Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran

It was a May Day, sometime in the early 1980s in Paris. The Islamic revolution
in Iran was only a few years old but had long since violently silenced all dissent.
Hundreds of the regime’s opponents were being executed, terror was the order of
the day, and the Islamic regime – at war with both its own civil society and Iraq
– had isolated Iran from the outside world. Scores of refugees had fled and Paris
was now the capital of political activism against the Iranian regime. I was a young
student of political sociology who had spent a few months in revolutionary Iran
where I had joined the ranks of Dr. Shapur Bakhtiar’s followers. [1] In Paris I
convinced my comrades at the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance (led
by Bakhtiar) that we social democrats in exile were the true supporters of workers’
rights, that communist regimes had set up a shameful system of exploitation of the
workers, and that we should join the May Day parade.

View the full article here