The Antinomies of Iran’s War Generation

Abstract

The difficulty of grappling with the subject of the war generation in Iran became evident to me as I posed my questions to Iranians of various backgrounds and ideological orientations.2 The immediate response was: “Which war generation? The one that went to war or the one that was born during the war?” I wanted to know about the contemporary sociopolitical position of the one that experienced the Iran-Iraq War either at the front or elsewhere. But the initial reaction pointed to a fundamental fissure that seems to rend Iranian society, a society in which at least part of the population, voluntarily or involuntarily, went through a very intense experience of war. Yet it also contains a much larger segment of the population that, for good or bad, apparently wants to leave the war and the values propagated during the war period behind. Seemingly, in this confrontation, on the one side stands a generation born during the eight-year war3 that declares with confidence that Iranian society can no longer be controlled or cowed by cannons, tanks, and reference to the vestiges and values of the people’s militia (Basij) that helped to “win” the war.4 On the other side stands a generation that sacrificed its life and livelihood in order to save the nation from Iraqi aggression. As such, in the official ideology, it is represented as the austere and yet benign guardian of values that helped Iran survive in spite of international aggression and collusion. It watches with distressed, and at times angry, eyes those whose memory of the war is either amnesiac or, even worse, blemished. Furthermore, it sometimes has to act violently, but only because no one else does and because essential values are violated. Its dilemma remains one of figuring out a way to pass on the memories, experiences of, and lessons learned during the war to the next generations.