My interest was further piqued by a book which I happened to have been reading when the revolt broke out: Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (more popularly referred to as The Banality of Evil). I was reminded of the book this morning, when I read this analysis from Jeffrey Goldberg:
The Iranian regime has exposed itself as interested mainly in self-preservation. Netanyahu told me earlier this spring that Iran is run by a "messianic, apocalyptic cult." But I think there's an argument to be made that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are grubby men mainly interested in perpetuating their power. In other words, they seem to behave like rather quotidian dictators, not religious fanatics. A confrontation with Israel would certainly threaten the stability of their regime, and the stability of their regime is something they quite obviously cherish.
I think Arendt would find much to unpack here, from the casual assumption that a regime can have a singular purpose (and that it can be exposed!) to our ease in assigning the status of "cult" to anything Islamic.
In Arendt's account of the final months of World War Two, she takes pains to emphasize just how preposterously self-destructive the Nazis' "Jewish policy" really was. Critical army transports of personnel and supplies were interrupted in order to move more Jews, more quickly, to death camps. Huge amounts of military manpower were expended pulling surviving Jews deeper and deeper into the Reich, in an effort to murder them before the coming surrender. And weeks were spent dismantling camps and burning documents in an effort to conceal the activity, all of it time that might have been spent on the war effort.
We are habituated to thinking of the Nazis as terrifyingly rational and efficient, though they were nothing of the sort. Why is this? Because of their early successes? Their totalitarian aesthetic? Their propaganda? That they were, in fact, an apocalyptic cult was so easily concealed by the regime that even today, with all of the facts available, few people understand the extent to which Nazism was sacrificed for the sake of killing Jews.
That Iran has come to surprise anyone, including Goldberg, with an instinct for self-preservation probably says much more about our perceptions of Islamic theocracies than about Iran itself. Indeed there may be something racial at the basis of this commentary (in general, not singularly from Goldberg) that allows us to more easily find hints of messianic extremism in Middle Easterners than in Europeans. That's not to suggest that such things don't exist in Iran, since they certainly do. I mean only that these strains of political thought should have been expected to exist in tension with an instinct for self-preservation, and thus they should have surprised no one. It will perhaps be a lesson to all concerned that there is yet a small bit of value to the "one-worldism" that teaches us to expect some similarities in the outlook of foreign peoples, rather than endless differences.
The other point of interest in Goldberg's post was his impulse to do away with the distinction between Iran's treatment of its internal political situation and its treatment of Israel. And this, more than anything else he has said, can probably be used as proof of his lack of sympathy for Netanyahu's worldview. For what self-respecting Israeli hawk would for a moment imagine that the Ayatollah's comparitive rationality in dealing with a political uprising within his country would have any bearing on his approach to Israel? We are, after all, talking about an Islamist death cult, yes? And while insane martyrdom may not be prescribed for quelling "reformist" uprisings within the country, they are most certainly the order of the day when it comes to an attack on Israel.
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