Robert Fisk: I saw a mesmeric Islamic uprising turn to savagery
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Independent Minds
The fall of the Shah was an epic, a morality play or a Greek tragedy if he had been a truly great man rather than just another American satrap, complete with US fighter aircraft, a swamp of corrupt officials and a sadistic intelligence service. When one of my colleagues suggested that the Iranian revolution could be compared to the fall of the Bastille and of the Tsar – he quoted Charles Fox’s line about “how much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world” – I thought his trust in Ayatollah Khomeini’s liberal intentions was born of wishful thinking.
When Khomeini’s prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, appeared on television to condemn the revolution’s bloody kangaroo courts as a disgrace to “a wonderful revolution of religious and human values” and appealed to the Ayatollah to set new rules for the trials, Khomeini agreed, then forgot his promise. The size of the street demonstrations in Tehran – a million one day, one and a half million the next – gave the Iranian revolution a mesmeric quality. It was anarchic, animalistic, ritualistic, very definitely Shia, but, in its earliest days, strangely moving.
I was then working for the pre-Murdoch Times, which was temporarily closed by a printing dispute, and made my way to Iran to report for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. But I still have the notes I sent back to my then news editor, Ivan Barnes. The Shah’s acolytes, I said, had been insufferably arrogant, but “I found that this arrogance had disappeared with the revolution. I was treated with courtesy and kindness almost everywhere I went and found Iranians much more aware of the implications of world events than ... the inhabitants of Arab countries. There was a straightforward quality about Iranians in the country as well as the towns that I couldn’t help admiring. They were thirsting to talk about anything.
“The only trouble I had was on the train to Qum [sic] when a gang of Islamic Guards (green armbands and M16 rifles) opened the compartment door and saw me recording a cassette with train sounds. I was accused of being a CIA spy (what else?) but explained that I was a journalist working for Canadian radio. The interpreter, a leftist student who travelled with me everywhere ... repeated the same thing and they relaxed. I had been told in Tehran to always say ‘Long live Khomeini, death to the Shah!’ to anyone nasty. I said my piece, at which the Guards raised their right fists in the air and shouted their approval. Then they all shook hands with me with giant smiles and tramped off down the train to torment someone in another compartment.”
The Shah’s gruesome medical odyssey through the hospitals of central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination. Not long after his departure I had sat at the feet of Hojatolislam Sadeq Khalkhali, the “hanging judge”, as he listed those of the Shah’s family sentenced to death in absentia. Khalkhali it was who had sentenced a14-year-old boy to death, who had approved of the stoning to death of women in Kermanshah, who earlier, in a mental hospital, would strangle cats in his prison cell. “The Shah will be strung up; he will be cut down and smashed,” he told me. “He is an instrument of Satan.”
Weeks later, in Evin prison, he discoursed again on the finer details of stoning to death. I still have the cassette of our conversation, his lips smacking audibly on a tub of vanilla ice cream as he spoke. From where did this brutality come? One of the regime’s new officials said the Shah’s Savak intelligence men were Nazi-type criminals. And how could I argue with this when reporters such as Derek Ive of the AP had managed to look inside a Savak agent’s house just before the revolution was successful? “There was a fishpond outside,” he told me. “There were vases of flowers in the front hall. But downstairs there were cells. In each of them was a steel bed with straps and beneath it two domestic cookers. There were lowering devices on the bedframes so the people strapped to them could be brought down on the flames. In another cell, I found a machine with a contraption which held a human arm beneath a knife and next to it was a metal sheath into which a human hand could be fitted. At one end was a bacon slicer. They had been shaving off hands.”
Derek Ive found a pile of human arms in a corner and, in a further cell, he discovered pieces of a corpse floating in inches of what appeared to be acid. Amid such savagery was the Iranian revolution born.
Robert Fisk’s full account of the 1979 Iranian revolution appears in his book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
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Comments
After 30 years of harsh religious rule, the Iranians are sick and tired of the Islamic regime. Unfortunately, the West and Israel are helping it stay in power by their constant threats and sanctions. If the West and Israel stop their threats, the regime will implode because they cannot help improve Iran's miserable economy and will have no scapegoats to rally the crowd.
I should mention that the Israeli savagery is far beyond this type of savagery. No wonder why both Iran & Israel are making the middle east a hell on earth.
out most of the middle east if not all.
The imagery of torture - the cookers beneath steel bed frames, a human arm beneath a knife, and a hand in a bacon slicer. These are right up there with the pictures of the Gaza genocide - http://portail.islamboutique.fr/gaza200
I'm sure it is valuable that we know these things. Because the Shah's, secret service, Savak, learned their trade from the US. And the US have been torturing - in Asia, in South and Central America - for a very long time. More recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course.
So we should know what they get up to. But I don't think that all your readers will thank you for those images that will stay with them for a very long time.
Iran continued to co-operate with the west even though they failed to recognise the rabid change in British attituides, they saw Britain as a means to begin facilitating dialogue with America, many Iranians helped indirectly the US in their operations in Iran but got little reward and plenty of vitriol from Bush and Blair.
And so the Iranians turned their back on the west, a golden opportunity lost possibly for good as Russia capitalised on the west's failure regarding Iran.
