Could Iran's Model of Governance Spread?

And why hasn't it?

Tonight live radio show (8 to 10 pm Eastern on Revolution.Radio) features Zafar Bangash of Crescent International discussing tomorrow’s 44th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The other two guests, Maisoon Rice and Linh Dinh, will also discuss that topic, and much more. So will E. Michael Jones on tomorrow’s False Flag Weekly News.

I just returned home after spending a week in Iran. I would have loved to stay for the Revolution anniversary celebration and participate in the big march, which generally attracts around 3 million people, but had to fly home to attend a memorial for Dr. David Ray Griffin at Claremont College.

Below is my article, published in this month’s Crescent, exploring the question of why other Muslim-majority countries haven’t revolted against Western neocolonialism and established Islamic Republics.

Why Hasn’t Iran’s Revolution and Governance Model Spread?

On February 11, Iranians will celebrate the 44^th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Each year millions of people take to the streets in Tehran and other Iranian cities to express their support for the revolution that overthrew the US puppet Shah and instituted the world’s first Islamic Republic.

I participated in one such demonstration several years ago. The festive crowd of more than three million people engulfed and overflowed Tehran’s widest boulevard and stretched as far as the eye could see. Among the many patriotic and revolutionary slogans were signs reading “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” I regularly heard things like: “Where are you from? Oh, you’re American? That is wonderful! Welcome to Iran! By the way, those signs... they’re about your government, not the people! Do you think maybe we should change those slogans?” My answer: “Yes, as soon as America and Israel change their ways.” “Insha’Allah.”

The USA, with its West Asia policy firmly under zionist control, has been working overtime to overthrow the Islamic Republic since 1979. The constant propaganda refrain emanating from Foggy Bottom, Langley, and their royalist Iranian exile assets in Los Angeles has never changed: “The Islamic Republic won’t last! It will fall within a few months, or at most a few years. Just give us more billions of US taxpayer dollars and we’ll put the Shah’s son back on the Peacock Throne and replace the IRGC with the MEK.!”

Yet despite nonstop regime change efforts by the world’s most powerful empire, the Islamic Republic has not just endured, it has thrived. Some see the Islamic Republic’s survival as a miracle. If so, Allah has worked the miracle by blessing Iran with unusually foolish enemies. It is hard to believe that anyone who actually knows anything about Iran would imagine that the Iranian people want to be ruled by an unholy alliance of the Pahlavis and the MEK. The former is one of the most notoriously corrupt and brutal puppet monarchies of the colonial age, while the latter may be the world’s most deranged terror cult, making even Daesh look relatively sane by comparison.

But it isn’t just a matter of having the right enemies. Islamic Iran has made tremendous advances in education, infrastructure, human development, and science and technology despite all-out western economic warfare and draconian sanctions. And it has achieved genuine sovereignty by building a military capable of fending off and/or deterring the west’s regime change attempts and proxy wars. In short, it has developed a successful society under Islamic governance.

Since most Muslims worldwide want to live in Islamically-governed societies, one might think that other West Asian countries would follow Iran’s lead, overthrow their despotic western-puppet rulers, and create Islamic Republics along the lines of the Iranian model. The million-dollar question is: Why haven’t they?

The most obvious answer is that the Islamic Revolution succeeded because it took the west by surprise, but that surprise factor soon evaporated. The Anglo-zionist Empire, terrified by the loss of its powerful and strategically-located Pahlavi client state, and by the rise of a new model of governance that threatened imperial interests, rolled out a containment strategy. Like George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” containment strategy against the former Soviet Union, the anti-Islamic-Republic program used dirty tricks, counterinsurgencies, proxy wars, heavily-funded propaganda, and similar tactics.

Despite the western Empire’s failure to impose regime change on Tehran, it largely succeeded with its containment strategy. The central tenet of that strategy is that any attempts to create fully sovereign Islamically-based democratic republics must be brutally suppressed. So, when the overwhelming majority of Algerians voted for Islamic governance, that majority was crushed by death squads and false flag massacres that murdered hundreds of thousands of committed Muslims. When Egyptians voted in an Islamic government, the zionists, Saudis and Emiratis orchestrated a brutal coup founded on the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of peaceful activists.

Even Imran Khan’s relatively mild efforts to bring an Islamic anti-corruption ethic to Pakistan elicited a US-backed coup followed by an assassination attempt. The message is clear: The west will never allow the creation of a second Islamic Republic or anything remotely like it, no matter how many must be murdered to prevent it.

But the citizens of the world’s Muslim-majority countries also share some blame. They have signally failed to shake off the chains of imperialism and colonialism and to rise up in sufficient numbers to overcome the empire’s containment strategy.

The westernized elites of Muslim-majority states, like the wealthy Shah supporters who now languish in opulence in Los Angeles, have naturally collaborated with the empire to prevent Islamic revolution. But what about the people? And what about the Muslim scholars and opinion leaders? Why haven’t they been able to follow in the footsteps of Imam Khomeini and the Iranian ulama and mobilize the people to revolt against dictators and secularized comprador bourgeois elites?

One answer is repression. Imam Khomeini benefited from the aforementioned surprise factor: western policy-makers in 1979 were obsessed with their struggle against Communism, saw that Muslims were also anti-communist, and imagined that Imam Khomeini, if he somehow came to power, might not be all that different from the “Muslim” rulers of Saudi Arabia. So, the CIA and Mossad did not pursue a scorched-earth policy against the leaders of the Islamic Revolution in Iran until it was too late. Once Imam Khomeini was established as the Revolution’s Supreme Leader and Guide and it became obvious that his anti-imperialism and anti-zionism were sincerely held positions rather than empty political talking points, the empire’s leaders undoubtedly wished they had been foresighted enough to strangle the revolution in its cradle back in, say, 1978.

They would not make the same mistake twice. Since 1979, Islamic scholars and leaders throughout the Muslim-majority lands have been put on notice that anyone seeking to follow in Imam Khomeini’s footsteps by organizing a revolution against the puppet dictators that dominate the region will be “terminated with extreme prejudice.” The puppet regimes, of course, are only too happy to put their mosques and ulama under hyper-surveillance and to operate the CIA-built torture chambers that await those who seek to free their countries from subjugation to the Empire of Riba. And if one were to try to organize a genuinely Islamic revolution from somewhere like Paris or London or New York, one would quickly learn that France’s relative tolerance of Imam Khomeini’s 1970s anti-Shah operation no longer pertains.

The wave of western terrorism against Muslims who wish to establish democratic Islamic republics has unfortunately succeeded. Most of our best leaders have been murdered or terrorized into silence, while the next tier has been compromised. At the same time the empire of Dajjal has succeeded in spreading the poison of sectarianism. Many pious Muslims have adopted a chauvinistic or fanatical insistence on their own school of Islamic thought and practice, which has misled them into identifying Muslims of different schools of thought, rather than the Empire of Riba, as their primary enemy.

If the bad news is that the Islamic Revolution has thus far been successfully contained by its enemies, the good news is that those enemies are unlikely to dominate the world much longer. The Anglo-zionist Empire, ruled by the bankers of Wall Street and the City of London and the political establishments they dominate, is on the brink of losing its “exorbitant privilege” to print unlimited quantities of dollars by lending them into existence at interest. As this riba-based revenue stream of disguised imperial tribute evaporates, the empire will be rolled back.

That will re-open space for Muslims to regain sovereignty and institute Islamically-based governmental and social paradigms. As that process unfolds, the successful experience of the Islamic Republic of Iran will undoubtedly inform and inspire the framers of the next wave of Islamic societies.