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Home » Roya Hakakian and SAVAK: another changer

Roya Hakakian and SAVAK: another changer

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was writing about the 1979 Iranian revolution I asked the following question:

The Shah’s secret police–SAVAK, usually referred to with an adjective such as “dreaded” or “hated” before the acronym–was active in Iran to stifle those who would oppose him. There is a great deal of controversy over just how dreadful SAVAK actually was in the larger scheme of things. Was it a wide-ranging and indiscriminate effort to track down, torture, imprison, exile and/or murder all those who dissented, or who even were thought to dissent, much like the operations of the Soviet KGB? Or was it far more benign, only dealing with those who would violently overthrow the government (such as Khomeini and his henchmen), and using torture only sparingly?

Recently I read the book Journey From the Land of No by Iranian-American writer and poet Roya Hakakian. She was raised in Iran in a Jewish family, and as a twelve-year old she experienced the 1979 revolution. Her book is a meditation on the profound dislocations of that time for herself, her relatives, and her friends.

Hakakian touches on her childhood memories of whispers about the dread SAVAK, which became a sort of boogie man to her. She writes:

Like God, SAVAK was ubiquitous and omnipresent in the national imagination…Dignity was what SAVAK deprived the nation of most…To escape its ominous attention, every citizen hid what was on his mind and learned to talk in a way that his true thoughts would not be obvious.

Certainly a frightening portrait.

Right before the Revolution she listened to a revered young woman friend named Bibi talk about the wonderful Ayatollah Khomeini (she refers to him as “Agha”). As in a fairy tale, he would make everything better:

Agha is the one who will set us free…Agha is the angel who’ll chase the devil away…He’ll not have cronies like the evil Shah…A revolution is on the way. Agha will make poverty history. We’ll be free to say and write anything we want because when Agha comes, SAVAK will be history too.

A sensitive and literary child, Roya loved the renowned Iranian children’s classic The Little Black Fish, which she read over and over. But Bibi told her a terrible tale of what had happened to its author:

SAVAK killed him…They snatch you away, torture you, even kill you if you say something against the shah. That’s what they did to the writer of The Little Black Fish. They put his feet in a block of cement and dropped him into the River Aras in Azerbaijan.

Of course, as we now know–and Roya learned–the Revolution betrayed the trust of Roya’s friends and family. Roya reports that by 1984, at the time of Iran’s war with Iraq, she dreamt every night of murdering the Ayatollah. And by then the Shah’s SAVAK had been replaced by the even more dreaded and intrusive SAVAMA, secret police of the mullahs.

And what of Bibi and her veneration for Agha? Kakakian meets an old friend who tells her the news. Just a few disillusioned months after the Revolution, Bibi had joined the People’s Mujahideen, an opposition movement. She’s written a protest essay and read it in class and was reported by a fellow student, imprisoned, and tortured.

Roya suggests visiting Bibi in prison and bringing her a copy of The Little Black Fish, a book they both had loved. But her friend explains that wouldn’t be a good idea. It might depress Bibi too much, because of what she’d learned in prison, to wit:

[The book’s author] Samad Behrangi had not been drowned. There had been no cement blocks. No cruel interrogation by SAVAK. A poor swimmer, he had drowned on his own. When news of the drowning reached several leading anti-shah intellectuals of the time, they saw it as an opportunity to pin it on the shah to fuel the public’s resentment of him. One of the pivotal legends that had tormented a generation and ignited the revolution had been nothing but a hoax. A strategic maneuver! A little lie between revolutionary friends! What of it?

What of it, indeed? Fake but accurate, no doubt.

And I wondered what happened to those anti-shah intellectuals who’d thought up the brilliant deception. Did they end up like so many others, swallowed by the revolution they helped bring about, perplexed at the strange and horrific turn events had taken?

[NOTE: I tried researching the story of the death of author Behrangi to see if I could determine the truth. It was impossible to do so. Different versions are offered, depending on the politics of the writer. Perhaps Wikipedia summarizes it best:

Behrangi drowned in the Aras river. It is rumored that he was killed by the agents of the Pahlavi government of Iran, because of his outspoken manner regarding the corruptness of the regime, while others believe that his death was accidental.]

Comments

Roya Hakakian and SAVAK: another changer — 22 Comments

  3. My hope is for JDAMS and cruise missles to descend on Iran’s nuclear facilities. With an unarmed population and well funded security forces who have a blank check to crush resistance, the best we can expect from Iran’s resistance movement is some sniping and hand wringing in blogs.

