Robert Fisk: Iran: A nation still haunted by its bloody past
The Independent / Robert Fisk
09-Feb-2009 (one comment)

There was not much mercy in the Iranian revolution: all the courts did was sentence men to death. But then there hadn't been much mercy before the revolution, when the Shah's imperial guard, the Javidan, or "immortals", slaughtered the crowds. I remember another court, in Tehran, where a man shouted at a torturer from the notorious Savak security service: "You killed my daughter. She was burned all over her flesh until she was paralysed. She was roasted." And the torturer looked back at the bereaved man and said quietly: "Your daughter hanged herself after seven months in custody." The killers even had a few secrets for us – their close and friendly relationship, for example, with British agents and their Savak counterparts. Not unlike, I suspect, our relationship with Pakistan's state torturers (or, I suppose, with America's torturers). It was easy to hear evil. In fact, there was even a face-mask that you could buy for a few riyals, a grotesque version of the Shah's face with horns sticking out of it. The moment I put it on, a whole crowd of Iranians started shrieking at me. So I took it off.

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A crimson tide overflowed

by fiskfisk (not verified) on

A crimson tide overflowed the fountain at the great cemetery of Behesht Zahra – close to where the great man himself now lies – and we would later watch corpses coming back by the hundred. I think the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq was final proof of the revolution.

Iran did not, as the US hoped, fall to pieces, but it entered a kind of stasis, a sort of childishness from which it never awoke. The French word infantilism may be closest. It was government for and by the dead. Iran had become a necrocracy.

So true, Necrocracy sums it up pretty eloquently.