Nightmare in Iran
Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post mentions the new website, Omid (Farsi for truth), detailing the endless nightmarish executions of the Iranian regime. Put together by two Iranian sisters, both historians, whose father was murdered by the mullahs, it is an awful testimony to murder. Francis Fukuyama discusses it, and this one sentence sums it up:
There is the young girl who, by swimming in a bathing suit in her pool at home, was found guilty of “causing a state of arousal” in a neighbor and was lashed to death.
These people deserve to be remembered, so that the Iranian regime cannot simply have them disappear to eliminate their guilt. (The Cuba Archive documents a similarly murderous regime.)
I think it is worth mentioning some other victims of the Iranian regime, more fortunate in that they were not murdered, but still had their lives damaged. The mad mullahs revolution started the revolution in Iran during my first year of graduate school. One of my professors, Steve Cheung, was a refugee from Mao’s China. He was also what I will describe as a colorful personality. We had quite a few Iranian students in my class. In the middle of lecture, completely out of the blue, Cheung asked on of them what he thought of Khomeini. The student said he favored him, because he thought it meant more freedom in Iran. Cheung replied, “Ah, yes, we used to think that about Mao, too.” And then he went back to his lecture. Like most of the Iranian grad students, the student Cheung called on was not a Muslim fanatic; he was naive. They really thought the fall of the shah and the rise of Khomeini meant a more liberalized Iran. They quickly learned otherwise.
And they paid, dearly. Most people who enter Ph.D. programs drop out, with good reason. Some are not intellectually capable of the work, some have the wrong personality, some do not like it. So they sensibly drop out and do something they are better suited for and happier doing. Unfortunately for the Iranian students, they were in the US on student visas. In other words, drop out and go back to Iran. With Khomeini in charge, they were poisoned by the Great Satan, and so returning to Iran likely meant a death sentence. So they stayed, the bulk of them doing Ph.D.s they were not suited for. And so by the early 1980s, the job market was filled with Iranian students who were not very good, and who consequently got nothing for their efforts. Not because the Iranians who entered were worse than average, but because the mediocre ones who normally would have quit stayed because their lives depended on it.