– 23 January 2026 –

Janus:

Summary: This article starts off describing the ways that reading first-hand accounts of history, or secondary sources from the same time period, can plug us in to the overall spirit of their times. The article then applies this notion to the study of today’s Iran, where serious conflict is brewing with the West. Should today’s traditional Christians care about Iran? And if so, why? Finally, the article presents a young American student’s 1963 account of pre-revolutionary Iran to help answer that question, as it shows parallels with both today’s Iran and today’s West as a whole.

People write about current events differently than they write about past events. Their audiences are different. Their motives in the telling are different. Even the participants themselves write their own memoirs very differently than how they would have described those same events right after they had happened.

When we read contemporary accounts from personal journals, periodicals, and books—especially over a broad range of sources—it’s like travelling in time. We get some of the feeling of living right there and then, with all of the cares and worries within the cultures of the day. We hear it in their own words. We hear all that they say and all that they assume doesn’t need to be said.

Reading contemporary sources also adds the benefit that these examples can help us, by comparison, to understand what’s important or not important in today’s accounts of present events, or in today’s analysis. Much of what very intelligent people think is critical right now ends up amounting to very little just ten years later, even though it seems so monumental. And this understanding isn’t merely the benefit of hindsight, or the fact that some roads were taken and other roads rejected, and therefore making the first road seem the most important later.

No, there are predictable patterns that we can see playing out. Reading these past accounts helps us to identify patterns in what actually holds up over time, and what ends up amounting to little more than historical footnotes. There are patterns as to what makes the historical cut, or what is almost immediately forgotten. For instance, outright propaganda and ideological posturing tends to amount to very little. Wild speculations are just manipulative what-ifs. And there are other kinds of noise, too.

Overall, whatever people say doesn’t especially matter; it’s what people deliberately and collectively do that matters, and who can lead them to do it.

In any case, as tensions between the “free and democratic” West and revolutionary Iran have spiked over the last year, I’m trying to apply these lessons of history to Iran. The Zionist West is applying internal and external pressures against Iran’s government and way of life, like we used against Qaddafi’s Libya or Assad’s Syria. Will the government of Iran survive intact as a distinct entity, or will it be crushed? Or will it technically survive but have to adapt dramatically to address new paradigms?

Most people in the West don’t really care about this situation in Iran except maybe through their own national interests, or against the larger geopolitical landscape. Who cares about a bunch of Muslim fanatics and backward-minded terrorists or whatever cartoon villains the system tells us they are?

But should serious Christians care? Should those of us who constantly endure the aggression and hostility of liberal Western “values” care? Considering that we face the same vile enemies, foreign and domestic, the fate of Iran is important. There is a reason we share the same enemies, and in the end, we might end up sharing the same fate!

Since I’ve tried to learn about the Iranian government, peoples, and history over the past century, I’ve grown impressed with what I’ve seen. One could wonder if I’m not getting sucked into their world; going “native,” as people used to say. Well, that will never happen. But I do have some sympathy with these people.

On the one hand, it’s true that the Iranians and their leaders uphold an infidel religion that has killed many of my fellow Orthodox Christians over the centuries, and for that reason and others I reject adapting their ways. But on the other hand, I’ll say that their form of Islamic governance, even with its inherent anti-Christian foundation, is not nearly as deviant from the Divine Order as what we see embedded in the West today, and there is much to admire in it.

Modern feminism, liberalism, egalitarianism, consumerism, and Zionism all serve as civic religions today that are more nefarious than Iran’s Shia Islam. Even what all-too-often passes as Christianity today—stewing together with all those listed ingredients—amounts to a greater violation of God’s order than what we see in Iran! If it was a raw choice between the Ayatollah and Joel Osteen, I’d pick the Ayatollah! (Though in reality I vehemently reject both.) So, yes, while I remember who I am and uphold my Faith, I look at today’s Iranian system with quite a bit of sympathy and respect these days!

In this information-gathering about Iran lately, I ran across a first-hand account of an American student who stayed in Iran from 1959 to 1961. The kid (Christopher T. Rand) was young, but quite intelligent, even visionary. He wanted to appreciate these people, but he was an adherent of the American civic religion and saw everything through that lens. He called his vision of the world “progressivism,” which (in my interpretation) meant a kind of circa-1960 liberalism: a mixture of science, hard work, individualism, modernism, civic institutionalism, anti-Communism, and consumer capitalism. In the end, the fanatics and revolutionaries of Iran who dominated the intellectual and student circles at the time rejected his progressivism, rejected Americanism, and they drove him to exasperation. He couldn’t stand it after a few years, so he left.

Even though this Silent Generation kid was devoted to circa-1960 Americanism through and through, he wrote some fascinating and prescient observations about the Iranians of that time. He observed a stirred up population who resented American influence and domination, with its (in the Iranians’ eyes) hollow, imperialist culture and empty promises. Rand tried to reason with them—and no doubt he considered himself very reasonable—but was repulsed by their visceral rejection of everything he believed and stood for. Why couldn’t these people simply accept the superior American way? It seemed so irrational to the kid from America at her peak. Rand predicted a particular kind of revolution in Iran that finally broke out in the late 1960’s and triumphed in 1979.

Overall, Rand’s article was a fascinating read that I could only find at archive.org. So I’ll share it in its entirety below, with added emphasis here and there.

It’s also noteworthy that both Rand on one side and the young Iranians on the other argued their points from the dialectic of their time: Western-style liberalism or ideological communism. Either/or. Rand supported his home system as a matter of faith. The Iranians rejected it and therefore leaned—reflexively if not in spirit—towards the Soviets as the only other alternative. If not the one, then the other. This was the only rhetorical or dialectical choice that these people had at the time, because they didn’t have the language or ideological tools for anything else. And of course, both rejected simple tradition and monarchy outright as obsolete, because they had no all-important modern structure!

