Independent article challenges anti-Iranian media mob

Darius Guppy challenged the Western media's assault on Iran

Almost every Western media outlet has played the same refrain for the last two months, misrepresenting the Iranian elections as a 'fraud', leading to a political 'crisis' in which 'reformers' are taking on a 'dictatorship'.

This deliberate campaign of distortion has now been challenged by a letter from Darius Guppy, the Old Etonian, half-Iranian businessman whose grandfather was one of Tehran's most eminent scholars.

Mr Guppy's initial letter was published on 21st July:

Elections in Iran were not rigged

As a regular visitor to Iran, and having recently returned from there, it is my duty to ensure, in whatever small way I can, that the British public is not misled by misrepresentations by the Western media.

The suggestion that the elections were rigged is farcical. Some 40 million people, or 85 per cent of the electorate, voted, an endorsement of the system and one that contrasts markedly with the justified apathy and disgust of voters in the West. It is inconceivable that an election of such magnitude could be fraudulent without smoking guns, someone, somewhere, blowing the whistle.

The Iranians, including the authorities, are highly intelligent, much more so than their British or American counterparts, as their masterful handling of the nuclear issue, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon have demonstrated. If they were going to rig an election, they would rig it 49 per cent to 51 per cent, say, and not by a landslide of two-thirds to one-third.

The history of Iran for the past few centuries is one of outside powers meddling in her affairs and stealing her resources, the principal culprits being Britain, America and Russia. And, in recent times, the first two have sought to bring down the Revolution, arming and funding Saddam Hussein in a war that cost a million lives.

The truth is that nothing would please the West more than for the Revolution to fail and for the great Iranian people to become like their own citizens, far from emancipated, the mindless, McDonald's-munching slaves of Mammon.

Darius Guppy

Cape Town, South Africa

 

Dr James Dickie

Predictably only hostile comments followed in several letters from anti-Iranian commentators published on 23rd June before the Islamic scholar Dr James Dickie complained of this anti-democratic slant and shamed the paper into allowing his reply to the debate in a letter published on 28th July:

Iranian elections put UK democracy to shame

One needs no better proof of Mr Average Briton's abdication from reason than the reaction of your correspondents to Darius Guppy's letter of 21 July in praise of Iranian democracy. In a country where practically no one is without a mobile phone, would not at least one opponent of the Iranian regime have recorded evidence of vote-rigging, or the burning of ballot boxes, or the intimidation of voters at polling stations?

As a democracy Iran puts Britain to shame; during an eight-year war with Iraq, Iran held three elections, whereas during a five-year war with Germany, Britain didn't hold one. In comparison with other Europeans, much less Iranians, we evince a gullibility that is yet another symptom of our national decline. Bereft of the healthy scepticism that once was a hallmark of the national character, we take our opinions on matters of foreign policy ready-made from a discredited political class and a press parasitic on that class.

Mendacious politicians who lied about weapons of mass destruction now pontificate about Iran to create a climate of fear like that which preceded the assault on Iraq and its execrable leader, whose usefulness to the West had by that stage been all used up. We are the victims of a consumerist culture that makes sure we swallow lies with the same voracity as we shorten our lives by munching Big Macs.

Dr James Dickie
Greenock Renfrewshire

Finally on 7th August the Independent commissioned a full length article by Darius Guppy rebutting the arguments of his critics and explaining the absurdity of the Western media's case against Iran. (Though this article was - very unusually - introduced by a hostile preamble: a curious Alice in Wonderland presentation in which the criticism came before the article!)

On 21 July, The Independent published a letter in which I argued that there was no empirical evidence of the elections in Iran having been rigged, despite prolific assurances to the contrary. Driven by forces beholden to the corporate interest, nothing would please the West more than to have the Iranian masses emulate "the mindless McDonald's-munching slaves of Mammon" of my last sentence.

Ignoring certain wholly predictable responses of a personal nature, two principal lines of reasoning have emerged that are intended to rebut my hypothesis. First, that recent events in Iran, notably large street demonstrations, are proof of election rigging, and second, that all the Iranian people really want is to enjoy "freedom" and "democracy" – just like us! A proposition that smacks as much of arrogance as of Fukuyaman hubris.

