 Ladies and gentlemen, my dear friends, I'm very grateful to Professor Hoppe and Dr. Imre Hoppe for their kind invitation and in particular for this challenge because I have to admit the task that I have today is entirely impossible. You can't even understand Iran and the lifetime, not to speak of 30 minutes, but I try my best to give you some background to the Iranian mindset. Already the name Iran is quite politically incorrect. I have to say, as it derives from Ariane Amveja, which means homeland of the Aryans. Now those Aryans, those original Aryans were inter-Germanic tribes and it wasn't so much a racial concept, but a religious concept. Those tribes were united by common mythology and a common religion, but mythology goes like that, that they somehow came from the high north, archaeology doesn't quite confirm that, to spread civilization to the south and to the west, being in the possession of some particular civilization or technologies like horseback riding, the wheel, cattle farming and then later on agriculture. And part of this mission is still quite alive because Iranians are still prone to a kind of messianic nationalism, which has come to be concealed under Islam. Now the Iranian religion was shaped in the second millennium before Christ by Soresta who had a dualistic worldview, but not in the sense that good and evil are equally strong. So it's a constant struggle between good and evil and good is associated with Ahor Mazda which is light and truth whereas Ahriman which is darkness and the lie. So it's quite interesting religious concept and it is highly underestimated how much it influenced Western thought through antiquity. There's a reference to objective values and Sorestians believe that by good thoughts, good words and good deeds, you should help bring light to the world, bring truth to the world and fight evil and fight the lie. There are some quite interesting prophecies linked to Sorestian philosophy in that later on it was claimed that Soresta would come back and be reborn as a redeemer king. And the sign of his advent would be shown by a star on the sky which explains the free Magi or Magi that came to Jesus' birth. Now this concept is important to understand later developments. So for the original Iranians, the Islamization, the Islamic conquest was at first conceived as a storm of darkness invading upon their civilization, but I think one of the paradoxical results of this conquest was that Iranian culture has survived in a way I think it would not have without Islamization. It's quite interesting. I think the same thing happened to the Austrian school by the way. By having to leave Austria it had to reassert itself later on and I think that's the main reason why it survived this distinct school and it didn't just disappear within other mainstream schools. Because if you are under assault, you either die and if you don't die you have to reassert yourself and that's what happened with Iranian culture. The Islamization of course started by using force, the Arab nomads which were united by Islamic seal used a particular advantage namely that there was internal conflict between the Iranian Empire, between the Sasanids and the Parthians, so it was a particularly good situation for cellars warriors to infect Conqueror in a fairly short amount of time this Empire. Empires are usually quite easily conquered once there's a problem within. But the interesting thing is that the Islamization took about 300 years. There was a lot of resistance, a lot of rebellions coming on and on, but in the end Iran after 300 years was largely a sunny Muslim country. The interesting thing is that after these 300 years there was a reassertion of Iranian culture in two ways. The one way was that Iran founded by being based within the Islamic realm which was quite imperialistic and was enlarging its territory. There was good use for intellectuals. Even Haldun, one of the first sociologists in the world has observed a curious thing for him that he said that almost all the Islamic intellectuals that he knows of are of Iranian descent even those who have systematized the Arabic grammar and language. Now that there was quite odd to the Arabs but of course from the Iranian point of view it was like primitive nomads invading their country and they made good use of this framework. Now the other way that Iranian culture reasserted itself was by a literary emergence. One of the most important and longest epic works of epic poetry was composed by Ferdowsi before the first millennium AD and it's the Shah Naumay and I think that's really interesting about it is that it's more than a thousand years old but it still can be read and understood by everyone who speaks Persian today. And it shows you how important there was for the language and at the same time how a language and culture was really conserved over a long period of time against all odds because it's really against all odds that Iranian culture and language has survived this way. And I think one of the reasons is that it had to reassert itself. So the Shah Naumay is interesting in a way that it resembles a lot other Germanic, Celtic and Scandinavian mythologies. It's a story about kings and heroes and the heroes are knights and they're following virtues, objective virtues. There's a lot of