As someone who grew up with coverage of the Iranian revolution of 1979, the subsequent American Hostage crisis in Tehran and the descent of Iran into an oppressive theocracy, being constantly on the various news bulletins, I am very familiar with the fatal errors that the Left made in Iran. Sadly these same fatal errors seem to being made by Leftists in the West as well in the modern day.
Because I lived through those times and saw via news and comment coming out of Iran in the 1980’s and beyond, I’ve watched how violent religious extremists following the revolution first violently purged secular leftists and then put the entire country into a Shia religious purgatory. I saw how Marxist secularists gave the religious rightists assistance and treated them as allies as in their view the theocrats were fighting a struggle of liberation against ‘imperialism’, only to be murdered by those same theocrats after the revolution.
Other readers may not be as familiar as I am with the descent of Iran into theocratic madness and this article posted on TR News will probably help many who are unfamiliar with the story of the Leftists siding with the Mullahs only to be destroyed by them. Therefore I’m posting an excerpt or two here and a link to this article.
TR News said:
Neither the Tudeh party, (a pro-USSR party), nor the Marxist-Leninist OIPFG, could introduce Karl Marx’s “Religion is people’s opiate” into their Iranian revolutionary agenda, so they considered “anti-imperialist” Muslim movements as their strategic allies. Khomeini’s Shia Islamist movement was “their ally”. The Marxist revolutionaries energised and mobilised the working class and students to agitate for their socialist utopian dream, but they miscalculated (for the most part). Khomeini’s book was readily available to read, a book that did not hide his fascistic, misogynistic, and anti-socialist ideas, the left “ignored” the challenges of political Islam, resulting in dire consequences. Islam, as a divisive or a monolithic factor, was not taken by the left into consideration.
Full article here: https://www.tr.news/irans-marxists-paved-the-way-for-islamic-revolutionaries/
The Left got truly shafted by their failure to take on board what Khomeini had said he would do. The knowledge that the religious extremists were theocratic fascists was completely ignored. The Left thought they could use the rising religious fervour in Iran for its own ends only to fail dismally in either increasing fiscal equality for the Iranian people or promoting secularism. I look at what happened in Iran in 1979 onwards and I look at the UK Labour Party and its policy of appeasement when it comes to Islamic interests and I weep. Labour, in fact all of the moderate and constitutional Left, should have looked at what happened in Iran and thought very carefully about whether or not they wanted to ally themselves with one particular and troublesome religious current. The Western Left are walking down the same dangerous and ultimately impossible path of thinking that those with extreme religious beliefs will respect the secularism and ecumenism that used to characterise what was once in the UK, the working class Left.
The Left are making exactly the same mistake here in the UK, allying themselves to the religion of fluffy kittens.
They are indeed. The Labour Party for example has become an ‘Islam Party’ in all but name. It is areas where Labour either governs or the local state organs such as social services are dominated by Labour supporters, where the bulk of the Islamic Rape Gangs have been operating.
That word “taqquiya” seems to allow all Muslims a get out of jail card approved by their sky fairy. Trust, or believe, a Muslim? Only if I had a death wish.
The use of the word ‘Taqiyya’ to describe dishonest or questionably honest Muslim individuals or Islamic groups is being increasingly criminalised in the UK owing to the actions of well connected Islamic advocacy organisations. Although Taqiyya started out as a Shia thing that Shias used to protect themselves from other ROPERS, lying to protect or promote Islam really is a thing. There have been cases of Islamic extremists posing as moderates in order to befriend naive Vicars and Rabbis in order to promote the lie that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’.