Thirty years ago, during the several months past, my generation was restructuring social life in Iran, breaking down government doors previously impervious to people's demands, evicting a dictatorial bunch of idiots who had been imposed on us in 1953, in a coup inspired in the U.K. and carried out by the CIA.And so it was, thirty years ago, during these very months past, that we stormed ministries, prisons and government buildings, sat down in school yards, refused to go to or teach classes, went on strike in factories, oil refineries and petrochemical plants, marched in the streets in hundreds, then thousands, and soon in hundreds of thousands.
The revolution had such a force that even in the most laidback towns, like Shiraz, people started taking to the streets in the tens and hundreds of thousands. In the famously mellow town of our beloved poets Sadi and Haafez, where martial law was declared last and lifted first, I saw hundreds of thousands in the streets and it was a sight to behold.
Back in those days thirty years ago, we were storming SAVAK buildings after pitch battles, some lasting hours some days, finding instruments of torture and files, files and more files. All those files that our rulers had indeed been keeping: on us, on our friends and classmates, our fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins and more. Those files, the cumulative result of diligent work, of years of training by the Israeli Mossad agents bringing the Shah's ability for secret information gathering up to par.
All those files that, just as swiftly as they were being unearthed, were trucked away to the mosques. For safe keeping they said. But, some knew better. Soon, those files would be added to. Soon, those files would be swallowed up by a far greater secret service that the theocrats had in mind.
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