Only when someone else, in the form of Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers, developed a different “ideology” or language of civic religion, did the revolutionaries of the day have the ideological lexicon to pursue a third way that represented something truly Iranian.

The bulk of Iranians had instinctively rejected both the liberal West and the communist East, just as they instinctively leaned towards their own national traditions. When they had gained dialectical tools that gave full expression to their hearts and a clear vision to their minds, Khomeini’s supporters knew what they were fighting for, and they ultimately won!

Overall, the unsettled state of Iran in 1960 doesn’t sound so different from today’s unsettled USA. . . .

Via The Internet Archive (“Debate Without End,” Christopher T. Rand, from Young Americans Abroad, ed. Robert H. Klein, 1963):

Debate Without End

Christopher T. Rand

Revolution has been hovering over Iran for the past years, though she was one of the first countries in Asia to have already gone through the experience of modern revolution (1909). In fact, according to many experienced Western observers, the next important revolt will take place in Iran, and some (such as Walter Lippmann, describing his well-known interview with Khrushchev in the spring of 1961) have indicated that the Russians believe this, too, and are trying as best they can to bring down the Shah and his regime. In Soviet eyes, the Shah and his government are degenerate and anachronistic and cannot possibly cope with the misery and poverty spreading through the land. The progressive elements are handcuffed and helpless; the social structure of the country is obsolete, its bureaucracy corrupt, its masses discontented and its economy in chaos.

Yet a revolution may be long in coming. All but the very mildest of the country’s progressive elements are carefully controlled by the government, which in turn is controlled by the most reactionary elements in the country, which in turn are upheld by the army.

The motives behind this control are obvious. In 1953, when the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh embarked on a program of nationalization and social reform that drew the country away from its alliance with the West and brought it more and more under Soviet influence, it became apparent that no important nonmilitary revolution could keep Iran out of the Communist bloc for long. No bourgeois reformist elements within the country now or then could succeed in effecting a nonmilitary revolution without Communist support; and once these bourgeois came to power, they would no longer be able to restrain the Communists because unlike the Communists they lack leadership, unity, and coherent, well-thought-out programs (which seems to be the universal problem of the non-Communist left) .

Iran borders on Russia and in past years has experienced constant attempts at subversion on the part of Soviet Russia and her agents. Furthermore, her land includes peoples who have struggled for autonomy in the past notably the Kurds and the Azerbaijanian Turks and who have received Russian support in those struggles. In 1946 both the Kurdish and the Azerbaijanian governments nearly succeeded in setting up autonomous states within Iran, breaking down the inner strength and cohesion of the Iranian nation, and weakening her resistance against further aggression from Soviet Russia.

The best solution to these problems would be for the government, with the aid of her Western allies, to institute a strong reform program herself. But so much damage has been done to the nation’s economy in recent years that the difficulties of instituting reform have become staggering, and the people have grown scornful of any government-proclaimed reformers. In the meantime, a system of suppression continues to spread, bringing moral sickness in its wake and paralyzing the energies of the young and progressive-minded.

As an Asian diplomat recently told me, Mosaddegh was the last hope for improvement in Iranian domestic affairs, but “the poor fellow was a bit sentimental.” In any case, he is now in forced political retirement. Since his demise in 1953, the progressive and active elements of Iranian society have been in a state of near apathy regarding the future of their country. The situation did not change during my two years in Iran, from the fall of 1959 until the fall of 1961.

This condition may surprise most Americans, who know nothing significant about Iran. What little they do know about the country is the result of publicity favorable to its government and irrelevant to its primary problems. Before I went there, I knew very little about it myself. Even if I had known more, I would have been unable, from my distant and comfortable vantage-point in the United States, to understand it any better. It was only when a graduate grant to study Persian allowed me actually to live in Iran that I started to understand the dimension of her troubles.

I went blithely, with the innocence of cocksure youth, assuming that I would master the language with ease, travel widely in the country, make friends with many people, learn a great deal of what went on around me, and return to the United States a lifelong friend of Iran, expert in her affairs and a fine intermediary for interpreting Iran and the United States to one another with unique sensitivity. And all this was to come about simply because I had gone a little out of my way to learn the language and study the country and its people.

When I finally did leave Iran, I had learned the language and gotten to know the people well; I had traveled around the country, made friends, and come to understand the daily life and ways of thought all as I had planned. I had stayed long enough for that purpose. What I had not expected was that staying longer would only have alienated me from the people of my acquaintance, especially my contemporaries. The longer I stayed, the more I realized that, fundamentally, I had not been able to communicate with them. When I tried to converse with them and hear what they had to say (unless they were the rare misfits who had been brought up in a Western tradition), all they wanted was to force their political sentiments on me and, even more, to force me to agree with them, so that they could convince themselves that they had made me relinquish my entire Western viewpoint. Having learned the approximate limitations of their thought, I wanted to move on.

* * *

Every Westerner visiting a country like Iran experiences discomforts and even hostilities. I came expecting life there to be hard and uncomfortable, and found it so. But most physical discomforts are insignificant; one gets used to them and, in fact, forgets them once they have passed. During the dry, hot, glaring Iranian summers I could never remember what a bitter Iranian winter felt like. I could never remember seeing Mashad from a distance, a dull brown, and wondering how the stiff, skeletal, gray sticks around the town and inside its walls could burst aflame with green by summer. I learned to ignore the stones thrown at me in back alleys of provincial towns, the insults snickered on the street here and there, the petty discriminations and embarrassments, the many refusals of merchants to accept the money from me that they would accept from any Iranian, the undue attention people sometimes gave me in public, the annoying teen-agers who seemed to collect around me in every new place, or the agents of the secret police and the uncooperative lower-ranking bureaucrats with their arbitrary use of the law.