To suggest that two undeniably devout men, Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, should have engaged in such an un-Islamic conspiracy as cheating their own people (unnecessary, since the consensus of the opinion polls put Mr Ahmadi Nejad comfortably ahead) constitutes possibly the most serious allegation that one could level against them.

In supposedly civilised societies, the more serious the accusation the greater the burden of proof required to shore it up. Evidence is required; hand-in-the-till-captured-live-on-video type evidence. Nothing that I have seen or read comes close to this standard; something all the more surprising given the Iranian people's inventiveness and tenacity.

If the death of a poor protester is able to be posted on YouTube within minutes of its occurrence, then one might have expected to see some footage perhaps of Revolutionary Guards intimidating voters or of a whistleblower with a blacked-out face claiming he was paid by the authorities to empty ballot boxes and refill them with voting slips he was handed.

Nor is the proposition that a hermetically sealed society has managed to contain evidence of wrongdoing convincing. Truth has an uncomfortable habit of getting out. Proper evidence, real smoking guns, have been regularly uncovered where genuinely repressive regimes such as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Stalinist Russia and so on are concerned.

In fact, those who rely on such arguments have clearly never set foot in Iran, where they would be struck by her openness, warmth, lack of surveillance cameras, fingerprinting at airports and other paraphernalia that accompany a KGB-like state apparatus. The Englishman need travel no further south than Land's End to experience a genuine police state.

As pointed out by Dr Dickie in his response to my letter (28 March), where then has the quality of scepticism, a crucial component of the liberal, reasonable mindset, and once so defining of the national character, gone? Now replaced in citizens of the so-called free world, including Britain, by a blind acceptance of what they hear from two most discredited sources: politicians and journalists.

How often does one hear, for example, that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has called for the eradication of Israel? A simple click of the mouse is all that separates those who swallow what they are fed from what the man actually said, which was that the state of Israel, qua state, should vanish, not that millions of Jews should be exterminated, as implied in the media.

Such bovine acquiescence before the official line negates the very justification for democracies – which rely upon a citizenry that is rational and capable of making up its own mind – and has dangerous consequences. Take, for example, the media and politically induced conviction that Iraq abounded in weapons of mass destruction capable of annihilating London at 45 minutes' notice.

And how to explain this sudden interest in Iran's democratic aspirations? Did Western governments care for the wishes of her people when it helped Saddam kill hundreds of thousands of them because they had risen up in popular revolt against a genuine dictator? Whether Iranians support Mr Ahmadi-Nejad or Mr Mousavi, one thing is for certain, virtually to a man they are in favour of their country developing nuclear energy.

Will Western governments support such a democratically expressed desire? How about the overwhelming numbers for Hamas? Or the Algerians when they voted for the Islamic Salvation Front to save them from oppression by corrupt army cadres? What about the wishes of the Uzbek, Egyptian and Saudi peoples? Are they respected? Put the question of Israel's legitimacy as a state to the world's Muslims – how do you think they will vote?

Always and everywhere, at least in the Muslim world, democracy sides with the dictators.

Perhaps too those, in Iran and elsewhere, who look with cynicism at your democratic utopias are not quite as wet behind the ears as your own citizens. This was the meaning of my reference to "McDonald's-munching slaves" – not, as one commentator put it, an expression of snobbery directed at the working class who cannot afford a meal at the Bullingdon, but a highlighting of who it is that actually runs the show in your democracies and enslaves your population through a culture of consumerism.

For McDonald's is the ultimate symbol of the bourgeois, corporate interests that hold the real reins of power in your countries. Was it an oppressed working class, as one commentator suggested, which took to the streets in the Nayavaran and Shemiran districts of North Tehran – districts as representative of the nation as are Mayfair and Knightsbridge of Britain?

On the contrary, Iran's workers are largely in favour of Mr Ahmadi Nejad. It was in fact commercial, bourgeois interests which choreographed the Tehran demonstrations, a class compromised by their collaboration with Pahlavi despotism and consequently repudiated by the Iranian masses who groaned under the regime from which that class prospered.

The truth is that many in Iran and in the Muslim world in general have grasped Western democracy's dirty little secret: that your leaders have no real power. And if your representatives are as ineffectual as their electorate before the Dictatorship of Money, then what meaning have your votes and your democracy?

