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6/18/2025, 11:07:23 AM
>>63856579
The analogy to the late USSR is a good one.
It's forgotten now but Iran was a deadly, agile, revolutionary regime in the 1980s. They were blowing up Marines by the dozens and bumping off CIA station chiefs and we didn't even know they were the ones behind it. I guess their brand of revolutionary Islamic revival also seemed fresh at the time, I dunno.
But there's something about revolutionary regimes where after a few decades, they go sclerotic. The ideology goes from a flexible, agile, and expansive system to a formulaic dogma. The regime can't dispense with the ideology, and the regime still fashions itself as an ideological regime (Islamic republic, communist, etc.) but the actual reality is a total alter-universe that nobody acts like they believe in. In the USSR, there was officially a planned economy and a massive parallel black market and shadow economy which is how things really worked. In Iran, everything is for sale, and the Islamic prohibitions on people's lives are not taken seriously in people's private lives.
The ideology has also lost its universality. Everywhere where there's Iranian influence, the ideology has helped contributed to sectarian divisions, which has the opposite effect from how it was originally intended as a uniting force against Zionism and Western imperialism. Communism was once thought of (and believed in) as a universal ideology but it ended up becoming a dogma to justify the interests of Soviet foreign policy which squelched the national aspirations of countries under Soviet influence.
The analogy to the late USSR is a good one.
It's forgotten now but Iran was a deadly, agile, revolutionary regime in the 1980s. They were blowing up Marines by the dozens and bumping off CIA station chiefs and we didn't even know they were the ones behind it. I guess their brand of revolutionary Islamic revival also seemed fresh at the time, I dunno.
But there's something about revolutionary regimes where after a few decades, they go sclerotic. The ideology goes from a flexible, agile, and expansive system to a formulaic dogma. The regime can't dispense with the ideology, and the regime still fashions itself as an ideological regime (Islamic republic, communist, etc.) but the actual reality is a total alter-universe that nobody acts like they believe in. In the USSR, there was officially a planned economy and a massive parallel black market and shadow economy which is how things really worked. In Iran, everything is for sale, and the Islamic prohibitions on people's lives are not taken seriously in people's private lives.
The ideology has also lost its universality. Everywhere where there's Iranian influence, the ideology has helped contributed to sectarian divisions, which has the opposite effect from how it was originally intended as a uniting force against Zionism and Western imperialism. Communism was once thought of (and believed in) as a universal ideology but it ended up becoming a dogma to justify the interests of Soviet foreign policy which squelched the national aspirations of countries under Soviet influence.
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