Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The government of Iran in the post-revolutionary period may have religious leaders in central positions, but it is far from being a pure  theocracy. This paper pursues this topic in the spirit of Michel Foucault’s widely explored notion of governmentality. Foucault’s concept is broad, but generally
covers the ways that government adopts a cultural ideology for carrying out its duties, a structural framework for implementing this ideology, and a rationality associated with that framework From an anthropological standpoint, it is expected that different forms of governmentality will be observed in different societies, with different cultural underpinnings resulting in unique institutions. Iranian governmental institutions are unique to Iran, emphasizing legitimacy as a mark of authority, and martyrdom as the symbolic proof of legitimacy.

Washington politicians and the press have cultivated, among Americans, the impression that Iran is a “theocracy” with no democratic institutions. Ignorance grew during the Bush
administration as the conflict in Iraq escalated, and the administration continuously looked to blame Iran for US failures. Larry Diamond, a scholar at the Hoover Institution who
advised the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq (CPA), told the Inter Press Service that the Mahdi Army of young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and other Shi`a militias (which, at the moment are giving Coalition forces a very hard time in Iraq) were being armed and financed by Iran with the aim of imposing “another Iranian-style theocracy.” Diamond’s comments were reiterated by another Coalition provisional authority advisor, Michael Rubin. Th e
story was echoed by influential New York Times conservative columnists William Safire and David Brooks, further compounding the misinformation and continued to be a running theme in the US press on into the Obama administration, particularly in the New York Times as reflected in the reporting of Michael R. Gordon. Th e claim is simply untrue. No official body in Iran is supporting al-Sadr and the idea that al-Sadr could ever dream of imposing an “Iranian-style theocracy” is absurd. Nevertheless, the impression that Iran has nothing even resembling democratic institutions makes the neoconservative claims more believable to many Americans, who know nothing of Iran and who are fearful of Islamic attacks on Western culture.

An accurate picture of Iranian electoral institutions helps in assessing both their strengths and weaknesses, and puts aside the notion that Iran is some kind of theocratic dictatorship. Consequently, I present here a sketch of the Iranian electoral procedure, the main governmental institutional bodies in Iran, and some of the underlying dynamics of political life in Iran today.

The Hojjatiyeh Society is one of the most fascinating religious groups in modern Iran. The society started its way in the 1950s as an anti-Baha'i movement but found itself fighting Khomeini's Velayat-i Faqih and leading an anti-Khomeini and messianic agenda. Despite the Hojjatiyeh's fight against Khomeini, the Hojjatiyeh became, unwillingly and unintentionally, a leading faction in the Islamic Revolution, with its members coming to occupy some of the highest echelon posts in Iranian politics. The Hojjatiyeh was dismissed in 1983 by Khomeini, but it seems it never truly left the political sphere until today, when its traces can still be found on Iranian politics. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his mentor the Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi are reported to be Hojjatiyeh members.

In the final days of 2017, a wave of protests erupted in Iran, bringing to surface a host of economic, social, and political resentments. Despite the profusion of slogans and demands, the initial trigger is widely believed to have been economic. This article aims to contextualize Iran’s protests by examining the changing dynamics between the state and the poor in the four decades since the country’s 1979 revolution. A case is made that while in the first decade after the revolution the poor became the primary social base of the post-revolutionary state, the (neo-liberal) shift in economic policies since the early 1990s has cultivated new dynamics in which the lower economic strata are increasingly disenchanted with and disenfranchised from the state.

سخنان آیت‌الله خامنه‌ای در دیدار با فرماندهان سپاه صریح و شفاف بود. او تاکید کرد که نظریه «تبدیل انقلاب به جمهوری اسلامی» ناممکن است چرا که دومی باید مظهر و استمرار اولی باشد. این جدال با آغاز شکل‌گیری نظام کنونی زاده شد و خواست جدی غالب نیروهای سیاسی در آنزمان برآمدن یک «دولت انقلابی» بود. مهدی بازرگان نخستین نمونه دولتمردی بود که انتظار داشت با شکل‌گیری قانون اساسی و تعیین ساز و کار امور، بساط رفتارهای انقلابی برچیده شود. برخلاف توقع او، تندترین تحرک انقلابی درست در زمانی رخ داد که او مسئول قانونی کشور بود؛ دانشجویان پیرو خط امام با اشغال سفارت آمریکا و بحران گروگان‌گیری «انقلاب دوم» را رقم زدند و کابینه‌ او را زمین‌گیر کردند.

