Living Under a Dictatorship
I’ve been having Co-Counseling sessions on the political conditions under which I grew up in Iran. I’m realizing that the sources of my chronic patterns include hurts from having grown up under a brutal dictatorship.
I was born ten years after the United States and Britain waged a coup d’état in Iran. They kidnapped and exiled my country’s first democratically elected prime minister, a socialist who had stood up against colonization. He had nationalized the oil industry that had been controlled by the British, introduced land reform, and enacted higher taxes for the rich, all in the first few years of his administration.
After the coup, the United States and Britain reinstalled the previous dictator, a brutal king (or shah as we say in Farsi) who then stayed in power for another twenty-five years. The dictatorship was designed to benefit the owning class. It put an end to the progressive attempts to bring about humane change. Every law, policy, and institution was set up to move the nation’s resources and wealth from the poor to the rich, with a good portion ultimately flowing to corporations and families in the United States and Britain.
I grew up having a single-party government. There were no national elections. There was no freedom of speech—the king and his regime controlled the media. All research on social issues was banned. Students were trained to memorize the government’s version of the “truth” and never to exercise critical thinking. Everyone was forced to collude with the lies. Reality about social conditions was always hidden. Fake news was a daily reality.
To justify its actions, the government kept inventing internal and external enemies. The wars with real and imaginary enemies included massive violations of human rights and transfer of wealth to the rich. All activism was banned and outlawed. Thousands of young people and young adults disappeared; they were imprisoned or killed.
The communist party was banned. I have vivid memories of being ten years old and watching on national television the trial of Golsorkhi, a leader of the Iranian communist party (the Tudeh Party) and a young charismatic man. I was horrified when I learned that he had been found guilty of (fabricated) crimes and put to death, mainly for his beliefs. That trial installed terror in my young mind and in the minds of other citizens.
Where were we left emotionally? Collectively, we felt terrified. People lived in constant fear of abduction, disappearance, confiscation of wages and property, exile, imprisonment, torture, rape, and death. We were made distrustful of others. We were trained to believe that every person outside of our immediate family was a potential informer. The distrust made it difficult to feel close and connected to others. It undermined collective action. Most people felt powerless to change the regime and hopeless about ever winning and living under better conditions. We were forced to give up integrity and courage to survive the daily assaults. We had to accept the normalization of violence, lies, distrust, and inhuman conditions.
It turns out [is a fact] that two-thirds of the world’s population live under owning-class-led dictatorships.
I’ve found it useful to discharge my early hurts related to political oppression so that I can think more clearly about creating a humane political system.
What has been your experience with dictatorship?
Brooklyn, New York, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 202, January 2021)