As I look back on it, I can remember other annoyances: the scarcity of people one could trust (especially in the cities) ; the occasions when no friendly people were around, or at least no one accommodating or anxious to talk; the inevitable poverty of congeniality and stimulation. I remember the young Iranians who clustered around me wherever I went, nagging me to speak English even after I had been in Iran awhile and could speak Persian better than most of them could speak English. They insisted on either speaking English, even the most rudimentary and boring kind, or not speaking at all. On occasion a boy would come up to me on the street and say something in broken English. I would reply in Persian. The boy would say, “Oh, you speak Persian?” perhaps say a word more, then drift off, shrugging his shoulders.

Sometimes even the friendliness that one craved could be annoying. It was hard to find a reply to the sincerity of the simple, aimless young man who at once said that he liked me very much, insisted that I come to his house, and then, having secured my presence for an elaborate meal by making it impossible for me to excuse myself, sat gaping at me for hours, making small talk about Iranian food and American movie stars, insisting that I be sure to write him a letter soon, and getting my address in America so that he could write me in return. Often I found myself among such people, wondering how to leave them gracefully or how to let them give me their addresses without leading them to expect a reply, or even a return visit.

But all these oddities and annoyances were minor. What mattered was something different, something I had not expected: the hostility of the people whom I had thought I would be close to and with whom I wanted to establish friendships—the educated, the interesting and alive, the future leaders of the country, those looked up to by the common people. In Iran these members of the elite are the ones who not only dislike their country but are genuinely hostile to it—not like the common people, who may gripe and be miserable in their surroundings, but are nonetheless at ease in them. The hostility of intellectuals, of the young and progressive-minded, is really significant, because it is deep, relentless, and malicious. Furthermore it is subtle. One becomes aware of it slowly, distracted at first by the day-to-day aggravations one had thought to be one’s main obstacle.

It may have been six months before I started to notice this deep antagonism. At the time I was on a trip to Teheran from Zahidan, a small, fly-ridden government outpost not far from the Pakistani border. On my way I stopped in Kerman and took a bed for the night in a cheap hotel. I entered the room, where there were several beds, and found some young men sitting around a table in the middle, eating roast chicken and freely drinking vodka. We fell into conversation. I told them that I was an American and that I was going to Teheran. One of them gave me a glass of vodka. Shortly someone else offered to give me a ride the rest of the way, which I accepted. For a while we made conversation aimlessly. Then another of the men turned to me and lifted his glass. Squinting, he moved it back and forth slightly until it was pointing at me. “You’re an American,” he said. “Tell me. Why does your country, the great democracy, act the way it does. Eh?”

“What way?” I asked.

“How do you think the people of Asia feel about the way your country acts? What does your country mean? Talking about democracy, by God what does your country mean about democracy? It has enslaved half the world. The Asian people know what your country means.”

I shrugged my shoulders and muttered that there was no perfect democracy anywhere what did he want?

“Oh, yes,” he went on. “And what about the enslavement of South Korea? And what about Formosa? Is this democracy?” He spoke half-coherently but with bitterness.

Again I shrugged my shoulders and told him to ask the refugees from China and North Korea.

“Hah!” he retorted.

“All right,” I went on, “what about Hungary? That’s oppression for you. Can a person leave Hungary whenever he wants to, the way somebody can leave Formosa?”

“Hah!” the man repeated. “What we know about Hungary comes from the American press. You tell us, what did the Americans do to Guatemala?” His lips immediately spread into a grin. “Eh? Tell me about Guatemala.”

He laughed, and I shrugged my shoulders again. I avoided looking at his grin. The conversation trailed off, and before long we went to bed. The next day I left early, and later joined the man who had offered me the ride. He told me that the other man sent his apologies for the way he had talked the night before he had been drunk, and besides, I was an honored guest from an allied country. He told me to forget the matter. He hadn’t meant what he said.

But such indictments started to proliferate. Shortly afterwards, when I was at a friend’s house in Teheran, someone came over, squatted next to me on the floor, took me by the arm, and started to tell me in an excited whisper how the people of Iran hated America and how they were going to throw the Americans out, the way Mosaddegh had. Then he darted away.

A while later, when I was attending classes at the University of Shiraz, a girl who heard me speaking Persian came up to me and asked if I knew Hindi, Turkish, and Arabic as well. After all, everyone in my profession did. Why else would I be learning Persian but for the sake of the profession?

About that time, one evening in a park near Shiraz, in a silence broken only by a gloomy singer and the whine of a violin, a young man with whom I had been talking took me aside and told me how miserable he was. He had nothing to live for. No one in Iran had anything to live for, he said. Everyone was waiting for the Russians. They were waiting to open their country to the Russians, to throw out the foreigners and the ruling class and escape from their misery.

When I was back in Teheran again, I visited a high school and gave a talk before a friend’s class. As I was going out into the hallway after the class, one student rushed up to me and asked, “Why does America keep the Arab countries from uniting?” The teacher scared him away and hastened to apologize, claiming that the student was under the influence of Communist propaganda. Later, however, in talking with the teacher, I found that his views, though hardly Communist, were much the same as his student’s.

On another evening when I was at a friend’s house, an Iranian girl came to visit his wife, sat down in a corner, and directly picked up a magazine. She didn’t look up when I spoke to her, and for a long time she said nothing but seemed nervous in her chair. I continued to converse with my friend. When he left, I turned once again to the girl, trying to put her at ease. When she did answer my questions, she did so evasively, never looking me in the eye and continuing to thumb through the magazine. Only when she came to some pictures of Cuban high-school girls marching with rifles on their shoulders did she speak out on her own. “They are alive,” she said simply. “They are marching for freedom. They are free now.” That was all she would say.

I met an intelligent young man from an old and respected Teheran family who was about to go to the United States to study. At first I thought that he was a progressive, from the way he discussed the outmoded laws of his religion; but when it came to a general discussion of religions, he defended his own, conservative though it was, against all others. In fact, he went so far as to call it “the justest and best of religions.” When I asked him what he wanted to study in the United States, he replied with an ironic smile, “I want to study against America.”