  4. In Artur Koestler famous novel “Darkness at Noon” very similar story about Stalin’s purges of “old Bolsheviks” is depicted. Anybody who wants understand nature of revolutions in half-medieval societes must read it. And those naive people who expect anything good of such events, especially should read it. It does not matter at all, is it Russia or Persia – pattern of events is just the same.

  5. Another frightening aspect is that those who put their faith blindly in revolutionary solutions are invariably disappointed. In free societies that disappointment plays out as a midlife reversion to the establishment, as with many American Baby Boomers. In not-free societies, exile, suffering and death are likely outcomes.

  6. In places where there is no free press, people will believe many wild rumors. If we think that conspiracy theorists run amok in Western societies, much more so do they in closed societies. Older Romanians still believe the most unlikely stories of the Ceasescu era, simply because it seemed possible that the Securitate could do anything. It takes at least a generation of openness for the myths to dissolve.

    And of course, there are always new ones being made. If some person fluent in Arabic (or Farsi, I suppose) were to create a Middle Eastern equivalent of snopes.com, it would be a great international service. It might be a dangerous job, though.

  7. This is what happens when you have a reputation that is hated, yet not feared.

    Why is it not feared yet hated? Because people believe you have killed, but they don’t believe that you will kill THEM. They believe because of fabricated and propagandistic stories about the cruelties of the oppressors, but they know deep in their heart of hearts that death won’t come to their doors. Which frees them to act, without fear.

    If the Shah was truly as evil as people believed, then the streets would have been lined with the impaled bodies of the Ayatollah as well as all his supporters, including the people mentioned in Neo’s post.

    As you can see, if the Shah was hated and feared, it would be consistent with reality. When people, nations, and organizations like the US and Israel, are HATED but not feared, then you know that there is something deceptive going on.

    It’s about matters of degree. If someone hates the US a lot, but only fears us a little, his fear will not be enough to stop him from killing. However, it doesn’t matter how much you hate the US, so long as you fear us to the same degree, your fear paralyzes you and renders you not a threat.

    The people of Iran believed in the deception and hated the Shah, but they did not fear the Shah’s retribution precisely because they knew deep in their sub-conscious that the Shah wasn’t as bad as he was portrayed.

    Same thing they say about Bush. Bush is Hitler, he is going Big Brother on you. If so, why is Michael Moore still alive? Why didn’t he have an “accident” due to heart attack and bad food? You hate him, but you don’t fear him. Yet if the reasons you hated him for were true… you would fear him.

    This is why it doesn’t matter how much people hate you, it only matters if they fear you enough or not.

    The Shah was too lenient, and his power failed him. Bush is too lenient, but he is safe because nobody can do a coup de grace in the United States without the military, and the military won’t go revolution.

  10. Ymarsakar:

    May I quote My Man, Niccolo Machiavelli.

    “Chapter XVII. Cruelty and compassion:whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse.

    …I say that a prince must want to have a reputation for compassion rather than cruelty: none the less, he must be careful that he does not make bad use of compassion.,,,A prince musst not worry if he incurs reproach for his cruelty so long as he keeps his subject united and loyal…

    From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and theother, but because it is difficult to combine them, it is far better to be feared than loved….Any prince who has come to depend entirely on promises and has taken no other precautions creates his own ruin….Men worry less about doing injury to one who makes himself loved rather than feared. The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so; but fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective.”

    The late Shah should have listened to Nick M.

  11. Eh. Machiavelli’s “The Prince” was originally a parody of the Italian princes who exiled him anyhow. Ymarsakar seems closer to the truth to me, and I seriously doubt the Shah was overly concerned about being loved.

    In any case, more important than being feared, is instilling a fear of a future without the ruling party. Such a fear can permenantly end all hope of a revolution, ensuring that only external forces can bring about change. Hitler understood this, and it’s what made the Nazi party so dangerous. Even the assassination of Hitler wouldn’t have ended the Thousand Year Reich, as any number of Germans would have stood up to replace him, just to keep the Nazi government working and the Holocaust they were committing hidden from outsiders.

