Few of us were alive when the Persians disappeared and instead became Iranians all in a single day. In 1935, Reza Shah asked foreign delegates to use the term Iran, the historical name of the country before the Greek conquest where the name Persia was born. Surprisingly, the word chosen to represent the master race was chosen carefully by the Nazis and they found their new name from a nation of great age and lineage but not in use by that nation from where it originated. This master race predecessor had all the necessary requirements, it was the name of one of the oldest and most stable of empires and apparently they disappeared from history so the Nazis grabbed their name and used it as their term of the master race, the Aryan race. The former owners of this name when they fell before Alexander the Great, were renamed by the Greeks using the word for nation, Persica or Persis, which in time became Persia. All the great accomplishments of that early and great empire were written into the history books using the Greek name as the name stuck until, as noted above, 1935. This was an act of deference and also a demand of an alliance with Germany as the Persian leader, Reza Shah, ordered that all diplomats for Persia now, immediately and without explanation, begin using the ancient, pre-Greek racial name of Cyrus the Great’s tribe and the tribes of peoples he took to the edge of ruling the known world, Iran. This name derived from Middle Persian Ērān, Pahlavi ʼyrʼn, and in modern pronunciation, Iran or Aryan. The change of name can only raise questions about Persia/Iran and where they sided during World War II.
So let us discuss Iran, Nazis, Aryan, Persia and World War II. Initially the Shah declared neutrality; but when the British, who held ownership of the majority of the Iranian oil fields, the British grew ever more nervous over the German engineers and workers manning their oil interests and demanded the Shah send them back to Germany. The British concerns were that many of these Germans may be spies or could damage the oil fields. The history was unclear as to whether this demand was made in a threatening nature or as a polite favor requesting their preference for different workers but the one thing which was made obvious is the successive requests became demands but were all met with the same answer from the Shah declaring his neutrality while refusing to fire and send packing workers who had given him any reason for doing so other than they suspected there might be German Nazi spies amongst them who could sabotage the oil fields. The Shah having no cares and doubting these people would risk their jobs and his neutrality by any such foolish acts refused the British demands. This went through a couple of renditions before the British nerves and politics and the war took over and forced their hand. In September of 1941 the British and Soviets took control of Iran. They refer to it a wartime occupation and not any effort to compromise Iranian national freedom and that the entire necessity was due to the dangers that the Axis Powers were poised to move on Iran and the British and Soviets were simply protecting their investments and Iranian freedoms from the Nazi threats. The British and Soviets withdrew after the war but had changed the Shah rule for that of his more compliant son; otherwise the damage was minimal though there are those who claim the invasion shook the people’s faith in their rulers.
Reza Shah of Iran 1935
There have been rumors that the Reza Shah was in negotiations with the Nazis to provide the Third Reich with much needed petroleum for their war machine which was running drastically low and even marginalizing operations. The Nazis were desperate and had likely offered the Shah great riches and power and potentially the reemergence of Persian like power in the Middle East, possibly a similar set of promises as they had given to the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini while he was living in Berlin to avoid the British forces who were poised to arrest him for allying with the Nazis. The British had much difficulty with different Arabs throughout World War II. The main thing to understand was that Iran actually was poised to assist the Nazis, allied with their cause and found a sympathy to their idea of an Aryan super race of perfected humans but the Iranian description might have varied from that of the Nazis who sought blond haired blue eyed men and women of above average height and physical fitness. The Iranians may have held for different qualities but they did believe in a pure Aryan race though theirs would be best represented in English as Ērān or ʼyrʼn.
Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini
in His One of Many Personal Meetings
with the Führer Adolf Hitler
Part of the above history shows there is a historic sense of grandeur and importance exuded by many Iranians which has been played to every extreme by the current rulers. The Islamist Ayatollahs take full use of this sense as well as a sense of entitlement and supremacy, especially when it comes to Israel and the United States. They have worked on that entitlement behavior to blame the United States and Israel, especially with the sanctions which the United States pioneered and joined by Europe to a pressure Iran into compliance and to explain a few things as objectively as possible. Considering I am a Jew living in Israel and as such have a bullseye emblazoned between my eyes makes me particularly sensitive to the fact that the Arab and Muslim nations and many of their peoples who sided with the Nazis but did not face the destructions and defeat as did the Nazis, never had those anti-Semitic views expunged. In the case of many of the Arab nations, they were exposed to the poisonous broadcasts by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini who had anti-Semitic leanings and blamed the Jews of the Holy Lands around Jerusalem for the poverty and what he viewed as miserable living conditions of his Arab peoples compared to the Jewish farmers and entrepreneurs and shop owners in Jerusalem many of which sold Jewish items needed in religious observances, marketed the produce, as did several Arab families who gained wealth, and serviced farm needs such as fertilizers and pesticides and finally had foreign contacts mostly in Europe but also across the Arab lands of MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and possibly even in the far east where the farmers could sell their harvests. The Mufti blamed the Jews for taking all of the economic pie and not leaving any wealth available to his Arab subjects thus forcing them into poverty. He never considered that they should improve their lot in life by working the lands or finding other means for earning a living instead of relying largely on the good graces of others who did produce to gift them charity, something he found demeaning and where he blessed Arabs who would give alms he always blamed the Jews, even those who might have given similarly or even greater amounts or percentages of their income, for being stingy and not granting the Arabs a greater share in their wealth. The one thing which has to be remembered is that nobody was become a millionaire working the Holy Lands in this era.
