Signs of Civil War and Why Iranians Do Not Rise Up
Pejvak Kokabian
Introduction
Before the Pahlavi era, the race to seize and appropriate common resources (tragedy of the commons) was not very significant due to the decentralized structure of the Qajar dynasty.
However, in the history of contemporary uprisings over the past hundred years, after the destruction of the Qajar decentralized structure, land confiscation, centralization of education, resources, and bureaucracy, all rebellions and revolutions in the geography of Iran have had competition over existing resources as the core of the conflicts of the past century. The reason is that the central government has tightly gripped control over resources, oil, customs, tariffs, administered pricing and guaranteed purchase of agricultural products, rentier provincial bureaucracy, and inflation rate (through money printing), so that the economic life of every part of the country depends on the decision-makers in the center. The answer must be sought in the problem of joint ownership and the tragedy of the commons.
Among merchants, there is an accepted point: if you want to be rich, you must either live in the center or on the border. In the first case, you are close to the core of power; in the second, you are far from the affliction of central power and adjacent to foreign money.
Iranians (central Persians region) will never participate en masse in any social transformation or change unless they are certain that control and monopoly over resources will remain in their own hands after the changes or revolution. They have never risen up nationwide for freedom. It has always been the minorities who have carried the torch of freedom and justice, because if justice is established, they will regain their usurped rights (right will return to its rightful owner).
A – The history of center-dwellers is not aligned with freedom-seeking and justice
It is necessary to briefly review the nationwide revolutions of the past hundred years.
1- Constitutional Revolution 1284/1905
(The revolutionaries shut down the Tehran bazaar and took sanctuary in the shrine of Abdolazim. This was because in Azar 1284 the governor of Tehran punished several reputable merchants on the pretext of sugar price increase, and the despotic king had supported the governor.) It had an economic origin, caused by the oppression and absolute despotism of the monarchy. It was first started by religious scholars, and then the demand for establishing a judiciary independent of the king (House of Justice) and limiting the king’s power was mainly added to it. In the Constitutional Revolution (establishing and enacting a constitution against the king’s unchecked power), Sardar Asaad Bakhtiari, Yeprem Khan the Armenian, Sattar Khan the Turk, and elites of the surrounding nations were all involved, all of whom were non-Persian.
2- In the nationalization of oil in 1328/1949, again the revolutionaries who had united in support of Mosaddegh were not doing it for freedom; rather, Mosaddegh, with his proud speeches, instilled in the people that their oil share was being stolen, which later practically led to the expulsion of the Shah (rejection of the monarchy) from the country.
3- In the 1357/1979 Revolution, Britain and its partners realized that the masses had to be deceived and fooled, so they deceived the Persian Shiite people with promises of free water and electricity and the establishment of Ali’s just government by the clergy. They lined up the people of central Iran behind Ayatollah Khomeini, but later the people realized they had been duped, yet it was too late, and the City of London and European bankers had control of Iran’s oil in the hands of the representatives of the center-dwellers.
4- In the 1388/2009-2011 electoral dispute, which was a conflict and competition at the top of power in the center between two factions, when the reformist Persians reached an agreement with the conservatives, they sent the people back home. This revolution was also not for freedom or democracy. After that, the bloody uprising of Aban 1398/2019 also had an economic origin.
5- In the 1401/2022 Jin(a) Amini revolution, the Kurds rose up against a hundred years of colonialism and oppression. Because the Kurds and minorities were the vanguard, for the first two weeks the Persians did not support it. Later, when the uprising became nationwide, attempts were made to appoint a controlled leader for a decentralized movement that would naturally be controllable, so the monarchy faction, Canada, and Germany were brought into the issue. After the reformists’ demand for a share, the royalists, in the Georgetown coalition, diverted the demand for freedom and rights under the spontaneous leadership of the people inside the country, created a leader, and handed it over to the fake Georgetown coalition abroad. Then, with the planning of intelligence forces, they again ordered Reza Pahlavi (beyond parties and currents) to leave the coalition, effectively confiscating the revolution from the Kurds and from inside the country and putting it to sleep abroad. Here, Germany, Canada, France, and Britain were seeking to calm things down and protect their own interests, and they were serious collaborators in the project of transforming Jina into Mahsa.
