August 30, 1981 began seven years of terror. The trigger was the assassination of Mohammad Javad Bahonar, prime minister of Iran, by the MEK. More hits followed. It has been asserted that the pace of hits was so quick, it threatened to eviscerate Ruhollah Khomeini’s government.
The MEK, a mind control cult, has isolated specks of appeal, such as equal rights for women. It is co-lead by a man and a woman. Nothing about those isolated specks justifies what the organization did in the 1981-1982 frame, or how it treats its members. Iran Protests notes that Iran is drowning in ideas. The creators of MEK made one more of the infinite varieties of folk stew philosophy out of these ideas, which include mayhem and murder. It also tastes of Marxism, Maoism, and Shi’ism. Scholars call it syncretistic, an amalgam of mutually incompatible ideas.
There has always been extrajudicial killing in Iran, but the pace accelerated in 1982, and climaxed in 1988. Nine years after the 1979 revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini was still, in word and reality, the supreme leader. In 1988, Khomeini had only one more year to live; perhaps he was anxious that the new forms of Iran would outlast him. So he suspended the rule of law.
What Khomeini’s followers did in the in the years climaxing in the 1988 executions of “political prisoners”, and doubtless at his direction, was absolutely horrible. The following year, echoing the reaction against the excesses of Iran’s reign of terror, Khomeini proclaimed a “year of law.”
As the Nuremberg Trials established, the will of the leader does not exempt his followers from guilt. The youngest victim of the French Reign of Terror was aged 14. Iran’s Terror was similar. Memories of the stories, which so vivify Iran’s native practice of terror, have faded. All this happened before Internet archiving, which makes it impossible to offer you reliable, respectable links. Nevertheless, I have a little, approximate corroboration for 10 Of The Youngest Children Sentenced to Death. Quoting,
It is likely that a good proportion of the stories, which can be found in contemporary nonfiction literature, are true.
By 2009, Iran had developed civil institutions useful to both religious and secular elements. Members of the Green Movement were punished in the civil framework. There was no need for terror, because the Greens had private lives of sufficient satisfaction that it was enough punishment to interrupt those lives.
But now Iran is faced with a bunch of rowdy, unemployed young men who have nothing to lose. They don’t feel prison, or house arrest, quite the same way. “Inside” is about the same as “outside.” If a young man has nothing to lose but his life, what effective punishment and deterrent can there be?
The complex of religion and military, the Qom religious establishment, the bonyads, and the IRIG, hold Khomeini’s charter, to create and perfect an Islamic state, and to expand it beyond Iran’s borders. Now there is civil conflict between the charter holders and the secular, civil needs of Iran. It’s really quite simple. Where does the money go?
The charter holders are old men now. Many of them are senior clerics. Like Khomeini in his last years, they may, in futile search for stasis, push for what worked for them in 1988. Immersed and isolated in their own ideas of “jurisprudence”, which are to us medieval, they may not be concerned with history as written by Western historians. History may be the judge, but not for them.
This is why Western cheerleading risks a new Terror.