My mother missed her flight out of Tehran on a Wednesday the same week that Israel launched its war against Iran on a Friday. The conflict ended 12 days later, following a Sunday bombardment of the underground nuclear sites of Fordow and Natanz by the United States. In Los Angeles, a city occupied by federal troops in support of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, all we could do was wait for news of a ceasefire, for her safe return. We endured as dual nationals caught between Tehran and the United States, between the city of my mother’s birth and the country of our citizenship, under siege by the same man and regime.
Now we wait again for news from Iran, 30 days into an Internet and communications blackout imposed by the government in the wake of an unprecedented, violent crackdown against peaceful demonstrators. Already a trickle of recorded horrors anticipates the flood to come. Over the course of three days in January, security forces beat, stabbed, and shot scores of civilians in unspeakable scenes of intimate terror. By the government’s own count over 3,000 people have died, most of them between January 8 and January 10, more than triple the number of lives lost to Israeli and American bombs last summer. There are well-founded fears that the total killed will increase tenfold as more evidence comes out in the coming days and weeks.
We live our lives as Iranians and Americans between existing and emerging autocracies, unrepentant regimes devoted to violence at home and abroad. Our circumstances position us, perhaps uniquely, to see the convergence of these two long-standing geopolitical rivals. When hooded men drag women out of cars or shoot them where they sit, when masked and unnamed agents pull children into unmarked vehicles in front of their terrified families, when the course of events render Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis indistinguishable from Mashad, Karaj, Tabriz, then our reward is perspective. We know that Iran anticipates what may happen in the United States, that the pair of murders by the equivalent of roving basijis in the Twin Cities are a dress rehearsal for the brutality yet to come.
I’ve devoted much of my writing and teaching in recent years to the proposition that Americans have much to learn from the brave efforts of activists and organizers in Iran who demonstrate the power of persistence at the ballot box and in peaceful gatherings in the streets and squares, who know that the struggle for democracy begins with accepting protests not as an alternative to voting but as its extension. As Narges Bajoghli recently highlighted, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement secured de facto abandonment of mandatory veiling “through years of outreach, patient organizing, and persistent civil disobedience.” The Islamic Republic’s greatest defeat since 1979 came because of collective action from below, not foreign intervention from above.
Events in Minneapolis and elsewhere have shown that Americans are quick learners. The spontaneous defiance of neighbors, organized at the grassroots into networks of mutual aid, the overwhelming goodness and courage of citizens rushing to the defense of non-citizens, whistles blaring against a chorus of “let them go, let them go” evoke memories of Iran 2009, 2022, and today. The resistance against ICE has upended the idea that the country is unraveling or that we are witnessing the end of the American experiment with democracy. Ordinary people are showing us every day that they not only love their country but are determined to fight to preserve it.
Knowledge goes both ways, of course. Repressive regimes learn from one another in iterative fashion, in order to refine their techniques of violent control. In its second term, the Trump administration has increasingly deployed the same playbook used by illiberal forces in Tehran and Moscow, if without the same aptitude or capacity. The rough control of objecting crowds, the paranoid insistence that protesters are paid agitators and outsiders, the harassment and arrest of political rivals: these are all hallmarks of the “new authoritarianism,” pioneered abroad and imported to the United States. The adept authoritarian knows when to deploy carrots instead of sticks, to conciliate where needed, and in this regard, the Trump administration still has much to learn. Its shoot-first, double-down-later approach to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, despite growing public outrage, suggests that the president and his minions are not up to the task, fated to remain in remedial class.
That Iran is a source of knowledge for activists and authoritarians alike may seem like an unlikely premise. There is a persistent belief that isolation and ideological rule render Iran a hidden and unknowable land, an Islamic Hermit Kingdom in the Middle East. Even before the current blackout, accurate knowledge of Iran seemed beyond reach. I can think of no other country where analysts and journalists alike routinely turn to tropes and clichés to fill in the gaps of their knowledge: a wall, a veil, ayatollahs on parade.
In fact, Iran has remained accessible for the members of its far-flung expatriate communities. There has been, since 1979, a steady exchange of culture and information across borders, carried back and forth by diaspora and native Iranians, producing threads that stretch across the generations, interlacing lives and memories. Family trips that begin as summer exchanges tied to the school calendar become more intentional and frequent as children get older. Years go by and now there are the weddings of nieces and nephews to celebrate with dance, a brother, a sister, a parent who has fallen ill, graves to attend to. My mother was on such a trip last June when the war broke out.
These exchanges, which continued even during the worst years of war and conflict, have had the notable effect of making us more devoted to our adopted country. Iran is always a temporary destination, a reminder of what we chose to leave behind. As I have noted elsewhere, we don’t go to Iran to find our “real” or lost identities. Our truer selves are produced here in the United States, across the generations. We become better Iranians by becoming Americans. America gives us that.
In seeking new beginnings, immigrants bring much to the United States in return, not least of all the knowledge of how things end. We know firsthand that the aspiring autocrat begins, always, with the weakest, the most exposed. (It was not by accident that even before last June’s war ended, Iran and the United States targeted their Afghan and Iranian refugees, respectively.) To be an immigrant, to be Iranian-American is to be aware of what is happening before our very eyes, to be reminded constantly of imminent danger from both sides of the hyphen, of the malice that resides within.
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