Mussolini in Tehran

Abstract

Abstract

The title of this essay owes it to Slavoj Žižek. In 2009 Žižek published an essay in London Review of Bookstitled: ‘Berlusconi in Tehran’. It was an ingenious title. He wrote his provocative essay shortly after the ‘Green movement’ in Iran which protested against the rigged election which secured a second term of ‘presidency’ for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Žižek aptly called him “a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi”. At that time, millions of protesters poured onto the streets of Tehran, marching in silence, holding up placards with noticeable words that read ‘where is my vote?’ Only fifteen years later, that silence has turned into a loud and courageous voice: ‘We do not want the Islamic republic’. It is on the occasion of this radical political motto that I have emulated Žižek’s title but going beyond it by  bringing it to date and calling the entirety of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a ‘fascist theocracy’. In this essay, I attempt to analyze the Islamic fascism in the structure of the Islamic Republic by tracing its roots to the historical fascism in Europe.