Even one good friend of mine, who had spent a long time in the United States, had lived well while there, and went out of his way to keep his old American friends and make new ones, used to talk the same way. “You Americans overthrew Mosaddegh,” he would say. “Some day the people are going to come to power again and kill the Shah and overthrow his government. We are going to get out of our alliances with the West and have a neutralist government. We will get help from Russia, too. We won’t need you any more.”

* * *

In this way, I came to sense the heavy undercurrent of anti-Americanism all around me. Its presence seemed natural, since Afro-Asians nowadays appear anti-American as a matter of course, hating alliances with big powers but not giving much thought to the need for them; and certainly there is much to complain of in American foreign policy. In fairness, I must say that I had many good Iranian friends who did not share this hostility, who took me in good faith and did not try to blame me and my “imperialistic” country for the general hostility between peoples. But they were exceptional. And while many young Iranians I met would not call themselves Communists if they were old enough to remember what the Soviets had done to their country during and immediately after the war, or if they had the imagination to realize what would become of them in a Communist system, they still weighed Russia and the United States on different scales.

It was not until my second year, when I had settled down to study in one place and got to know some of the people around me better, that I came to understand the forces underlying this contradiction. Hitherto I had been misled by the amiability and ready hospitality of the Iranians, by their insistence that all men must become brothers and that the illusory walls between peoples must be broken down. I gradually realized that they had no real interest in brotherhood, and certainly not in brotherhood with Americans. When they complained about America, they were not reacting to misdeeds committed by a brother or a good friend, which once redressed, would be forgotten. They were crying out against the modern world, the very facts and circumstances of modern life.

This outcry was baffling, even to one who might sympathize with it. At times it seemed to stem from leftist thinking, at other times from nationalist thinking which were often mutually incompatible. Many Iranians I met really were convinced Communists, Socialists, or Nationalists; yet many more who professed to be so had no concept of the ideology they were professing, no firm intellectual position.

I felt this very strongly one evening when I went out with some young poets and writers with whom I had recently made friends and whom I later discovered to have been Communists, Socialists, or Nationalists of some form or another. In the midst of drinking vodka, making small talk, and listening to various people recite their poetry, someone made a comment that instantly provoked a rain of bitterly anti-American exclamations from the others at the table. I started to argue with them—why not?—and at once the argument took fire and burst wild with insults and bitter invective. I sat shaking my head as one of them waved his fist at me and said that I had better commit suicide because the West was all washed up. Another sat back, grinning and rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, and gloated that for all the money and arms in the world America could not buy a grain of the Orient’s wisdom and could not postpone her own inevitable destruction by even one day. At that moment it flashed through my mind that the people with me were not just against American foreign policy, which could never have called forth that sort of outraged, unsolicited declamation. When the confused echoes ceased, I knew that they were not even talking about the economic and political realities of the modern world, which they should have accepted as impersonal pressures, pressures outside the pay of Britain and America. What they were preaching was an anarchistic holy war, a war against all society and social intercourse and the pressures and restrictions it brought on the individual (especially that pattern of social life imposed, consciously or unconsciously, upon them by the West). They were merely clothing their declaration of war in a variegated garb of leftist and nationalist ideas a garb that they could be persuaded to remove only nominally, and then only out of hospitality or fear for an outsider in their presence.

The most articulate of these intellectuals was a tall, slender man who had spent six years in England and spoke powerful, almost flawless English, well-emphasized by a noble, ascetic profile and a touch of gray hair around the temples. At once he made a string of withering remarks against the government. I asked him what, in his opinion, was wrong with the government. He said that it was bleeding the nation at the profit of a few degenerate millionaires (adding that he was an aristocrat himself). “Look at all those cars on the street!” he exclaimed. “Look at all the beauty shops! Look at the shops selling American television sets and cheap American records! Oh, it makes me sick. It makes me sick to watch my nation’s money, the sweat of our peasants, vanish into these foreign luxuries. Ohhhh!”

He was right in saying that Iran had a weak system of currency control and that the rich were sending millions of dollars out of the country for frivolities. But the government with strong resistance from large interests was starting to combat this, and has continued to do so. When I told them that he could not criticize the government for making improvements, he dropped the subject. He said he really hated the government because it had come to power through American money, by overthrowing Mosaddegh. I asked him about the mobs that came out against Mosaddegh. “Oh, they were bribed. Anyway, they were made up of thieves and beggars from the south of Teheran.”

“So were the mobs which supported Mosaddegh,” I said.

“No!” he shouted. “Mosaddegh was beaten by American money! Not by the Iranian people! Mosaddegh was beaten by American money, and when he was tried in court, he even read out the number of the check that the Americans had paid to have him overthrown!”

“The chaos of the nation’s economy defeated Mosaddegh,” I said.

“That’s a lie,” he replied. “The Western powers were against him. What else do you expect from a blockade?” I asked him how the Western powers could have supported Mosaddegh after his stand in the oil crisis. “Bah!” he shouted. “We could have run the oil refinery ourselves! The British government wouldn’t let us; that was it. She forced her technicians to leave.”

I said, “They left of their own accord.”

“Then Russia would have bought our oil!” he exclaimed. “Russia would have bought it! As soon as our government started trade agreements with the Russians, you overthrew it!”

“By that time,” I replied, “the only people supporting Mosaddegh were the Communists.”

“The Communists! The Communists!” He banged his fists in frustration. “Can’t you say anything original? Must you repeat the gibberish the State Department puts out?” He shook his head. “Why do you talk that way? Why do you keep talking about the Communists? The other Americans [mostly exchange students] don’t talk that way. We don’t have anything against you. We like most Americans who come out here. As individuals, we like them. I’m shocked. I thought you might have some understanding. I thought, since you were interested in Persian and all that ” He shook his head.

