HyperNormalisation Page #7

out of the Middle East.

And to do this, he made an alliance

with the new revolutionary force

of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

And what Khomeini could bring to Assad

was an extraordinary new weapon

that he had just created.

It was called it "the poor man's atomic bomb".

Ayatollah Khomeini had come

to power two years before

as the leader of the Iranian revolution.

But his hold on power was precarious,

and Khomeini had developed a new

idea of how to fight his enemies

and defend the revolution.

Khomeini told his followers that

they could destroy themselves

in order to save the revolution

providing that, in the process,

they killed as many enemies

around them as possible.

This was completely new,

because the Koran specifically prohibited suicide.

In the past, you became a

martyr on the battlefield

because God chose the time

and place of your death.

But Khomeini changed this.

He did it by going back to one of

the central rituals of Shia Islam.

MUSIC PLAYS:

Every year, Shi'ites march in a procession

mourning the sacrifice of their founder, Husayn.

As they do, they whip themselves,

symbolically re-enacting Husayn's suffering.

Khomeini said that the ultimate act of penitence

was not just to whip yourself,

but to kill yourself...

...providing it was for the

greater good of the revolution.

In the name of God, the

compassionate, the merciful,

good afternoon.

"An Iraqi Soviet-made MiG-23 was shot down

"by the air-force jet fighters

of the Islamic Republic

"over the north-western Iranian

border region of Marivan

"at 10.08 hours local time, Saturday,"

said the Joint Staff Commands

communique numbered 1710.

Khomeini had mobilised this force

when the country was attacked by Iraq.

Iran faced almost certain defeat

because Iraq had far superior weapons,

many of them supplied by America.

So, the revolutionaries took

tens of thousands of young boys

out of schools, put them on buses

and sent them to the front line.

CHANTING:

Their job was to walk through

the enemies' minefields,

deliberately blowing themselves

up in order to open gaps

that would allow the Iranian

army to pass through unharmed.

It was organised suicide on a vast scale.

This human sacrifice was commemorated

in giant cemeteries across the country.

Fountains flowing with blood red-water

glorified this new kind of martyrdom.

And it was this new idea -

of an unstoppable human weapon -

that President Assad took from Khomeini,

and brought to the West for the first time.

But, as it travelled,

it would mutate into something even more deadly.

Instead of just killing yourself,

you would take explosives with

you into the heart of the enemy

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