drinking, there's a lot of laugh, there's a lot of tragedy involved, there's in all of those stories. But they're very succinct and very different from what you would expect from Islamic poetry even though it was a time where Iran was formerly Islamic already. Another odd thing to reassert Iranian identity was the adoption of the Shia. How did it come about? One would have expected Iran to become, to somehow disappear in the Ottoman Empire, maybe conserve some of its language and culture but as a political entity to disappear in a larger Muslim realm. Only enough a militant Sufi order arising from the region of Azerbaijan, the Safaviyya, decided to enforce Shia Islam on Iran, also by force. It was a forced conversion but Shia Islam somehow attached to former Zoroastrian elements in a better way than the Sunni Islam. Now from the Shia perspective, what's the difference to Sunni Islam? From the Shia perspective, the leader of the faithful has to be selected by God because otherwise he will be selected by party politics, by power politics. And that's what the Shiites have experienced according to their interpretation of history that when Muhammad, he appointed his son-in-law Ali as his successor. But while his family was still occupied with preparing his burial, the Arab tribes just chose another leader and so from then on, you have a split between the Sunni and the Shiite view, who should be the leader of the faithful? According to the Shiites, it shows you that injustice and evil is so strong, again going back to Zoroastrian belief that evil is equally strong as good, that it even subdued the family of the Prophet himself. So injustice is really a very strong force which you have to fight against. The Shiites believe that Ali's wife plus the daughter of Muhammad himself was attacked by the Sunni Muslims that she was beaten, that she lost her child due to death, that his house was put on fire. And every Imam, the Shiites call the spiritual leader the Imam, and every Imam has been killed at the order of the Khalif, that is the political leader of the Islamic world. So from early on, the Shiites had the perception of being a persecuted minority because they are the party of principle and the party of the God-appointed leader versus the power-oriented, corrupting Islamic politicians in a way that abused religion for the strive for power. So being a minority within Islam played out very well for the Iranian mindsets by feeling themselves to be a minority amongst the incursions of the Arabs, which of course in the beginning tried to eradicate the Persian language and replace it with Arabic, which is the language of the Quran, that's the holy language. So the Shiites believe that you had a series of 12 Imams, the 12 Ashiites, which are the dominant Shiites in Iran, with the 12th Imam disappearing. They also believe that the younger son of Ali, who tried to engage the other Muslims and tried to reassert the leadership of the family of the Prophet, was murdered as all other descendants of Muhammad, who claimed their right to leadership. And he was murdered because even his own followers left him because of fear. So until this day, you have a very important holiday in Shiite Islam, which is a memorial of this kind of the killing of Hossain and him being left by his fellow Shiite followers. As we have processions in Iran, which very much resemble fundamentalist Christian processions with a lot of self-legalation. When you're in a great mosque and you see a group of people suddenly starting to cry, most probably Shiites. So there's a lot of suffering and there's also a concept which is quite close to Christian religious thought that Hossain had to die for our sins because we didn't come to his help, to his rescue because of fear, because of corruption, and so on. The 12th Imam in this line is thought to have disappeared and to come back to the world. He's in occultation, as the Shiites believe, and he'll come back to the world as a kind of redeemer king. So there you have the old Saurasian prophecy. And interestingly enough, the Shiites believe that he will come with Jesus. So they'll come hand in hand, more or less, to judge the world on Judgment Day and establish the internal kingdom. So there's a quite, quite odd stance which explains a lot of tenets of the Iranian development. To further understand the Iranian development, you see, a truth was a very important issue for Iranian religion. The Greeks who described the Persians, they mentioned and highlighted the truth is taught to the young people from an early age on to always tell the truth. Now, when you compare it to contemporary Iranians, you'd be quite surprised the truth doesn't seem to play such an important role. On the opposite, you'd always hear, say, about Iranians that they are the perfect liars. Rothbard in class theory, to state it, says that it's not the Marxist view, that it's the rich and the poor who oppose to each other, but rather it's the state and the population and those who use just economic terms for their survival. And that's directly the Iranian point of view. They call the two classes, Melat and Dolat, the people and the state. It's always people versus the state, which leads to the paradoxical conclusion for an Iranian that whenever the state is weak, you have to hit it. It makes