Dr. Aziz Fooladvand
In the quiet streets of Germany, where the memory of history still carries the smell of ashes, and the collapsed walls of despotism still stand in the mind of Europe, a name suddenly rises from the depths of darkness: SAVAK. A name that, for thousands of Iranians, was not an administrative institution, but the sound of a cell door closing; the damp smell of a torture chamber; the sound of footsteps climbing the stairs at midnight to tear a human being from the embrace of life. SAVAK was not merely a security institution; it was a metaphor for organized fear. A power that sought to make the human being collapse inwardly before breaking his body.
And now, when in the heart of Europe, in a country that has lived through all the nightmares of the twentieth century, some appear with the flags, symbols, and nostalgia of that era, the issue is not merely a political disagreement; it is the return of the language of violence to the public sphere. Every age of tyranny, before building prisons, constructs its signs. Before sealing mouths, it normalizes its symbols. In fact, normalization becomes a technique of subjugation. Pierre Bourdieu, through the concept of habitus, explains how social structures — such as the institution of torture — become normalized and turn into enduring patterns of action. When the glorification of torture becomes an everyday experience, it gradually settles into the habitus — into people’s habits and behavioral patterns. And the danger begins precisely there: at the moment when torture is translated as “authority,” and repression appears in the garment of “order.”
Europe knows well that catastrophe does not always begin with the roar of tanks. Sometimes it enters the streets with a few flags, a few slogans, the glorification of secret police, and the romanticization of fear. History, before becoming bloody, becomes banal; it becomes normalized; it smiles in photographs and symbols. More terrifying than violence itself is the erasure of the memory of violence. Violence does not survive only in prisons and torture chambers; sometimes it continues in forgetting. When victims are erased and collective memory becomes worn down, torturers once again find the opportunity to recreate themselves in the form of order, greatness, or the salvation of the homeland. For this reason, defending freedom is, before anything else, defending human memory. Freedom is never a permanent condition; freedom is a constant vigilance against the return of darkness. No secret police in the world has ever reconciled itself with human dignity. Torture, even if decorated with the flag of the homeland, remains torture. And fear, even if it calls itself security, remains fear. Albert Camus once wrote that “freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” Yet at the very moment when a human being justifies the suffering of another, freedom dies — quietly, silently, and often amid the applause, dancing, and celebration of the crowd. Today, the issue is not only Iran. The issue is the defense of this fundamental principle: that no political ideal, no historical nostalgia, and no dream of power has the right to sacrifice human dignity. If a society becomes indifferent to the symbols of repression, tomorrow truth itself will be in danger. For despotism, before placing human beings in chains, imprisons language; it distorts meanings; and it brings evil into the streets dressed in the clothing of patriotism. And perhaps this is the task of our time: not to allow the memory of the victims to be buried beneath the nostalgia of power.
The Face of the “Grandson of the Mirpanj”
What is most alarming is not merely the return of SAVAK’s symbols, but the face of that same grandson of the Mirpanj who has paved the way for this return; someone who for years adorned himself with the language of “tolerance,” with soft words and an apparently civilized face, constantly calling people to “nonviolence” and patience — yet now, under his shadow, the same ghosts of dungeons and intimidation are returning to the streets.
But history judges human beings not by the words they utter, but by the forces they mobilize around themselves. What a bitter contradiction it is: someone who used to call every radical uprising against religious despotism “extremist” is today at the head of a current that has not even reached power, yet whose words and conduct already reek of exclusion and revenge. A current that has risen not against the jailers in power, but against other opponents — against those very people who, for decades, have paid the price of freedom with exile, prison, the gallows, and nameless graves. It is strange. Astonishing and terrifying. Had religious despotism left anything undone in repression, exclusion, imprisonment, and torture, that the heirs of authoritarian ambition must now repeat the same language of threat and intimidation, this time under another flag?
It is as though history, instead of learning from human suffering, has merely changed the clothes of the executioners. Has this land already been emptied of the sound of the whip, of the memory of massacre, of the smell of its young people’s blood, that promises of “elimination” and “cleansing” are once again being made? Rather than standing against this past and acknowledging its historical responsibility, the grandson of the Mirpanj seeks to push the wound to the margins — as though, if memory is silenced, suffering too will disappear. But history, contrary to human desire, does not forget. The past always returns somewhere in the collective conscience: in silences, in sudden outbursts of anger, and in the memory of bodies that have lived through torture. For this reason, his recent trip to Berlin became not a scene of political welcome, but a moment of confrontation between memories — a place where protesters, by throwing tomato paste, displayed an accumulated anger.
