly half a century—that they intend to do.

And, the Nazi connection:

The Islamic Republic’s antisemitism is also, in some measure, imported, and imported from the most catastrophic source imaginable. Astonishingly, Adolf Hitler was once believed to be the Twelfth Imam.…

The German historian Matthias Küntzel, working in the tradition of Jeffrey Herf, has done interesting work on this period. Like Herf, Küntzel argues that modern Islamist antisemitism is not merely traditional Islamic anti-Jewish theology; it is qualitatively different, a product of the encounter with Nazism. The claim cuts against two comfortable notions simultaneously: the first says that Islamist antisemitism is purely a response to Israeli policies; the second that it’s merely traditional Islamic theology. Küntzel says it’s neither: There’s a specific historical moment of contamination that explains the genocidal intensity. The Islamic Republic’s obsession with Jews, fed by reinforcing streams, is an overdetermined hatred.