Stalin ... and others like him, were prompted by a hubris that made them to perceive society as a blank sheet of paper on which they could draw whatever mad design came into their minds. The original leaders of the French Revolutions hared that illusion. They decided to "cancels the whole of human history and introduced a new calendar, which began with the year zero. Needless to say, they ended up headless after a brief encounter with the very guillotine that they had installed at what is now the Concorde Square in Paris.

The hubris of trying to reshape an entire society at will is a disease of all those who have lost faith in humanity ... all spoke of "a second creation"; as if the first creation had been nothing but a draft for their imagined masterpiece.

In every case, a single concept is magnified into a monster of monistic mania and used as a means of destroying society. The concept chosen by the leaders of the French Revolution was "la nation" (the nation). Lenin and Stalin used the concept of "proletariat". Hitler used the concept of "race". Mao Zedong's favoured concept was "the people". Khomeini, for his part used "Islam" as the abstract concept to use as a weapon against the people.

The entire exercise represents the most corrupt version of Platonic idealism imaginable. The "Ideal" is built as an enemy of the "Real", with the assumption that the latter must ultimately submit to the former. The problem is that the "Ideal" must be pure; it must be self- contained and exclusive. Reality is never like that. Reality is impure, complex and inclusive.

When the French Revolution came, most inhabitants of France did have a vague notion of belonging to a French entity. But there was no French nation in the sense intended by the party of the guillotine. The attempt at imposing the "Ideal" on reality provoked revolts on the part of the latter. In the city of Lyon alone the French revolutionaries killed almost 100,000 people in a week. The massacre of the peasants in Vandee by the French revolutionaries is one of the darkest chapters of human history.

The concept of "proletariat" produced similar disastrous results. First invented by Feuerbach, it was turned into a phantasmagoria passe-partout of pseudo- philosophy by Marx and Engels. Lenin and Stalin transformed it into the engine of a diabolical state machine. The two dictators could not understand that man cannot be reduced to a single aspect of his existence. Hitler, for his part, believed that being German required being Aryan, an artificial and largely meaningless word invented by philologists for entirely different purposes. He feigned to ignore the fact that the German state, created in 1866 was a largely Jewish project, designed by Jewish . intellectuals and politicians and financed by Jewish capitalists. The Jews also enjoyed an overwhelming presence in the German literary, scientific and artistic elite. Francois Poncet was not wide off the mark when he claimed that Germany, as created by Bismarck, had been a largely Jewish project.

.Khomeini used his ... version of Islam as the "Ideal" he needed in his attempts at destroying reality. He could not understand that a man could be both a pious Muslim nd a patriotic Iranian ... He saw man as a one- dimensional being ...

Now-Ruz ... survived Khomeini's assault. And thero is already much talk of restoring the lion and the scimitar as the symbol of the Iranian state. Reality always wins. Reality is never partial and exclusive. As Iranian families gather together to celebrate Now-Ruz, a copy of the Holy Quran is given pride of place on the beautifully decorated table where the symbols of the Iranian existence are laid out. Non-Muslim Iranians will, of course, give their own holy books pride of place. in other words, culture does not exclude faith. And faith should not be used to exclude culture either.

The Khomeinists have begun to learn that Iran will forever be Iranian. The more militant anti- Khomeinists who confound Islam and Khomeinism, also have a lesson to learn. It is a simple one: Iran will forever be Islamic, also. (Source: The Arab News, 19 February, 2000)