This was not merely a political protest; it was the eruption of a memory that has not yet been able to reconcile itself with the shadow of royal dictatorship and its apparatus of repression and torture. A human being may be able to deny the past, but he cannot escape its consequences. For when suffering enters collective memory, it is no longer merely a historical event; it becomes part of the very existence of those who carry it in their flesh and bones. We seek a freer human being to emerge from these ruins — not another version of the same authoritarian power, merely dressed in different clothing.
The Crown of Power upon the Grave of Freedom
Fascism does not always begin with boots; sometimes it begins with nostalgia. With the praise of iron order. With the sanctification of the leader. With that terrifying and ancient notion that the “nation” can be saved only under obedience and submission. And from there, the fall begins: where opposition and every independent voice are seen not as signs of a living society, but as obstacles on the path to the “salvation of the homeland.” In such an atmosphere, truth is slowly suffocated, and freedom, before dying in prison, is killed in language. This is the same dark core that reveals itself in extreme crown-worship: the desire to reproduce power, not to tolerate freedom. For freedom is, by its nature, plural; but the authoritarian mind can endure only one voice.
In Germany, eighty years after the collapse of Hitlerite fascism, human beings still stand against the shadow of the past; because history is not something that can simply be buried. The past continues like a silent anxiety in the walls of the city and in collective memory. For this reason, the use of Nazi symbols and Holocaust denial are crimes; because a society that has reached awareness knows that forgetting is the first step toward the return of horror. If carrying the swastika is forbidden in Germany, then displaying the symbol of SAVAK cannot be regarded merely as “political nostalgia.” SAVAK was not simply an intelligence organization; it was the institutional embodiment of fear — the moment when one human being reduced another to the threshold of objecthood. Torture is not merely pain inflicted upon the body; it is the denial of the existence of the other. The whip, electric shocks, the Apollo device, the pulling out of fingernails, and dark cells were not merely tools; they were the language of a government that sought to suffocate freedom in the depth of human bones. In those rooms, the human being touched not only suffering, but the absurdity of a world in which cries sometimes reached no listening ear. And can blood ever be erased from memory? The hills of Evin are not merely geography; they are the embodied memory of suffering. There are still families in Iran who carry the past not in books, but in the silence of night, in nightmares, and in the empty places of their loved ones. When history has been lived, it never ends.
In the heart of Europe, in a land that still carries the memory of camps, cells, and silenced cries, the open display of SAVAK symbols is not merely “political nostalgia.” It is a crossing of moral boundaries. And perhaps something even beyond that: a kind of normalization of organized violence. Where the symbol of torture is tolerated, the conscience of society dies before freedom does. For no nation passes beyond the wounds of despotism by showing tolerance toward the symbols of torturers; what collapses first is its historical conscience. Symbols are not innocent. Every flag carries a memory; every emblem contains a history of suffering or liberation. To raise the sign of SAVAK is to bring the shadow of the dungeon back into the public sphere. It is an implicit defense of an apparatus that saw the human being not as a free being, but as raw material to be crushed beneath the wheels of power. SAVAK is not merely a name; it recalls rooms where fingernails were pulled out, bodies were burned with irons, whips fell upon flesh, and human beings, under torture devices such as the “Apollo,” were driven to the brink of psychological collapse.
These were not “historical mistakes”; they were the logical manifestation of a power that considered itself above human dignity. Torture is not a deviation within the system; it is the logic of rule. And precisely for this reason, the praise or whitewashing of such a structure is no longer merely a political position; it is a moral, and even legal, question. After the fall of fascism, Europe learned that some symbols are not merely “opinions.” Nazism and its symbols were banned because the world understood that certain ideas, if normalized, would once again carry human dignity to the altar of power. Some symbols are not merely memories; they carry within them the possibility of catastrophe being repeated. For this reason, society learned that normalizing them is playing with human life. If a society allows the instruments of repression to return to the streets with smiles, dancing, and nostalgia, it is in truth burying the memory of the victims for a second time. And that is the moment when history begins to decay once more. Humanism, before being a philosophy, is a kind of loyalty to human suffering. It means the inability to remain indifferent when human dignity is trampled upon. Camus said that the greatest catastrophe of the modern age was that human beings learned to kill without feeling guilt. And today, the danger may lie precisely here: that some people can carry the symbol of torture without even pausing for a moment in silence before the memory of the victims.