  12. Hi neo,

    Love your blog and your thoughts. Not to seem critical here, but the SAVAK were actually pretty brutal in their techniques, and they were largely hated even by the more centrist elements of the Iranian Revolution. That said, they were replaced by an even more brutal element under the mullahs. The more cruel members of the SAVAK were kept around to train the new members of the MOIS and the Pasdaran, the Revolutionary Guards. Forgive me Sergey, for making an analogy to Russian history here, but it was like the relatively lightweight Okhrana or Oprichniki being replaced by the Cheka. Keep writing, neo, excellent stuff.

  13. Tatterdemalian:

    As far satire is concerned, I believe that is still an open question. Certainly later “princes” operated on the advice of Il Principe.

    One “prince” who comes to mind is one J. V. Stalin who supposedly had a copy of the book on his bedside table. Hitler was too generally illiterate to have much to do with The Book: he was more of a natural genius making his own way.

    I don’t agree with your assessment that Nazi-ism would have develpoed the same way it did in the absence of Our Beloved Leader. Specifically, I don’t think Adolf’s likely successor – Goering or Himmler – would have allowed WWII to start by default.

    Granted, the Holocaust in some form would have taken place. And there would be no “kinder, gentler” variation.

    Just my two kopecks, comrade…

  14. In any case, I wonder what would happen if Michael Moore did, in fact, die of a heart attack tomorrow. I bet our own “intellectual activists” wouldn’t hesitate to claim Bush had him whacked. In fact, if the “progressives” weren’t such cowards, they might actually start trying to commit suicide, just so their friends would be able to “prove” Bush was having his enemies assassinated.

  15. I don’t think, that the Shah was a “good” man in his context but merely misrepresented somewhat like W has been misrepresented.

    cjd’s comment makes a lot of sense, and gibes with what I had heard from an Iranian whom I knew back during Carter’s presidency when the Shah was still in power, but with whom I didn’t maintain contact. Back then, this Iranian said he was son of one of the Shah’s generals, a claim which I was able by chance to corroborate (for myself — sorry, I won’t state names or details) a few years ago in speaking with other Iranians. I had long wanted to corroborate it, since I had to wonder what was a general’s son doing working side by side with me in an ice cream shop? (The shop’s owners could have corroborated, but it was only later that my curiosity increased.) “Sociological research” was the Iranian’s reply in those days.

    He said that all sectors of Iranian society hated the Shah and his secret police, and that his own father — a general under the Shah — hated the Shah. (A news event, soon before the Shah’s fall, involving an Iranian general who had my co-worker’s last name, somewhat corroborated this for me at the time). We talked about how misinformed President Carter seemed to be. The CIA, which Jimmeh had helped vitiate, was telling him what he wanted to hear. My co-worker looked forward to the Shah’s fall. I strongly doubt that he doesn’t regret what has happened since then.

    My Iranian co-worker (again, this was back in the late 1970s) was also into the beyond-the-fringe social revolutionary theory of an expatriate Iranian professor E.M. Esfandiary who taught at the New School for Social Research, calling for, among other things, the systematic, deliberate, “scientific” rushing of social “progress,” and for children to be routinely switched to new parents every seven — months or years, I forget which now.

    Iranian culture is not all crazy, but I’ve come away from those and other things (like the mullahcracy, of course, and also the Mujahedin-e Khalq a.k.a. MEK, MKO, and many other names) with the impression that Iranian culture has a streak of revolutionary craziness in it, a craziness, violentness, and naivety into which reformism is poured and turned into revolutionary terror as in France and Russia in past centuries.

  16. “During the Iranian revolution in 1979 many, including moderate or liberal intellectuals and ulama (clergies), expected the ulama to return to their mosques and schools and at best advise the government on Islamic matters, Khomeini and the bulk of more militant and conservative ulama believed in a clerically guided state. At the apex of government it was the Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme authority assisted by other clergy, who dominated the branches of government and its organizations in a clerical state or theocracy.

    Voices of dissent, lay and clerical, were intimidated or silenced – from secularists and leftists to Islamically oriented intellectuals such as Bazargan and Bani-Sadr. Sadeq Ghotbzadeh, an early protege of the Ayatollah Khomeini who had held a number of senior government positions including foreign minister, was executed for an alleged plot to assassinate Khomeini. Dissident clergy, in particular those who refused to accept Khomeini’s interpretation of Islam, which had yielded his doctrine of “rule by the jurist,” were hounded and harassed by fellow clerics. Many were silenced; the Ayatollah Muhammad Kazem Shariatmadari, a senior ayatollah revered for his knowledge and piety, was even defrocked in 1982.

