America+-+From+'Reading+Lolita+in+Tehran'

America: From "Reading Lolita in Tehran" This was a really short excerpt, but then again, a lot of the chapters in the book are, but it was interesting nonetheless. The first paragraph was a tweak confusing to me. I'm assuming that all of the happenings occurred among the Iranian student population and that the only people who seren't Iranian were the FBI agents and their dog. However, it doesn't seem like keeping the characters straight is really necessary considering the contents; it's more about the irony of the revolutionaries and torture.

The interesting part in the second paragraph that grabbed my attention was really the last sentence, "He [the tortured] could not bring himself to expose his tormentors ... once more proving the justness of the oppressed masses (114)." The biggest question in my head was 'what justness?' How were this man's tormentors just? It could be because the tortured was part of the revolutionaries and therefore could not give up his brothers in the revolution even if they had treated him brutally. So then the answer to the tortured's question of he had been treated so cruelly is that it was justifiable, and more importantly, that's the torture works. If, and I'm trying to make sense of the situation, the tortured was accused of being part of a group that was not in favor of the revolution, then the tortured has become a threat. Asking nicely won't get the information if true and there's no way to distinguish a lie from a truth when there's an atmosphere of suspicion, thus the information is extracted via torture. Let's face it, there is no "gentle" or "proper" way of torturing; it's a method turned to when, in the tormentors mind, there is no way to get a straight answer. Evidence is not needed; if there were evidence the tortured would've been taken care of in a completely different manner, he'd would've been eradicated. To draw parrallels to the torture talks under Bush, it would be hard to call for "proper" torture when no such thing exists, most, if not all, of the torture is based on suspicion, false confessions, wild goose hunts, profiling, and the all essential us-versus-them mentality. Now back to the second paragraph, how exactly could the tortured have just walked away defeated? Well there's the hive mentality of the group and the general peer pressure of the whole situation. It appears that the revolutionary Iranians were perfectly willing to dispose of one of their own to keep their ideals front and center. Returning with the FBI agents brought on "muttered threats in Persian (114)." At the same time, it was the tortured himself who brought the malevolent feelings against him. He went against the hive mentality; he thought about himself. All of this combined plays a role in the tortured's walking away because it also meant that he would be ejected from the group. In groups with hive mentality, the worst thing is too be abandoned, because then the security of the group is gone and the oppressors will have full control; it takes away a sense of security and power. So is this what the female friend meant by " 'the power of the masses' (114)"? Was the power of the masses simply the power of fear working in a hive mentality enviornment to create the feeling of power? More and likely; otherwise the masses, which simply stood on the sidelines to watch the ordeal, were in reality powerless to their leaders.

The interesting theme in the short little chapter was the comparison of the Iranian revolution to the revolution that overtook Russia which would eventually create the U.S.S.R. Specifically how "many quoted Comrade Stalin approvingly, spouting lines from a fashionable book, //A Brief History of the Bolshevik Party// ... about the need to dstroy ... the Trotskyites, the White Guards ... and ... [all] who were bent on destroying the revolution (114)." If the comparison is indeed being made by the students at that time, it's complete irony. Had any of them picked up an actual history book, they might've noticed that Stalin was a complete madman. Stalin himself had little to do with the initial Bolshevik revolution but spun his propaganda so much that he eventually became the person who single-handedly liberated Russia. In reality, the succession of power in the revolution was usually based on overthrowing the previous ruler and making the country hate them. Before Stalin was Trotsky and Lenin who were all for the revolution, but not Stalin's revolution. Keeping the parrallel in mind, the real Trotskyites were these first revolutionaries, the real people that would come to represent Stalin would be those who brought these students to "tried in a Revolutionary Court, tortured and killed as traitors and spies (115)."

The central point of the chapter though were the words of the person who "defended the right of the masses to torture (114)." His chilling argument that "there were two kinds of torture, two kinds of killing - those committed by the enemy and those by the friends of the people. It was okay to murder enemies (114)." Argue against it all you want, be disturbed by it all you want, but the reality of the matter is that in many ways he was, and is, right. True, he is arguing that the torture of the man was perfectly justified because it was protecting the revolutionaries, but in retrospect, cigarettes to the index finger in a hotel room seems light compared to the imagery that comes to mind of waterboarding: a dark, windowless cellroom with a single chair, with a man sitting in the chair, head covered in a tarp, barely able to breathe, if at all, only to be "drowned" on land over in over in a neverending hell... maybe that was too descriptive. In many ways though, it's simply a matter of perspective; what is the torture of the enemies and what is the torture of friends are divided by arbitrary lines, drawn by those in power or the general mass. The enemy tortures because they want the information to defeat the revolution, the friends torture for information in order to protect the people. So in many ways, there is no difference between the hotel-room torture and U.S.-sanctioned waterboarding; both were used to collect intelligence in order to protect the entities' respected interests that often conflict with each other, and that's where a lind has to be drawn that somehow magically makes "our" torture different than "theirs". Deep down, we know we're wrong, but we cling to our safety and call our actions justified while at the same time condemning the same actions being committed by others. Of course it's okay to kill the enemy, there's no difference between killing and murdering except the cannotations the words have, and perhaps some semantic differences, as long as the enemy is out to get you. And when you live in a revolutionary atmosphere, everyone __is__ out to get you. Sometimes literally, most times it's state-sponsored propaganda to get the citizens to cling to the government, or even just mass paranoia. There doesn't seem to be a concrete line that divides "right" from "wrong" in these instances, because everyone says we're in the right and they're in the wrong, if for no other reason than 'we are us and we are right.'