Khomeini’s Three-Phased Plan of Action
As Iran’s revolutionary leaders stepped up to fill the power vacuum left by the shah’s flight, Khomeini promised support for democracy, but it was a ruse. As in the Russian Revolution and the Nazi seizure of power, the man who would rule as Iran’s dictator for the next ten years moved quickly to consolidate control. Lenin eliminated all those he deemed threats to Bolshevism, including noncommunist reformers.
After Hitler seized total power in 1933, he immediately targeted internal enemies and built concentration camps. Khomeini, too, issued a flurry of arrest warrants, rounding up his enemies and killing or imprisoning them. Just as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union infiltrated neighboring states to ferret out rivals and exert power, Khomeini did as well. Both Lenin and Hitler pursued ambitions of international conquest; here, too, Khomeini trod in their footsteps.
Khomeini’s agenda upon seizing power can be distilled into three phases: eliminating domestic enemies and purging Iranian society of non-Islamic elements; expanding Iranian regional influence; and establishing world supremacy. The Guards would play prominent roles in all three phases. In the first, the Basij would subdue and destroy domestic enemies. In the second, the Guards, particularly the Qods Force, would infiltrate Shia communities in neighboring states. In the third, the Guards would project power worldwide.
Phase One: The Guards at Home
During the domestic stage, in which all remnants of the shah’s rule were expunged, Khomeini ordered the purge of all non-Islamic elements from Iranian society. “Death to America” was proclaimed as a unifying national slogan. The Guards targeted known associates of the shah and those suspected of harboring an antirevolutionary agenda. Values that did not align with the mullahs’ vision of Islam were to be eliminated, as this first phase of Khomeini’s plan focused on persons deemed enemies of the revolution. The Guards, particularly the Basij, would extirpate the country of its alleged Westoxification. They were the soldiers in the supreme leader’s war on Western culture.
Iran’s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1980, was the first step toward the Islamization of Iran’s educational system. The first targets were universities, which Khomeini sought to cleanse of students and professors who criticized the new regime. Authorities locked down the universities in 1980 for two years while the new revolutionary regime purged disloyal faculty and rewrote the curriculum to conform to its philosophy. Once reopened, the universities were ordered to fill their ranks with zealous revolutionaries. This initial restructuring was followed by a second wave of Islamization in 1994 and a third following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory in the 2005 presidential election. The last wave reflected that, a quarter century after the revolution, Iran’s new president expressed full solidarity with the Guards and opposition to liberalism: “Some people keep saying that our revolution is aimed at establishing democracy. No. Neither in the Imam’s statements nor in the message of the martyr . . . has any such idea been considered.”
The Islamization came from both below and above. Guard leaders indoctrinated children, young adults, and middle-aged adults. This was loosely parallel to the Nazi seizure of all rudiments of culture during the mid-1930s, via “Nazification,” or Gleichschaltung, a process that involved removing anyone or anything deemed undesirable by the state. Among the first targets were the free spirits and satirists. Nazis feared the Berlin cabaret as a vehicle for weaponized humor against the state, and the police and Gestapo pursued out-of-favor jesters. Similarly, the early Soviets labeled political satire “a disease” that undermined the state’s effort to create an obedient citizenry. A joke to the wrong audience could send a funnyman to prison under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code. In Iran, anti-regime jokes came to target the Guards and Basij, with punchlines centering on the Basij’s prudery, ignorance, and hypocrisy. They also targeted the regime’s prissiness and Ayatollah Khomeini’s commandment: “There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.” Such sentiments were, and remain, suspect. From the early days of the Islamic Republic, the Guards, the MOIS, and the Basij established networks to infiltrate dissident groups.
During the first phase of Khomeini’s rule, Iranian intelligence and security services shut down newspapers and arrested intellectuals. As technology evolved, particularly in information technology, the Basij confiscated satellite dishes and disrupted Internet traffic as that means of communication developed. Seeking to harness culture and art, the regime established the Committee for Cultural Revolution, charged with policing all forms of art and cultural activities. This was a central mission of the Basij.
The services are intended to purify poetry, Iran's most beloved literary genre, of un-Islamic contaminants. As a young man, Khomeini composed both gloomy and light-hearted poems, but his love of romantic verse waned. The new leaders of Iran forbade poems that did not promote their view of Islam. They were particularly hostile to the New Poetry of the 1950s and to contemporary verse. Later, resistance poetry that portrayed the Islamic Revolution in dark tones and that the mullahs declared subversive could result in death sentences for its authors.