“And they killed Fatemi,” another one broke in. “They killed that genius Fatemi.” Fatemi was Mosaddegh’s foreign minister and quite pro-Russian. “If you could have seen what they did to him it was a crime. The greatest crime.” Fatemi had been shot. “Everywhere the Americans go, it is the same,” he added. “America is guilty of the greatest crimes.” I mentioned some of the crimes Communists have committed and asked him what he thought of them. He laughed and impatiently brushed my question aside. I insisted I was telling him the truth. He told me to prove what I said with photographs and articles.

“If you had not overthrown our Nationalist government,” the noble and ascetic one went on, “we could have sold our oil to the Russians. We could have thrown out these foreigners. They do us no good. They take money from us and raise the cost of living. We could have built a strong economy. But you overthrew the people’s government.”

“How?” I asked.

“I told you! By bribery, by paying the army a million dollars to stage a coup d’etat.”

“What million dollars?”

“Ah, ah, ah! Mosaddegh read the number of the check in court.”

“It was a check from Point Four,” the first one affirmed.

“What check?” I asked. “You asked for proof what proof is there of this?”

“Pah! Mosaddegh proved it,” said the noble, ascetic one. “He read the number in court.” The other one nodded.

“Here you doubt what I say,” I went on, “you doubt things that were written in newspapers all over the world; and then you say something you cannot prove and demand that I believe it?”

The other one smiled. “It doesn’t matter what you believe. It’s what the people know that matters.”

I tried another tack. “Then suppose Mosaddegh had stayed in,” I continued. “The country would have gone Communist.” By the end of his regime the Communist Party was the only powerful group supporting him. A friend of mine heard an Iranian Communist boast once, while drunk, that his party had planned to kill Mosaddegh when it took over.

Everyone at the table was outraged. They accused me of slandering and parroting State Department clichés. They said the Communists could never take over Iran. It couldn’t be done. Every time the Russians had come into Iran, the Iranians had expelled them.

“Truman expelled the Russians from Azerbaijan in 1946,” I said, “by threatening Stalin with war.”

“Nonsense!” one person shouted.

“It was our prime minister!” exclaimed another. “It was our army!”

“Well,” I said, “the army supports the present government.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” one of them retorted. “The generals support the government. Some officers who were sent from orphanages to military school when they were small children support the government because they have no other dignity. But most officers, the young and enlightened, don’t support this government.”

“Then why don’t they take over the government and change it?” I asked.

“They won’t let them,” one said.

“The Americans won’t let them,” another said.

“The Americans have their guns trained on the city,” a third said. “We are paralyzed.”

The discussion went on. “Why can’t we get aid from the Russians as well as the Americans?” the first one asked. “The Russians have done great things. Did you know that in Soviet Central Asia the literacy rate is one hundred percent?” I asked him if he could prove that. He told me that he could, by bringing me a magazine from his house a British magazine, as no American magazine would print such statistics but he never did. “The Americans have done nothing in this country,” he continued, “that the Russians could not have done better. The Americans have done nothing but send technicians, who stay aloof from the people and raise the cost of living so that the common people can barely stay alive. People are starving because of the Americans. Even the so-called development programs are a farce the dams, the agricultural assistance, the public health improvements, are nothing but conspiracies of big business. American aid to this country is nothing but a bribe a bribe to keep the wealthy and degenerate in power so that America can continue to bleed us dry.”

“Look at Bulgaria,” said one who had passed through there. “That country has made great progress. Then look at the misery of Turkey. Those two countries were the same once. Everywhere the Russians have gone they have brought great progress. Look at what they have done in Afghanistan. All the young intellectuals in Afghanistan are Communists.” I said that I knew some young Afghan intellectuals who were not Communist. “How do you know they aren’t?” the man asked. “They wouldn’t tell you if they were. They wouldn’t tell any American.” I was the only one among them who had been to Afghanistan; but again, they refused to believe what I said.

By this time it was late, so we stopped talking and went home. But the discussion continued from then until I left Iran. From that day on, Iranians could tell that I knew what they were thinking and they could not keep themselves from discussing it with me. In a sense, it was as if there was bad blood between my tribe and theirs, and I was being held accountable for it.

Other people had different things to say. Many contended and Western diplomats have heard the same thing that the Communist mobs who rioted towards the end of Mosaddegh’s rule were not Communists at all. They claimed that to say so was just propagandizing, that the “Communists” in the mobs were really agents of the British, who wanted to scare America into overthrowing Mosaddegh. Some others Communists said that the mobs really were Communist in fact, that all of Teheran was Communist and that the mobs were just the vanguard of a free peoples’ democratic movement to throw Rockefeller and the imperialists out of the country. Although the people overwhelmingly supported these mobs, they could do nothing against American tanks because they were weak and oppressed (of course, the Communists had also infiltrated the army very effectively). Still others, who had thought a little about the future of their country, said that it might even be for the good if Iran turned Communist. “Of course, if it did, I would be the first to get out,” they swore, or, “Why doesn’t America let the Russians come in and take over? Then America can become the champion of the people in their fight for liberation.”

Without going into a discussion of the virtues and defects of Amini’s recent premiership, or the advantages and disadvantages of laissez-faire capitalism relative to Communism in furthering the development of Iran’s economy, one can easily maintain that such a discussion would be valid, and that it would not be easy to make a choice between the two approaches. Yet young Iranian intellectuals seem already to have made their choice almost without hesitation against any approach based on Western liberalism.

One student of my acquaintance made a revealing comment once when he told me, “All the students in Iran are leftists. Either one is a leftist, or one doesn’t think.” He wanted to convince me that the left was the only intellectually defensible position to hold anywhere; what he really meant was that the only political attitudes acceptable to Iranian youth as a whole were leftist ones. This is true. Many young Iranians “think” without being leftist, of course, and many have no political inclinations of any kind; but there is no active, youthful, but serious movement for them to join other than the movement of the left, and they often have to keep their disagreement to themselves in order to live at peace in the young intellectuals’ world. Actually, and this is the essential point, anarchism is stronger than leftism among Iranian students. But it is the left that guides them and draws the young intellectuals away from whatever organizations might offer a program of reform within the present structure of government.