The article compares Lula’s foreign policy to the Middle East with Ahmadinejad’s to Latin America. Methodologically, the historical concepts of each diplomacy is combined with empirical data on trade flows and diplomatic actions. It is argued that the implementation of foreign policies involved similar (presidential diplomacy) and distinct means (universalism and multilateralism by Brazil, and personalism, bilateralism and low institutionalization by Iran). The results of diplomacies also resembled: although the economic implications were modest, Brasilia politically increased its global projection capacity, while Tehran relatively reduced its international isolation.

This article intends to compare the speeches of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez with the help of Critical Discourse Analysis. This article has applied Van Dijk's theoretical framework to dig out the issues of domination, imperialism, violence, resistance and injustice not only in a social context but also in a political arena inculcated in speeches. The research has analyzed one speech of each president qualitatively to investigate the concepts of resistance against the hegemonic domination of the US. The study finds that both the leaders have utilized positive selfrepresentation and negative other representation with the help of discursive devices. The study has also found the brutality, domination and injustice of the US. There may be found ideological similarities between the two presidents' positions over the imperialist designs. They are agreed that certain global powers' incursions and hegemonies need to be resisted due to their designs of imperialism and hegemony in places like the Middle East and Venezuela. The Study recommends that resistance rhetoric in politics can be significantly helpful in terms of international political diplomacies and policies for the nations of the world.

With the proposition that even the "best" can learn from what is worse, I ask, What can voting in Iran teach us about what ails our democracy here in the US? Casting a ballot in Iran, against the odds and against the regime, is the ultimate despair-denying act. In choosing between bad and worse in order to keep out the *worst*, Iranians give us a lesson in the power of presence, in showing up for the vote. "Absence and apathy," I write, "embolden the authoritarian, creeping or otherwise," something that we Americans have learned in spades over the past two years.

Para orang tua mempunyai kewajiban dalam mengasuh anak-anaknya dengan tujuan jelas sebagai kader bangsa yang cinta agama dan cinta negara. Seperti di dalam keluarga maka dalam bernegara pun pemerintah memegang kewajiban penuh untuk melestarikan semangat cinta tanah air yang tak boleh padam. Keberlangsungan hidup bernegara merupakan kesatuan seimbang lintas generasi di saat yang tua memberi pedoman dan yang muda mengambil langkah dan mencipta perubahan. Dalam tulisan ini akan diungkap beberapa tokoh revolusioner dari Timur Tengah yang bisa dijadikan role model dalam membangun semangat cinta tanah air.
Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini (Lahir 1902) yang dikenal sebagai Rahbar atau pemimpin tertinggi Revolusi Islam Iran bisa diambil menjadi contoh tentang pemimpin yang mengutamakan ilmu pengetahuan.  Tidaklah mengherankan kalau nantinya Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini terkenal dengan kesuksesannya menggulingkan pemerintahan Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlevi yang despotik dan didukung oleh negara-negara Barat. Ia  bukan saja inspirasi bagi Iran tapi juga bagi dunia. ia membuktikan loyalitasnya kepada Iran yang dirongrong oleh gangguan Barat.

The Economical Contexts of the Hegemonic Discourses in The Islamic Republic of Iran
(Typology, Approaches and Functions)


بسترهای اقتصادی گفتمان‌های هژمون در جمهوری اسلامی ایران
(نشانه‌شناسی،رویکردها و کارکردها)


Abstract:
After Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 and seek of the definite hegemonic discourse of the Islamic republic in the year 1981, many discourses reached a relatively hegemonic position in the social domain of the Islamic republic. This article first of all identifies 4 dominant discourses that are the Islamic leftist value-based, Reconstruction & Economical Development, Islamic Democracy and Social Justice & Fundamentalism discourses. It then investigates their typology system, approaches and their economical workbook. In fact the 2 domains of thought and theory and the annexation domain of these discourses are studied, and the reason of how each of these discourses is replaced by the other is given. This study tries to find the economical contexts and foundations of the hegemonic discourses in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in another part of the paper, the regional, global and international factors that affect the reproduction of these processes are studied. From this research's viewpoint, in many cases there is a kind of match among the economical policies of the hegemonic discourses and approaches in the international domain.

Key words:
Islamic Revolution, Islamic Republic of Iran, Hegemonic Discourse, Economical Context & Bases, Social Justice.