MaryAnnDVC
"Mare", DISing since '99; prefers being tagless
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2001
- Messages
- 14,950
I happen to come across this recently and thought it was really interesting. The whole thing at this link http://www.aiipowmia.com/other/iran.html is VERY long (very interesting, if you have the time)...just makes you wonder how you get through to people who think like this, which it appears many of the Iraqis do as well. It was written by one of the hostages, William J. Daugherty.
There were a number of common denominators among these young men. First and foremost, they were fanatically religious and totally obedient to the wishes (or what they perceived as the wishes) of the clergy, as personified in Khomeini. Literally hundreds of hours of talks with these kids distilled down to one basic tenet: Khomeini was infallible because he was the Imam, and he was the Imam because he was infallible. It was not necessary for any of them to really know firsthand anything about anything, or to be independently convinced of the correctness of any position or action. If Khomeini said it was so, or if he ordered it done, then that was all they needed to know. Not once did I ever hear one discuss anything, whether the subject was religion, human rights, politics, or social responsibilities, in which he felt obliged or even willing to question Khomeini's judgments or to decide facts, opinions, and actions for himself.
My Iranian captors contended that America was responsible for all the evils and wrongs in the world. One of them declared to me that Iran had been America's main enemy for over 400 years! Even after I mentioned that America had actually been a nation for only 203 years and had been populated only by Native Americans less than 300 years before that, I could not sway him.
I learned from these Iranians that America had created plagues and national disasters in its efforts to control the world ("hegemony" was a favorite criticism); that all the West European countries and NATO as an organization were controlled by the United States; that we had decided--apparently just for the hell of it--to beat up on the peace-loving Vietnamese people, creating and then maliciously prolonging our war in Southeast Asia; and that in general America had never done anything positive or good for the world. When I pointed out a few of the innumerable "nonpolitical" things Americans had done which benefited the world (the Salk polio vaccine and other medical discoveries), the Iranians would find ulterior motives underlying each accomplishment; world control was one of the all-time favorites, as were greed and profit. Or they would deny that the achievement was useful, or say they had not heard of it, in which case it could not be really important or true. I asked one pre-med student to compare the number of American Nobel prize winners to the number of Iranian Nobelists, and the student replied that America always fixed the voting so that no Iranian could win; it was just part of our war against Iran.
Most of my captors stubbornly asserted that they were always right and that everyone else was always wrong. If they broke any law, it was because they had a justification for doing so. One student related the story of how he had been in a car accident because, at 0200, he had run a red light, and another car, which had the green, hit him broadside. Perfectly seriously, he said that the little traffic at that hour made it OK for him to ignore traffic signals (no point in waiting at a red light when no one is coming from the other side) and that it was the other driver who was at fault because he should have known someone might be running red lights and therefore should have been driving slowly while looking out for other drivers like him.
The corollary to never being wrong was that nothing was ever their fault. In the midst of our captivity, more than one of the guards complained to me that holding us hostage was ruining their lives: they could not go to school, they were not spending time with their families, they were not able to go home to their villages. In short, it was their lives which were on hold. And it was all our fault because we were there. The obvious solution of putting us on a plane and sending us home made no impression.
These same Iranians who shouted "death to America," who condemned everything American as evil or decadent, and who would have killed us had it been ordered, would nonetheless ask my colleagues for help in obtaining visas to the United States, and then could not understand why they were laughed at. If the reader by now suspects, too, that these Iranians, at least, seemed to have difficulty with the concept of cause and effect, he or she would be dead on.
There were a number of common denominators among these young men. First and foremost, they were fanatically religious and totally obedient to the wishes (or what they perceived as the wishes) of the clergy, as personified in Khomeini. Literally hundreds of hours of talks with these kids distilled down to one basic tenet: Khomeini was infallible because he was the Imam, and he was the Imam because he was infallible. It was not necessary for any of them to really know firsthand anything about anything, or to be independently convinced of the correctness of any position or action. If Khomeini said it was so, or if he ordered it done, then that was all they needed to know. Not once did I ever hear one discuss anything, whether the subject was religion, human rights, politics, or social responsibilities, in which he felt obliged or even willing to question Khomeini's judgments or to decide facts, opinions, and actions for himself.
My Iranian captors contended that America was responsible for all the evils and wrongs in the world. One of them declared to me that Iran had been America's main enemy for over 400 years! Even after I mentioned that America had actually been a nation for only 203 years and had been populated only by Native Americans less than 300 years before that, I could not sway him.
I learned from these Iranians that America had created plagues and national disasters in its efforts to control the world ("hegemony" was a favorite criticism); that all the West European countries and NATO as an organization were controlled by the United States; that we had decided--apparently just for the hell of it--to beat up on the peace-loving Vietnamese people, creating and then maliciously prolonging our war in Southeast Asia; and that in general America had never done anything positive or good for the world. When I pointed out a few of the innumerable "nonpolitical" things Americans had done which benefited the world (the Salk polio vaccine and other medical discoveries), the Iranians would find ulterior motives underlying each accomplishment; world control was one of the all-time favorites, as were greed and profit. Or they would deny that the achievement was useful, or say they had not heard of it, in which case it could not be really important or true. I asked one pre-med student to compare the number of American Nobel prize winners to the number of Iranian Nobelists, and the student replied that America always fixed the voting so that no Iranian could win; it was just part of our war against Iran.
Most of my captors stubbornly asserted that they were always right and that everyone else was always wrong. If they broke any law, it was because they had a justification for doing so. One student related the story of how he had been in a car accident because, at 0200, he had run a red light, and another car, which had the green, hit him broadside. Perfectly seriously, he said that the little traffic at that hour made it OK for him to ignore traffic signals (no point in waiting at a red light when no one is coming from the other side) and that it was the other driver who was at fault because he should have known someone might be running red lights and therefore should have been driving slowly while looking out for other drivers like him.
The corollary to never being wrong was that nothing was ever their fault. In the midst of our captivity, more than one of the guards complained to me that holding us hostage was ruining their lives: they could not go to school, they were not spending time with their families, they were not able to go home to their villages. In short, it was their lives which were on hold. And it was all our fault because we were there. The obvious solution of putting us on a plane and sending us home made no impression.
These same Iranians who shouted "death to America," who condemned everything American as evil or decadent, and who would have killed us had it been ordered, would nonetheless ask my colleagues for help in obtaining visas to the United States, and then could not understand why they were laughed at. If the reader by now suspects, too, that these Iranians, at least, seemed to have difficulty with the concept of cause and effect, he or she would be dead on.
