ANALYSIS: The Iranian regime’s willing executioners

Al-Arabia – Whatever way you examine the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the defining feature of its politics has been to further its policies both at home and abroad, through the systematic slaughter of all those that stand in its way. Within its borders, all those that have dared to speak out against it policies, have been rounded up, tortured, and in the most part hung.

At the same time, to hit back at those it deems its enemies abroad, the regime carries out horrific terror attacks, which have taken dozens of lives, perpetrated through the operational direction of its IRGC Quds Force, using the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah as its main proxy.

The regime been programmed through methods of dehumanization, brought to bear by the pernicious ideology of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, to carry out hideous acts of murder and oppression against the citizens of Iran, to ensure the preservation of both the regime, and their founder’s ongoing revolution, at whatever cost to human life.

Throughout 1988, which was the final year of the Iran-Iraq War, when thousands of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) prisoners were being held in Iranian prisons, production-line slaughter took place against them.

The victims of this systematic slaughter, had been languishing in stinking, poorly ventilated cells, where they had suffered every form of abuse and torture, many since the early days of the establishment of the Islamic Republic, and most ended up at the end of a rope, with an estimated body count of 3000. Khomeini himself had given the order for the slaughter to commence, issuing a fatwah for all those who opposed him to be slain.

Following the issue of this fatwah, with the grim efficiency of the Nazi regime, high-ranking clerics in the Iranian administration, were chosen by the Supreme Leader to visit prisons throughout the land, and under the umbrella of what became known as the Death Commission, they interrogated all dissidents held in Iranian jails.

Scale of brutality

The scale of brutality meted out by the security services policing Iran, whose duty it is to ensure people obey all of the regime’s draconian laws; is astronomical. The paramilitary Basij militia, which has 90,000 active personnel, is one of five forces within the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Well-known for various acts of brutality against Iranian citizens, all members of the Basij are fanatical in their devotion towards the Supreme Leader, carrying out whatever ruthless tasks are assigned to them, which include the beating of unarmed protestors with clubs, shooting dissenters dead during street protests, and throwing acid into the faces of women deemed not to be adhering to the country’s strict Islamic dress code.

According to the research organization RAND, the number of personnel in the ranks of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) number as many as one million conscripts. When one adds this to all of the administrators of the various other institutions of death, scattered throughout the Iranian security system, the potential reach of those in charge of security is quite terrifying.

Within the security apparatus, there are also women attached to the various groups that carry out these atrocious acts, many amongst them patrol the streets of Iran, mercilessly hunting down women who disobey the rules on decency set down by the country’s leading clerics.

As well as this, there are those who act as warders within the prison system, who are known to be as pitiless as their male counterparts, when it comes to meting out violence.

One thing those within the Iranian security forces have in common with their victims, is they all have family attachments in one way or another. Many younger members live at home with loving parents and siblings, while other personnel are happily married with children, and like all doting parents, show love and affection to their offspring whenever they are at home.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hasan Rouhani (L) arriving for a ceremony in Tehran on April 14, 2018. (AFP)

Nazi killing

These are the same basic animal instincts that existed within the ranks of the Nazi killing units, which carried out the intense wave of mass killing, at the core of the Holocaust, during the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which was the Nazi’s plan to carry out the extermination of the world’s Jews during World War II.

Carrying out their orders without pity, they were immune from any form of feeling, executing barbaric acts of slaughter, as blood, bones and brains flew everywhere, spattering their faces and clothes.

But far from being all-out psychopaths, many of those taking part in the slaughter were ordinary people from varied backgrounds, who, through becoming embroiled in German politics and culture during the Nazi period, were brainwashed by a system devised to dehumanise the target population.

This was a time when the state controlled all of Germany’s media outlets, pumping out despicable anti-Jewish propaganda in a bid to show that Jews were subhuman, often showing them as greedy moneylenders or paedophiles preying on young German children and such was the bombardment of crude propaganda, it warped and twisted the minds of many who listened in.

But where the Nazis in their time preached on the need to destroy the world’s Jewry, claiming they were planning global domination, and were a threat to Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, the teaching curriculum conducted in present day Iran, where the state’s education system similarly feeds young and susceptible brains with government propaganda, it deals with the dangers of outside forces ranged against it.

As far as antisemitism is concerned, the Iranian regime matched the Nazis in their hatred of the Jews, where the Nazi weekly Der Sturmer luridly portrayed Jews as parasites and locusts, moving forward to Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, he had portrayed them in a 2008 speech as being; “a black and filthy microbe called the Zionist regime,” while often threatening to destroy Israel.

Personality cult

There is also the case of personality cults, where a regime paints its leader as almost godlike, convincing the population to commit absolute loyalty towards him, even at the cost of their lives.

Just like images of Hitler could be seen in every house, and on many walls across Germany, so it is with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and to ensure that the masses will lay down their lives to protect them, both Hitler and Khamenei ensured lessons of self-sacrifice for both leader and nation were taught to youths in the school system, as well as in organizations such as the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, and the Basij militia in Iran.

Through the use of such methods, dictatorial administrations go all out to preserve their oppressive regime, and through whipping up hatred through slick propaganda campaigns, they turn the country’s population against those trying to free them from tyranny, and when disorder appears within its borders, the administration will claim that those carrying out acts of subversion, are being paid to do so by foreign powers.

Then through a ritual of daily hangings, the regime will set in place a climate of fear, in a bid to deter other dissidents from taking to the streets. By using such methods to brainwash the masses into believing that outside forces are determined to take over their country, it makes it easier for a regime to find willing executioners to carry out its bidding.

But as it is today, with thousands now taking to the streets in protest, with mass arrests filling prison cells, and social media still available to keep dissidents abreast of what is going on, the tide is fast turning against the Iranian regime, and those willing executioners, will soon be turning on their masters, or their victims on them.