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Speaking of the Aspen Institute....

Many moons ago I saved this unusual webpage while digging up info on Khomeini :

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At the Aspen Institute 1977

(photo caption)At the Aspen Institute Symposium, (July 1977) I am seen briefing Empress Farah Pahlavi about matters under discussion. Walking behind is Houshang Nahavandi, counselor to the Empress and former Minister of Housing, wearing a blanket and shivering in the
cold mountain air of Colorado where the conference was held.

My brother Amir Abbas Hoveyda's message to Aspen
H.I.M. Farah Pahlavi's message to Aspen

And of course, like in everything else, there is always a conspiracy theory:

Was Aspen a Conspiracy? Yes for some, no for others or perhaps, just a little maybe ...
X-Files' Moulder and Sculley, where are you?

Below are some amazing comments by Robert Dreyfus in:
Hostage to Khomeini, ( pp 106 - 108 ) published by:
New Benjamin Franklin House, New York 1980 - ISBN 0-933488-4

The mullahs did not come to rule in Iran on the basis of their own power; they were placed in power by men more evil than they - who would use the depravity of backwardness for their own ends.

In September 1975, the Aspen Institute held a symposium in Persepolis, Iran. The public side of the transactions was published years later under the title of Iran: Past, Present, and Future. In the behind-the-scenes discussion, the plans for reversing the Shah's industrialization program and for turning Iran into a model dark ages regime were mapped out. It is a bitter twist of history, that the Shah and his wife Empress Farah Diba witlessly provided huge amounts of funding to the Aspen project.

Attending the Persepolis symposium were at least a dozen members of the Club of Rome, including its chairman, Aureho Peccei; Sol Linowitz of Coudert Brothers law firm; Jacques Freymond of the Institute of International Studies in Geneva; and Robert 0. Anderson and Rarlan Cleveland, both Aspen Institute officials and associates of the Club of Rome in the United States. Other luminaries were also on hand: Charles Yost, Catherine Bateson, Richard Gardner, Theo Sommer, Daniel Yankelovitch, John Oakes of the New York Times, and the cream of Anglo-Amencan intelligence specialists on Iran, such as James Bill, Marvin Zonis, Leonard Binder, Rouhollah Ramazani, and Charles Issawi. The Aspen Institute session stressed a single theme: modernization and industry undermine the "spiritual, nonmaterial" values of ancient Iranian society, and these values must he preserved above all else. Ehsan Naraghi, a collaborator of Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, told the conference:

"Universities and research centers in the West have all based their studies of development upon a linear, Westernizing conception of progress Human sciences, founded on rational objectivity, are today suffering setbacks and defeats. Is it not important that, having exalted rationality to ensure human happiness, we should now he induced to invent a special discipline-psycho-analysis-to cure the ills arising from an overrationally organized life that is deprived of its basic relationship with the nonrational?. . . Why should cultures like ours, in which man is considered in all his aspects, be deprived of their substance by following called rational course at the end of which lies the vast expanse of the non-rational?"

He continued: "The people have needs and aspira.tions that are not merely material. . . . The intrusion of machines into the traditional system may well jeopardize this creative life." Naraghi's praise of the "nonrational" was followed by a similar outburst from Hormoz Fekrat of Teheran University. "America has hecome more and more aware of her exaggerated reliance on material values," he told Aspen's gathering. "Conscious movements have been made, during the past fifteen years, to refocus the aims of life to the spiritual. This consciousness has most prominently manifested itself in the attitude of young people toward life.

"Let us now focus our attention on what has been happening in Iran in terms of the point just raised. The country is going through an enormous social upheaval. . . . I believe that the current revolutionary state of the nation, when important far-reaching measures are effectively enacted, provides the right circumstances for a national resurgence in the direction of a moral uprising based on truth and justice."

Spoken three years before the rise of the Khomeini movement in 1978, these words were more than prophetic. They were the marching orders to the clique around Khomeini to charge the Shah with destroying the cultural values of Iran and its Shiite religion by developing industry and "materialist" values.

From 1975 onward, the Aspen Institute developed closer and closer links to the Iranian ministry of education through well-placed agents like Manuchehr Ganji, who introduced both Marvin Zonis 'and the Aspen Institute itself to Iran.

Catherine Bateson, of Damavand College in Teheran, was a critical participant in this strategy, sowing the seeds of "antimaterialist" rebellion among Iran's youth.

The word also went to Professor Ali Shariati to intensify his activity. More than anyone else, Shariati was the guiding light behind the Iranian students and intellectuals who brought about the Muslim Brotherhood revolution. Shariati's special ability was to be able to cast the mystical, antiscience Sufi doctrines into terms that might be accepted by modern young people not trained in religious law. Iran's youth could not be won over directly to Khomeini 5 version of Shusm, so it was necessary to create Ali Shariati, who disguised the Sufi doctrines in a radical, almost Marxist cloak. Shariati is the originator of so-called Islamic Marxism.

