I grew up in a midsize Iranian city, raised by two former political prisoners. My father had been tortured, but he never revealed any scars on his soul—except once. He worked in the construction industry, and I once helped him move leftover materials from a project site to our basement. As we went to pick up some thick and heavy electric cables, he froze, went white, and said, “They used to beat me with these.” Politics was not just a topic of conversation at home; it was the only topic. Regardless of the conversation, the conclusion was always predetermined: Tyranny is unjust.
Mine was an atypical household. My parents were not the average secular Iranians who still had a soft spot for the Shi’ite saints, who would drink alcohol nine months a year but abstain during the holy months. They were former Marxists, having gotten a taste of oppression in the Islamic Republic’s prisons in the 1980s and watched an impoverished Soviet Union collapse at the feet of American prosperity. My father, in particular, saw firsthand how the government mismanaged industry on a good day and abused it in pursuit of oppression more often. But as my parents shed the economic theories of Karl Marx, they compensated for it by holding fast to their atheistic beliefs. During the holy months, drinking was mandatory—even for me as a child—to stick it to the regime and Islam.
My father was a highly competent civil engineer who had attended an American boarding school in Tehran and college and graduate school in Germany. Being a communist, he could not go back to Iran until 1978, when the shah began making concessions to the opposition. But his business ethics were Western. He could not bring himself to cheat on his projects, and, after decades of work, he still did not know how to perform the most fundamental trade practice in Iran: bribing government authorities to win lucrative projects. He only once won such a project, to build a public clinic in a remote area, and that was because nobody else wanted it. The job required him to leave the house at 5:30 in the morning for a village in the mountains and get home more than 12 hours later, several days a week, for two years. I grew up watching my brilliant and hardworking father struggle financially, while hearing my mother tell me that I would never get anywhere in life because “we raised you to be honest, and this country is not a place for people like you and your dad.”
At 17, I left home for Tehran to study at a top engineering program. But my brief euphoria about an exciting big-city life and future success was quickly corrected by reality. My professors, with elite doctoral degrees, were struggling to make ends meet while working on their applications to emigrate to North America or Europe. One professor I was particularly close with, a young biomedical engineer, routinely traveled to London to present his findings. His work fascinated me, and I became his volunteer test subject in his experiments with electroencephalogram devices. During a conversation in the lab, I asked him what the dream outcome of the project was. He responded, “Getting my immigration application to Canada approved.” The prospects of his students helped explain his desire to emigrate: Only a few of my peers had hopes about their futures, and all of them were the sons of regime cronies.
At college, I had lost my one pleasure in life, discussing the injustices of the Islamic Republic, because such discussions could result in my persecution. Living under a totalitarian system makes you paranoid; always wary of whether someone is a friend or an informant, you master self-censorship. I did not wish to end up in a torture chamber like my father. I had hoped that, at least in college, I could finally meet girls—all K-12 schools are gender segregated. That did not prove to be easy, either. If you got too flirtatious, members of the Basij could always rat you out to campus security. It once happened to me, and I was let go with the threat that future misbehavior could result in my expulsion.
For years, I lived under the watchful eyes of student informants, attending school without any social groups or political clubs. Because it was an engineering school, subjects deeper than soccer rarely arose. When they did, most students fondly remembered the days of reformist President Mohammad Khatami (hardliners had been carefully kept out of our social circles). Still, seldom did anyone question the regime in its entirety. I learned to stop doing so because it was a conversation killer. Religion, on the other hand, simply never came up.
During this period, there was a screen—literally—through which I could see what normal life looked like. It was easy to buy American movies on the black market. Most people watched the classics like The Godfather or more recent productions like Benjamin Button and Sweeney Todd. I liked films about high school and college life. They were aspirational—even dreamy. That was the worst part of my lonely life, because I could contrast it with the one the Islamic Republic had robbed me of. I had to wonder, what just God would put me in that hell and another baby in the capital of freedom? My circumstances provided proof for my atheism, and it depressed me. In the spring of 2009, in my sophomore year, I attempted suicide.
Miraculously, I did not die. My mother’s instincts prompted her to call her sister to check on me past midnight. After days at the hospital, I was as good as new—at least physically. Meanwhile, a presidential election was brewing between the loathed incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi. I decided to join Mousavi’s campaign, and for the first time, I felt alive.
I had grown up without purpose or agency. Showing up to campaign events, distributing posters on streets, and, most importantly, the camaraderie with my fellow volunteers became the cure for my depression. After months of hard work, the election day arrived. Our candidate lost—because of election fraud.
The Green Movement emerged as a result. Young Iranians took to the streets to demand a recount. The movement grew. At one point, more than 3 million people were marching on the same street in Tehran. Never in my life had I seen Iranians be so charitable and kind to one another. A rugged society had found solidarity. A video of demonstrators giving water to captured guards went viral. Deep down, I knew that the captured guards would return the mercy with bullets if given the opportunity. During protests, I was in the front, not covering my face, with one thought on my mind: I will either succeed and become a hero or die a martyr, but I will not go back to my old life. I was frustrated that very few people seemed to feel the same.