But let us also going back, remember it was the Americans that sparked the Iranian revolution, by forcing Saddam Hussein to eject Khomenei, they forced the Ayatollah into the media limelight in France and the rest is as they say, is history, if the Americans had left things alone, let Khomenei stay in Baghdad with all the other failed dictators of that time, it is very very likely that Khomenei would have attained more than a modest following and nothing like the millions of dollars of financial support that he got from the exposure in France, in short, the Americans interference once again blew up in their faces.
Pre-Murdoch Times, ah the halcyon days when the "Thunderer" was the paper to be reckoned with, lunching with my late mother at Grays Inn Road, sitting in the super modern foyer of the Times, then off to the el grotty canteen in the less than inspiring Sunday Times building next door or if we were lucky like after her work was completed on the royal wedding supplement, off to the exclusive Roberto's... I have very fond memories of the Times.
If the rest of the world has the same warped, closed minds, little wonder there is no peace in the middle east. Just watch these posts move away from Fisk's subject into the same old rhetoric.
"Not too long ago they fought the pathetic Sadaam's Iraq for 8 years over...er nothing."
No, not "er nothing". Iraq started the war by invading southwest Iran with a view to conquering its oilfields and plundering their production.
With that level of ignorance victormc I can only assume that,
"You are obviously either living in a parallel universe or dream world or know nothing of this subject."
I suggest that politicians across the world - both in the West and else where - reduce their anti-Iranian rhetoric. This is the best way to undermine the current delusional regime in Tehran. After all, the Iranian economy is in a terrible state and the majority are unsatisfied. The only tool this regime has in its hands is anti-Iranian rhetoric.
By genuine I'm excluding events such as the American Revolution or Britain's Glorious Revolution, important and rather violent events but only rather loosely called revolutions.
True revolutions are always explosive, violent, life-changing events. That's why we can use the word for events like the Industrial Revolution, a world-changing set of events that hurt numberless people.
Indeed, when you are familiar with the history of such events, the word revolution takes on the kind of connotations of earthquake or natural disaster.
But most political revolutions are completely avoidable. They always come out of an environment of abuse and excessive privilege and trampling on others. The signs are always there to read too, requiring only changes in policy or reforms. This was absolutely true in such revolutions as the French and the Russian.
The policies of the United States, it should be remembered, bear a great responsibility for the extremes of Iran's Revolution. It overthrew the first democratic government in the Middle East to install the bloody Shah, and they supported that vampire for years in every way they could.
He was sold what then was an amazing pile of armaments, being equipped to serve as an American surrogate in the region.
Meanwhile Savak, his secret police, pulled out the finger nails of victims and murdered thousands.
The U.S. has never stopped playing such dirty games.
It supported Hussein in his horrible war against Iran, an 8-year long horror that in terms of the proportion of population killed or hurt compares to the Great War for major European countries.
Today it supports Israel's endless threats against Iran for the sin of entering the modern age with satellites and nuclear power stations. And it says nothing of Israel's horrible abuses and of its nuclear arsenal threatening everyone in the Middle East.
Still, these Iranian people werent "tourtured" by Americans so who gives a f? No one will censure if its not the USA getting it and theres nothing mindlessly bigotted abouyt that at all is there
Iraqis got the better deal maybe? It looks like they have a true plural democracy, although I see Sarkozy is sniffing for odious oil contracts in Baghdad today so lets not count our Poussin. You know its safe when the French turn up. Isnt Iraq free despite and in spite of France? I wonder what they gave him for lunch?
I am having medical problem in writing more to you ?
remember that Hamas and resistant group are under microscope ?
bless you now and later?
First, to have a well educated upper middle class people who have no decisive administrative role in the governing system of regime.
Second, a great professional working class people who are financially and socially impoverished and generally segregated, hence are unable to improve their social status.
Third, sets of common and motivating causes such as nationalism, etc that can act as the unifying elements between these two groups.
Forth, a well-structured civic life style in most of the country.
What happened in Iran had not been a revolution. It happened so quick and unpredicted, lacking many required conditions for an independent movement.
I have a feeling that we need look for questions and answers elsewhere. The analyses drawn in this article are too naive, frankly too good to be true.
Revolution and Blood have a tight connection. Every revolution needed huge amount of blood to fuel its.
However, we should looked at the result afterward.
It's true Iranian nowadays are not good in freedom of speech and so on. But still better than Shah era because Iranian could speaks as what they wanted as long as not against the religion, which the main point that most western government left out.
It's always casualities with the revolution.
But the main point is the result afaterward.
Today Iran is better than old Iran (under Shah). Today Iran has sucessfully put themselves independently. old Iran just a pariah to US. Today Iran achieve high level techology which does'nt achieve by any muslim nation nor old Iran.
If US & most NATO member not blocked their economics relation with today Iran, i'm sure Iran will be listed together with Brazil, Russia, India dan China in term of economic development.
" I for one would be very happy if they do aquire them; then, God willing, we can wave bye bye to the appalling Nazi like regime of Israel"
you appear to be yet another blood thirsty theist you do.
you are a very short sighted, unthinking, idiot!