You could be forgiven for thinking that Robert Fisk was happy that the British embassy in Tehran was sacked and firebombed Tuesday by a regime-sponsored mob when he writes, “Anyway, the Iranians trashed us yesterday and made off, we are told, with a clutch of UK embassy documents. I cannot wait to read their contents. For be sure, they will soon be revealed.”
Little is ever revealed to a man whose surname has become an ironic verb to describe a rigorous fact-checking and contextualization of bad journalism. For Fisk, Iranians are quite right to suspect and loathe the Brits for their long history of imperial naughtiness, from Baron von Reuter’s mustache-twisting plot to amass a great fortune in the Persian railroad system to the joint CIA-MI6 overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953. What Fisk fails to mention, however, is that Iran’s hatred of Britain relates to its own long, bizarre history of Anglo-centric conspiracy theories. “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” are never a complete series in the foam-flecked rantings of the ayatollah class without the third installment: “Death to England!” Why so angry?
Because behind every foul misdeed that should ever befall Iran or an everyday Iranian is some lurking John Bull provocateur. So pervasive is this paranoia in the culture that it pre-dates the Islamic Revolution, which indeed, was also once blamed on British interference. As Golnaz Esfandiari points out in a great piece on the subject at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, “When you lift a mullah’s beard, it says ‘Made in England,’ or so went a popular joke in the early years following the 1979 revolution.” The best treatment of this cultural paranoia is My Uncle Napoleon, Iraj Pezeshkzad’s satirical novel published in 1973 and later turned into a must-watch television series. In a 2006 re-issue of the book, Pezeshkzad noted:
In his fantasies, the novel’s central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase “My Uncle Napoleon” is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter.
And so the ridicule and laughter is at the expense of mullahs who claim to have found the same culprit behind any act of dissidence against their psychopathic cult, such as the Green Revolution of 2009. The 7/7 bombings, one lead cleric in the Guardian Council announced triumphantly in 2005, was actually concocted by Westminster. But don’t even dial back that far. I quote from an article just published today on the website of Press TV, the London-based English-language “news” channel of the regime, which has just been fined £100,000 by the independent British broadcasting monitor, Ofcom, for presenting the prison interrogation of a Newsweek reporter arrested in 2009 for covering the Green Revolution as a voluntary “interview”:
Independent analysts say Ofcom is under mounting pressure from the British royal family to silence Press TV’s critical voice. The British royal family exercises an overarching power over all branches in the political system of the country, including the government and the parliament, as well as on Ofcom. Press TV had criticized the royal family’s lavish expenditures at a time of great economic difficulty in the UK. The royal family later sent a message to Press TV, asking the network to stop criticizing them.
Who are these “independent analysts,” one wonders, presenting the Windsors as having control over the entire machinery of the British state? And how confident are Press TV’s producers that they’ve found the right sources for peeling by the layers of constitutional monarchy. There are wheels within wheels. One begins to detect the dark work of My Uncle Napoleon yet again…