Banners Carried on the Shoulders of Forgetfulness
In the waving of the flag of humiliation, the organizers of this dark display cannot hide behind words such as “patriotism” or “political freedom.”vFor defending an institution founded upon torture is defending the destruction of the human being. And no democratic society should remain indifferent to the normalization of such violence. This is not only an Iranian issue. It is the defense of the very principle upon which Europe was built after the Second World War, upon the ruins: that the human being, even at the height of political disagreement, must never be turned into an object. Not in terrifying cells, not under the whip, not in interrogation rooms, and not in streets where the symbol of torture is raised. For wherever torture is whitewashed, humanity has already been wounded.In those banners, there are not merely a few lines, colors, and signs; in those flags lies buried the memory of human dignity being crushed. Every time the symbol of SAVAK is carried on shoulders, it is as if part of the victims’ suffering is brought back into the streets — the suffering of those who, in the darkness of cells, under the lights of interrogation rooms, were slowly emptied of their humanity. The bearers of these flags may wish to call it “nostalgia,” but history is not purified by beautiful words. One cannot carry the symbol of a torture apparatus and at the same time claim to defend freedom. For at the heart of every system of torture lies one principle: the horrifying belief that the human being has no intrinsic value, and that he may be broken, humiliated, burned, and silenced so that power may remain standing. SAVAK was not merely a security organization; it was the embodiment of an anti-human philosophy in which truth was extracted from the wounded mouth of the prisoner, and silence was produced through pain.
The flag of that institution was the flag of fear’s victory over the human being. And this is what must be said openly: anyone who carries those symbols today, knowingly or unknowingly, places himself beside the memory of torture, not beside the memory of freedom. Behind these signs there is not only history; there is a graveyard of human dignity. Every time a symbol of repression is normalized, part of society’s moral memory collapses. The hell of despotism may return this time with flags and nostalgia, not with the robe of religion; but in essence there is no difference, because every form of despotism ultimately wants the human being as a tool for the survival of power. Perhaps many do not know what they are defending; perhaps they do not know what bodies were broken behind these symbols, what youths decayed in cells, and what mothers grew old waiting. A society that grows accustomed to these symbols gradually loses its sensitivity to human suffering. And there, despotism is born again — in new clothing, but with the same old thirst for silencing the human being.
The Spirit of Despotism in Search of Silence
Those who claim to defend “freedom” are themselves engaged in the normalization of intimidation. Slowly, they have turned the language of threats into a normal part of politics. The hidden tragedy of authoritarianism is that it always adorns itself with the language of freedom. Those who preach democracy have not yet learned that democracy without the right to dissent is merely an empty name. Democracy means hearing a voice that disturbs you without wishing for its elimination. Democracy means polyphony; it means a power that can be criticized, even mocked, without the shadow of elimination falling upon the critic. The essence of democracy lies not in praising the like-minded, but in tolerating opponents.
But when the symbol of torture is brought into the streets, when the dream of revenge replaces the dream of freedom, one must understand that the issue is no longer merely political disagreement; it is the return of the spirit of despotism. And despotism, whatever name it bears — turban or crown — ultimately wants one thing: a silent human being. The grandson of the Mirpanj is still dreaming of revenge against a nation that once invalidated the myth of crown-worship and consigned hereditary rule to the memory of history. This is the moment when the dream of revenge takes the place of freedom. Religious fascism crushed the human being in the name of God; and today’s fear is that a fascism soaked in nostalgia may repeat the same humiliation, this time in the name of the nation and the glory of the past. In both, the human being is not the end, but the instrument for the survival of power. More bitter still is that many of those who carry these symbols are themselves children of suffering and disillusionment — wounded human beings whose historical anger, without their knowing it, becomes fuel for a new machine of authoritarianism. They think they are crying out for “freedom,” for the “homeland,” but what they unknowingly reproduce is the same old logic of exclusion and the silencing of opponents. Perhaps many of them are wounded people in the service of a dark project. But no nation is redeemed from within torture.
No freedom is born from an interrogation room. And no flag, if it smells of the dungeon, can be the bearer of human dignity. The defense of humanity begins precisely where the human being dares to stand against every symbol of human humiliation; to refuse indifference; and to prevent the memory of pain from being buried beneath the noise of slogans.