The young generation in Iran has shown tremendous courage and determination to defend their democratic rights against the totalitarian, theocratic regime in recent years. However, they have paid a high price with hundreds of dead, thousands of injured young people who lost an eye or other parts of their bodies and became disabled for the rest of their lives. They were shot with hunting rifles in different parts of their bodies (faces, genitals, breasts etc.). Today, thousands of these young men and women are also in prison on trumped-up charges. However, the young generation has shown that they are not giving up the fight. We see today that the struggle continues in various guises, many times in the guise of civil disobedience, such as boycotting the last election.
What I have heard many times at the height of the zan-zendegi-azadi (women, life, freedom) movement and even these days is that they accuse young revolutionaries of the 1979 revolution of being completely naive and fed up with enormous wealth with free education at the basic and advanced levels, cheap food – and fuel prices as well as a dollar costing only 7 tomans (today 1 dollar costs 60,000 tomans) revolted and everyone, without critical thinking or critical examination, lifted up and flamed Ayatollah Khomeini as the sole leader of the revolution which led to total disaster and bankrupt Iran finds itself today. We see today that some opponents of the Islamic regime are constantly beating their drums that they had a wise leader (the shah) who had nothing else in his leadership and his desire than to bring Iran and Iranians into the most democratic and industrialized world.
What today’s young generation in Iran does not know is that Iran was in its worst condition both in terms of education and welfare, as well as culture building and state building despite the strong economy Iran had via its oil industry. The Shah was a sole ruler who believed he had received his mission from God when he was a child via a dream (pure paranoia). He considered himself the only savior of the people, just similar to what we hear today from Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei that Islam came, that Khomeini and the revolution came, to save Iran and the Iranian people from corruption and that the word of God falls from his mouth. The Shah had been a tyrannical sole ruler who had gathered incompetent individuals around him who did not dare to tell him the truth. He only created a one-party-system which characterizes only dictatorial and appalling regimes. His aim was to control every aspect of Iranians’ lives also by investing billions of dollars in building his intelligence service, SAVAK.
I have seen this with my own eyes. It was enough that you drove 5 minutes outside the cities in almost all Iranian cities then you could see with your own eyes that the people had almost nothing, there were no roads, there was no electricity, there was no running water, there was no sewage. People struggled in misery while the Shah spent hundreds of millions of dollars for his 2500th anniversaries. He paid almost all of Iran’s oil purchasing power to buy US military weapons which basically floored all of Iran’s infrastructure construction and agriculture. The Shah was fully aware of this and believed that one must build the military before building the country, which was basically the case under his father’s and his own rule for 45 years. What I saw with my own eyes in 1979 was that Iran had not been so different from the Iran the mullahs created today after 44 years of rule. Both the leadership then and now have been/are backward systems that did not have/have the capacity to lead the country to prosperity, wealth, and democracy. Let us not be fooled by these regressive forces and fall into the same trap again. And those regressive forces are unfortunately many today. The Iranian people cannot afford it.
The Iranian resistance movement needs to be very alert today. There are forces that believe that they have fought for democracy for 44 years and sacrificed thousands of lives, then they claim the right to be the sole ruler of Iran and can easily think of killing ”executing” everyone who is against them. There are forces that believe that under no circumstances should you talk about, for example, Kurdistan getting autonomy or possibly some parts of Iran getting independence. These forces are ready and willing to bombard and kill hundreds of thousands/millions of Iranians so that their Iran with its current map will not be subject to any change.
Let me say this: In a democratic Iran of the future, all forces must be able to operate without one force accusing the other and pointing its weapon at. Let us consider the idea that this current regime may also get 15/20 percent of the votes, The Constitutionalist Party of Iran-Liberal Democrat gets 15/20 percent of the votes, other parties, such as National Front, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan, different Islamic, Christian, and Jewish parties, People´s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, The Iranian People´s Fedaee Guerrillas, and other democratic forces in Iran may get a certain percentage of the votes in an internationally monitored election. They should all be able to be in parliament and work for their cause. And Iranians must learn to respect each other’s differences and allow all parties under a democratic spirit to work for the country. It is possible although it takes time. We must be patient.
© Samuel E. Rajeus, Editor S.E.R.P & Publishing
Sources
Amin, P. M. (2002). A single party state in Iran, 1975-78: The Rastakhiz party – the final attempt by the Shah to consolidate his political base. Middle Eastern Studies, 38 (1).
Looney, R. E. (2022). The role of military expenditures in pre-revolutionary Iran´s economic decline. Iranian Studies, 21(3-4). 52-83.
www.varldenshistoria.se Världens dyraste fest kostade Shahen av Iran tronen https://varldenshistoria.se/samhalle/kungar-och-drottningar/folj-med-till-varldens-dyraste-fest