As for the patronising assumption that Muslims in general and Iranians in particular, look with envy from far across the Bosphorus at Western society: wake up! While I do not claim to speak for every Muslim or even every Iranian, I am confident that my views coincide with those of the majority.

For we look with horror at your anarchy and what you have become. Visit Iran and you will see a people polite, hospitable, cultured, noble and brave. Look at Britain's urban hell and you will see young girls and boys armed with knives, swearing, half naked, vomiting the previous night's attempt to stifle their pain and their emptiness. Turn on the radio and listen to laddettes boasting about what they did with their boyfriends in bed the day before, but tune in to Iran's airwaves and you will hear poetry and beautiful music.

Now while you may have traded Turner for Emin, Shakespeare for Rushdie, Mozart for Madonna, people who think very much like me will never allow such a thing to happen to their nation. You offer us Puff Daddy but we have Hafez, thank you very much. You offer us Hollywood when we have perhaps the finest modern cinema on earth. You may have jettisoned a once great European and God-fearing civilisation, but your moral poison must never be allowed to insinuate its way into one of the greatest and oldest cultures on the planet.

The events in Iran of the past 30 years must be seen for what they really are, not a revolution at all, but a counter revolution; not a negation of a nation's grand past as occurred in France or Russia or China, but an affirmation of it; a realisation that the experiment you call the Enlightenment, or secular liberalism, far from being the triumph of your comfortable certainties, has been the opposite – a bringing low of all that once made Europe great.

The planet has been brought to its knees by bourgeois greed. Scientists increasingly consider us to be in the midst of a "mass extinction event", similar to that which gripped the world when a giant meteorite slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and extinguished the dinosaurs. Vast and increasing discrepancies in wealth cause massive social unrest that can but accelerate the apocalypse. Meanwhile, the value of your cultural output is zero, and in the West the family has all but disappeared.

Built on a doctrine of expansion, your effervescence entailed history's greatest genocides, 60 million alone in South and Central America within a century of Columbus's arrival, the virtual eradication of the Plains Indians in the North ("Manifest Destiny"), the enslavement of millions of Africans and Asians and the pillaging of half the world's resources. No creature in history has been as destructive as European Man and no force has harnessed that destructiveness as successfully as secular liberalism with its denial of a transcendent order.

And yet you accuse us of aggression.

The history of Iran is one of invasion by foreign powers. How many Iranian warships patrol the Gulf of Mexico or the straits of Dover? How many Iranian spy satellites sail across your skies? How many Iranian troops are stationed next to your borders poised to invade? How many billions of Toumans are pumped into destabilising your regimes? How many Iranian nuclear missiles are aimed at your cities? How many atom bombs has Iran dropped on civilian populations? Now ask these questions in reverse. And yet you allow your politicians to make you feel insecure!

Were the catastrophes I outlined above caused by Islam, or Iran, or even Bin Laden for that matter? Or were they in fact caused by a way of life which you arrogantly assume the whole world wishes to embrace? Your "mindlessness", by which I mean your failure to ask such questions, comes from the fact that you cannot even comprehend your own indenture – to money and to desires that can never be satisfied.

Iran is set irreversibly on a course towards independence and will never adopt the position of servility towards Mammon and America which has earned for England the appellative not of the "the Great Satan", a term reserved for the United States, but "shaytan-e-kuchek" or "the little Satan".

To this end, she has recently developed her own fighter jets and her own communications satellites. Likewise, she is engaged in building a giant oil refinery so that she will no longer be reliant upon imported petrol. And, rest assured, she will develop a peaceful nuclear technology to insure her energy requirements against the inevitable day when the oil runs out, however much the "free world" or "international community" plot.

God willing, she can then become what Huntingdon refers to as a "core state" around which other nations that cherish freedom can coalesce. As one of the few countries that has consistently dared to stand up to Mammon, she must be a bastion in the coming clash – not of civilisations, as Huntingdon puts it, but between civilisation on the one hand and the barbarism that is now synonymous with secular liberalism in the minds of so many Muslims, and others disillusioned with the fruits of the West, and not just in the imagination of one particular old Etonian, former member of the Bullingdon.