Orwell’s warnings (Source: The Daily Times)
Comments (0) Kian’s friend Pamela Kilpadi has published an editorial in the Daily Times of Pakistan:
“[Kian’s] only apparent “crime” has been to dare live his life as an independent American Iranian scholar in Iran… [He] was swept up in a sudden, unimaginable convulsion — Iran’s greatest political and popular upheaval since the 1979 revolution. As award-winning journalist and Iran scholar Robin Wright recently noted: “Although embryonic, today’s public resolve [in Iran] is reminiscent of civil disobedience in colonial India before independence or in the American Deep South in the 1960s.” The regime lashed out viciously…
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death,” Orwell wrote in 1984. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
Painfully, the details of where Kian has been taken, by whom, and for how long remains unclear. What is clear is that the struggle for the freedom of Kian and other innocent victims of official repression is also the struggle for our own. Our own freedom of thought, and our own future.
Orwell’s warnings are as relevant today as ever. If we, as individuals and as members of society, fail to stand up for what we believe is right, we consent to wearing an ugly mask. And our face grows to fit it.”
[Full article: Orwell’s warnings]
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Kian Tajbakhsh, Pamela Kilpadi, Daily Times
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