One nationality, therefore one nation also (rather than multiple ones), no?
Yes one nationality (Iranian), therefore one nation, but Iran is still a multi-ethnic state. There are Persians, Lors, Azeri, Baloch and many more.
That's a highly relative notion in reality.
In the strict sense of the term "ethnicity", over 95% of Iranians tend to share one and the same ethnicity.
See this representation of the genetic map of Iranians:
This means that apart from Persian Gulf islanders (a few hundreds of thousands of citizens only), who have African and Semitic roots, those among the Turkmen who do not have strong indigeneous Iranian admixture (again, less than 1% of Iran's population), as well as the Baluch and Sistanis (who are actually closest, genetically speaking, to the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau prior to the settlement of Aryan tribes, though they later adopted a western Iranian language), all other groups in Iran i. e. some 97% of the population, are of a same "racial" or "ethnic" stock.
Therefore one can at best speak of several linguistic communities, but not so much of different "ethnicities".
Now even when it comes to those linguistic communities, you skipped the main point of my aforegone commentary: these communities overlap and do not have clear boundaries, because most Iranians have mixed linguistic backgrounds thanks to overwhelming intermarriage over the course of centuries and millenia between members of the various linguistic groups present in Iran.
So once again, it is impossible to assign some exclusive linguistic affiliation to every single Iranian citizen, because most of them will objectively have their roots in two or more of these communities at the same time!
Hence, the subdivision of the Iranian population into "ethnicities" or more exactly, into linguistic communities, is very problematic to start with.
it is important to charge and prosecute those who want to rile up ethnic tensions and cause Iran to eventually disintegrate along ethnic lines. We've seen what they've done to Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Balkanization. It's the age old divide and conquer strategy. Keep Syria weak by dividing it, keep Yemen weak by dividing it. If they can't defeat the enemy at the present moment, then they start by dividing them into smaller, more manageable, weaker peices.
Yes, but introducing this sort of laws and jurisprudence is
not the proper way to proceed. On the contrary, this would prove to be profoundly counter-productive and would only
help the enemy in its attempts to promote so-called "ethnic" divisions among Iranians.
If someone is identified by Iran's security agencies as a provocateur engaged in stirring this sort of trouble, they have to be prosecuted under
national security laws (if there is reason to suspect they are agents), under
general laws for the protection of public order (if they are just misguided individuals), or for
insults.
There is no need to introduce "anti-racism" laws if the aim is to ensure social peace, and in reality such laws are a trap set by Iran's enemies. Here is why:
1) Once you start going down that road and making concessions to such requests, which by the way are mostly formulated by "ethno"-separatists and their liberal (reformist/centrist) backers as well as associated 'nofoozis' working in the interests of Iran's foreign enemies,
more and more demands will surface from the same quarters
aiming to turn purported "ethnic" communities into legal persons, and then into codified institutional realities, much as was the case in former Yugoslavia.
Namely,
they will press for an "ethnic" federalization of the Iranian state, i. e. for the creation of federate provinces defined by purported, fictive notions of "ethnicity" - when in fact, even major federal polities such as the US or Germany took care not to organize federal subdivisions along so-called "ethnic" lines, for they were fully aware that this is a recipe for catastrophy, like witnessed in ex-Yugoslavia.
If the Iranian state were to give in to the first such demand - i. e. "anti-racist"
laws promugated with a view to protect not individual Iranian citizens but collective so-called "ethnic" communities whose very existence is largely mythical (see above as to why) and thereby grant a first notion of legal recognition to these widely imaginary groups, it will find itself under tremendous pressure from then on to consent to additional concessions driven by the same logic.
This is an extremely dangerous, slippery slope which Iran's enemies, supported by domestic "ethno"-separatists (pan-Turkists, pan-Kurdists, pan-Arabists etc) and liberal fifth-columnists, have kickstarted. It echoes their initiation of a similarly hazardous spiral for Iran's foreign policy with the nuclear JCPOA - which was always meant as an initial stepping stone for future JCPOA's intended to roll back Iran's ballistic missile arsenal and her regional presence, both of which would have achieved to dismantle Iran's military deterrence, exposing her therewith to acute risks of military aggression.
2) Such laws would not only seal the recognition within the country's legal framework of inexistent "ethnic" dividing lines, but would have a similar impact on the hearts and minds of Iranians, driving wedges between them and weakening their national unity.
Look, for the enemy to be able to turn Iranians against one another using "ethnic" pretexts, it first needs to make Iranians believe in the illusion that each of them does in fact belong to one distinct "ethnic" community, and that there is a major issue of discrimination against minority communities. To this effect, the enemy and its internal collaborators will set out to promote "ethnic" victimhood-mentalities among Iranians receptive to the drivel.
And it is precisely here that "anti-racist" legislation would make life easier for the enemy in pursuit of its sinister program. With such laws in place, the enemy's collaborators and useful idiots inside Iran would trigger trial after trial and turn each one of these into a media sensation. As a result,
the fallacious notion that there are inter-"ethnic" issues in Iran would get cultivated and artificially inflated in the minds of Iranians.
