Para-militarization of Universities in Iran By Cyrus Bina and Hamid Zangeneh Open Letter to Academic Colleagues and the Academic Community At Large
The 16th of Āzar (December 7th) marks the commemoration of the 56th anniversary of student protest against the Richard M. Nixon, the then Vice President of the United States, who visited the Shah’s government of the post-CIA coup d'état in the late 1953 in Tehran. This is also an occasion for the continuation of protests against June 2009 post-election bloody crack downs against the Ahmadinejad administration and its benefactor, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’ei, which in large measure also brings to light the 30-year unpardonable conduct of the regime to the court of the public opinion again. The Islamic Republic is now turned into a paramilitary regime beyond the imagination of both the Shah’s regime and the founding fathers of the so-called Islamic Revolution. The irony of recent history that had positioned the Iranians between a premeditated tragedy and an impulsive comedy: the former—the CIA intervention that brought the Shah back; the latter—the pathetic post-election coup that metamorphosed the regime toward an all-encompassing paramilitary state. The context below is more pertinent to this year’s Student Day anniversary than ever.
As the universities in Iran have turned into the bastion of paramilitary "Revolutionary Guards" and "Basijis," the present-day post-revolutionary Sha'abaan bi Mokhs (literally, Sha'abaan the Brainless), like Mr. Kamran Daneshjoo and Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, portray themselves as learned individuals worthy of respect. These individuals, whose numbers are sky rocketing and whose purpose has nothing to do with learning and scholarship, have been able to get phony degrees and titles that presumably give them respect and thus prop up their stature to sugarcoat their thuggish and unbecoming mission as the agents of repression in Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad, of course, is a talented man who wore many hats in the past; he was a one-time assistant executioner in the notorious Evin Prison in which he was reportedly putting the final bullet (tir-e khalās) in political prisoner’s head. Ahmadinejad and his cohorts in the “Revolutionary Guard” and Basij are thus desperately seeking such titles in order to do their dirty work in disguise—as a “respectable” make-belief academic authority. And this is but a horrifying parallel for some of us who know one or two things about Iran’s recent history that the senior interrogators under the Shah’s regime too used to call themselves “Doctor,” when they engaged in interrogation by means of torture leveled routinely against the tied up political prisoners in the same prison in Tehran.
full: http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/9218/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
