The story of Kianoush Assa’s life and untimely death.

Iran’s military heroes, often forgotten while alive, are both valorized and cynically employed in death.

…Yesterday, I spent a few hours with a middle-aged veteran who served at the front for most of the war’s eight years. He was bitter about the lack of true respect for Iran’s martyrs. As he sipped his tea, he told me, “They paint Bakeri’s portrait on all the highways and then fill their media with filthy gossip about his wife. They have no respect for martyrs; they just treat them as propaganda instruments. Look at us, I served at the front and they never really pay attention to our problems or even our opinions.”

A friend of his joined us in the middle of the conversation. The friend shook his head in agreement and said, “Look, they talk about martyrs and yet they never come to talk to us about those martyrs, who they really were. We shared foxholes and trenches. We went over the top together. We were their friends and brothers in arms and saw them as men and human beings. But you cannot talk about them as men, of their love for their children, wives, and parents, or their plans for the future. You only can talk about them publicly if you talk according to their guidelines.”

He gazed at me and continued, “Look at how they are treating Haj Mohsen. Mohsen was our commander for the whole war and now they are at him whenever he talks or criticizes the government.”

Major General Mohsen Rezaei, known by his troops as Haj Mohsen, was the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for most of the war and some years after that. After the war he continued his studies and received a doctoral degree in economics from the University of Tehran. Today he prefers to be called Dr. Rezaei. He ran for office in the last presidential election and performed well in face-to-face debate with Ahmadinejad. Government supporters accused him of disloyalty, of conspiring with former president Rafsanjani and disobeying the Supreme Leader by challenging Ahmadinejad. After my conversation with the veterans, I checked his website. One comment posted there by a reader was striking: “Haj Mohsen, I wish you dead, so they finally appreciate what you did for Iran.”

Yes, for Iran’s heroes it is not easy to be alive.

Go to Tehran Bureau.

February 11, 2010 did not turn out to be the end of the regime in Tehran. But in time, it may prove to have been the end of something even more important for Iranians, and perhaps, for the Shiite culture. It was the end of an ancient love affair with death. It was the end of blind sacrifice—of martyrdom.

In 1978, red handprints dotted the walls of Tehran. And what it conveyed to a nation that was on the verge of erupting was far more powerful than any words or slogans. That year, every shirt imbrued with blood was held above the heads of the demonstrating crowds not simply as a flag, but a talisman. We have always worshipped blood.

It was this quality that Ayatollah Khomeini exploited to drag on the war with Iraq, long after Iran had driven Saddam’s army from the territories it had initially captured. “Our leader is that thirteen-year-old boy who straps grenades around his waist and throws himself in the way of the Iraqi tanks,” he declared before the audience that was always weeping in his presence. The leader’s endorsement, and a plastic key to open the gates of paradise, was all that droves of young men needed to step on their own death by rushing headlong into the Iraqi minefields.Even secular and Marxist groups were bent on this kind of blind sacrifice. In the early 1980s, several of them, a Maoist group named Sarbedaran among them, staged doomed uprisings throughout Iran that could only lead to their imminent deaths and executions, as they did. In busy bazaars and bus terminals in those early years, members of the Islamic opposition group, the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, also staged random, singular acts of protest by shouting anti-ayatollah slogans, then followed with swallowing cyanide pills and dying before the stunned public. Freud must have been looking down upon Iran, pointing to us as “Exhibit A” in his defense of Thanatos.

The national drive for death is a tradition that predates Ayatollah Khomeini. Sacrifice is that primordial mud in which the Iranian psyche was cast. It has been the cornerstone of our literature. The self, the material body, have always been shunned. To annihilate them is, what our best poets suggest, the way to reach the light, the beloved, and, according to some, God. It’s the untranslatable in our celebrated poetry. It’s only the grains of love, not the death that flow through the strainer of translation. It’s that filtered verse with which English speakers are so enamored.
Last Thursday, the regime had armed itself to the teeth, unleashed its thugs onto the streets, and bused in thousands more protesting day-laborers from the far-flung corners of the country into the capital. Tehran was under siege by strangers. They outnumbered and out-powered the peaceful activists. Instead of coming out and protesting, and clearly rushing to their own death as their national inner circuitry would have charged them to, the Green demonstrators kept inert. After all, the migrants would have to return home. And between the births and deaths of the 12 imams—which Iranians celebrate as steadfastly as the pagan events on the calendar—there were numerous reasons to take to the streets again in the near future.

When it comes to the Green Movement, there are the grand signs –a million people’s march on the street—that need no interpreting. But there are also the subtler, the subterranean ones that do. What’s most promising about the Green Movement is its desire to be bloodless, to self-preserve, and its wish to live for a cause, not die for it. This isn’t to say that the movement isn’t facing obstacles—the greatest being its inability to communicate with its leaders and foot soldiers. Yet despite all the odds, the restraint, the composure by which the Green activists have conducted themselves thus far is both admirable and unprecedented. This surely is no consolation to those who are consumed by the more immediate threats of Iran’s regime. But for those less intoxicated by “yellowcake,” last Thursday revealed signs of a different kind of promise –of the birth of self, the will to live, the longstanding morbid drive disappearing —the stuff that enduring peace is made of. Go to original article.

The clash between Iran’s regime and its opposition has morphed into a Shiite passion play with role reversal—the Shiite order of the Rule of the Jurisprudent, whose Supreme Leader arrogantly views himself as “God’s shadow on earth,” is now nothing more than an earthly villain. Suddenly, the martyrs are not deadly pawns in the hands of the Islamic Republic. They do not drive explosive-laden cars into innocent crowds; they stand defenseless and defiant against the regime’s thugs, as they truly seek to emulate Hussein, ready to die for a just cause. Stripped of the ideological grievances and preposterous manipulation of the Islamic Republic’s narrative, Shiite martyrdom suddenly stands for freedom. Martyrs no longer die in the cause of the Islamic revolution; they die to overthrow it. Go to WSJ.

An interview with Ali Agha-Soltan, Neda’s father.

Keeping the memory of the martyrs alive……

Compilation in memory of Amir Javadifar.  

Azar Majedi tells the story of Soheila Ghadiri—remembering her life and her tragic execution at the hands of Iran’s Islamic regime.

A group of mothers and family members of the martyrs and political prisoners as well as a number of women activists gathered in Laleh Park in Tehran in protest (Oct 3, 2009). They were demanding the immediate release of all political prisoners and that the responsible authorities held accountable for their illegal acts

This Video Clip shows the pictures of a number of Iranian voters killed during post election incidents – June 2009. The pictures are accompanied by a beautiful song named “Varan” or “Rain” performed by the legend Iranian Fusion-Traditional vocalist and artist, Mamak Khadem.