B – What happens when external intervention with international standards is applied to the geography of Iran?
Due to the multi-ethnic conditions of Iran’s geography, generally foreign force and external intervention cause internationally acceptable standards in the field of justice, freedom (expression, institutions, ethnic language, share of subsoil resources), minority rights (right to political party, minority rights, right to fair trial, right to individual and collective self-rule) to be forcibly imposed on that geography. For example, the governance model that America designed for Iraq was very much based on American idealism. This model would have been significantly implementable if it had not been subject to interference and manipulation by Iraq’s neighbors. For example, in reality, two projects: 1- implementing the constitution and 2- political federalism could have been very successful. Although political federalism has been successful in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and the region’s constitution would have been approved and implemented fifteen years ago if Iran and Turkey had not obstructed it, but with financial control and refusal to send budget by Baghdad, the major political progress process in Iraq has been driven into a deadlock. In the rest of Iraq, where the Shiites are absolutely opposed to the new political order, the rights of Sunnis have also been taken hostage by the Shiites.
In Iran, central Persians region will not go along with changes that lead to freedom and justice in the use of resources belonging to other peoples. The political, institutional, and economic power, along with the security monopoly that center-dwellers hold, has been strengthened over the past hundred years by colonial partners. Political centralism, economic monopoly, and institutional rent have caused the concentration of productive manufacturing economy in the center (with the help of Europeans) and the remaining raw material economy in the periphery and the lands of non-Persian nations. This is why the role of Iran’s periphery is like that of a colony that provides cheap labor, free raw materials, stolen water, and confiscated oil to the central productive institutions.
C – The masses and populism
Gustave Le Bon states somewhere that one should not underestimate the power of the stupidity of the masses. About half a century has passed since Iranians migrated to the Western world; the majority of these Western-dwelling Iranians have enjoyed more facilities and media than non-Persians due to a hundred years of internal colonialism. The reality is that the majority of voluntary migrants are from among Persians, and the majority of involuntary exiles belong to non-Persians. Despite the education of central dwellers in the West (which has mostly been in engineering sciences leading to the job market), unfortunately in the fields of social sciences, politics, and governance systems in the West—where they experience the most freedom and justice—Persians, whether willingly or unwillingly, lack insight and wisdom. Center-dwellers, despite decades of living in the West, do not deem the same decentralized and just system that they themselves live under in the West appropriate for their mother country, and this is a terrible hypocrisy and immorality.
They still do not want to understand or do not know that in contemporary laws, majority does not confer legitimacy. For example, if in a group of four people, even if three vote to kill the fourth, the fourth still has rights that numerical majority cannot strip from him. Iranian center-dwellers, who are mostly ethnic Persians, imagining that with widespread numerical support for the son of an appointed king and holding the charter for reproducing despotism again (Emergency Notebook – Third Revision), cannot continue the economic plunder of peripheral lands, imposition of one language and one narrative, and economic rent. Reproducing despotism will be the greatest reason for civil war, and there is no doubt about this.
It is not difficult to understand that if even a carrot were chosen as the national covenant, it would gain more consensus than the former king’s son, because everyone would agree that a fruit that is orange, shaped like a carrot, and tastes like a carrot is definitely a carrot.
What is the solution?
The only way forward is that, as in the Jina revolution, respect for life, freedom, human rights (including women’s rights) become the accepted basis for unity and gathering of the peoples of this geography (not reproduction of the monarchy system), and this criterion acts as a catalyst for establishing economic justice, people’s sovereignty, and practical freedom; the central ethnic group will also necessarily join the freedom caravan.
If the central Persians region do not pay attention to the demands for justice, freedom, economic justice, and decentralization, like a forced marriage, other nations will separate from them, even though from the very beginning this marriage of peoples was neither voluntary nor by their own desire, and their consent was never obtained.
In the hope of freedom and justice for all the peoples of this land.