All the political goings-on, all the rallies, demonstrations, and parades that took place in the University of Teheran while I was there, all the pamphlets that went around in open gatherings or under desks in fact, all serious student organizing was done by leftist groups, usually by the National Front, a Socialist organization, but also by crypto-Communists sheltering themselves in the National Front.

Student Socialists rarely planned beyond the overthrow of the old order and the subsequent vendetta. They approached me from time to time, looking for argument or approval. Often they told me how they had to conceal their allegiance and pretend to be simple nationalists. They described the organization of their party to me, including the means they used to conceal themselves from the government formation of secret meetings, clandestine sessions with Radio Moscow, smuggling of pamphlets from counterpart organizations in East Germany, and so on. With little hesitation a student would relate how Iran needed Socialism not Communism how so-and-so, whose word counted, had told him just that; how America could help the Iranian people by supporting this Socialism; and how I could support it by writing about it.

It may seem at first that the students were violently leftist because, after weighing all the factors, they thought anti-Western Socialism or Communism could develop their country faster than any other form of government. “Look at Russia,” they said. “After all, she is beating America in the race to the moon, in armaments, in steel production, in dam construction, and so on.” Yet many had heard the other side of these arguments, too. For instance, many who condemned America for not giving Iran a steel mill knew that it would be implausible to manufacture steel in Iran, that no one would invest in Iranian steel, and that the country saves money by buying steel from Germany and Japan instead of producing it herself. Many who condemned America for not “industrializing” Iran knew that America has built several factories in Iran but that the Iranian government and its employees have been unwilling to run them properly.

While I was in Iran, I read an indicative article in a popular weekly from the spring of 1958, which bitterly attacked America’s foreign aid program. It claimed that Iran could do much better for herself if America, instead of sending technicians and aid, just sent a supply of drugs and medical equipment. Here we see a widespread tendency at work: the article made no mention whatever of the drugs and medical equipment America had already brought to Iran, or of the technicians sent with it, or of the problems they had encountered while in Iran.

Young Iranians invariably criticized American aid and found little value in it. In the last seven years America has given Iran over a billion dollars in aid. Certainly much of this money has gone to waste, through either corruption (consciously or unconsciously overlooked), inefficiency (misappropriations, experiments that did not work, American ignorance of the society they are dealing with), or misunderstandings such as one reads about in The Ugly American. However, American critics such as the authors of The Ugly American or C. Wright Mills (who in his Causes of World War Three expressed the opinion that American aid programs were doomed to fail in the face of Russian aid because our foreign policy was so un-altruistic and oppressive towards the Russians) as well as the Iranian critics tend to neglect the main difficulties. The main problem with the mission to Iran is that Iranians responsible for administering it and applying the advice it gives are often not interested in making it work for their country.

First of all, they are usually not apt to work well unless made to. But the American technical mission to Iran cannot make Iranian employees work: it cannot fire recalcitrant employees or force the government to hire enthusiastic ones. Many capable government officials, including at least one minister and several deputy ministers of the interior, have been forced to resign. One wonders whether their resignation stemmed from working well with the American mission. Others, though corrupt, have gained power through the American mission, even though it has not given them recommendations. To advise without interfering in administration is a policy on which the American government is insistent Because this policy prevails, work often falls into the hands of the corrupt and incompetent and lags behind. Moreover, many Iranians think that America is no less imperialistic for giving Iran a free hand in administering the aid she receives.

Once I got into an argument with a couple of medical students in Mashad. They claimed that America and her fellow conspirator the British (“Always remember,” they said, “that the Americans and the British are cut from the same cloth because they speak the same language”) were guilty for all the misery in Iran the poverty of the masses, the control of wealth by the few, the stagnant economy, the iron tyranny of the government. “But we will change all that,” they said. “When we come into power and drive out the imperialists and the feudalists, you will see a renaissance.”

“Well,” I replied, “for the moment you have to live with the present government, so why not postpone your vengeance and do what you can to help your people anyway? After you get your doctor’s degrees, why not go out into the poorest province, offer your services to the poor and sick (they will keep you alive), and tell your friends to do the same?”

“Ridiculous!” they replied. “Do you think we are that low, to let the clique that rules our people deceive us and bribe us to go out and live among ignorant peasants who understand nothing, not even what their own interests are? Are we so foolish as to let them disunite us and exile us from the centers of activity? Our country calls us, not those despots. We must stay here and fight.”

I asked another student, who claimed that America had done nothing good for his country, why the Iranians didn’t at least put what they had gotten to good use. “We will not work with America,” he replied, “or with any country that has suppressed the people and thrown out its leaders and rightful representatives.”

Anti-Americanism is not, however, the most important reason that draws young Iranians toward extreme leftist organizations. The Communists attract the young because they are the loudest in their denunciations of the status quo at home and the most violent in their attacks on the Shah and the present reform-minded government. They promise a great deal, especially to young people, and are impressive because of the strength of their convictions.

Iran’s social structure is traditionally very paternalistic and authoritarian. The government is highly centralized and autocratic. The population of the country consists of close-knit tribes and big families, likewise governed by autocratic elders, who are too conservative and arrogant to broaden their knowledge of the world and too jealous of their own position to promote the reforms necessary for their country. As the elders stiffen in their resistance to modern ideas, they oppress their inferiors and juniors more and more, and the gap between the generations widens.

I used to hear a Western professor describe the pitilessness often the sadism with which many of his colleagues in the University of Teheran examined their students. The examinations were oral, and the students often passed only after the professors had established their superiority over them. They would ask the students difficult questions such as no Western professor would expect them to answer. The students, brought up to mimic their professors’ pronouncements and suppress their own initiative, came in sleepless and trembling with apprehension.

