Violence in Iran and how it relates to industrialisation

Today in the newspaper Blitz, there is is really good look at how the Muslim regime of Iran has succumbed to the pressure caused by modernisation in Iran.

Like so many of the best articles about the Islamic Republic of Iran, it illustrates so clearly how every traditional society will undergo a crisis unless it possesses or can migrate to large supplies of flat, ice- and permafrost-free land. Iran, of course, is an exceedingly mountainous country where such supplies simply do not exist, so that its communities will have a typical crisis just as Europe and East Asia did. One should see some difference between the response of conservative Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam on the one hand versus the muted response of other traditional religions, but at the bone there is no real difference: any form of religion is not going to survive in a nation short of usable land and key minerals.

However, it is to the credit of Blitz that they are able to show how horrific so many of the practices that have been carried out by the Islamic Republic are. Amongst them:

1. "virgin women prisoners must be raped before execution to prevent their going to heaven"
2. "...Revolutionary Guards fire a single bullet into the womb of women political prisoners, leaving them to bleed to death in a slow process of excruciating pain. Even pregnant women are not spared, and hundreds have been executed with their unborn children."
3. "small children of many young women in Evin Prison (in the northwest of Tehran) are viciously abused"

This really does show that, as many commentators have said, Islam has many similarities with Marxism - in spite of the fact that Marx never knew of concepts like jihad and that Marxism before Lenin was not spread by the sword.