So radically antimaterialist was Shariati that he saw a willing acceptance of death as the only legitimate "escape" from the material world! 'Do you not see how sweetly and peacefully a martyr dies?" he once wrote. "For those not fully accustomed to their everyday routine, death is an awesome tragedy, a horrendous cessation of all things; it is becoming lost in nothingness. But the one who intends to migrate from himself begins with death. How great are those men who have heeded this command and acted accordingly: 'Die before you die.'

Shariati's father was Aqa Muhammad Taqi Shariati, who had heen part of the British intelligence freemasonic movement and had started the Center for the Propagation of Islamic Truth in Mashad, Iran. Of his father, Shariati says, "He stayed in the city, and strove mightily to preserve himself with knowledge, love, and jihad in the midst of the swamp of urban life." The elder Shariati, he said, was "in the forefront of efforts to bring the modern-educated youth back to faith and Islam, delivering them from materialism, worship of the West, and hostility to religion." It was the battle cry of the Khomeini revolution.

Traveling often between Paris and Teheran, Shariati built up a cult following among the youth of Iran. He introduced Iranian students to the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Jacques Berque, and Louis Massignon, all writers of the anticapitalist existentialist swamp, all funded and guided by the same Club of Rome networks that gathered at Persepolis.

Fanon's book, The Wretched of the Earth, in which he argues for anarchy and revolution in the Third World directed against "the West" and violence for violence's sake, hecame Shariati's bible. "Come friends, let us abandon Europe," wrote Shariati. "Let us cease this nauseating, apish imitation of Europe. Let us leave behind this Europe that always speaks of humanity but destroys human heings wherever it finds them."

Through his writings and the publication of his Farsi journal, Shariati became something of a legend. In 1977, he was apparently murdered, and although his cult followers-like Ibrahim Yazdi-blamed the Shah for his death, it is more likely that he was killed by his backers in the Savak in order to create a martyr that would spark a movement around his figure. Were it not for Shariati, few students in Iran's universities would have followed ~ the mad Khomeini.

As the Aspen Institute and Shariati began agitating against the Shah, in early 1977 the Club of Rome's Peccei, Jacques Freymond, and others hegan to focus the Muslim Brotherhood in Western Europe around a new, synthetic, zero-growth version of Islam. Called "Islam and the West," this project held its first planning sessions at Cambridge University in England. Under the guidance of Peccei, Lord Caradon, and Muslim Brotherhood leader Maarouf Dawalibi, "Islam and the West" assembled a policy outline on science and technology for the subversion of Islam. The outline was published in 1979, and backed by the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Study, headed by Club of Rome member and NATO science adviser Alexander King.

Islam and the West declared: "We have to return to a more spiritual conception of life. . . . The first lesson of Islamic science is its insistence on the notion of a balanced equilibrium which would not destroy the ecological order of the environment, on which collective survival finally depends." This argument was used to attack "Western" science and technological progress in Europe and North America.

Peccei and the Club of Rome then moved into the Shah's court. At a November 1977 Lisbon conference sponsored by the Interreligious Peace Colloquium-an organization set up by Cyrus Vance and Sol Linowitz-Peccei conspired with several leading lights of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, particularly with the well-known Iranian "court philosopher" Seyyed Hossein Nasr of Teheran University, a personal friend of the Shah. Also in attendance at this event were Ismail Faruqi of Temple University in Philadelphia and Khurshid Ah-mad, former head of the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, England, and now the minister of planning for Pakistan. Professor Nasr has been instrumental, along with Dr. Manucher Ganji, in obtaining money from the Shah's wife, Farah Diba, and others for a Club of Rome economic modeling project for Iran. According to Iranian sources, Nasr prevailed upon Teheran University Chancellor Hushang Nahavandi, an adviser to the Shahbanou, to funnel millions of dollars to the French Jesuitlinked theorist Roger Garaudy, for his Institute for the Dialogue of Civilizations.

The money was designated in part for the Club of Rome's Mesarovich-Pestel regional planning model for Iran, under the partial supervision of its French coordinator, Maurice Guernier. Thus, Guernier and Garaudy became de facto advisers on economic planning and "development strategy' to the Shah! One of the outlets they reportedly funded was the Institute for Mediterranean Research, set up in 1977 by Paul Veille, a radical Paris sociologist, and by Abolhassan Bani-Sadr.

