Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, January 17, 2014

Iran's Onion?

I have to wonder whether The Washington Post's Max Fisher has been taken in by an "April Fool" conspiracy of Iranian journalists or that he's right that "A worldview that sees the U.S. as an evil hegemonic force so irrationally driven toward global domination that it must be run by space aliens is not a worldview that is predisposed toward negotiation or accommodation."

Then again, I'll bet we could find some Americans who would uncomfortably admit to agreeing with these Iranians.

Iranian news agency says the U.S. is secretly run by Nazi space aliens. Really.

Iran's semi-official news outlets have something of a reputation for taking conspiracy theorism to the next level…

On Sunday, the hard-line semi-official Fars News dropped one of its biggest bombshells yet: The United States government has been secretly run by a "shadow government" of space aliens since 1945. Yes, space aliens. The alien government is based out of Nevada and had previously run Nazi Germany…

[A]fter losing the war, the aliens apparently installed themselves as the secret force behind the United States government. President Obama is said to be a tool of the aliens… Their present aim is to install a global surveillance system that will, somehow, allow them to finally impose a one-world government and enslave humanity…

Yes, this story is highly entertaining, as are many of the bizarre conspiracy theories proposed by official or semi-official news agencies in authoritarian states. But there's also a more serious undercurrent here. A worldview that sees the U.S. as an evil hegemonic force so irrationally driven toward global domination that it must be run by space aliens is not a worldview that is predisposed toward negotiation or accommodation. It's one that justified, or perhaps even necessitates, total resistance and a refusal to compromise. To be clear, this does not appear to be the present view of the Iranian president; the ongoing and highly public friction between Rouhani's moderate-minded camp and Fars is proof enough of that. But the fact that there are people anywhere within the Iranian system sympathetic enough to this viewpoint to let through an article like this is a reminder of how some hard-liners see the world.