Last week the Iranian government disclosed that 2,427 civilians and members of the security services and 690 insurgents were killed in the “riots” earlier this month, which recontextualizes what actually occurred – and explains the push to “manifest” a new Iranian government.⬇️
Allow me to explain some insurgency theory. A “conventional” insurgency, as we saw in Vietnam, basically follows five phases per Galula:
1. Creation of the insurgent party
2. Cooption of all other opposition groups
3. Guerilla war
4. Conventional war
5. Final overthrow of the government
This is the standard model of revolution by insurgency as used by the East Asian communist movements – China, Vietnam, et cetera. Critically, it involves the parallel creation of a communist state at the same time as the extant state is destroyed – the insurgent leaders will arrive at the abandoned government palace, sit down at the former El Presidete’s desk, and can immediately set about governing the country in an orderly way through the apparatus of the Party that is now spread root and stem through society at large.
There is, however, an alternative method if you just want to seize power and don’t care so much about governing anything. Galula refers to it as the “bourgeois-nationalist shortcut” method, and it’s quite simple – the insurgent party replaces the years of boring organization and coalition-building in Phases 1 and 2 with a few weeks of MASS TERRORISM.
If the target state falters and fails to crush the insurrectionists during this critical stage, the insurgents will be able to rapidly organize a guerilla army using their newfound notoriety and political power and proceed to go about fighting the revolutionary war and eventually overthrowing the government. There won’t be a state apparatus left afterwards to let the revolutionaries govern anything, but generally the kind of people who use these methods don’t really care about little things like that.
There is a critical drawback to this model, however – if the state doesn’t buckle and cracks down effectively during the key terrorism phase, the insurgency is doomed. Unlike the communist model, in this phase the insurgency isn’t a broad-based social movement that can withstand official sanctions – it’s a plot involving a few hundred heavily-armed maniacs who can simply be killed by the police.
So how does this tie into Iran? Well, earlier this month organic protests about economic issues were hijacked by heavily-armed insurgents who proclaimed their general opposition to the government, fought running gun battles with police, caused a shocking amount of property damage, and attempted to organize public support for their movement via an intense social media push – all of this with some success! Then the Iranian government cracked down hard and the insurrection collapsed.
All of this ties exactly into the model of a bourgeois-nationalist “terrorist insurgency” which was defeated during its period of maximum vulnerability – the terrorism phase itself – by a robust and agile state opponent. It also explains the sudden and massive push in the West to recognize the insurgency as a rival Iranian government almost immediately – all of this was very clearly orchestrated by Western interests (read: Mossad), and this insurrection had the clear aim of either overthrowing the Iranian government outright or starting a civil war in Iran. The people pushing to change the Iranian flag emoji on this website (which remains as the pre-1979 flag to this day) absolutely knew what their intended end-state was.
The key thing to realize is that the bourgeois-nationalist insurgency method does not require a large network and mass popular support. It requires a few hundred – or even a few dozen – hard men with guns, and a capable PR team capable of getting people behind the insurgents so as to build a mass movement and support for guerilla war overnight. This is what Mossad et al. was trying to do in Iran earlier this month, and that was in all likelihood the actual extent of their remaining attack network in the country after much of it was dismantled during and after the Twelve Days’ War.
