By Ramin Mazaheri – posted with permission and x-posted with PressTV
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism.’
“ A people without hate cannot triumph over a brutal enemy.” – Che Guevara
The assassination on Iraqi soil of Iran’s Qassem Soleimani will produce many things, and global resentment and hatred for Washington is undoubtedly already one of them.
Around the world the assessment is the same: Washington has committed an act of war. In their bloodlust to reverse Iran’s popular and democratic revolution – in order to keep feeding their bottomless neo-imperial greed – Washington has electroshocked the world into remembering its brutal immorality: one remembers the pain of doctor’s needle with more clarity than the pain of a week-long illness, after all.
There will be so many ramifications to this cowardly, illegal, inhuman act – which so nakedly aims to be of profit solely to the US elite and not the average American – that we should take time to historically assess the true legacy of Soleimani: he is the Muslim Che Guevara.
He is not merely the “Iranian Che Guevara” because that makes no sense given Che’s ideals: Just like the Argentinian, Soleimani spent many years of his life fighting US imperialism in many countries and ultimately died in a foreign land out of his certainty in the reality of international brotherhood.
Limiting Soleimani’s legacy to the “Iranian Che Guevara” also makes no sense given the ideals of the Iranian revolution: Soleimani’s death reminds the world that Iran – seemingly alone in the anti-imperialist struggle in 2019 – repeatedly gives their time, money, blood, love and lives to non-Iranians out of a sense of progressive political internationalism.
Che Guevara died in October 1967 in Bolivia. The group Che died with was international, including Peruvians, Argentinians, Cubans, Bolivians and even two Europeans. Without Soleimani’s presence in Iraq and Syria both of those countries would be under total imperialist domination today, and probably Lebanon as well.
The Iranian revolution is just as international in scope and reach as the Cuban revolution Che was a part of creating and defending. Iran’s critics say they want to turn every Muslim into a Shia and make the laws of Iran the laws of the entire world…. but that is obviously the hubris goal of the imperialist West – Iran’s progressive goal is not control but liberation of the masses and then their empowerment.
Few Westerners seem to realize that the primary motivation of Che – perhaps the very picture of internationalism – was undoubtedly Latin American nationalism: his dream was the same as Bolivar’s (and Cuba’s Marti and others in Chile, Nicaragua, etc.). For those who see the anti-imperialist struggle with historical accuracy, there is in an obvious parallel here with the “Muslim World nationalism” of Iran’s Soleimani.
Only the religion-phobes, the uselessly pedantic and the outright Iranophobes and Islamophobes will fail to see that.
It’s no matter to billions of people if such persons remain blind: Just like Soleimani, Che was disavowed by the leading leftists and revolutionaries of his day – the USSR detested Che and his bold resistance to Washington, which few recall. (Like Iran today, Che was appreciative of the Chinese view.) Moscow insisted – in their quite European fashion – that only they should lead and strategise the fight against Western imperialism. In short: now that the USSR had been liberated from foreign imperialism, nobody else needed to take up arms anymore. Of course, at the time of Che’s death the USSR was no longer led by the anti-fascist hero Che affectionately called “Daddy Stalin” – Khrushchev, Brezhnev and finally Gorbachev would grow decadent, corrupt, even renounce Soviet support for international anti-imperialist struggles, and finally wilfully implode the USSR from the very top and against the overwhelming democratic will of the Soviet people.
To the Western leftists – or anywhere else in the world – who can’t see clearly: Why did they kill Soleimani, too? Do they still think he was, to use a term popular in the US around 2003, an “Islamo-fascist”? Washington is certainly fascist, but they are not so very Islamophobic to kill Soleimani in such a way over just being a Muslim. I hope this group keeps trying – one day they’ll finally understand.
Che was assassinated because his explicit goal was to create “multiple Vietnams”. Surely many streets will be named after Soleimani in Syria, and Iraq, and even Palestine (if Iran could get some help from Arab nations). Soleimani was undoubtedly a success.
But the invasion, sanctions, re-invasion and occupation of Iraq never motivated the West like Vietnam. Why? Islamophobia, perhaps. The injustice towards Iraqis did, however, motivate Iranians like Soleimani.
