Who Is Killing Iran? Demographic Collapse

Iran is dying. The collapse of Iran's birth rate during the past 20 years is the fastest recorded in any country, ever. Demographers have sought in vain to explain Iran's population implosion through family planning policies, or through social factors such as the rise of female literacy. _Spengler

We remember that the mad mullahs took over Iran back in 1979, with the blessing of US President Carter. Since that time Iran has been involved in revolutions, wars, and proxy wars across the middle east. Iran lost millions of its very young in the 1980s war against Saddam's Iraq, when the mad mullahs used millions of Iran's helpless youth as cannon fodder against Saddam's more seasoned troops. What karmic shadow did that huge loss throw over the future of the fanatical theocracy?

Iran is currently involved in arming and financing ethnic/sectarian killings in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iraq, and in building the foundations of Shia rebellion inside Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations. All this emphasis on killing, religious fanaticism and oppression, and -- the apocalyptic visions of the coming of the twelfth imam -- cannot help but warp a small nation already ripped by ethnic tensions between Persians, Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Azaris, Armenians, Assyrians, Georgians, and others. But, as Spengler says, a nation is never truly beaten until it begins selling its women.

...prostitution has become a career of choice among educated Iranian women. On February 3, the Austrian daily Der Standard published the results of two investigations conducted by the Tehran police, suppressed by the Iranian media. [1]

"More than 90% of Tehran's prostitutes have passed the university entrance exam, according to the results of one study, and more than 30% of them are registered at a university or studying," reports Der Standard. "The study was assigned to the Tehran Police Department and the Ministry of Health, and when the results were tabulated in early January no local newspaper dared to so much as mention them."

The Austrian newspaper added, "Eighty percent of the Tehran sex workers maintained that they pursue this career voluntarily and temporarily. The educated ones are waiting for better jobs. Those with university qualifications intend to study later, and the ones who already are registered at university mention the high tuition [fees] as their motive for prostitution ... they are content with their occupation and do not consider it a sin according to Islamic law."

There is an extensive trade in poor Iranian women who are trafficked to the Gulf states in huge numbers, as well as to Europe and Japan. _Spengler

Iranians can watch the world on satellite television. They understand that life under the mullahs is not the best life available on Earth. Many of them want something better.

For the majority of young Iranians, there is no way up, only a way out; 36% of Iran's youth aged 15 to 29 years want to emigrate, according to yet another unpublicized Iranian study, this time by the country's Education Ministry, Der Standard adds. Only 32% find the existing social norms acceptable, while 63% complain about unemployment, the social order or lack of money.

...The declining morale of the Iranian population helps make sense of its galloping demographic decline. Academic demographers have tried to explain collapsing fertility as a function of rising female literacy. The problem is that the Iranian regime lies about literacy data, and has admitted as much recently.

...The cause of Iran's collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity. _Spengler

In Iran, they still stone women for adultery, and execute homosexuals for homosexuality. In a land of fossil fuels, people freeze in their apartments for lack of natural gas. Political connections are everything, and the politically connected can literally get away with murder, as in most oppressive authoritarian states.

Expect low energy prices to put enormous pressure on the current regime. Iran is a dead-end state, and it is becoming more difficult to conceal this fact from its citizens. Historically, such states tend to involve themselves in wars as a last ditch attempt at self preservation. Given recent revelations concerning Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons, such a war might go nuclear, and involve as much as half the world.