    Institutionalization of the revolution at home was accompanied by its export abroad. The promotion and spread of Islam and Iran’s “Islamic revolution” was a foreign policy goal of the Khomeini government, explicitly stated in the exhortation of Iran’s constitution: “to perpetuate the revolution both at home and abroad.” Both preaching and propagation of the faith (through distribution of publications, conferences, and funding of religious institutions abroad) were combined with confrontation and armed struggle. At the same time, the Ayatollah Khomeini and other government officials, as well as Iran’s radio broadcast “Voice of the Islamic Revolution,” called on the Muslims of the Gulf and throughout the world to rise up and overthrow “oppressive, un-Islamic” governments. Gulf states were condemned because of the nature of their governments (monarchy was dismissed as “un-Islamic”) and because of their close ties with America, which was often referred to as “American Islam,” that is, offering a form of Islam acceptable to the West”…more

    http://arabworld.nitle.org/texts.php?module_id=2&reading_id=211&sequence=6

  18. Thanks neo-neocon: I just read your Bio. I changed my political party too on September 11. Having fled the barbaric theocracy and ideology almost 3 decades ago, I couldn’t believe that it would follow me to my newly-adopted and generous country. To make the long story short, 9/11 triggered my PTSD and many ugly memories about my own 9/11 long ago (27 years to be exact). I love your blog. Keep on writing.

  19. By the way Ludwig = Red Violin

    I use Ludwig when I post at one of the most anti-american blogs of a UC Berkley professor. It’s hard to keep up when you’re blogging in parallel.LOL

  20. My two cents: SAVAK was indeed brutal although brutality is relevant I guess. The current regime’s henchmen have done far, far worse but that doesn’t vindicate SAVAK’s atrocities which included severe beatings, death under torture and rape. The real damage SAVAK and the Pahlavis did wasn’t the bones they broke and the intellectuals they imprisoned or executed but the climate of fear they created. The greatest damage they inflicted was the suppression of all democratic processes in Iran. The depressing thing about any dictatorship is that it perpetuates itself since when there is a “crisis of hegemony”, a political void when the monster can no longer maintain its hold on power, the chances are that the most reactionary elements will fill that void. By suppressing the progressive forces, and by that I mean people like the National Front (Jebeh-e Melli), progressive Islamic intellectuals like Bazargan, and even people like Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last Prime Minister, the Shah and his SAVAK contributed to the rise of Khomeini. By the way, I seriously doubt if the intellectuals you refer to it, sat around and decided to propagate Behrangi’s death as a SAVAK’s doing. This kind of legend making most of the time, if not always, is the by product of living under an omniscient dictatorship.

  21. The current regime’s henchmen have done far, far worse but that doesn’t vindicate SAVAK’s atrocities which included severe beatings, death under torture and rape.

    People still seem under the impression that what they were told about SAVAK is true.

    In case people had not noticed, propaganda is not designed to enlighten people as to the truth. It is only to manipulate them into thinking and believing what the propagandist wants them to think and believe.

    If you think SAVAK is brutal, what is that based upon? Most of it, you will find, is based upon what other people told you. And who are these other people exactly.

    Criminals, as amazing as that may seem, don’t like the police. Perhaps you might say they hate the police. Well, do they hate the police PRIMARILY because the police are brutal, rape suspects, are corrupt, loose cannons or what not? Maybe, maybe not. But I say they hate the police primarily because the police GET in their Way.

    That’s about it.

    Is that “truth”? It doesn’t really matter. The only truth that matters is that people hate their enemies. They don’t need a reason. They don’t an atrocity. An atrocity is convenient, yes, but they’d hate their enemies anyways. If they didn’t have a reason to hate SAVAK, they’d make up a reason to hate it, just because SAVAK stood in the way of the revolutionaries.

  22. I think you meant “coup d’état”, Ymarsakar.

    Roy,

    No, that wasn’t what I wanted to use.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_de_gr%C3%A2ce

    Literally, one cannot destroy the US without co-opting or destroying the US military. It’s an institution, a pillar that props up the US Constitution and how Americans enforce the rule of law.

    There was no coup in Iran. The Shah abdicated (another inconsistency with the propaganda claims about the Shah).

    This also is linking back up with the Egyptian issues now. I wonder who is going to “take power” after the dictatorship of Egypt goes away heh.

    Btw, reading my former comments from so long ago is vaguely strange.

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