After last summerʼs disputed presidential election,
Iranʼs government relied largely on brute
force — beatings, arrests and show trials — to
stifle the countryʼs embattled opposition movement.
Now, stung by the force and persistence of the
protests, the government appears to be starting
a far more ambitious effort to discredit its opponents
and re-educate Iranʼs mostly young and
restive population. In recent weeks, the government
has announced a variety of new ideological
offensives.
It is implanting 6,000 Basij militia centers in
elementary schools across Iran to promote the
ideals of the Islamic Revolution, and it has created
a new police unit to sweep the Internet for
dissident voices. A company affiliated with the
Revolutionary Guards acquired a majority share
in the nationʼs telecommunications monopoly
this year, giving the Guards de facto control of
Iranʼs land lines, Internet providers and two cellphone
companies. And in the spring, the Revolutionary
Guards plan to open a news agency
with print, photo and television elements.
The government calls it “soft war,” and Iranʼs
leaders often seem to take it more seriously than
a real military confrontation. It is rooted in an
old accusation: that Iranʼs domestic ills are the
result of Western cultural subversion and call for
an equally vigorous response. The extent of the
new campaign underscores just how badly Iranʼs
clerical and military elite were shaken by the
protests, which set off the worst internal dissent
since the countryʼs 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranʼs supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
has been using the phrase “soft war” regularly
since September, when he warned a group
of artists and teachers that they were living in an
“atmosphere of sedition” in which all cultural
phenomena must be seen in the context of a
vast battle between Iran and the West. He and
other officials have since invoked the phrase in
describing new efforts to re-Islamize the educational
system, purge secular influences and
professors, and purify the media of subversive
ideas.
The new emphasis on cultural warfare may
also reflect the rising influence of the Revolutionary
Guards, whose leader, Mohammad Ali
Jafari, has long been one of the main proponents
of a “soft war” strategy, analysts say.
There have been periodic earlier campaigns
to reinforce the governmentʼs Islamist message
throughout society. Some analysts say that the
new efforts are unlikely to be any more effective
than those in the past, and may even backfire.
“By trying to gain more control of the media,
to re-Islamize schools, they think they can make
a comeback,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iran
expert and professor at Syracuse University.
“But the enemy here is Iranʼs demographics.
The Iranian population is overwhelmingly literate
and young, and previous efforts to reinstall
orthodoxy have only exacerbated cleavages
between citizens and the state.”
In early September, Brig. Gen. Muhammad
Bagher-Zolghadr, the former deputy chief of the
Revolutionary Guards, outlined the “soft war”
concept in a speech: “In a hard war, the line
between you and the enemy is clear, but in a
soft war there is nothing so solid. The enemy is
everywhere.” General Zolghadr said that a soft
war was fought in large part through the media,
and that the West was “better equipped” to fight
it than Iran.
Soon after his speech, the authorities unrolled
a series of measures seemingly aimed at redressing
that imbalance. This month, Brig. Gen.
Mohammad Reza Naqdi, the head of the Basij
militia, announced a new era of “super media
power” cooperation between the media and the
Revolutionary Guards, according to the stateowned
official press.
The Revolutionary Guards plan to start a
news agency called Atlas in the spring, modeled
on services like the BBC and The Associated
Press, according to semiofficial Iranian news
sites.
The Revolutionary Guards already largely
control the Fars news agency, which reflects
views of Iranʼs hard-line camp. Two weeks ago
Iran formed a 12-person unit to monitor the
Internet for “insults and the spreading of lies,”
a phrase used to describe opposition activities,
the semiofficial media reported. And the government
has teamed up with private companies
to begin giving out free home Internet filtering
software.
The authorities have also cracked down on
dissent within the educational system, hinting
that professors who do not toe the official line
will be purged. A number of hard-line clerics
have called for the university humanities curriculums
to be Islamized further.
Mohammad-Saleh Jokar, the head of the
student and cultural section of the Basij, said
the group was opening the elementary school
centers because “students of this age are more
open to influence than older students, and for
this reason we want to promote and establish the
ideas of the revolution and the Basij,” according
to Iranʼs official state news agency.
The stateʼs new efforts to inoculate Iranians
against dissident ideas in the media may be
difficult — or even counterproductive, analysts
say. Last month a high-ranking official at IRIB,
the state broadcaster, seemed to unwittingly
concede the point when he announced that 40%
of Iranians — twice as many as last year — had
access to satellite television in their homes.
“The enemy no longer invests in the military
to advance their goals,” said the official, Ali Daraei.
“Their primary investment is in the media
war through satellite channels.”
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The New York Times (abridged)