In Iran, would that it were history in the making.
What is it about Iran that I, and probably most Americans who read and follow the international news, find so fascinating about that country? Right now it’s the struggle, a death struggle for some, between the Iranian people and their Iranian oppressors. And the latter, for the moment anyway, hold all the clubs. David and Goliath.
But for me the fascination lies no less in the faces I see daily in the news. The Iranians are a handsome people, clearly intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, and as you look at the pictures coming out of Iran during the current struggle you just know that this people doesn’t want to be led, and that they won’t be led except, as in the present instance, by brute force. And you hope for them, and for the world, that those wielding the clubs will disappear.
However, brute force, embodied at this moment by that fierce and unenlightened little boy-man Ahmadinejad, in the service of the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, is what the Iranian people, now and again, find themselves up against. And up until now there seems to be no way the people can continue their struggle other than by going into hiding, and if they don’t, no way to avoid being knocked down and bloodied by Ahmadinejad’s henchmen, the Basijis.
The Basijis are vigilantes, not too different from Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, the brown-shirted thugs in Hitler’s pay who were used by Hitler to quash his rivals. Not too different from Ahmadinejad and his ruling clique who send their henchmen, the Basijis, out during the night when they cannot be easily seen, to beat, loot, and sometimes even gun down the individuals protesting Ahmadinejad’s authoritarian hold on power.
Helas, we cry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Iran, the inheritor of a long and splendid history, an inheritance now totally rejected by its present rulers who would with clubs return the people to the darkest moments of their past. A freer if not free way of life was supposed to follow the Shah’s flight just 30 years ago. It didn’t happen, and doesn’t seem about to happen now.
Instead the 1979 revolutionaries are still in power. The country is still ruled by the Supreme Leader, the Ayotollah Khamenei, the successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini, along with the now barbaric remnant of the original Revolutionary Guards from which comes Ahmadinejad himself.
During the 30 years since the Shah’s overthrow the people of Iran have greatly evolved and now resemble in their modernity their peers in Western Europe and the United States. These people clearly want now to be part of the modern and developed world. But their narrow, fanatical, and authoritarian leaders, as if sensing there would be no place for them if they were to join the developed world, have remained much as they were when as followers of their leader, Khomeini, they overthrew the Shah.
At this very moment we are transfixed by the spectacle of Iran, by the street demonstrations carried out by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who, much like us, want simply to live in greater freedom, be guaranteed by their rulers more opportunities and more choices. We await with dread the next fall of the club wielded by the Basiji thugs, in the employ of the country’s autocratic rulers, onto the heads and backs of the people.
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