I was talking to my wife about how I was concerned about my two smaller brothers who are living in Iran and struggling with all the complexities of life in Ahmadinejad’s chaotic time. Then the conversation strayed to what I had noticed while reading the posts in Google Reader (what is referred to as Gooder by Iranian bloggers) that the people in our circle of friends (most of them virtual friends) who are currently living in Iran usually share. So, this is a group of people who religiously read every single post shared until they have “zero unread posts” and who know each other actually or virtually and sometimes leave personal comments for each other, which shows how secured they feel about the whole Gooder space.
Reading their shared posts I have found a very similar theme. Nostalgia! And about what? The 80's! Yes, the war time in Iran. But, why should someone feel nostalgic about the 80's? And I have to add here that this is the war generation we are talking about, the generation who spent its childhood in the 80's.
I was watching Van Trier's "Europa" the other day. It's about war-beaten Germany of 1945. A very dark movie that animates the complexity of the traumatized people of once a great nation, through an extremely dramatized love story. There was a line in the movie that is permanently marked in my mind. One of the characters of the movie says "During the war everything was simple and straightforward. It's after the war that the complexities grew in everyday life", and I am paraphrasing here. I thought about it and found it very true about the Iranian society. We lived a very simple life during the war time. A simple life of no luxury; where every family was depended on the subsidies and the "coupons" the government provided. The main concern was to make the two ends meet. There was no sense of competitiveness to achieve more in life. Because there was no "more" to it! And hey, life was tough alright; we were in one of the most brutal wars of after WWII world for god's sake. The lifestyle was simple.
For the kids like us, who were fed mainly by the two state TV channels, every single program on TV (and there was only a very limited number of them) had to be chewed upon in the greediest of manners. We had no other choice, we had to watch any single program tens of times. And that was the main in a few sources of imaginary world we had access to. The lives of the characters of the animated series, the children seeking for their parents, the lives of the castaway families; and those bitter Japanese series originally made for grown-ups; but there were no kid not watching them every week, religiously.
After the war, construction of the nation started. Iran is a rich country if she doesn't have to spend her resources to expense a destructive war. So, people's lives changed quickly. And people got back to their lush habits of living, denying all the bad memories of the war as if it never happened. Then it came the era of Khatami and the reformists. The reform that brought hope to people's eyes and changed their prospective overnight. They wanted khatami to overthrow the supreme leader based on the popular votes they'd given him. Khatami said “hey we are still an islamic republic, people! I can't fight with the Sepah and all that! Let's go on our slow but steady reform, that’s the only way.”
This time life was no simple. People had access to satellite TVs and the internet. They wanted freedom in its most European forms. They did not want religious democracy as Khatami had proposed. They wanted secular democracy.
Khatami's term was finishing when the reformist proposed Moein for presidency. People were disappointed at them though. They rationalized that they had had the worst. What could be worse than that. Khatami and reformists were puppets in the hands of the Supreme leader and the conservatives, they did not do anything. Most of them decided not to vote at all. And this was how Ahmadinejad came to power. People experienced days of each being worse than the previous. They dreamed about days of Khatami. They understood the difference it made to have the nation be run by the reformists or fundamentalists (not even conservatives). And it came the time to vote again.
Khatami's term was finishing when the reformist proposed Moein for presidency. People were disappointed at them though. They rationalized that they had had the worst. What could be worse than that. Khatami and reformists were puppets in the hands of the Supreme leader and the conservatives, they did not do anything. Most of them decided not to vote at all. And this was how Ahmadinejad came to power. People experienced days of each being worse than the previous. They dreamed about days of Khatami. They understood the difference it made to have the nation be run by the reformists or fundamentalists (not even conservatives). And it came the time to vote again.
Mousavi ignited the enthusiasm in the depressed, disappointed hearts of Iranians again like never before. This time people knew by heart that they wanted reform and they wanted it then. They knew how mistaken they were not voting for reformists the previous election. They went to the polls and voted for Mousavi, the majority of them, to make a landslide.
Do they let people gain what they had given them for the last 4 years back? The answer is no. They wanted it and they wanted it entirely. They could not afford another reformist in power. No, they wouldn't let go of the power. They would do anything this time. They wouldn't care even keeping up appearances. They would kill if it would necessitate. And they did; not by a few number: they killed tens if not hundreds. They arrested hundreds if not thousands. They buried the dead in unknown graves, they brutalized and tortured the arrested. They tried the heads of the reformist party. They beat, terrorized, and isolated reformists’ main three leaders which they did not dare arresting (and that was the only red line they did not cross). They shut down the websites. They blocked the news circulation. And there came the Google reader. The fastest, easiest, and safest way to circulate the news without being censored. And there came the generation of Gooder. The war generation with all its shattered hopes and dreams.
With its Nostalgia of the 80's.
