Iranians to beware of the United States, saying it has no interest in other nations other than to have a master-servant relationship.
Speaking on the anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy in 1979, Khamenehi minced no words in denouncing the US.
“We must always keep in mind the fact that the United States is never after normal relations with other countries; they are only after a kind of master-servant relationship and want to plunder the wealth of other nations,” he said.
It was strong language, but hardly unique for Khamenehi. In the 21 years that Khamenehi has been Supreme Leader and in which the Iran Times has been reviewing his speeches, this newspaper has only seen two speeches in which Khamenehi did not devote at least one paragraph to denunciations of the United States.
Even in a speech to elementary school students, he warned of the United States and spoke of it as a veritable boogeyman.
But before Khamenehi became Supreme Leader in 1989, he rarely even mentioned the United States in his speeches; he was president during the 1980s. And he never engaged in the florid flights of rhetoric that he has engaged in since his very first speech as Supreme Leader.
His predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, often threw brickbats at the Americans and it appears that Khamenehi felt he had to adopt that rhetorical tactic to prove himself with the ultraconservatives, many of whom viewed him as too moderate. But the rhetorical tactic adopted in 1989 is still in use.
In his speech on the anniversary of the embassy seizure, Khamenehi painted a picture of Americans as the personification of evil.
“They are the masters and the others are the servants,” he said.
“They had full authority in this country [before the revolution]. They could take its oil, gas, resources and money and secure America’s interests here and humiliate the nation.
“An American officer could slap an Iranian Army general without being held accountable. In the country’s military barracks, when a lower-ranking American military officer spoke to a senior-ranking Iranian officer, the former treated the latter as a master would treat a servant,” Khamenehi asserted, using a description even he must know to be false.
American officers who served in Iran at that time regularly complained how little the advice they provided was ever put into effect. But Khamenehi consciously went out of his way to paint the pre-revolution relationship in the most demeaning way for Iran.