Was Che a success? He failed in Bolivia and the Congo, but Cuba remains the “first free country in the Americas”, and many would rightly say the only. Less appreciated is how Cuba fought alongside non-Latin Angola – who had the misfortune of being colonised by the most backwards Western imperialist (Portugal) – and how this directly led to the end of Apartheid in South Africa. Che was undoubtedly a success.
In the West Che is only a successful way to make money – his face sells all types of merchandise – but the notion that his ideas are remembered, understood or (LOL) taught is laughable. For the West Che merely symbolises romance, not revolution, politics or morality.
And that’s where this article moves on from placing Soleimani in his proper historical context.
If Iranians think that continuing their revolution is just romance and posing – instead of a necessary self-sacrifice, which is undertaken with no expectation of earthly reward (and in fact more likely to produce quite the contrary), in order to prevent brutality and hate ruining the lives of tens of millions of Iranians – then their revolution will fail. Revolutions often fail: ask the French. They still celebrate it every Bastille Day, but that is more romance and posing.
For those non-Iranians who think the Iranian revolution is not needed globally, and especially regionally, urgently – just go ask an Iraqi, Syrian or Palestinian if they agree. Other countries will be included one day, and I am first thinking of those areas which are so deeply vital to Islamic culture, such as Egypt, Morocco and Arabia. One day the sons and daughters of Che and Soleimani will unite in countries which are neither Muslim nor Latin, Inshallah.
For those who think Soleimani will be the last atrocious slaying it is necessary to recall that the death of Che was only the first – Sukarno, Nkrumah, Ben Bella, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy soon followed.
However, we should not forget they were preceded domestically by Malcolm X and John Kennedy – assassination is not at all a new policy for the US, and we should not imagine that it suddenly is now. The goal of such assassinations is clear: to discourage future revolutionaries, and also to retard ongoing anti-imperialist movements.
However, I am not worried that the Iranian Revolution will fall with Soleimani, and I mean that with reverence for his sacrifice and achievements: the idea that a popular revolution can (or should) rest on the work of one man alone… this is not revolution, nor popular, but the “great man-ism” of Western capitalism-imperialism. This is Macron, Rhodesia, Louis XIV, Churchill, and, of course, Trump. A successful revolutionary culture produces a system which is able to produce moral and capable leaders over and over and over until the revolution is truly secure – Iranians have more than 40 years of successful revolution upon which to justifiably base their faith in the future, despite these sad days.
Trump has committed an act of war, but a quick, hasty revenge will almost certainly be detrimental to the many just causes Soleimani and others have sacrificed so much for. Soleimani did not become the Muslim Che Guevara and repeatedly triumph over a brutal enemy by placing the good of one person over the good of the nation and the good of the struggle.
Angola provides the best example of how Che’s death should have been dealt with: they launched an anti-imperialist offensive called “Che is not dead”, which proved to be the beginning of the end of Portuguese control over Guinea-Bissau and then of the entire Portuguese empire by 1974.
Thanks in large part to Soleimani’s efforts, after so many decades of Western-led corruption, hate and brutality Iraq now appears strong enough that they may be able to expel the US immediately and even peacefully. I don’t think Soleimani would ask for any greater legacy than that – this is what he died for.
Great article, Ramin, thank you. Please, see below my own thoughts about this tragic event and the Latin Americam history of social struggles, in which I had the priviledge to participate for a good part of my life:
The message by the Leader Ayatollah Khamenei regarding the martyrdom of General Shahid Sardar Qasem Suleimani reminds us of the struggle for liberation in Latin America, in the 1960s and 1970s, where a new religious movement developed — known as the Theology for Liberation — as a guide to people’s struggle against the socially destructive US Operation Condor, which restored the neoliberal/neo-colonial imperialist project in the region. Legion
Latin America has a long history of struggle for liberation. After the battles for liberation from colonial independence during the 18th and 19th centuries, the struggles in the 20th century were mostly constituted by the combination of the aims of the social and the national liberation into an anti-imperialistic struggle, becoming more recently increasingly focused in the ethnic self-definition of sectors of population and their fight for a right to self-determination within the boundaries of a plurinational state, as it happens in Bolivia, for example.
By the end of the 19th century, a shift in the role of the USA — from a role model for declaring its colonial independence from the British Empire, to a threat, carrying out imperialistic policies towards its southern neighbours — had already become obvious.
