foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Appendix 195
a regency for a while, before making definitive decisions." "The shah must
totally or partially step back. " "The Pahlavis should leave the country and
never be heard from again." But always, underlying all these responses, there
is the same leitmotif: U At any rate, we want nothing from this regime." I have
advanced very little.
One morning, in a big empty apartment where closed curtains let through
only the almost unbearable noise of the cars passing by, I met an oppositionist
who was described to me as one of the country's astute political minds. He
was wanted by the police. He was a very calm, very reserved man. He made
few gestures, but when he opened his hand, one could see large scars. He had
already had encounters with the police.
- Why do you fight?
- To bring down despotism and corruption.
- Despotism first, or corruption?
- Despotism sustains corruption, and corruption supports despotism.
- What do you think of the idea, often put fo rward by the shah's entourage, that
it is necessary to have a strong power in order to modernize a still backward
country, that modernization cannot help but lead to corruption in a country
that lacks a cohesive administration?
- The modernization-despotism-corruption combination is precisely what we
reject.
- In short, that is how you characterize "this regime."
- Exactly.
A small detail that struck me the day before when I visited the bazaar,
which had just reopened after a strike that had lasted more than eight days,
suddenly came back to me. Incredible sewing machines, high and misshapen,
as can be seen in the advertisements of nineteenth-century newspapers, were
lined up in the stalls. They were adorned with patterns of ivy, climbing plants,
and budding flowers, roughly imitating old Persian miniatures. These unfitfor-use
Western objects, under the sign of an obsolete Orient, all bore the
inscription: "Made in South Korea."
I then felt that I had understood that recent events did not signify a shrinking
bad{ in the face of modernization by extremely retrograde elements, but
the rejection, by a whole culture and a whole people, of a modernization that
is itself an archaism.
The shah's misfortune is to have espoused this archaism. His crime is to
have maintained, through a corrupt and despotic system, that fragment of the
past in a present that no longer wants it.