Posted by:
anybody
(
)
Date: December 09, 2023 10:04AM
She was lucky enough to have somwere to go and the financial resources to leave.
For most Americans, scenes from the fall of Saigon or the fall of Kabul are distant abstractions that could never happen here... but the day may soon arrive when "the border" won't be something to keep people out, but to keep people in.
I will never understand religious fundamentalists or why they are so desperate and driven by hate to destroy everything and everyone who is not like them.
You can tell yourself that you have nothing to fear, there's nothing to worry about, and this isn't happening all you want, but it is happening -- and one day they will also come for you.
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https://petapixel.com/2022/10/14/photos-show-what-life-looked-like-for-iranian-women-before-1979-revolution/https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iran-shah-regime-1979-revolution-protests-liberal-reform-hassan-rouhani-ayatollah-khomeini-a8141311.html"My perspective, however, is a little different. I spent a summer in Iran in the early 1970s, when the Shah was still in power, American backing for the regime was visible and an Islamic uprising was (barely) on the radar. Younger city women worked and wore heels and lipstick and regarded their chador-ed sisters in the religious cities and the countryside as backward. The assumed trajectory – assumed that is by Iran’s urban middle class, by foreign investors and by the UK and Washington – was that Iran was rapidly modernising and would take its place as a leading, and reliably pro-Western, regional power."
"Mary Isaac was headmistress of a charitable girls’ school in Isfahan, a character made of the same sort of determined and pioneering stuff as the solitary female travellers of earlier years. She had aspired to be a Christian missionary in China, but the missions there were being closed, and she was assigned to Persia instead. By the time the Shah nationalised education and declared that all school heads (among others) had to be civil servants, she was more educator than missionary, and was granted Iranian citizenship to continue her job."
"When I visited, she was living in retirement in a flat in the precincts of “her” school, more Iranian in many ways than British. She even adopted an Iranian girl."
"What I recalled in 1979, though, was this. She despaired of the impracticality of many of the new educated middle class, their condescension as she saw it towards their uneducated compatriots, and their refusal to become involved in politics, which left the field clear for clerics and the corrupt. She was also acutely aware of the authority wielded, largely invisibly, by the mullahs. That, she told me, nodding towards a small group of berobed and turbanned clerics conversing at the entrance to the bazaar, is where the real power lies."
"She also took me into the depths of the countryside, where mores and conditions were essentially biblical. The gap between rich and poor, between those with education and without, between north Tehran’s Westernised “fast set” and the shanty town that stretched as far as you could see on the city’s southern rim – and gave Ayatollah Khomeini his mass support base – was obvious"
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