Waller Newell writes in The Weekly Standard that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was strongly influenced by an Iranian intellectual by the name of Ali Shariati and that Shariati, like the genocidal Cambodian Pol Pot, was strongly influenced by the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre and the Marxist Frantz Fanon:
The key figure here is the acknowledged intellectual godfather of the Iranian revolution, Ali Shariati. To understand Ahmadinejad's campaign to return to the purity of the revolution and why it leads him to flirt with nuclear Armageddon, it is necessary to understand Ali Shariati.
Ali Shariati (1933-1977) was an Iranian intellectual who studied comparative literature in Paris in the early 1960s and was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. He translated Sartre's major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, into Farsi, and coauthored a translation of Fanon's famous revolutionary tract The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre and Fanon together were responsible for revitalizing Marxism by borrowing from Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existentialism, which stressed man's need to struggle against a purposeless bourgeois world in order to endow life with meaning through passionate commitment.
By lionizing revolutionary violence as a purifying catharsis that forces us to turn our backs on the bourgeois world, Sartre and Fanon hoped to rescue the downtrodden from the seduction of Western material prosperity. Fanon was even more important because he imported from Heidegger's philosophy a passionate commitment to the "destiny" of "the people," the longing for the lost purity of the premodern collective that had drawn Heidegger to National Socialism.
This potent brew of violent struggle and passionate commitment to a utopian vision of a collectivist past deeply influenced Ali Shariati, just as it had influenced another student in Paris a few years earlier, the Cambodian Pol Pot. Fanon in effect replaced the international proletariat of classical Marxism with the existentialist Volk of Heidegger's Nazi period, repudiating both liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninist politics as too materialistic. As applied in practice by the Khmer Rouge, this led to the bloodbath of 1975-1979 in which the cities of Cambodia were forcibly evacuated and the Cambodian people were purified of the taint of Western corruption by being reduced to a primitive collective of slave labor. Just as the the Jacobins had literally started the calendar over at the Year One, so Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, on assuming power, proclaimed the Year Zero.
Ali Shariati aimed to politicize the Shiite faith of his fellow Iranians with this same existentialist creed of revolutionary violence and purification. He sought to turn Shiism from pious hopes for a better world to come to the creation of a political utopia in the here and now.
What a legacy - Pol Pot and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One wonders whether Sartre and Fanon would be proud of their intellectual descendents. When people possess a passionate commitment to changing the world, the use of any means, including genocide, is justified if it produces the desired outcome. The only check on such fanaticism is the belief that such means are immoral, but for the existentialist and the Marxist there is no morality other than pragmatism. Whatever works to advance one's cause is right. Indeed, It was Karl Marx himself who wrote in the Communist Manifesto that "Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality".
The only ideology or belief system that gives any grounds at all for believing that some means and ends are evil is the Judeo-Christian religion, but Sartre and Fanon, Pol Pot and Ahmadinejad all reject the moral teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition root and branch. Thus we got the killing fields in Cambodia in the 1970s from Pol Pot and the threat of a nuclear holocaust in Israel today from Ahmadinejad. Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas in the minds of evil and powerful men often have catastrophic outcomes.