You are comparing 1980 Iran to Hitler Germany? Close to a Godwin point.
The mythical Godwin: the ruler by which permissable talk might be measured.
So Measure!
Simple truths
Evin Prison: summer 1988
by Moniereh Baradaran
The warm summer months appeared normal. We were allowed out into the prison courtyard as before. Fruits and other goods were on sale. Life went on with its normal order and rhythm. The rota to clean and serve the cell-block was the same as before. The fact that there was less of us had not made a difference in this. The daily classes were not disrupted. We began classes, like school children at 8 am. We would study a language, a book or articles that we had archived form newspapers. Silence was compulsory until lunch was brought.
But beneath this apparently calm life there was also something else. An anxiety and fear that showed itself at night in nightmares. We would wake up suddenly by the strangled wailing of someone, and dazed would look at each other in search of the source. We would trace the voice, wake up its owner, and give her some water. Then there was sleep and nightmares once again. The painful feeling of being lonely and defenceless. Death was this side of the wall. Did those on the other side know? No. Perhaps the calamity this side of the wall was no more than a small pebble thrown on the calm waters of those on the other side. Or, perhaps, the turbulent waves of life ?outside? rolled and broke on one another drowning the cries of our slaughter.
At dusk I would stand an stare at the other side of the wall between two iron bars. A youth flew his pigeons, and they would circle a little while before returning to their shed. On Fridays, people continued to pour onto the mountainside [1]. In those summer months the happy cries of children and grown-ups mingled with the loud music of the Luna Park [2] not far from us.
That August and September of 1988, the presence of balloons in the sky, was a sign that the International Trade Fair was on again. On one of the highest the British flag was displayed. The logic of the trading world was not to be disturbed by the gloom of our loneliness, the cruelty of the hangman?s noose and the pain of a whipping which appeared to have no end.
It was in the small world of the prison that I learnt that I have a larger motherland. You could not trust the papers for internal news. You could find more news and articles from other worlds. I read, and in advanced Europe, besides the technology whose delirious growth sometimes disappointed me, I found myself alongside striking British miners; in mysterious Latin America, I found myself agreeing with the Sandinistas in their search for peace and sympathetic to the Farabundo Marti Front [of El-Salvador]; in the Middle East in empathy with the anger and defencelessness of the Palestinians; and ... But in those days I saw myself, and us, as the forgotten in the age of communications. In its noisy clamours and trumpetings it ignored us. An huge and naked tragedy was unfolding in the silence of the ?free peoples? of the world and the applause of politicians rewarding the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
Yet I will assume, and let us assume, that at that moment the prisoner felt the course rope round the neck, he or she did not have my bitter feeling; that they murmured songs which began with the pronoun ?we? so that our ?free? consciences do not commit suicide from despondency and disillusion.
Questions
From time to time they would come from judicial authorities with questions which only called for a ?yes? or ?no? reply. Once we were having lunch and they came asking: ?do you pray?? and ?will you give a videoed interview??.
We put down our spoons and one by one said ?no? and waited for death. The two who had said ?yes? had such a bitter and angry tone that the judicial authority doubted his own ears. Next day they came back and introduced themselves as being an amnesty commission charged with investigating our files. They had said the same thing before. A number of times they took away some prisoners with a life sentence. They had kept them waiting for hours in the interrogation building and then returned them. Fardin [3] who had for years been under a death sentence was kept for weeks in one of the solitary cells of 209 [4]. Every night she waited her turn. She had heard and seen that every night they take some prisoners away and next day replace them by new ones. When she returned to us a deep groove had been added to all the groove on her face, and she hid a mysterious something in her pale smile.
In August we got a newspaper cutting from cell-block 2. They had began to supply newspapers to block 2. We read that the spokesman for the Supreme Judicial Council, after much cursing at the ?discredited? communists had asked for the ?maximum penalty? for them. He had said that ?after the hypocrites [Mujadedin] it is the turn of the non-believers? [5]. The words were clear and needed no analysis etc. But there are times when knowing something and being informed is not the same as actually believing. One fights with oneself not to believe, not to be overcome, to stay alive.
From the second week in September the whipping of the leftist women began. The news reached us by a women who had been arrested for being a Baha?i. We did not believe until it was confirmed by another news form block 2. The news was: with the first light at 4 am, with the sound of the muezzin?s call to prayer, the cell door opens, the prisoner is taken out, laid out on a bed in the middle of the corridor, and is whipped. Five lashes. The cell door is then locked and another door opened. The second prisoner is laid out on the bed. The third, fourth and .... it takes about an hour. The next turn is with the mid-day call to prayer, another five lashes, the third about four p.m., the fourth at nightfall about 8 o?clock and the last before midnight. Twenty five lashes on five occasions.
In the first days Mojtaba Sarlak came personally. The prisoners inside their cells could hear the whistle of the whip, and the squeaks of the bed when the lash hit the prisoner?s body. Later it was the old female Pasdar Taleqani, with her large build and masculine face, also whipped, and her whip hand was no less strong than Mojtaba?s. In subsequent weeks other Pasdars, male and female, came and lashed. They even gave the whip to Yusefi, an old woman who had excused herself that she does not know how.
At first we could not make out who they whipped. New prisoners or veterans? A complementary report came. They were veterans who had long finished their sentence [6] and had been transferred to solitary. after one or two weeks some of them were returned to block 2. The news spread like wildfire. We jumped on top of the cupboard and saw them from the gap in the window. Thin and bent, they walked with difficulty. It was as if they were ashamed. They did not lift their heads to look at us. They send us news that they had agreed to pray; regarded themselves as defeated. They had been told in their trial that the punishment of a non-believing woman is death under the lash, or repentance. They wished they had been given a death sentence rather than a slow death. They saw no hope for an end to whippings. How sad and disappointed they looked.
Analyses and judgements on those who had accepted to pray under the lash had barely began when this time the draw fell on us. We had expected it. They took away seven or eight. Anxiously we saw them off. They were returned near noon so that they could give us the exact news. They had been taken to court and asked: ?are you a Muslim??, ?do you pray??. They had all answered in the negative. The religious judge had given out a verdict of death under the whip or repentance. They had announced there and there that from that moment they will go on a hunger strike in protest at the judgement. A dry hunger strike. This took immense courage, especially under the circumstances, and it seemed that they were prepared to stick out their decisions. They were all prisoners of 5th Branch who had been arrested in relations to the Tudeh party and the Fada?i majority.
When the muezzin sounded they were taken away. The judge had said that the whipping will start from that noon. From then on we would be transfixed to our spot whenever the call to prayer sounded. Silence threw its shadow everywhere. I imagined the cell doors opening one by one. They were laid out on the bed. The whistle of the whip would resound along the long corridors. They were returned to the cell. The wait for the next turn. It would have been less painful if they had been dealt the 25 lashes in one go. They said themselves that the wait was much worse than the whipping itself. They could not sleep at night. The gap between the last lash, around midnight and the early morning whipping, between 3.30 to 4 am was too short. They later learnt to sleep between the morning and noon lashings, which was longer.
Continued here:
iran-bulletin.org
You might find, if you looked, the similarities between 1980 Iran and Hitlers's time to be remarkably close. The imprisonemet, torture and murder of people on the basis of islamofascist ideology began with the Khomeni coup and continues today.
Of course, we shouldn't want to talk about such a thing. It might offend Miss Manners. |
