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Not so pure
Our parents made the greatest blunder they could ever make

By Vahid
November 23, 2001
The Iranian

I am a 20-year-old Iranian currently residing in Ottawa, Canada. I am amongst the Iranian youth whose family had to leave Iran hot on the heels of my birth. However, that has never waned my affection to my homeland. The irreversible mistake the previous generation made to pave the way for the creation of an Islamic Revolution, though unwillingly and intentionally, has profoundly revolutionised the lives of millions of Iranians who have never managed to taste even a bit of the freedom their parents emphatically mentioned they had prior to the revolution.

The present move of discontentment initiated by the youth of Iran who have born the brunt of a repressive form of the restrictions of basic freedoms very well depicts what the Iranian youth is asking for. They do not want to pay the price of the spider's web their parents have mistakenly created around them. What sounds somewhat bizarre is the growing popularity of Mr. Reza Pahlavi in and outside of Iran especially amongst the youth. One would assume the resurrection of his dynasty's reign, although he pledges greater freedoms than what was existent during his father's reign, sounds like a pendulum alternating between two possible options.

The exact motive of Mr. Pahlavi's growing popularity is attributable to the fact that the young both abroad and in homeland, is haggard, fed up and impatient. I can remember my parents telling me about the wide array of opportunities presented before the young in Iran prior to the revolution in terms of education.

It is irrefutable that the number of universities within the country were not enough to meet the growing demand, but it is undeniable, on the other hand, that the program launched by the Shah whereby tens of thousands of students were being sent abroad, in fact making Iran the country with the greatest number of university and college students abroad, contributed immensely to the fact we boast the best-educated and most Western-Minded population in the Middle East in spite of the fact that we are not well-represented by the current regime.

Nevertheless, it really saddens me to see how passive Iranians abroad are at singling out a decent and democratic leader to quench Iran's thirst of democracy. You might have got the impression that because I have exalted the Shah in the above paragraph, I am a staunch supporter of Monarchy. However, the only reason why I have stipulated his educational program was to emphasise the fact that he valued education a lot. On the other hand, I am not amongst those who totally welcomes the idea of granting Reza Pahlavi leadership.

As a young Iranian who has spent the bulk of his life abroad, I think we -- Iranian youth abroad -- have spent enough years outside of our homeland and I personally cannot wait for the day when we will embrace broad-based freedoms to lead us to prosperity. Above all, the potential and prowess our people possess are incomparable to those of any nation in the region. We have successful engineers, doctors, scientists and politicians abroad willing to create a second Japan in the Middle East, especially the young Iranian expatriate community, who opened their eyes abroad, is unbelievably patriotic and we young Iranians are ready to return to Iran to contribute to the excelling of Iran.

I first went to Iran at the age of 13, with all the exhilaration in myself to get a taste of what my homeland is like. Although my first impression of Iran was not an impeccable one; I gradually started to take to it mostly because of the optimism I had at the time and wanted to get a lot out of my summer holiday. Later on, I went to Iran successively for about five times until the age of 18. Throughout all these visits to Iran, I realised how the country was deteriorating and how hopeless people were getting, knowing the fact that the Iranian dignity they were proud of had been obliterated by a state which had contributed tremendously to the maligning of the image of the Iranian nation abroad.

What agitated me most was the situation of the young, who were completely hopeless about their future. At each of those visits, I noticed how the level of enthusiasm amongst the young to leave the country was bolstering and how the number of trained and skilled Iranians moving outside of the country was boosting. According to last year,s figures, the estimated brain-drain towards the outside of Iran is supposed to be at a rate of 220,000 people per year. This indicates how much we are contributing to the growth of the economies of other countries in the world, but ours.

This new generation has grown up listening to the stories told by their parents about what a completely different place Iran was prior to the revolution. As the baby-boomers of the revolution grew up two decades after that massive movement, they have started to voice their pessimism about how hard the acquisition of Democracy under a clerical rule is and how religion and Democracy are incompatible. Our parents made the greatest blunder they could ever make by falling for clerics, being under the impression that any regime that would supersede Monarchy would be favourable.That clearly underestimated the worse since they must have been fairly indignant at some adverse policies of the Shah.

However, the legacy they have left for their children has created a more indignant and also astute generation that has had to behave differently at home, at school and at work. A generation grew up to know that their homeland, Iran, is belittled throughout the world and that its citizens are being deemed as terrorists. A generation grew up to look forward to the day to leaving Iran as soon as possible. This generation will more likely appreciate the value of Secularism, something they have not tasted before

They have been right through the initial and current stages of this theocracy, which never respected its youth and has never been proud of their accomplishments and has always disdained its young population by strict and intolerable rules which has brought the young to the current stage at which the toppling the regime seems to be nigh given the present extent of discontentment escalating rapidly throughout the country. The young is devoid of any forbearance to even fall for the lies that this regime can be reformed and it seems to me that the current giant public movement indicates how livid the young are.

As a young Iranian, I believe my generation will not be as naive as the one preceding us. The previous generation dared to confine us to live either in a country with a constitution written with Medieval mentality or to leave the country to seek a new opportunity. We definitely will not be so pure...

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