TOTALITARIANISM DAMAGES THE BRAIN

On the surface they seem like everybody else but they are not. Living in a world where news are manufactured, everybody may be an informant and one mood of one man can determine whether you live or die leads one to assume that the rest of the world functions in a similar manner. The man who wrote No one believes in conspiracy theories more than people who lived in such societies. It seems to assuage their helplessness. I remember being in Communist Budapest during Israeli elections. I asked a hotel to direct me to a TV so that I can find out the results."Why bother?" he asked."They are not going to tell you the truth.""Why wouldn't they give me the correct results of the Israeli elections?" I asked. He looked at me with pity and shrugged."You do not know them," he said.

In this as in much else, Dan Pipes is prescient. In The Hidden Hand he writes:

Conspiracism has a profound impact on life in the Middle East. Credulity in conspiracy theories causes Arabs and Iranians to believe in what's not true; acting on these beliefs then alters the course of events. Ironically, fears of conspiracy also directly led to proliferation of actual conspiracies. In the aggregate, the paranoid mentality creates a suspiciousness that impedes modernization in the Middle East.

Well, lately the Iranians seem to have fallen into this trap even more than others. The US may be the"big Satan" but their world is filled with many"little" ones, in addition to the obvious Israeli one. Britain may have lost its influence there in the nineteen fifties but that matters little to the average Iranian. As far as he/she are concerned, Britain still rules Iran. Consider the following stories:

During the last elections a British colleague went around asking people who they thought would win, only to find Iranians looking at him strangely and saying:"Surely you know the answer - you are British." . . .

We went to buy water because it was extremely hot. The shopkeeper asked what all the fuss was about. When we told him (demonstration outside the British embassy during a reception celebrating the Queen's birthday), he said:"What nonsense, why are they attacking the British Embassy when they themselves have been put up to it by the British?"

These are the people who insist on their right to have a finger on a nuclear button. And our Western altruist reporters are working hard to help them and their allies push their agenda along.