Police were already clashing with demonstrators in cities from Tehran to Abadan demanding the shah’s departure and Ayatollah Khomeini’s return, but industrialist Habib Elghanian, who was in America on business, ignored his family’s warnings and decided to return home.
It was a big mistake. A self-made tycoon who dominated Iran’s plastics industry and invested extensively in Israel, Iranian Jewry’s leader was arrested shortly after Khomeini’s return to Iran.
He was led to a kangaroo court that after a 20-minute trial sent him to the rooftop of Khomeini’s headquarters where he was executed by a firing squad.
The execution that sent some 60,000 Jews to Iran’s exit doors, was but a sideshow in the executions of hundreds of key figures, including the commander of the air force; the head of the internal security service; the speaker of the parliament; the mayor of Tehran, and a battery of former ministers, including Amir Abbas-Hobeyda, whose 12-year premiership is the longest in Iranian history.
Such, in brief, is the face of the purge, the gloveless treatment of a previous regime by a new regime, driven by a mixture of hatred and fear – hatred of what the purged ostensibly did in the past, and fear of what they might do in the future.
For centuries, purges happened in tyrannies and did not happen in democracies. Now one is underway in the capital of the free world.
KHOMEINI’S PURGE was not original. Joseph Stalin tried and executed 10 of the original Bolshevik government’s 15 ministers.It was the same dynamic described in the Bible, when Jehu, the general who usurped King Jehoram, had Queen Jezebel defenestrated and 70 princes beheaded along with an entire class of “notables, intimates and priests” who were “struck” (II King 10:7-11).
The purge in Israel triggered a counter-purge in Judah, where Queen Athaliah – the slain Israelite monarch’s sister – “promptly killed off all who were of royal stock,” meaning the rival Davidic dynasty. An exceptional purge led by a woman, it was so comprehensive that no one in Judah’s nobility survived it except one boy, the future King Jehoash.
Such purges remained confined to the elites, but others spread to the masses. During the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror from 1792-1794, some 25,000 were executed. In the USSR, Stalin’s goons shot some 7 million people by 1941 (according to a KGB report cited in Duncan Townson, Dictionary of Modern History 1789-1945).
Is any such bloodshed happening now in the US? Of course not. The new American government has not killed anyone. It has, however, ignited a purge.
The purge begins in America
THE PURGE in America is being carried out in broad daylight. What began with the dismissals of 17 federal agencies’ inspectors-general was followed by the hunting of FBI officials who were involved in finding and arresting the rioters who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. A similar hunt was reportedly launched in the National Archives, targeting archivists who reported the disappearance of documents related to the assault.Then the new attorney-general, Pam Bondi, ordered a review of the federal prosecution her boss had come to face, while entire agencies – from USAID to the Education Department – were ordered shut.
And all these were but the prelude to the big one, Elon Musk’s barging into the scene donning the Orwellian title Head of the Department of Government Efficiency, displaying a chainsaw, and emailing dismissal threats to millions of federal employees.
The result of all this is already seismic. Some 85,000 public servants have left their jobs. Nearly 10,000 of them have been fired, but they are not where the real purge factor lies. The purge’s real impact is about the 75,000 who quit, reflecting a massacre atmosphere, the same atmosphere that clouded 1935 Moscow and 1979 Tehran: the atmosphere of fear.
If the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can be fired one night for no clearly stated failure, as Gen. Charles Q. Brown was last week, then every one of America’s 2.3 million civil servants now understands that he or she can also be fired any moment, for no fault on their part.
Fear will now take over America’s corridors of power and become their absolute king. The result will be administrative degeneration, and it will come in four phases:
First will come the high-profile dismissals, like those of Gen. Brown and five other generals who were sacked with him. Then will emerge the dismissals’ inversion: new officials who will be appointed not because of their skills but because of their loyalty. Then will come – or rather go – good civil servants who will resign rather than serve under-par bosses; and under all these will sprawl the weak people who will stay behind and work not according to their tasks’ demands but according to their sword-wielding superiors’ whims.
Professionalism, impartiality, assertiveness, and initiative will gradually be replaced by servility and sycophancy, as the good of the nation will make way for the good of the regime.
That’s what happened in Iran, where the army that lost all its commanders soon failed to block the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
That’s also what happened to Judah and Israel, whose purged armies failed to defeat an invasion by Aram. That’s also what happened to the Red Army after 17 of its 21 commanding marshals and generals were purged.
The new commanders were loyal to Stalin, but when Hitler’s panzers invaded, they and their troops collapsed.
Will American cities, mountains, and coasts be invaded by a foreign army?
They won’t be. What will be invaded is the American dream – the celebration of freedom, opportunity, and merit that awed the whole world. Will it look like the Barbarian invasion that trampled Rome’s piazzas, temples, and statues? It won’t, but it will be barbarian nonetheless. It already is.
www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.
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