it difficult to understand revolutions in Iran because, for example, the revolution against the Shah wasn't a revolution because the Shah was so oppressed, it was perceived to be so oppressive at the time of the revolution. To the contrary, beginning in 1977, the Shah started a policy of opening up and allowing this course and allowing a little debate and so on. It was a liberalizing tendency. But because you have this gulf between society and the state, the Iranian mindset would say, okay, the state is weak, let's hit him while it's weak. Not when it's strong, let's hit it while it's weak. So I think phenomenons like the Arabic spring or which Islam phrases this more correctly as the Islamic spring is widely misunderstood. It's of course not a Facebook-driven pro-emocracy event that's going on there. And of course the manifestation on the street in Iran weren't really that much about this issue and weren't really much about proposing an alternative to the Islamic Republic. They perceived the state as being weak again because there was some internal struggle within a very, very complicated power structure. So I try to explain to you, I hope, a time for Safis to do that. Another thing that Rothbard was very correct about when you want to understand Iranian history is the importance of millenarian thought for political ideologies. Of course the ideology between the Iranian revolution was not so much homebred. It was interestingly developed in the West, Khomeini spent a lot of time in Paris. And the thinkers behind the Iranian revolution were very deeply versed in Marxist and postmodernist thought. One of the most influential figures probably was Ali Shariati of whom Sartre himself has said that if I would have to choose a religion, I choose the religion of Ali Shariati. What did Shariati do? He picked up anti-imperialism and other kind of leftist, anti-Western thought and he said to himself, well, we've got this problem, we can't make a Marxist revolution work in Iran. And he perceived without explicitly telling so because we don't have these classes. We have a different class theory. It's not the rich, the rich, the poor. It would be impossible to have a Marxist revolution in Iran because people know, okay, either you're with the state or you're against the state. It's not between the population. It's not different interests of the population. It's always the interests of coercion, whereas it's the interests of the people. So the only way to have that kind of revolution was somehow linking it to the strife of Iranians for justice, which was very much linked in Zoroastrian thought and is of deep importance in Islam and particularly in Shiite Islam. And to somehow link it to the martyrdom of Hussein. So he used a lot of Shiite concept to just put into practice Western leftist thought. That's what he basically tried. He translated this thought to Shiite concepts. So that was quite influential on the early proponents of the Islamic revolution. The revolution started because the state was perceived as weak, a lot of liberals, Democrats, communists, later useful idiots for the Islamists, as it usually happens. And the problem was, of course, the big promise of bringing justice. And whenever you have a millenary and utopian thought, after a short while, you realize justice is not coming about or justice means poverty. It means starvation. It just doesn't work. Utopian economic policies just don't work. If you follow Islamic course, it doesn't bring you all the promised goods and the promised land. Particularly, it was particularly strong streak in Khomeini's ideology because he was the one who did the shift from a pre-millionarian thought to post-millionarian thought. Post-millionarian thought, as Robert explained it, differs from pre-millionarian thought in that you think you have to actively do something to bring about the millennium. So the former Shiite clergy, they all believed that the Mahdi will come. So they have an apocalyptic vision. But you can't do anything to hasten his arrival on earth. So better you abstain from politics because politics, as it is today, it's always been just not the right politics you have to wait for the redeemer. You can't have a good, just policy now. So it's only the post-millionarian should think you have to do something in the present in order that the redeemer will come. And you can't do something so that he will come earlier. And that was the important change in ideology and thought and what made it so dangerous in the beginning. But of course, the Mahdi didn't arrive, which might have been a surprise in the beginning. And then the only thing that helped this Islamic revolution, this Islamic Republic to survive was the devil himself, as you might say, and in the eyes of Hormini, he was very glad that the devil himself interfered because it highlighted the struggle between good and evil and the devil at the time was Saddam Hussein, who used to try to use the weakness of Iran and getting some oil fields, of course, and getting some land from Iran. Of course, Iran was weakened. I mean, you just had a regime change, the military had to be rebuilt in a way. So even though Iran is larger than Iraq, in the beginning it looked like it would fail and would be easy war for Hussein. But then Hormini realized that you