I used to observe the deference students showed their teachers: they all stood when a teacher entered or left the room; they bowed their heads whenever a teacher passed by; they copied everything he said in class with diligence, never questioned him, and never visited him in his office to propose a differing opinion. (In class I once corrected a professor on a minor error, a slip of the tongue, and he spent over half an hour disputing this correction, trying, by confusing me, to force me to say in the end that he had never made the error in the first place.) Compare this with what the students used to say in their teachers’ absence: in reality they had no respect for them and accused them of all sorts of treachery and immorality. Men such as Manuchehr Eghbal, ex-prime minister and onetime president of the University of Teheran, or Doctor Ghorban, ex-chancellor of the University of Shiraz, showed a high degree of competence in their university work; yet few students would admit that Eghbal was an honest man who never got rich by working for the government, or that Ghorban was a good professor of medicine and drew little profit from the twelve jobs mostly honorary that he held during his chancellorship.

The gap in generations is also reflected in anachronisms in the social system, which the young are entitled to oppose. There is little need any more for the intensive religious training still carried on in the schools, with its heavy memory work, studies of outmoded legal concepts, and biased historical teaching. There is little value in some of the old social restrictions either. The young people, hearing how free social life is in the West and how easy it is to find part-time work (even if it is manual) or to go out with girls, make every effort to go abroad for a superior education. Often they never come back.

Through the poets I became especially familiar with one aspect of the conflict. The young poets were attempting to find new ways of expressing themselves in their language and had come up against a very rigid tradition. To most literate Iranians, a poem must be written in the classical language, must contain a fixed number of lines in conformity to its subject, must follow one of the established metric patterns, and must rhyme consistently. It is as though no poet could gain recognition in America unless he wrote sonnets, quatrains, odes, or epics with the same strictness of meter and rhyme, and even the same vocabulary and idiom, that one finds in Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats. It is as though all respectable American literary critics or professors of English literature were to condemn the poems of Robert Frost for not adhering to the classical forms.

The free verse, or “white poetry,” that young Iranians are writing now is new and inspired by modern Western poetry. In 1920 a prominent poet brought out the first work in this genre. Most of the young poets have a wide knowledge of classical Persian poetry and versification as well as of Western poetry, but it is “white poetry” that arouses their enthusiasm. Yet because the young are fighting to secure an audience for it, the elders are becoming more and more determined to fight against it, thus arousing conflict. Drawn up on one side are the old guard of the universities and their proteges, who still produce most of Iran’s poetry and criticism and still control the obedience of young students of literature. On the other side are the young poets, the habitues of the coffee shops and vodka-and-shishlik hangouts in downtown Teheran, who sit around reading and discussing their own poetry as well as new poetry from abroad, gossiping about the embarrassment one of their number may have caused someone from the old guard in public, or figuring out ways to mask their radical political views so that no one else can find them in their poetry. The old guard, at their most dogmatic, ignore the young poets altogether or accuse them of opportunism and poor workmanship; at their most tolerant they shrug their shoulders and dismiss the young as immature and unconcerned with deeper human emotions. The young poets, for their part, keep striving for public approval by writing widely (even for movie magazines), staging public readings, and working on foreign scholars to translate and publish their works abroad.

What is missing is debate between the two groups. There is neither mellowing of the youthful vitality and experimentation nor revitalization of the classical rhetoric, brilliance of description, and technical skill. I heard more than one professor, well-versed in Persian literature, say that the young poets “were not poets at all.” And I heard a spokesman of the young poets say, in appraising another young poet’s work, “What this poet has done so far is good; now, let us hope that he breaks even further away from the traditional styles and comes to discuss more current issues.” Another young poet accused one of his fellows of anachronism and insufficient enthusiasm for radical views.

Strangely enough, rebelling against their elders and their society means that the young Iranian is protesting on the one hand against the old authoritarian, paternalistic society of tribes, and on the other hand against the selfish tradition of individualism and social unconcern that is strong in Iranian society. It may seem surprising to encounter this individualism in an environment of strong class distinction and rigid social behavior, but in reality the apparent rigidities of the society are characteristics evolved to protect the individual and keep strangers out of his affairs, not to suppress them. Perhaps they mirror the Iranian’s uneasiness toward society as such. Another friend of mine once claimed that the Mafia could control Iran. Because the Iranian people are disunited and wary of their own society, any powerful organization even a fairly small one could paralyze and control them merely by demonstrating techniques of intimidation and extortion.

It might seem that Iranian students become extreme leftists because they believe (having been told so by the enemies of the West) that their society contains ills such as class struggles which can be cured by imposing a variety of Marxist regimes upon it. But is a class struggle of the kind Marx diagnosed in nineteenth-century Western Europe actually taking place in present-day Iran?

For one thing, there is a very marked social mobility in the country and considerable respect for the individual as individual, no matter what his origins. An Iranian once told me that to get ahead in the country, one needed “money, connections, and gall.” I met many Iranians who had acquired the two former qualities by possessing the latter who had bettered themselves simply by pushing their own way ahead. For example, one of Iran’s wealthiest landlords started his career as an agent in a small cotton business; his boss appreciated his aggressiveness and married him off to his daughter. A young but respected professor of literature in a provincial university was the son of a washerwoman. Many of Iran’s prominent people came from equally humble beginnings: several recent prime ministers, people in other high governmental positions, and certainly many in high military positions. A good many of the country’s merchants started with a small shop in a bazaar, or a taxicab, or a small piece of land, or perhaps only a cartload of vegetables. The law does not force the poor to remain miserable. Any peasant can occupy and gain possession of a piece of unenclosed land by building a wall around it and squatting on it for a period of time. Even if someone else owns the land, he will have trouble evicting the squatter. I saw many poor people living on choice lots in the north of Teheran this way, and no doubt they will someday be able to sell their land and go into a small business with their profits. The only real distinction between classes in Iran comes from money and property, and this is available to one person as well as another. The Iranian people are racially homogeneous, and until the West began to give the rich real material superiority by bringing in machinery, automobiles, television, and the like, the rich lived much the same as the poor, and often still do. They ate simple meals, dined and slept on the floor, lived in homes no better-equipped (though of course bigger and more comfortable) than those of their peasants, and had no access to such secret weapons of superiority as technological power, international connections, or foreign languages. Thus there was little to prevent an Iranian who felt bitter about his humble birth from reaching the top if he was intelligent, worked hard, and had good luck.