If you seek to effectively counter and neutralize the enemy's project for so-called "ethnic" disintegration of Iran and its corresponding social engineering effort, the one thing you do not do is to resort to measures whose net effect it would be to disseminate a so-called "ethnic" type of thinking among Iranians, to put such so-called "ethnic" topics into the spotlight, to make such questions an issue of public debate in society -
especially when such was not the prevailing social state of affairs to begin with!
By doing so, you would only
manufacture a widely accepted false reality which has no material, objective existence and which hitherto had no place in the minds of Iranians. Indeed,
"ethnicity" did not and does not play any role in the daily social interactions of Iranians: in Iran, you are never asked what your "ethnicity" is, be it when you are applying for a job in the private or public sectors, trying to make friends, registering as a candidate in an election. In other terms,
there is no "ethnicity"-based discrimination to speak of in Iranian society.
I'm not even delving into the
topic of discrimination by state institutions, other than remingding how people in positions as high as the Supreme Leader, various key political decision making posts, high ranking military commanders etc have Azari roots, so clearly, one will find
no discrimination whatsoever in this area either.
"Anti-racist" laws would therefore tend to turn a non-issue into an issue
in the perceptions of the Iranian people.
So rather than indirectly advertizing, through such laws, the idea that "ethnicity" is a relevant issue in Iran, what you want to do on the contrary is to
drive any and all so-called "ethnic" discussions and "ethnicist" types of identitarianism / tribalism to the margins of society and public debate.
As I pointed out, continued promotion of the shared national identity and civilizational heritage, including through all available educational and cultural consumer goods, is one way to go about this.
Another way, and this is too often overlooked, is to widely and insistently inform Iranians (including through TV advertizing etc) about a simple, verifiable truth:
that most of them have multiple, not "pure" linguistic-communal backgrounds and that therefore, most Iranians cannot be crammed into a narrow "ethnic" category in the first place.
In Iran luckily, we haven't seen communal violence and discrimination on the same level that we've seen in various other countries. Like you said, that is because most Iranians think of themselves as Iranians first.
This isn't what I said in the post you replied to - although it is true as well.
You seem not to want to pay attention to the central point of my demonstration:
upwards of 50% to 60% of Iranians do not belong to a single linguistic community, but to several of these simultaneously, owing to their mixed ancestry. This is the best argument that will completely stop the enmy's plot in its tracks.
And it is nothing but an adequate and truthful reflection of a demographic reality. Be honest: how many Iranians do you know who do not have at least two grandparents hailing from distinct linguistic communities? I have known, talked to or rubbed shoulders with hundreds of Iranians, and every single one of them - and I mean this verbatim - who evoked his family tree, turned out to have ancestors practicing multiple local languages (or belonging to a variety of linguistic communities).
How many Iranians have surnames corresponding to cities and towns located way outside their province of birth and residence?
This is simply a fact, and it is bound to become increasingly pronounced as urbanization nears 80%, since urban settlement directly favors intermingling and inter-marriage in countries like Iran with extremely low levels of social discrimination against minorities.
It should be actively encouraged by authorities - both mixed marriages, and Iranian citizens' consciousness that their ancestors belonged to different national linguistic groups, and not to a single one.
After all, there are some Kurds who want to break away from Iran and join a greater Kurdistan. There are some Azeri people who want to split from Iran and join Azerbaijan or Turkey. These people, their goal is to weaken the sense of unity in the nation by causing communal tension and hatred among various ethnic groups in Iran.
That is why the Iranian government cannot tolerate such behavior. Anyone who tries to belittle or discriminate or poke fun at a specific ethnic group publicly or advocate for the disintegration of Iran must be dealt with decisively.
Not by granting legal recognition to so-called "ethnic groups" or to grievances formulated in artificial "ethnic" terms - that would only play into the hands of provocateurs, and would benefit the enemy's project. If someone threatens Iran's unity, it is equally an issue for all Iranians, not for some specific, purported "ethnic" group.
What needs to be done is to erode, not legitimize or favor the deployment of so-called "ethnic" discourse.
See how I systematically put "ethnicity" / "ethnic" into quotation marks when talking about Iran? This is the way forward.
Undermine the very conceptual basis upon which the enemy seeks to operate. Do not commit the fatal mistake of playing in a field defined by the enemy.
Racism and discrimination are outlawed in most industrialized nations that contain various ethnic groups or large minorities.
Iran should never draw inspiration from those failed, slowly crumbling and essentially criminal systems.
Also the analogy is not a valid one, because:
1) While the problematic does reflect certain social realities in the west - although "anti-racist" discourse has a tendency to exaggerate them, this is not the case in Iran. As I showed above, in Iran there's no traditional practice of discrimination against linguistic minorities, neither on the societal nor on the institutional stage.