They had already declared Central and South America as their sphere of interest to the European powers in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823; soon after, between 1845 and 1848, they annexed large areas of Mexico. “Between 1869 and 1897, the US sent warships into Latin American ports a nearly unbelievable 5,980 times (average 206 US warship calls to Latin America ports per year, or about one every other day for 29 years).” See https://www.brianwillson.com/history-us-military-overt-and-covert-global-interventions/
Then, in 1898, when it won the brief Spanish-American War, the USA took off Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Puerto Rico, the Philippines and other colonial possessions from Spain — hypocritically challenging the foundation of Nation States by the colonies that, following their model, were declaring their independence. In addition to “having invaded Cuba and Mexico once again, Guatemala, Honduras, and taken Panama from Colombia, fought protracted wars in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti, all enabling US corporations and financial houses to dominate the economies of most of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and much of South America”, by 1930, Washington had sent military gunboats into Latin American ports over six thousand times.
Worldwide, over 560 “overt US military interventions occurred since the end of WWII to 2008 with at least 20 million killed.” “This does NOT count several thousand military uses of US Naval ships to intimidate various nations in the Pacific, Caribbean, and Latin America.” “The US has conventionally bombed 28 countries since the end of World War II.” There is permanent fear of overt or covert military interventions by the USA in Latin America — mainly when governments start to reclaim their sovereignty and the interests of large US companies are at risk.
Due to the brutality of the imperialist interventions, in the first half of the 1960s, a new religious revolutionary movement started in the Vatican II. By the end of the decade, the new Theology for Liberation had turned the Latin American Catholic Church focus over — from a blind, dogmatic spot, to the needs of the poor and oppressed, to the need of liberating the nation from the claws of imperialism.
This shift in the Catholic Church praxis came about after decades of struggle in Latin America. The overthrowing of the Batista regime in 1959, during the Cuban Revolution, is the most influential occurrence of that time. Fulgencio Batista was a Cuban military officer (Colonel) and politician who had served as the elected President of Cuba from 1940 to 1944, and as a military dictator (backed by the US) from 1952 to 1959, when he was finally deposed during the Cuban Revolution. He had suspended all constitutional bodies and presided over a time of brutality against the population, crumbling economy (when he made his personal fortune), and disquiet in the military. Fulgencio Batista was replaced by Fidel Castro, who became Prime Minister from 1959 until 1976, and President from 1976 until 2008.
The ideals of the successful Cuban Revolution spread to other Latin American countries. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, an Argentine revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist who had become a key figure in the Cuban Revolution, served in the new Cuban government for a while; but, he eventually left to continue spreading the liberation revolution elsewhere in Latin America and Africa. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara was brutally assassinated in a filthy operation in October 1967, much like the one that killed Suleimani in January 2019.
Religion started to have a role in the political struggles of the people in the mid-1950s. The new Theology for Liberation (theses) was a result of that struggle. While Che’s humanist concept of the new socialist man and woman had influenced the preaching of many priests in Latin America, the widespread Teaching Methodology of Paulo Freire, expressed in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), instructed the modus operandi of the new Pastoral works.
During the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of priests were deeply involved in the new theology, nourished by biblical texts and hope in salvation, which spread all over South and Central America while uniting the people in a common effort. A very promising, overpowering struggle resulted, against all forms of domestic and foreign domination, with the aim at transforming society.
It was not going to be, though… In the long run, a new praxis, American Evangelicalism (anti-theses), replaced the one taught by the Theology of Liberation. In Brazil, in a seemingly orchestrated crusade from the 1980s until recently, Evangelicals infiltrated in mass the Liberation Movement and by the end of the first decade of the new century eventually replaced the liberation ideal. As a result, the government of the Workers Party, which since 2002 was re-elected (every four years) four consecutive times, was removed in 2016 through a fraudulent Parliamentary coup d’état by a Congress notoriously comprised of Evangelical politicians… Today, in the political sphere in Brazil, American Evangelicalism has a more decisive role than Catholicism, whose progressive theological preaching has unfortunately wittered down…
The struggle for liberation and emancipation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, founded by the revolutionary politician and cleric Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, resembles our struggle in Latin America against imperialism. The death of General Soleimani must NOT stop Iran’s RESISTANCE, which has global impact. The struggle for freedom from imperialism must continue. Hasta la Victoria, SIEMPRE!
