I grew up in a midsize Iranian city, raised by two former political prisoners. My father had been tortured, but he never revealed any scars on his soul—except once. He worked in the construction industry, and I once helped him move leftover materials from a project site to our basement. As we went to pick up some thick and heavy electric cables, he froze, went white, and said, “They used to beat me with these.” Politics was not just a topic of conversation at home; it was the only topic. Regardless of the conversation, the conclusion was always predetermined: Tyranny is unjust.
Mine was an atypical household. My parents were not the average secular Iranians who still had a soft spot for the Shi’ite saints, who would drink alcohol nine months a year but abstain during the holy months. They were former Marxists, having gotten a taste of oppression in the Islamic Republic’s prisons in the 1980s and watched an impoverished Soviet Union collapse at the feet of American prosperity. My father, in particular, saw firsthand how the government mismanaged industry on a good day and abused it in pursuit of oppression more often. But as my parents shed the economic theories of Karl Marx, they compensated for it by holding fast to their atheistic beliefs. During the holy months, drinking was mandatory—even for me as a child—to stick it to the regime and Islam.
My father was a highly competent civil engineer who had attended an American boarding school in Tehran and college and graduate school in Germany. Being a communist, he could not go back to Iran until 1978, when the shah began making concessions to the opposition. But his business ethics were Western. He could not bring himself to cheat on his projects, and, after decades of work, he still did not know how to perform the most fundamental trade practice in Iran: bribing government authorities to win lucrative projects. He only once won such a project, to build a public clinic in a remote area, and that was because nobody else wanted it. The job required him to leave the house at 5:30 in the morning for a village in the mountains and get home more than 12 hours later, several days a week, for two years. I grew up watching my brilliant and hardworking father struggle financially, while hearing my mother tell me that I would never get anywhere in life because “we raised you to be honest, and this country is not a place for people like you and your dad.”
At 17, I left home for Tehran to study at a top engineering program. But my brief euphoria about an exciting big-city life and future success was quickly corrected by reality. My professors, with elite doctoral degrees, were struggling to make ends meet while working on their applications to emigrate to North America or Europe. One professor I was particularly close with, a young biomedical engineer, routinely traveled to London to present his findings. His work fascinated me, and I became his volunteer test subject in his experiments with electroencephalogram devices. During a conversation in the lab, I asked him what the dream outcome of the project was. He responded, “Getting my immigration application to Canada approved.” The prospects of his students helped explain his desire to emigrate: Only a few of my peers had hopes about their futures, and all of them were the sons of regime cronies.
Read the rest at The Dispatch.
Shay Khatiri is a Senior Fellow at Yorktown Institute.
