Iranian Diasporas from 1976 to Today

An observation on Iranian support for violent regime change at home. It usually doesn't end well.

[Pascal’s Note: The following is part of an email from my colleague, Dr. Stephen R. Parsons, that I publish here with his kind permission. I find the observations quite valuable about the dangers of Iranian support for regime change intervention.]

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By Stephen R. Parsons

At the moment, I have a strong feeling of deja vu as I’m experiencing my fifth iteration of the Iranian diaspora, each of which, over the years, has been tragically reduced to following events in their own country, and with an escalating burning hatred for those in power. Virtually all the iterations ended up being isolated in their own political bubbles, and in the case of several, even though I sympathize to varying degrees with them, ended up being seen as ‘anti-Iranian’ by the vast majority back home.

First, at Lancaster University there were those political exiles who identified with the Tudeh party, communists, with a long history of fighting against the Shah through trade union activity and civil rights campaigning – they were very well-meaning progressive secularists but they were hampered by their orthodoxy (a starry-eyed view of the Soviet Union) and the huge popular uprising around the persona of Khomeini seemed to take them by complete surprise. They returned to Iran and probably all died in the maelstrom of the Islamic revolution (incidentally, this was undoubtedly the fate of the Iraqis I got to know – Saddam Hussein had been a CIA asset, and he was helped to power by the Americans but at some stage he reemphasized the secular nationalist project of the Ba`ath Party and the Iraqi CP called on its members to back Saddam in his struggle to ´defend Iraqi sovereignty`, they went back home and were eliminated – the US embassy provided long lists of names of communists to the Iraqi authorities which would have included all those I knew at Lancaster – sorry for the long digression).

The next iteration, the followers of Khomeini, came in our second year, and they completely dominated, had their own ´imam`, and kept irreligious westerners at a distance – an attempt was made to involve them in Palestinian solidarity work but they had instructions not to have any personal relations with us (the university left). After Lancaster and in my first years in Denmark, I experienced those Iranian exiles associated with the Shah. They considered themselves to be pro-American but generally ended up being very bitter about their fall from social grace and being reduced to immigrant status. I remember one of them complaining about not being given top marks in his English language exam - ´how dare you, I was a powerful and rich man in Iran!`Some of them even imagined that they would return to power in time.

Then there was the Islamic left, those who wanted the revolution to lead to a redistribution of economic wealth and the establishment of ´people`s power` and the liberation of women, etc. These were the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) and I met several of their members in the Danish language class I attended in the first year I moved to Denmark. I had quite a few discussions with them and tried desperately to convince them that throwing in their lot with Iraq in their armed struggle with the Iranian Islamic Republic was madness – that they would be seen forever as enemies by the great mass of the Iranians. Numerous martyrdoms (public hangings) of their members achieved, as far as I can see, nothing. This is often the fatal logic of believing that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

This brings me to the current crop of Iranians I have something to do with at the University of Southern Denmark – young Iranian men and women, postgraduate researchers, who are part of the staff at the university (there are quite a few of them - ´a brain drain`) – they are very westernized and the women now seem all to have dropped wearing headwear. They still have family in Iran. I ended up in a conversation with one of them the other day and undoubtedly made myself very unpopular. A woman in her early thirties who told me that 40,000 people had been killed in the two-day protest in January, and although her parents still lived in the country, she put her faith in the coming military attack by the US (´the only hope`). Again, a case of my enemy`s enemy is my friend.

First, of all I told her that a figure of 40,000 was absurd and I asked her how she as a scientist could believe in such a number? I said I`m not in doubt that the authorities in Iran are ruthless when it comes to repressing opposition but any serious person knows that such a high number of fatalities would require bombs, tanks, and machineguns and for people not to run away. The Israelis have needed 2 years and an estimated 200,000 tonnes of explosives on a population confined to an area 141 sq. miles to kill about 100,000. Moreover, if really tens of thousands had been killed, mass burials would be necessary, given that every inch of Iran is under satellite observation – the Americans would have released pictures of such a thing. I`m afraid I`m getting crotchety in my old age – it makes me angry when educated people don`t use their common sense and just swallow such obvious propaganda. One believes something because one wants to believe it (on one occasion, another colleague told me she believed the report in her newspaper that the Russians had blown up the Nord Stream pipeline).

If 40,000 had been killed, then an attack using 500 missiles or even a tactical nuclear weapon seems less outrageous. Since when have unprovoked (Iran has not attacked another country – it has been the victim of attacks by Iraq, Israel, and America) aerial attacks not led people in the said countries to back up their government/state? Even if such a military action collapses the existing power structure (which I doubt – recently, an estimated 30% of the population were out on the streets to mark the founding of the Islamic Republic), what would come in its place? As I said to the woman in question, ´don`t think something cannot be worse than it already is`(there needs to be some coherent political strategy that doesn`t mean you end up as a fifth column for foreign powers that are not motivated by the interests of the Iranian people). Ethnic division and bitter civil war, and a splitting up of the country as has happened in Libya and Syria? In Syria, the Kurds (who put their faith in the Americans) are now being militarily suppressed, and the country has a former ISIS/al-Qaeda leader as its president, with areas under Israeli and Turkish occupation. As with Iraq, the historic presence of Christians has now ended.