One wonders what $75 million US dollars would have translated into in 1953? I ask only because it was in 1953 that the United States engineered the overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeq, largely by painting him a communist. The reason? Because he dared consider the nationalization of Iranian oil, which was, at the time, and as it would remain after his overthrow, the province of what is now British Petroleum.
Western greed via a joint CIA/MI6 operation known as AJAX destroyed Iranian democracy in its infancy, replacing it with an autocratic regime friendly to Western privatization rights that would rule Iran until the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Twenty eight years later the United States finds itself in a different position. As of March of 2006, it operates an Office of Iranian Affairs on the State Department’s second floor, an office that receives considerable funding – the afore mentioned $75 million dollars. According to The New York Times…
“According to an internal State Department memo, the office was part of a new effort to “respond to the full spectrum of threats Iran poses,” as well as to “reach out to the Iranian people to support their desire for freedom and democracy.”
That’s quite the missive coming from a major department of a country that, 44 years ago, played an integral role in the demise of Iranian democracy.
One therefore has to ask themselves – what sort of democracy are we talking about with regards to Iran? One that will placate the West’s desire to see its markets open to the exploitation of foreign companies, or one that actually represents the will of the Iranian people? Because one has to wonder, were an Iranian leader to find themselves in the same potion as Mossadeq did in 1953, what then would be the outcome?
Like numerous other terms, democracy is just a word, one largely used to completely misrepresent the intentions of those that use it in a positive context while cloaking their selfish ends. Thus, the implementation of any truly democratic government must not only be one that is overwhelmingly supported and struggled for by a segment of a population that is prepared to face the consequences of their actions, but by one that undertakes that struggle in the purest sense, not one funded by an expectant third-party.
We find ourselves living in a world in which the deliverance of democracy is not unlike taking out an overwhelmingly high interest loan from the world’s most corrupted bank. No matter the liberties or self determination promoted, the repayment of the loan becomes the paramount fixture in that democracy’s birth, primarily meaning that the creation of free markets are thrust upon those that were ignorant enough to do business with such a corrupted institution. And that is not democracy, but imperialism disguised as something palatable.
Thus, I found one of the more profound passages from the afore quoted New York Times article to be…
“It is particularly telling, perhaps, that some of the most outspoken critics of the Iranian government have been among the most outspoken critics of the democracy fund. Activists from the journalist Emadeddin Baghi to the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to the former political prisoner Akbar Ganji have all said thanks but no thanks. Ganji has refused three personal invitations to meet with Bush.”
On whose terms shall liberty be embraced? There was a time in our history in which liberty itself was a pure goal in and of itself that did not come with stipulations attached to it. That said, the existence of a fund to help promote what is hypocritically referred to as “Iranian democracy” by a nation whose own self interest is of the foremost concern, something they have certainly proved to be the case in Iraq (to disastrous effect), is an affront at best, not only to the Iranian people, but to true democracy itself.