In Reflections on Violence(1908), the French political theorist and anarcho-syndicalist agitator Georges Sorel sought to understand what drives successful revolutionary movements. What mania possesses the revolutionary who puts his life at risk, knowing that his actions may fail to change the status quo? Why do revolutionaries so often throw themselves at hopeless efforts to overthrow the ancien régime, and, having failed, arise once more to do the same? Sorel found his answer in the power of political myth; revolutionary movements that subscribed to certain myths of inevitable victory were far more likely to foster mass proletarian support for class struggle. That collective support occasionally led to success, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. For Sorel, myths are evocative “groups of images”, through which “men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.” Every conflict is viewed as a precursor to the decisive war that is fated to occur. Every successful workers’ strike is a piecemeal advance towards a ‘general strike’, and the inevitable victory of the Marxist revolution. Meanwhile, every failed insurrection creates martyrs, whose sacrifices are never in vain. Those who lose today’s battle can already be said to share in tomorrow’s triumph. Sorel points out that the revolution’s mythmakers and leaders need not themselves believe in the myth; it is necessary only for each successive wave of martyrs to believe that they may be the last.
Sorel’s penetrating insight into the psychology of revolution was later instrumentalized, either explicitly or unconsciously, by 20th century totalitarian movements that promised victory over perceived and real enemies of established order. The French fascist Georges Valois subscribed to Sorel’s thought, while Mussolini proclaimed that “[e]verything I am, I owe to Sorel.” Likewise, for Hitler’s inner circle, every battle against Soviet and Allied forces prefigured a final victory—the prophesied Endsieg and Thousand Year Reich—of National Socialism against ‘Jewish-Bolshevik’ forces. Hitler held steadfast to this vision even as he cowered in his bunker in Berlin. “Prophecy is an essential element in the new technique of rulership,” notes the German-Jewish émigré and political theorist, Ernst Cassirer, in The Myth of the State (1946). “The most improbable or even impossible promises are made; the millennium is predicted over and over again.”
Decades later, Sorel’s methods were employed by Iranian revolutionaries against the Shah. According to recent scholarship, “Sorel’s ‘myth of general strike’ came to life in the 1960s and, specifically, within a generation that founded in Iranian policies something utterly new: Marxist-Leninist, urban, intellectual-based, guerrilla warfare.” Leftist revolutionary movements such as the People’s Fada’i Guerrillas inspired collective action by constructing a popular mythology of selfless activists supporting the oppressed masses against the Shah’s profligate regime. Leading intellectuals behind the revolution, such as Ali Shariati, fused Marxist eschatology with bastardized interpretations of Islamic teaching, preaching the importance of martyrdom and collective revolutionary action to establish a divinely sanctioned earthly utopia. The more radical Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini were happy to ally with such movements, so long as it was expedient. As Laurent Murawiec points out in his seminal study on contemporary Islamist movements, “[a]s long as they all fought uphill to oust the shah, Khomeini cunningly kept silent or even encouraged the Leftist revolutionaries and gave his clerics a wide mandate to work with them.”
After 1979, of course, the same rhetoric that once branded the old regime the ‘enemy of the people’ was now turned against erstwhile fellow travelers. The myth had served its purpose, its socialist martyrs now abandoned to history, while mythmakers recalibrated the struggle against new ‘imperialist’ bogeymen—the Great Satan and the Lesser Satan. Contemporary Iran was thus born out of Sorelian revolution, and, to date, the Ayatollah continues to govern according to revolutionary ideology. An enduring and core aspect of this national myth is enmity towards Israel and the US, interpreted as principal spoilers for the Islamic Republic’s strategic goal of exporting the revolution beyond its borders and establishing Shi’a Islamist rule across the Middle East. Here, too, the conceptual parallels with Sorel are noteworthy; like today’s mullahs, Sorel supported narratives of anti-capitalist antisemitism to stirr up populist proletarian support for his desired revolution. But the parallels run much deeper than mere propaganda.
Sorel’s concept of the revolutionary myth sheds important light on Iran’s decades-long proxy war with Israel and the US. Iran understands that it cannot face Israel or America directly, and has therefore pursued a piecemeal strategy of asymmetric warfare through attrition and ‘strategic patience.’ These revolutionary tactics were first embraced in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) warfighting doctrine during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), when countless “human waves” of martyrs—often child soldiers recruited from the voluntary Basij militia—were thrown recklessly to their death in a futile attempt to push back Saddam Hussein’s forces. The state’s clergy served as propagandists of the myth of final victory, distributing “keys to heaven” necklaces to child soldiers, while evoking images of martyred Shi’a leaders, such as Imam Ali and Imam Husayn, and drawing parallels between the Battle of Karbala and the IRGC’s exploits. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, the IRGC discovered that it could rely on “human waves” from other countries, by indoctrinating, training, and funding proxy militias to fight its own wars. These militias, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, propagate millenarian ideologies that foretell of a coming apocalypse, while its fighters and martyrs are heralded as “agents of the massive destruction that clears the way for the coming of ‘heaven on earth.’” Unlike Iran’s ill-fated war with Saddam, Iran’s use of these militias has largely succeeded; Hezbollah fighters have arguably won two asymmetric wars with Israel, despite suffering major casualties, by merely outlasting and surviving Israel’s eighteen-year occupation of southern Lebanon (1985–2000), and later, by reconsolidating as a powerful political entity in the aftermath of the 2006 war.
Iran’s strategy of attrition and strategic patience was arguably perfected during America’s 2003 war in Iraq. The IRGC developed close ties with Iraq’s post-Saddam Shi’a majoritarian political parties, while sub rosa supporting the Shi’a insurgency against Coalition forces to hasten their withdrawal. When that withdrawal inevitably occurred, the stage was set for political vassalage—a conclusion drawn by the US Army’s own history of the war. Today, the IRGC has moved well beyond its roots as a ragtag collection of guerrilla enforcers in 1979. But while the IRGC controls vast military capabilities that mirror those of a conventional state, its military doctrine and institutional culture remain deeply rooted in the revolution. Syria’s regime of Bashar al-Assad owes its continued survival to Iran’s support, and so does Yemen’s Ansar Allah (or Houthi) revolutionary movement. Proxies in both countries regularly deploy missiles and drones against Israel and US assets in the region.
By relying on this ‘Axis of Resistance’ strategy, Iran has constructed a “ring of fire” or territorial vise grip around Israel. It has also bought itself time and plausible deniability, while quietly seeking to produce nuclear weapons in pursuit of its own Endsieg. Fast forward to October 7, 2023, and the resultant war with Hamas and Hezbollah. Given even a cursory assessment of military and technological asymmetries, Iran’s proxies in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon were never expected to win outright in the present-day war (or the last one, or the one before that). But that is precisely the point. Intermittent conflicts are seen by Tehran as mere tactical advances in a much broader struggle that will one day conclude in what Sorel calls a prophesied “catastrophe” of apocalyptic violence. A thousand papercuts preceding a nuclear bomb.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s long-serving secretary-general, is now dead. Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ feared leader in the Gaza strip and mastermind of the October 7th atrocities, has joined him in the grave. And yet, not long after this latest news broke, Iran’s mission to the UN announced that “the martyr [Sinwar] remains alive and a source of inspiration.” For revolutionary states like Iran (and vanguard organizations like the IRGC), the conviction that a final “catastrophe” will one day occur is not based on any factual analysis of events on the ground. At its core, it is a matter of faith, and this is where its strength lies. According to Sorel, “a myth cannot be refuted.”