Victims of the Shah
HERRICK, WILLIAM
Victims of the Shah The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran By Reza Baraheni Vintage. 279 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Golcz" Testicles crushed between two...
...Had the CIA failed and Iran been lost to 'Orrible Osip, there would of course have been torture as well...
...It is the youth who revolt against the monarch, it is they who are tortured, it is they who die and disappear...
...What can we do for them [the Soviet dissidents, the tortured] short of beginning World War III on their behalf...
...It is undeniable, too, that Iranian police and functionaries of savak are trained in the U.S...
...Only few years ago, members of a theater group were given between two and 11 years in prison for rehearsing Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths...
...Our history is the history of infanticide...
...In Quri-Chai, a slum of Tabriz, the nation's second largest city, there is one school for 100,000 children...
...Moreover, the end is hardly in sight because there are too many on this earth who pay selective attention...
...Nevertheless, engineers and doctors, few enough in numbers as it is, are jailed for treason if they criticize the neglect, the inefficiency, the lack of hospitals and schools...
...Baraheni answers: "There is only one man who knows: the Shah of Iran, our crowned cannibal, because he is the one who has swallowed them up...
...History...
...They are not pretty or objective or cool...
...Reviewed by William Herrick Author, "Golcz" Testicles crushed between two stones or in an iron vise, women and men sodomized against their will, prison cells where one can neither stand nor lie down, fire applied to soles of feet, and electric currents to genitalia, eyes gouged, burnings at the stake, gas ovens...
...The author of this book, a poet and founder of modern literary criticism in Iran, is another who has been tortured-not by the KGB or Chile's General Pinochet, but by savak, the secret police of the very same Shah who was helped into power by the CIA in August 1953...
...Before they unplug their ears to the victims' screams, they ask: whose side...
...The book begins with an Introduction by E. L. Doctorow...
...As he demonstrates, for most of that history, including the present, poets, writers, the population, have had to sing the praises of "the Ruler, Light of the Aryans and the Shadow of God on Earth...
...At the back of his tortured book he has included some of his poems...
...They are passionate denunciations of barbarism, and vibrating through every line is a cry for freedom: The old woman at the gate Was ready to tell us the names of the flowers It was her duty to tell us the names of the flowers But the old man came over to her And stapled her lips to her tongue...
...It seems the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union would rather die than live in freedom, whereas Doctorow would rather live than die for freedom...
...In the country that produces more oil than nearly all Arabia put together, people freeze to death in winter...
...All writers still must write in Persian-even if they know no Persian, and although less than half of the Iranians do...
...He teaches creative writing and lectures on literature, politics and oppression in his homeland-a bitter irony that should not escape us...
...Baraheni writes: "Now not only the face of Iranian society but also the forms of its poetry are determined in the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA...
...The Party...
...Where are the hundreds of young men and women who have been kidnapped by savak and never seen again...
...And Baraheni, in addition to witnessing the suffering of countless men and women when he was imprisoned for 102 days, was himself tortured in an attempt to force a confession from him for an unspecified political act of treason...
...Vae victis...
...Hamlet or Macbeth cannot be staged, because no Iranian must see a prince or king die on stage...
...After all, the Shah would not be around today if not for the support he received from an arm of the United States government...
...He swings out at all who commit atrocities, and pleads for a United States policy that would deny aid, arms and protection to countries that deny human rights to their citizens...
...When Doctorow deals with the Russians, however, condemnatory though he is of their "murderously rigid...
...The Nation...
...In fact, one definition of the kings of Iran is that they are youth killers...
...Our crowned cannibals find the flesh of young men and women more palatable...
...state paranoia," his moral fervor cools slightly...
...That is going too far, but one can hardly blame him for believing otherwise...
...Baraheni's real crime was seeking the truth through poetry and criticism and a study of Iranian history...
...The methods may change over the centuries, but the torture is always for a good cause: The King...
...Yet that doesn't ameliorate one's guilt...
...Born in 1935, the author now lives in exile in the United States with his wife and two children...
Vol. 60 • October 1977 • No. 21