can use all those concepts of the revolution, in particular the martyrdom of Hussein to instill a new kind of warfare. And it was one of the bloodiest wars in history, what the Iranians did was just send on children to the battlefield as martyrs. So just use the high number of people that they have in contrast to Iraq and they sent waves of people to pluck off the missiles and the mines and whatsoever. So it was a terrible kind of warfare. But what Iran learned in this process is that the conventional army didn't really work that well. It was a particular asymmetrical warfare which worked in the end. And that was an important lesson for Iran. Of course, the war is always was the health of the state and the Islamic Republic could assert itself against all opposition because as always, if you are in war, a centralized state proves to be a quite useful asset. So what happened after the war? The interesting thing and a lot of things to learn for libertarians from Iran is that coercion doesn't work. The effects of this coercive policy of bringing about the perfect just Islamic society didn't only not work, but at the opposite, they brought about results which many would never have expected. And that's very odd for observers from the West. You would expect Iran to be a highly Islamic coercive society. But to the contrast, if you compare it with all other societies in the Middle East, Iran is the most secularized, most pro-Western society in the region. That's very odd. If you talk to a regular Iranian, they are very interested in the West. They feel no kind of hatred. They might feel some kind of injustice that's done to the country. But on a personal level, they are very eager if they have a chance to go to the West, to learn from the West. You find when you're traveling Iran that people are very friendly to foreigners. I guess one of the countries where people are friendliest, maybe on the earth, what I hear from stories of people going there, so that's quite amazing. Has it worked in bringing virtue about Islamic society? On the contrary, Iran is now one of the countries with the highest drug addiction. Prostitution is looming. And odd thing, the prostitution is run by mullahs. How do they do it? Because they have a Shiite instrument, a time marriage, which allows Shiite to marry for a short period of time. Of course, now you have very strong incentives as a mullah who can do this kind of marriage to get money for doing a time marriage. And of course, time marriage might last as long as an hour. And you realize that it pays us well to have the room that you offer the room as well. So it's just economic logic which brings about these results. And it's quite odd because there you see, so a lot of current Iran is a fight between economic reality and intentions of coercive power which always fail. Another interesting thing that it did something in Islamic thought within Iran. I'd say that they developed a very strange phenomenon of politically libertarian Islamic scholars. You would be so surprised if you know what leading Grand Ayatollahs say to what the regime. Now Iran is conceived as a theocracy. The problem is after Khomeini it stopped being a theocracy in the sense of having really highly esteemed scholar at the top because they couldn't find any Shiite scholar of importance to endorse this kind of republic. As I told you, most Shiite clerics are before the Premillinarians. So they distanced themselves from politics. The interesting thing about Shiite Islam is that there's a clergy like the church in Christendom and you have a bottom-up process of selection where even the phenomenon of an Islamic pope might emerge. It's called the Marjai Taglit among the Grand Ayatollahs. You become a Grand Ayatollah by having a lot of education, many years of education, many exams and you're considered by an Islamic school to be a scholar of the utmost importance and quality. Now if you yourself as a Grand Ayatollah are considered a Marjai Taglit which means a source of imitation by other Grand Ayatollahs, then you rise above the Grand Ayatollahs and it happens every now and then that one single Grand Ayatollah is selected voluntarily by all other Grand Ayatollahs as their source of imitation which means if they have a conflict or a doubt about something, they'd ask him, they'd refer to him to settle their conflict. The last time that was this kind of Islamic pope was in 1961 that when the last Marjai Taglit that was accepted by all Grand Ayatollahs by it. Since then there have been various Grand Ayatollahs. Interesting thing is there was no Grand Ayatollah that could serve as the supreme leader of Iran because even the only one that agreed to Khomeini's heresy in fact, Khomeini's ideology is a Shiite heresy. It's not mainstream Shiite theology. Even the only one who agreed that the Grand Ayatollah might play a role before the Mahdi comes. All others say no, you have to guide the souls of the people but not do politics because you will destroy religion by doing it. The only one who agreed to that, Grand Ayatollah Montaserri, disappointed Khomeini because Montaserri said, wow, you did the same thing that the Shah did but only in the name of religion. How dare you? How dare you? So there was a big conflict you couldn't, of course, be following Khomeini. So a