The Most Un-Islamic Republic of
Persia By Spengler
"A
new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic
Republic," I called Iran last year (Jihadis and whores,
November 21). Now the mask has fallen. Iran's
uninterrupted tantrum over the portrayal of the
5th-century BC Persian Empire in a US film is very
Persian, but not at all Islamic. It has gone
unnoticed in the shouting over 300 that the
Koran explicitly welcomed the destruction of the
pagan (Zoroastrian) empire at the hands of the
Byzantine Christians a millennium after the
Spartans and their allies defended the pass at
Thermopylae. Iran's identification with pre-
Islamic Persian paganism is
decidedly un-Islamic.
Writing of the
destruction of the Sassanid Empire at the hands of
the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius at the Battle of
Issus in AD 628, the Koran hailed a "victory for
believers", namely the Christian monotheists of
the Eastern Roman Empire, over the Persian
heathens. [1] The Romans at first would be
defeated (as they were when the Persians occupied
Jerusalem in 615), but they would rise and win
again, and "on that day, the believers shall
rejoice" (Sura 30, verses 2-4). The Sura is by no
means obscure, for Islamic scholars cite it as an
example of a Koranic prophecy that came true.
That does not square with the declaration
last Friday of Iran's embassy in France denouncing
the local release of the film 300:
"Throughout history, the Iranian culture has
always advocated peace ... As a result, any wrong
image about Iranian culture will be void of value
and will be accordingly judged by those familiar
with the history of the world." Every organ of the
Iranian regime has issued a denunciation of
300, based on a comic-book account of the
events of 480 BC. At Friday evening prayers,
former president Hashemi Rafsanjani added his
outrage to the chorus, according to the state news
service. He "condemned production and screening of
the film 300 and described it [as] a cruel
case of historical theft and added that [this]
film which has been produced by Hollywood distorts
history and paints a fabricated picture of
Iranians".
The West's hope to avoid war
with Iran centers on Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the
ostensibly moderate alternative to Supreme Leader
Ali Khamenei and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
European diplomats as well as the Saudis hope that
health problems will force Khamenei out of office,
allowing Rafsanjani to assume the top position,
and negotiate an end to Iran's nuclear-weapons
program. [2] For the moment, Washington will sit
back and see whether the Saudi scenario might
succeed. If it does not, eventually it will employ
force.
Too much, I think, is made over the
tug-of-war within Tehran, and too little attention
is paid to Iran's underlying motives. Within as
little as a decade, Iran will produce too little
oil to export, and its economy will collapse, as I
warned in several locations, most recently on
December 5 (Civil wars or proxy
wars?). Within a generation Iran
will have half as many soldiers and twice as many
pensioners. Driving down the price of oil to crush
the Iranian economy sooner rather than later is a
favorite scenario of American strategists - Victor
Davis Hanson offers it up in his latest column -
and the Iranians know better than Americans that
the sand has nearly run through the hourglass.
Iran's imperial ambitions, I maintain, express a
unique solution to an otherwise insoluble problem,
namely to grab the oil resources of southern Iraq,
Azerbaijan, and perhaps even northern Saudi
Arabia.
These new imperial ambitions
inspire Iran's impassioned defense of the ancient
Persian Empire, which, as noted, trample over the
Koran's clear view of the matter. What upsets the
Persians is not the inaccuracies of 300, a
Hollywood genre film with few pretenses at
historical authenticity. They simply don't like
the fact that the Persians lost.
On the
surface, the most objectionable departure from
historical fact is the figure of Persia's King
Xerxes, who is portrayed as a monstrous,
body-pierced, sexually ambiguous monster prancing
madly about the battlefield. That is fanciful, to
be sure, but conveys a deeper truth about the
character of Persian rulers, who were among the
most lascivious, concupiscent, slothful, sensual,
deceitful and greedy gang of louts who ever had
the misfortune to reign.
The high culture
of the Persian court was not so much sexually
ambiguous as it was overtly pederastic. Persian
historian Ehsan Yarsheter observed of medieval
Persian-language love poetry, "As a rule, the
beloved is not a woman, but a young man." Hafez,
the most celebrated of Persian poets (and the
inspiration for many Western adaptors, including J
W von Goethe), wrote many such love songs to
adolescent boys as this:
My sweetheart
is a beauty and a child, and I fear that in play
one day He will kill me miserably and he will
not be accountable according to the holy law.
I have a fourteen-year-old idol, sweet and
nimble For whom the full moon is a willing
slave.
His sweet lips have (still) the
scent of milk Even though the demeanor of his
dark eyes drips blood. (Divan, No 284)
If the wine-serving magian boy would
shine in this way I will make a broom of my
eyelashes to sweep the entrance of the tavern.
(Divan, No 9)
Hafez was a poet of
surpassing skill, to be sure, quite worthy of the
widespread interest he attracted among
19th-century Europeans. Among the major cultures
of the world, however, there is no other example
of one so exclusively devoted to pederasty. The
Greeks (and especially the Spartans) had their
share of erotic fascination for boys, eg Ibycus
(flourished 6th century BC). But the defining
erotic figure of Greek literature is a woman,
namely Helen.
In that light I do not think
the makers of 300 portrayed Xerxes
unfairly; they showed the inner man, as it were.
As I wrote last October 24, [3] the Persians "have
been rather a nuisance since Thermopylae in 480
BC, and it is time that someone taught them a
lesson". My friend Corporal Malone LaVey of the
United States Marine Corps agrees.
2. See
for example The Guardian of March 25: "When the
Security Council first agreed sanctions against
Iran last December, it triggered a wave of
condemnation of the president.
"The
outcry, widely reflected in the Iranian media,
aided the political renaissance of a pragmatic
former president, Aqbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who
had been written off after being defeated by
Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election.
Rafsanjani has been trying to reassert himself
since topping the poll in last December's
elections to the Experts' Council - a powerful
clerical body that supervises the performance of
the supreme leader.
"That represents a
potential threat to Khamenei, who has long seen
Rafsanjani as a rival and supported Ahmadinejad's
presidential bid against him.
"Add to this
Ahmadinejad's mysterious cancellation of his
address to the Security Council and a pattern
begins to form."
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