Therefore, when the young Iranian rebels against the society of his father or grandfather, part of his rebellion is against the outmoded spirit of individualism—not just its aspects of amorality and disrespect for the law—and he often adopts a puritanical view of life. The young Iranian sees no future for a country that has no effective social security or taxation and that relies only on largesse to take care of its underprivileged; he has no patience with skepticism, debate, interest groups, and individual apathy towards society. When Cubans say that they used to be confused by their odd, corruptible electoral system and now feel that they have a more direct democracy under Fidel Castro, they are expressing what many Iranians feel about their own country.

Young Iranians are thus frustrated by the very facts of modern life. They know as well as anyone else how badly their country needs development and aid; they are as discouraged as anyone by the enormity of her needs. Yet they never really face them. Instead, they claim that the matter is out of their hands, that they are not allowed to work, that they are denied a share in running their country. The leftist and nationalist points of view help them entertain this attitude, and they exploit it as much as they can, not in order to rebuild their society but to rebel against it anarchically. Therefore, one can seriously question the sincerity of most Iranian leftism, just as one can praise the genuineness of most Iranian anarchism and the devotion of its adherents.

As I saw when talking with the poets, it is useless to question their assertions. They have one aim in mind, will use any means available to achieve it, and will not be stopped by anything. That aim is to rebel against their society, and one of the means is to reject Western liberalism (along with the rest of the modern world and its apparatus). Western liberalism has become more and more familiar to them at their own expense. It is often among those who have studied abroad, whom one would expect to be the most cosmopolitan and broad-minded of Iranians, that rejection is strongest. The young person is forced to stand up and take notice of the modern world, he comes to feel bitter for representing a poor, unhealthy country, so weak it can barely keep control over its own tribes, so poor it has to gear its economic life to the production of oil (for which it has little use and for which it has to employ foreigners), and so superstitious and fatalistic that the great majority of its population regards education as contrary to the will of God and turns to vodka and opium for refuge.

Western liberalism exposes the young Iranian to the weaknesses of his country, but it does not give him the confidence he needs to face them. It lays on his shoulders alone, and not on the shoulders of a powerful, well-organized bureaucracy in which he would have an important position, the crushing work, of confronting an opposition of ridicule, apathy, or intrigue. Nor will Western liberalism help the young Iranian gain respect from his own society. The same person who told me that all thinking people were leftists added, another time, this half-apologetic note: “We have to be you see, it’s hard to think otherwise when no one respects you.” He told me that he became a Communist when he was fourteen, motivated to join the party simply by a hatred of religion.

What will come of this rebellion? Will the young, when their turn comes to manage the nation and preside over its society, bring about the radical reforms and sudden elevation of morality and public responsibility that they dream of and discuss so intensely nowadays? What will be the outcome of their veiled anarchistic rebellion against the older ruling classes?

One can expect a climate of puritanism, conformity, and self-righteousness. The society will probably be more close-knit than the old one, and probably after a number of years it will bring a higher standard of living and a fairer distribution of wealth to its people. But it will also bring a more authoritarian and obscurantist climate of opinion. Not that such tendencies are absent in any society. Isolationists, xenophobes, and puritans thrive everywhere. The alienation of the young intellectuals in Iran, not only from their fathers and grandfathers but also from the course of modernization that their country has been following for the last hundred and fifty years, is surprisingly strong, but one can find it elsewhere. The alienation of the young Iranians is significant mainly because of its all-pervasiveness.

The intellectuals carry real weight in Iran, more than intellectuals in Western countries. By being dogmatic, uncritical of their favorite theories, and confused about the forces they are rebelling against—in short, through intellectual weakness—the young intellectuals have become more united than most other elements of the population. Being better educated and more aware of their interests than most, they wield a power and are a threat to their enemies out of all proportion to their numbers, and undoubtedly they are destined to occupy positions way beyond their qualifications.

From what I have experienced and described here, I would guess that if the power of the intellectuals was increased, it would be used irresponsibly, and that the people then in power would commit excesses beyond those of the present government, obsolete, corrupt, and authoritarian as it is. There is much evidence that active intellectuals are unwilling to co-operate seriously with moderate elements in the government, or with any moderate government. Often they show themselves more interested in the acquisition of power than in sober administration. For instance, most young intellectuals of my acquaintance burst out in tune with Soviet propaganda criticizing Amini or at least expressing doubts about him. They feared that at last the old-style government of individualism, conservatism, and landed interests might provide the country with a capable administration and thus prevent the laying of groundwork for an anarchistic revolution. Many condemned Amini’s reform efforts in 1961 because back in 1954 he had been the one to sign an oil agreement with Great Britain, ending Mosaddegh’s nationalization decree and resuming Iran’s oil exportation, at last. This action was quite irrelevant to Dr. Amini’s later reform aspirations, but many intellectuals would not forgive him for putting the country back to work again in proper order.

Intellectual alienation from obvious present-day needs was probably the most disheartening thing I found in Iran, and it broke my will to stay in the country any longer. I left Iran because in the end I came to realize that the liberal Westerner has no place among his better-educated Iranian contemporaries. I had ceased to communicate with them, and I imagine that it will be a long time before they bring their country out of the society that I saw in the making during my two years there.

_{Klein, Robert H. (ed.), Young Americans Abroad, 36-61. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.}