The Monolith Crumbles: Reality and Revisionism in Iran

I still remember the incredibly moving sight of a million Iranians in the streets of Tehran participating in a candleight vigil for our citizens killed on 9/11. Yet a sizable fraction of the American people swallow the broad strokes by which the Bush administration paints Iran as solely a nation of American haters bent on nuclear terrorism.

Chris Floyd explores this issue in a recent post on his blog:

"It is a well-known fact – except among the American media, the American government, and about 98.7 percent of the American people – that Iran is not a monolithic state where sheep-like masses bray with a single voice in chorus with their demented leaders, but is, on the contrary, a complex society where many conflicting opinions on matters political, religious, social, historical, etc., contend with each other in open debate. True, it does have a government dominated by repressive clerics, who exercise the kind of veto power over secular law that George W. Bush's vaunted "base" dreams of seeing established in the United States; but Iran is far more open than, say, Saudi Arabia or China, just to name two countries where the Bush Family and friends have long engorged their bellies through insider connections with the ruling cliques.

"Therefore it must have come as a great shock to the system for Americans this week to hear Iran's former president, Mohammad Khatami, rail against the ignorant Holocaust revisionism mouthed by his successor, the hardline flibbertigibbet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Excerpts after the jump below.) Or rather, it would have come as a shock to the American system to hear Khatami's words – if Americans had actually been told about them. But it serves no interests among America's own ruling cliques to dilute the current line of the day: that Iran is a hellhole of unremitting evil, a new Nazi Germany led by a new Hitler. So Khatami's remarks, reported widely elsewhere in the world, were not allowed to disturb the lie-drugged slumber of the American consciousness."

Full article here.