When the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini fled Jerusalem fearing arrest by the British, who he also saw as favoring the Jews over the Arabs, not exactly an accurate appraisal as there may have been British who favored the Jews to an extent, British policy was either equally damning or anti-Semitic in its application on orders or preferences of the higher officers. The Mufti made broadcasts into the Arab lands with a very powerful directions broadcast tower spewing the Nazi supremacy and equating them with Arab and Muslim ideals of supremacy and equated Nazism and Islam in some unholy marriage of joining forces against the evil Jew who stole the food from Arab and Muslim mouths and refused to share and were enslaving the Arabs and Muslims in poverty by cruel and inhuman measures of attempted superiority born out of jealousy of the true Master Races, Nazis and Islamic, against the base and animalistic Jews. These broadcasts cast hatred of the Jews as the Jews selfishly stole all the wealth and held to it tightly were themes repeated by Imams as you preach to the masses basing your message on some of their ready beliefs as that is the path easiest to their attentions. So the message of Jewish hoarding became the legal tender on which much of the anti-Semitism was based and much of that was based on the Jews having stolen all the land from its rightful Arab, Muslim owners, the people in the Mosques for the sermons. This combinations drummed this hatred and the deceits such that many, nowhere near all, but a possible plurality bought into this message and it became their legal tender to claim the possessions of the Jews because they were only returning the lands and other wealth to its rightful owners.
Grand Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei
These alliances with the Nazis further poisoned the well against the Jews and many of the British chose not to intervene or actually harbored their own anti-Semitic leanings and thus their not opposing these beliefs only served to amplify their validity. This further amplified the latent anti-Semitic feelings, especially amongst the Arabs who were living in poverty and who were seeking a reason and the Jew selfishly stealing all the wealth and controlling the distribution of assets and their control of the British played heavily into that market. In Iran there was their neutrality which always appeared to favor the Germans as there were numerous German citizens working within Iran and the Shah had changed the name their nation was known by internationally to the Iranian Farsi word which meant Aryan, namely Iran, and this was often seen as tacit approval of the Nazi principles of the Master Race and the poignant hatred and casting of the Jews as an animalistic sub-human species which polluted the genetic superiority of the rest of the human race and as such needed to be extinguished. When Israel became a nation they soon afterwards enjoyed good relations with Iran of open friendship and embassies were exchanged and all the benefits which goes with such. All of this was shut down almost immediately after the revolution and the betrayal of the Shah by his former ally, the United States. President Jimmy Carter ‘understood’ the heart of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as President Carter saw him as a holy man and thus he must uphold Christian principles from the post-enlightenment period of modern Western thought.
The American President could not have been any more mistaken, much like the current American President who trusts Iran to hold to the limitations of the treaty he signed with them. The treaty itself is lenient and pro-Iranian in its make-up but likely does not suit the immediacy of the Ayatollahs drive for nuclear weapons with which to claim preeminence in the Arab and Muslim world and thus as the rightful leader of such in the conquest of the world. The Ayatollah likely see their ascendance to be the rightful leaders of the Muslim world and as such the ones who will bring the Ummah from predominant Sunni beliefs to almost entirely Shiite in their beliefs as Iran, as the titular leader of Shia Islam will have ascended unarguably the strongest of position and have gained dominance over Saudi Arabia and Egypt and as such gained the title as the next and only true claimant to Caliph. Should the Saudi Royal family refuse to basically kneel before the Ayatollah Khamenei, they may have earned Riyadh the initial test of the Iranian super weapon in their nuclear armed quest to gain the world. Any upset or obstruction to the Iranian claim and smooth path to world dominance will have a ready-made and golden diabolical reason, Israel as the Jew amongst the nations and the Jews world-wide as they will be cast as all serving Israel against the perfection of the World by the Ayatollahs. Israel will actually be spared initially as they are required to serve as the true source of any difficulties because the Grand Ayatollah is a position of ultimate perfection and a straight connection to Allah if ever such could exist. They would be assuming a similar position to Emperor and Pope Constantine the Great who was crowned Pope after he conquered most of Europe, ending the many squabbles and smaller wars, uniting all under his banner. Unfortunately for Europe all men die and when Constantine died, so went his empire.
Emperor and Pope Constantine the Great
with Map of Conquest
Preserving the Byzantine Empire
How this will end? That, my friends and acquaintances, is the really big question. The things we know is that Iran will be at its weakest and most vulnerable and have given the world cause for alarm and a call for action right after they move on any nation whether directly or through terrorist proxies beyond their actions in Syria. What will be interesting is who allies with Iran and who starts to slide into the position of leaders of the opposition other than Saudi Arabia and possibly Egypt and other Sunni Arab nations. They would be uniting against both Shia Islam and the fact that Iran is of Persian lineage and thus not Arab and this also is an abomination to many Muslims, especially Arab Muslims. We know also that the Saudi oil fields have a majority Shiite population and could be the next war’s Sudetenland which Iran will claim as part of bringing all of Shia Islam under their rule which is what has already occurred for all intents and purposes in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Where else they will initially turn will be telling. We expect their first move will be to co-opt Pakistan through some alliance deal as the two Islamic nuclear powers with similar goals, though that is not entirely true. Iran could promise Pakistan that one of their first moves would be to subsume by means other than direct war possibly as a treaty with India, to gain them the lands which they and India have fought wars over and potentially some of north-western India where there is a large Muslim presence. All things will become fungible when Iran becomes a nuclear armed nation with a war chest of nuclear weapons and the will to use them. This has us thinking of Alice in Wonderland and the disappearing Cheshire Cat’s smile and Alice commenting that everything was becoming “Curiouser and curiouser!”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani smiling for report on how he and Iran charmed the world reminding all of the evil laugh as the Cheshire Cat faded away leaving only his wicked smile and it just fit calling him the ‘Smiling Cheshire Man’
Beyond the Cusp
Beyond the Cusp 