Also to be fair, in western countries society is confronted with mass immigration originating from very different socio-cultural and economic contexts, which is not the case in Iran - Iran is lucky that the 3 to 4 million Afghan immigrants on its soil hail from areas that formerly belonged to Iran and form part of the Greater Iranian civilizational realm. So there are fewer grounds for such problematics to arise in Iran anyway.
Now I've no doubt that the liberal and globalist Iranian fifth-column harbours distant dreams of opening their country's gates to massive entries of immigrants from all over the planet. Their advocacy of low natality rates and fewer children per woman, which has led to a dangerously low natural population growth and to an increasing aging of Iran's demographic pool, is in line with this. This one's an actual ticking time bomb Iran needs to address and fix as soon as possible.
2) You need to understand what's at stake at the deeper political and systemic level when it comes to the "racism" vs "anti-racism" debate in the west.
In effect, this binary opposition is essentially a politically engineered one, used as an instrument of governance and employed as a means to extend regime survival by governing elites and ruling oligarchies of so-called "secular liberal democracies".
At both ends of the spectrum, western intelligence services have a finger in the pie. This way, they create a formidable spectacle magnified by regime-controlled mainstream media, aimed at generating artificial, perfectly manageable public debates which they let their populations busy themselves with, in order to redirect popular wrath stemming from socio-economic pressures, inequality and exploitation as well as from cultural-anthropological uprooting, onto segments of society itself. It's another "divide to rule" ploy executed by the western ruling class.
Both "racist" grouplets on the far-right and "anti-racist" activists on the far-left are largely controlled and manipulated by regime agencies. Same goes for their patrons at the apparent top of the state pyramid. In other words, both Trump and Biden serve one same system, one same regime. It is in fact their pseudo-dialectic interplay, their fake opposition which fascinates and grips a zombified and uprooted population, that allows the system to survive.
The "anti-racist" thesis corresponds to the globalist ruling elites' persuasions, while the "racist" antithesis and those sporting it, represent a controlled type of dissent that is never going to threaten the system in its foundations. The whole western-zionist order needs to go, "racists" and "anti-racists" alike, for people to have peace.
So the "racist" vs "anti-racist" debate in the west, as well as accompanying "anti-discrimination" laws and daily scandals you read about in the media, are fulfilling a specific function that has no relevance to the Iranian context. The Islamic Republic has no need to legitimize itself through such socially engineered artefacts, which moreover would be detached from Iran's social realities. Guess who would stand to benfit from this if Iran introduced that type of legislation? That's right, the same western regimes, Iran's existential foes, since such a legislation would offer them a practical tool with which to engineer so-called "ethnic" dissensions in Iran, by making it appear as if the topic had any real bearing in people's lives when it doesn't.
Nobody said that we have to learn from the west. Cyrus was arguably the first anti abolitionist and anti racist world leader.
No! The notion that Cyrus was an "anti racist" is just as erroneous as the mythical belief held by many Iranians that Cyrus authored the first "human rights" charter (or that the text of the Cyrus document adorns the entrance to some UN building in New York - this is simply not factual). Indeed, those weren't "rights" that could be claimed in a court of law, but a status consented to by an emperor, building upon which the empire would organize its conquests and dependencies (this principle of organization was indeed a generous one which recognized and protected local customs more than previous empires, that is true). Secondly, so-called "human rights" are individual rights by nature, whereas the status defined by Cyrus concerned comunities, not individuals.
This isn't to say Cyrus was "racist" either. It's just that these notions have a historicity and do not exist in a vacuum. They would have made no sense in the historic context of the seventh or sixth century BC. These are concepts, not timeless common words.
The concept of "human rights", for instance, would have been unconceivable prior to the advent of post-Renaissance modernity, nor outside of the western realm. It is effectively a product of the masonic American and French revolutions. It served and serves the purpose of implementing a secular order in which traditional religion is gradually replaced by substitute-religions, namely these "human rights", which transition from ideology to a dogmatic quasi-religion.
As for the concept and political ideology of "anti racism", it pertains to the post-WW2 world and especially to the period starting from the 1970's economic crises and continuing into the post-modern era.
The idea of tolerance and prohibiting racism or hate speech can be considered a universal concept among humanity or any other sentient being with sufficient intelligence, in the same way that mathematics is universal.
Anti-discrimination laws as found in the west today, as well as their deep function and underlying logic do not have anything universal to them: they are products of a particular history, of a particular type of society with its own problematics, of particular ideologic underpinnings pertaining to given regimes.
Free speech ? Well Iran is not exactly a bastion of free speech. If you open your mouth in Iran and say you want a referendum on the Islamic Republic system, well we all know what would happen to that person.
In most cases nothing much would happen to the average citizen if he expressed this opinion in public. But apart from that, what political system holds referenda on whether to maintain or not the entire existing constitutional order? This is totally unheard of. Referenda on the type of governing system to have, are held in the aftermath of a regime collapse. Not once a system of governance is established.
