A joke has been circulating widely in Iran these past few years:
One day, a fox sees a friend running fast through the forest. "Why are you running?" asks the fox. "They are killing foxes who have three testicles," the friend replies. "So, why are you running?" the bewildered friend asks again. "After all," he adds, "all the males in our skulk have only two testicles." As he quickens his pace, the fleeing fox says, "Yes, but they kill you first, and then count your balls."
When a regime is paranoid and when it tries to interfere in every aspect of private and public life, its citizens will run like the fox. In Iran, every unexpected ring of the phone, every unexpected nocturnal knock on the door produces a racing heart and a sense of imminent danger. The scars of living under a paranoid regime last a lifetime. Today, even after I have resided in California for almost a quarter of century, a ring of the phone can still provoke fear and trembling.
Earlier this month, I received a phone call. One hundred leaders of the Iranian opposition had been placed on trial and this was the first night of the grotesque spectacle. "You are mentioned in the indictment," the caller told me. Even though it was a good friend relaying this information, I felt a familiar rush of foreboding.
In style and substance, the trial of the hundred emulates the infamous Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Like their Bolshevik mentors, the mullahs are at least as keen in destroying those who share their ideology as those who oppose it altogether. Stalin, for his part, killed far more leftist writers than those of a tsarist persuasion. Pasternak was always safer than Babel or Bulgakov. In the Tehran trial, we witness leaders (former government ministers, a vice president even) who served the Islamic republic for 30 years paraded in front of the cameras, broken in spirit, wan in countenance, and wearing, for maximum humiliation, pajamas. For them, the indictment is the ultimate betrayal by a regime they had long served, and by an ideology they had long shared.
The first warning that I would be assigned some role in the regime's paranoid scenario came a few months ago. An editorial in Keyhan--Ayatollah Khamenei's mouthpiece--described the lawyer Shirin Ebadi, the scholar Abdol-Karim Soroush and myself as partners in an "American plan" to overthrow the regime. At about the same time, a number of so-called intellectuals and journalists began to accuse the three of us of the same alleged crime. Sometimes the language shifted: In the sterile jargon of the left, we were described as "comprador intellectuals" who pave the way for "imperialism."
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