politician was selected who had credentials in the war who was an Ayatollah but was not in high regard by other Ayatollahs. So it was a second class clergy member who turned out to be a politician who became the supreme leader Khomeini who still is the supreme leader today. He's not in high esteem by any Shiite clergy. So you can't really consider that theocracy I'd say by now. Interestingly, other Grand Ayatollahs were even more explicit in how they charged the Islamic Republic. For example, Grand Ayatollah, Yusuf Alsani, he said, and I tried to translate it as literally as I can, he said, the clergy has lost the holiness because they became part of the power elite. Governing, he says. Governing always means lying to your population and stealing from your population. Governing always means that. In his words, as a Grand Ayatollah, Shiite clergy is saying that. So if you govern, you destroy religion and you become a criminal. That's one of the most important Grand Ayatollahs who of course is under house arrest like most other Grand Ayatollahs in Iran. So Iran is actually imprisoning its own clergy. Now the power conflict within Iran now, it's quite complicated to understand because it's a struggle within the ruling classes. What happened is that as most Grand Ayatollahs observed, power corrupts. So the saying by Lord Ektan, it was really dated in Iran, power corrupts. But the interesting lesson from Iran is that power does not only corrupt good principles, power also corrupts bad principles. Of course, those were very principled people in the beginning of the Islamic revolution. But by using power and by profiting from power and by earning riches, their bad principles got corrupted as well. So now you have people who are leading the Basij and the Pasdaram, those were paramilitary forces to withstand the Iraqi invasion. You have those people, they ended up controlling a large part of the Iranian economy. And by this way, they became managers and they became entrepreneurs. And it's very interesting to observe now that you have these apparent fundamentalists who are not interfering in their own enterprises because they realized, okay, if you try to apply our Islamic principles, it just doesn't work that way. If you try to put our people who are fighters on the street in a management position, it just doesn't work. It doesn't bring the same result, the same wealth for us. So they've become very pragmatic over the last years. So the ruling class in Iran is completely different from the early revolutionary class. They are very pragmatic, quite rational people which surprises a lot of observers in the region, in particular the Israeli secret service are quite surprised how rational their supposed enemy is. And in the whole Middle Eastern region, people would rather consider as the irrational and fundamentalist power, the United States. Because from everything that they see and try to judge, they see, okay, it makes sense what Iran does. And the strange thing is when Iran is supporting groups outside, they never want their allegiance to their religious ideas. They're very pragmatic. They don't demand from a Sunni group that they're supporting, that they turn over to Shia. But what they observe at the same time is with the American invasion, hundreds of missionaries came to Iraq, for example. So they're wondering, okay, who are the fundamentalists now? Because they don't see any missionaries from Iran working there. So the perception is completely opposite. You're seeing an irrational force from the outside, the United States, whereas a rational, quite dominant power in the region which by this corruption of bad principle has become quite pragmatic. Of course, in no way I would defend the regime, but it's quite strange, it's paradoxical that this kind of regime, with this kind of ideological background would turn out to be the most regional actor in the Middle East right now. What Iran is striving for is being appreciated by other Muslims. Maybe filling the gap within Sunni Islam which has proved to be impotent, even from the proof of Muslims. It could not withstand, Israel could not withstand the United States. Sunnis have lost almost every war that they have started, they have engaged in. So that's now the chance that Iran sees to preserve its position in the region as regional power, and they're quite surprised that I'd say that the United States is not cooperating with them, but with Takfiri movements, the Taliban and so on. Sunni fundamentalists with, in contrast to the so-called Iranian fundamentalists, they are undisciplined, and they are the greatest enemy of Iran, the greatest danger to Iran, because as I said, in Shia you have a clergy, you have a process of interpretation of Quran. It's not allowed as in the Protestant faith, quite similar to Catholic versus Protestant. You can't just go on and interpret the Quran as you like it and you read something and you go on slaughtering infidels, but you have to go through a process of interpretation and the clergy that guides you and that might use tactical means of if there is a reason, if there's a rational aim to be fulfilled. So I think I have to finish now. I told you it was an impossible task. I hope I was able to give you a bit of a background. Thank you very much for your patience. Thank you.