Mental Emigration

In the late 1930s, when most Germans were intoxicated with the Nazis,  there was a small minority of educated dissenters who felt powerless and intimidated. But rather than engage with the twisted values of Hitler’s regime, they retreated. They could have taken on Hitler’s main intellectual apologist, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Instead they withdrew from public discourse. An article I read recently coined an excellent term for their reaction: “mental emigration”.

I see the same phenomenon here in Iran.

Every holiday weekend, the educated and the well-to-do fill their cars with bootleg liquor and drive out of Tehran to seclusion and luxury in their villas on the Caspian Sea. (Villas, by the way, that were built at huge environmental expense on land cleared of precious jungle and ancient trees.)

There, in the hills overlooking the water, they eat, drink, watch satellite TV and trade jokes ridiculing the mullahs and ex-President Ahmadinejad, whom they see as a has-been and a hick. They congratulate themselves for voting in President Rouhani whose team has just concluded the nuclear deal with the West.

These people have simply checked out politically, castrated and coopted by a system that lets them hang on to their wealth as long as they don’t make waves. Rather than thinking critically about Iran’s ruthless and corrupt government, they muse about getting foreign passports. They ponder a second villa on the Turkish Mediterranean coast.  One recently told me, “I want to go away somewhere where if I’m ever asked why I left Iran, I will reply, ‘Sorry I don’t know what you are talking about’”.

It’s a phenomenon that seems to occur in every repressive society.

Lately I’ve been reading Russian novels and Soviet history and came across the Persian translation of a book by the French Communist couple Nina and Jean Keyahan. It’s called Rue du Proletaire Rouge, named after the Moscow street where they met with other disillusioned Communists in a café – all of whom had given up critical evaluation of the Soviet state and had emigrated in their minds. 

In the book, which they wrote four years after moving to the Soviet Union, the Keyahans describe the ultimate imaginary emigrant.  A man they called “a crazy Russian Jew.” He was an antique collector and engineer who for years had smuggled helicopter parts into the country. His dream was to assemble the machine in his apartment and fly away one day from his balcony – forever.

Now, holding the worn-out Persian version of the book, I am overcome with melancholy and a fit of soul searching. For 30 years I have owned this book and often looked at its publication date.  Only now I realize that it appeared just months after the Revolution in 1979. Three decades on, it has not been reprinted and remains unappreciated by Iranian intellectuals who — like their German and Soviet predecessors – choose to live half-lives stranded in a country they will neither change nor leave.

As Robert Frost writes in “The Road Less Travelled”:c

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

More blogs from Firouz Farzani: 

Mosques on Steroids

Iran’s Obsession with America’s Human Rights

Human Rights – Better than Universal. Islamic!

Clearer and Clearer – The Price of Jason Rezaian’s Freedom

History as Cut and Paste

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