Here in Sweden, the news flash about the mammoth crowds in the streets throughout Iran of course tossed in the ludicrous, moronic pronunciamento that ’certainly many were coerced by the REGIME to participate’.
Coerced, yes. But not by Iran’s government.
Great article Ramin, thank you very much. And yes both Che Guevara and Soleimani killed cowardly by the same empire. Who can’t learn from history, can not have any good enough teacher after all.
A friend of mine made the same parallel earlier today…
Thanks for this article, which by doing this Soleimani-Guevara comparison, reminds us that the Iranian “Axis of the resistance” is a real global revolutionary movement resisting US imperialism, not a simple local Shia affair.
Soleimani clearly had some talent to lead and create links with foreign fighters: I hope the man who will replace him will show the same resolve and the same skills, even if he doesn’t benefit from Soleimani’s iconic status.
I stand with Iran and all the good people of the world against the maniacal cartel that controls the government of the USA and much of the western world.
My Condolences to the Iranian people on the loss of General Qassem Soleimani.
The “Che Guevara” is a ziofake, that’s why the ziomedia promotes his image heavily. He was a Khazarian terrorist, and probably his link of being the cousin of the Khazarian terrorist Shimon Peres may be true. The link of Guevara with the also Khazarian Fidel Castro speaks volumes of their real nature.
The real defense of Latinoamérica is the reintegration under the Natural Law. We were divided by a bloody coup carried out by Masonic murderers supported by the usual suspects: the Khazarian Mafia settled in the City of London. So, as always, it was a ziocoup.
Supporting the banana republics without questioning the inherent fundational ziocoups that formed the bananized divisions has been a tiresome and infuriating tactic to lead us astray from the real issue.
Please Mr. Mazaheri, notice that the Khazarians have consistently poisoned the information everywhere. In Latinoamérica, their Masonic agents brainwashed everybody by rewriting the history and presenting us a fake version. By the way, there was never a “French Revolution” or a “Russian Revolution”: they were just ziocoups.
“Guevara is a Ziofake”? “A cousin of Shimon Peres?”
Don’t know why they let you post here. Just degrades the fine Saker blog.
My mistake. Guevara’s cousin was not Shimon Peres, but the brutal murderer Ariel Sharon. Check:
https://espacioseuropeos.com/2013/03/el-secreto-familiar-del-che-guevara-era-primo-de-ariel-sharon-segun-documentacion-usa/
Documented crimes by the despicable Masonic zioagent Bolivar:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00IRIHN4I/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3 ( AL OÍDO DEL REY: La historia jamás contada sobre la rebelión americana y el genocidio bolivariano (Spanish Edition) )
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/8491646760/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0 (El terror bolivariano)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KV53KB5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i4 (AL OÍDO DEL REY VOL. IV: AMÉRICA SE BALCANIZA Y EL INFIERNO SE EXTIENDE )
https://www.amazon.com/LOS-CR%C3%8DMENES-BOL%C3%8DVAR-VICTORIA-Spanish-ebook/dp/B01M4IWTZO/ref=sr_1_4?crid=1C7CDH5SK52UD&keywords=pablo+victoria&qid=1578273546&sprefix=pablo+vict%2Caps%2C200&sr=8-4 (LOS CRÍMENES DE BOLÍVAR: PABLO VICTORIA (Spanish Edition))
Bolivar, Santander, Hidalgo, Marti, O’Higgins, San Martin, Paez, etc. were not heroes. They didn’t liberate anything. On the contrary: they were Masonic murderers, traitors, cheaters. They divided and bananized these Spanish provinces, so they could fall under the grip of the AngloZionist Empire.
Dear Saker, you may have to do something about this…
The distortions of people’s history — as much as the killing of people’s heroes — are truly evil… This site should NOT publish posts that degrade the most cherished ideals of the people. We are living in a very dangerous time, and we must prevent the use our space for the promotion of those deceptions.
Although there are more great men also murdered for standing up to the same adversary, I would include John Lennon, who was silenced because the youth of the world listened to his message of peace, love, and justice.
Soleimani was in Bosnia, fighting against Bosnian Serbs.
Maybe in your Muslim, Iranian view he can be compared to Che Guevara, not in our Serbian!