And so, whether he knew it or not, the Shah himself was funding Bani-Sadr! Garaudy is an important figure in British intelligence operations. He is highly influential in post-revolutionary Iran and among the ultraleft in Algeria, as well as being one of the closest mentors to Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Garaudy is a former Communist Party theoretician converted to Roman Catholicism through the influence of Pere Lebret, a Jesuit authority on maintaining African social structures based on tribal witchcraft.

In 1977, Garaudy formed two institutions, the International Institute for the Dialogue of Civilizations and the University des Mutants in Senegal. In recent months, he has published a burst of articles in the French press describing nuclear energy as a "threat to the very existence of the planet" and castigating "capitalist growth" for "b'reaking the unity between man and nature." Garaudy also contributes to the journal Mediterranean Peoples, set up in 1977 as a control channel for British intelligence among Third World radical" networks. In June 1980, Garaudy attended the U.S.-Iran conference in Teheran arranged by Bani-Sadr, featuring former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Before leaving for Teheran with a European delegation of Bertrand Russell followers, Garaudy published an impassioned review praising Bani-Sadr's latest book, Which Revolution for Iran? Bani-Sadr's analysis, Garaudy wrote, is "valuable for its main lines not only for the entire developing sector, but even for our country, if we do not want to be late for the coming mutation." According to Garaudy, Bani-Sadr correctly locates the Iranian revolution as a "revolt of the people" against the "Western model of growth," and against the belief that the "primary task of governments in our modern world is the one of economic development, of growth and consumption, of progress, of education."

"We must thank President Bani-Sadr," Garaudy concludes, "for having, through his beautiful book, cast a new light on the future we can anticipate if, through nudear power, we take a route similar to the one Iran took through its oil: the route of technocratic despotism within, of dependence on foreign powers, and of the loss of our material wealth as well as our soul." Garaudy's influence over Bani-Sadr was one of many influences upon Iran's president during his exile in France~ Bani-Sadr himself is a product, neatly packaged, of the same individuals and institutions who created the environmentalist movements and the terrorist shock troops typified by Italy's Red Brigades.

Bani-Sadr's experience is not unique in this respect. Most of his colleagues presently in Teheran, and much of the advisory group to Khomeini, were trained, either like Bani-Sadr in France's sociology-anthropology nests, or in U.S. -based institutions promoting an "Aquarian -rehellion against industrial society, such as the Stanford-Berkeley complex in California or the Harvard-MIT complex in Massachusetts. In all these cases, the post Shah elite-to-be were indoctrinated in hatred of "Westem" ways. The simple equation, the Shah equals the West, became their motivating belief structure.

A slightly earlier "elite" was also trained at the same institutions, the Pol Pot-leng Sary butchers of Cambodia, whose genocidal "cultural revolution" became the model for what Bani-Sadr and his associates would do in Iran.

Cambodia's president under Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, was trained in the same Sorbonne center that produced Bani Sadr.
Bani-Sadr's closest mentors and associates came from four overlapping institutions: the sociology-anthropology division of the Centre Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS), "Division Six" of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE-6), and the National Institute for Agronomical Research. Of these, the most important is EPHE-6, which trained Bani-Sadr's thesis adviser, Professor George Balandier, a student of African tribal customs. EPHE-6 is the base for the ecology-antinuclear movement in France. While studying "agrarian reform" Maoism under Balandier, Bani-Sadr was influenced directly or indirectly by the following individuals:

Paul Veille, "Marxist sociologist," CNRS, Institute for Mediterranean Research.

Re'ne' Dumont, a radical agronomist at the CNRS, who is honorary president of the Friends of the Earth, and a founder of Ecoropa, the European environmentalist umbrella organization. Dumont, a World Bank adviser, has been expelled from both Cuba and Algeria for heing a CIA agent.
In 1976, Dumont led an expedition to Iran to investigate the agricultural system there, and has since hecome an adviser to Khomeini.

Miche Crozier, an EPHE-6 theorist from Tavistock Institute at Britain's Sussex University, who helped to coordinate the 1968 destabilization of the Charles de Gaulle government.

Jean-Pierre Vigier, a radical scientist at CNRS who ran the 1968 secretive "Command Center of the Revolution" against de Gaulle.

Other individuals who worked with Bani-Sadr, and all of whom participated in the British and Israeli intelligence destabilization of de Gaulle and France during the 1960s and 197Os, include Michel Foucault, Jacques Soustelle, Charles Bettelheim, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the late Henri Corbin.

It is these gentlemen, backed by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, the Leho Basso Foundation, the Transnational Institute, and the Ramsey Clarks and Richard Falks of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, whom we have to thank for the current horror in Iran called-by Bani-Sadr-" Cambodianization by persuasion."