That was during the daytime marches. Nighttime protests were the opposite. The crowds were small, but they were violent. I was among my fellow radicals who had no fear. One night, a group of us disarmed a guard who had been shooting at us. He was on the ground and not getting up, either because he was wounded or because he was terrified. As I was wondering what to do with him—and giving him a few kicks—I saw a group of men carrying a heavy cement block. Before I realized what was happening, they dropped it on his head. You will never forget the sight of a human brain on asphalt. We all ran our separate ways.
To me, the regime had initiated violence against its citizens, and retaliation was simple self-defense. My family history had taught me that blood was the price of freedom, as had the example of America’s revolutionary forefathers.
Such violence was rare, which is why the Green Movement eventually failed. The vast majority of people had something to live for. There were very few of us who preferred death to life without dignity. The regime fully crushed the Green Movement in December 2009, known in Iran as the Bloody ‘Ashura. Again, I had nothing to live for, and my parents came to an intelligent realization: To keep me alive, they needed to say farewell to me, possibly forever, and send me to live a free life abroad.
The rest of Iranian society also came to a realization: The regime had immunized itself against reform. As President John F. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” I never convinced my fellow protesters of the need for violence. To them, my argument that peaceful marches would not change the behaviors of a zealous regime sounded like an untested theory. But history had informed my prescription. My family’s civil activism had ended in imprisonment and torture. To me, the regime had initiated violence against its citizens, and retaliation was simple self-defense. My family history had taught me that blood was the price of freedom, as had the example of America’s revolutionary forefathers. Since the Green Movement, the Islamic Republic has forced Iranians to confront this painful reality: Tyrants don’t reform peacefully.
The Islamic Republic promised economic leveling, the rule of Islam, and anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. What it delivered is cronyism and poverty, zealous hatred of Islam, and military humiliation by its enemies, enemies that are becoming increasingly popular among the Iranian people. Even those who believe in the revolution’s ideals admit that the regime has failed to uphold them.
Since I left Iran in 2011, Iranian society has gone through the education I received from my parents. Iranians have not become secular but militantly anti-Islam, which they see as a tool of oppression and an impediment to progress. A few years ago, a friend realized that his father was not performing an annual religious ritual. When he asked why, the septuagenarian responded, “Because I have come to realize that all these things are bulls–t.” Another friend who would boast about getting blisters on his hands for performing religious rituals now drinks on Ashura, the most sacred day of religious mourning in Shi’ism. I learned that you cannot succeed in Iran by living an honest life; they learned that you cannot even if you lead a dishonest one. Once upon a time, joining the regime’s security apparatus would have guaranteed prosperity. No longer, as even the regime’s own rank and file are struggling materially.
In college, I worried about sharing my political opinions, confessing my atheism, or admitting my Zionism. I usually remained silent during public conversations or challenged people’s assumptions without stating my own views. My friends tell me that the opposite has become a phenomenon. I hear stories such as, X person came with a friend. He must be in the Basij. He was silent when we were praising Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. To stick it to him, I even juiced up my praise and cursed at Khamenei more.
After the 2022 protests ended, mothers began talking about what to do when people rose against the regime again. Many of them told each other—and me—“I used to beg my children to stay home; next time, I am going out with them.” And sure enough, in this latest wave of uprising, all demographics were out, demanding change.
The recent nighttime protests have been the most telling about the lengths to which the Iranian people are willing to go to oust the regime. The scenes are similar to my riot nights, but many multitudes larger. There are videos of people setting security guards on fire while crowds of onlookers cheer. Mosques and seminaries—including, according to video footage, a mosque I frequently passed in Tehran’s upscale neighborhood of Sa’adat Abad—were torched multiple times. One surgeon told me that when people were brought in with injuries, the hospital staff checked to ensure that the patients were protesters—and not guards—before treating them. The Hippocratic oath has reached its limits. According to the surgeon, this has been routine practice in other hospitals, too. The latest report claims that 36,500 Iranians sacrificed their lives, making it the worst massacre of civilian protesters in world history. That is six times the number of American troops killed in both Afghanistan and Iraq over 20 years. Iranians have done their part, and it is still not enough.
Our movement failed in 2009 because very few of us were willing to embrace death in the pursuit of a dignified life. Fifteen years later, most Iranians no longer have anything to lose. Their options have narrowed down to heroic success or martyrdom for the revolution. For my entire professional life, I have been the lonely member of the diaspora arguing that the regime will not fall, due to the timidity of the protest movement and the commitment of the security forces. For the first time, I can see the Shi’ite caliphate succumbing to the radical nation it has created; its timid suppression forces, unlike in 2009, know that they will not be given water if captured and not treated if wounded.
I recently asked a young Iranian woman what she predicted might happen. “We’ve done our best, but we need a foreign push.” She was speaking in Persian, but, in an all-too-common way for young Iranians nowadays who throw an English word in every other sentence, she used the English word “push.” Her subconscious was making a point that, despite the regime’s best efforts, the country has adopted the most radical notion of all: Americanization. After all, asking for foreign intervention is the American way. Even George Washington asked the French to help.
