I’m a lifelong pacifist living in Santa Cruz; in 1980, I had an encounter with the Islamic Revolution

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The call came in January 1980, one year after the fall of the shah of Iran and two months after a group of pro-Ayatollah Khomeini Iranian college students had taken 52 Americans hostage in Iran. I quickly became one of 50 U.S. peace activists asked to go to Tehran as guests of the students holding the hostages.

Our purpose: dialogue for reconciliation. Our hope: a peaceful resolution. 

I represented SEIU Local 400, the San Francisco city workers union. Our delegation of “ordinary citizens” included Jewish, Baptist and other Protestant, Catholic and Unitarian faith leaders and representatives of other unions, and African American, Chicano, Native American and women’s movement groups. 

Over 12 intensive days in and around Tehran, we met with victims of the shah’s brutal secret police, and we accompanied our student hosts to hospitals, prisons, cemeteries and mosques. We met multiple participants in the ongoing struggle to set the course of the still-young revolution. We journeyed to the holy city of Qom to meet with one of them: Ali Khamenei, a close ally of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s son Ahmad.  

Ten years later, Khamenei succeeded Khomeini as “guardian” or “supreme leader” of the country. 

I think back on this now, 46 years later, weeks after the U.S.-Israeli assassination of Ali Khamenei and as the new war begins to spread across the region and perhaps beyond.  

I write in several voices. Ten years before the hostage crisis, I had been a soldier and a war resister, trained to fight but refusing deployment in the infantry during the Vietnam War. By 1980, I was a union leader, still an advocate for peace. In the years after these events, I would become a sociologist. And now I am becoming an old man, dedicated to the development of sanctuary communities here on California’s Central Coast. 

So now I speak the same words we have spoken again and again. This terror must end. This war will not benefit Iran nor the U.S. nor our world. It is immoral and illegal and must be resisted. And I speak the words I spoke to my fellow soldiers 55 years ago: These war orders are immoral and illegal and should not be obeyed.

My days in Iran were tumultuous, as struggles unfolded within the broad coalition that forced the shah to flee the country. There were struggles over the character of the government that would replace his modernizing but repressive dynasty. As we landed, in fact, our plane was held on the runway as factions argued over whether we should be permitted to disembark. 

Those factions included liberal democrats, who wanted to make a deal and hoped to release the hostages to us “representatives of the American people” as part of an overarching deal. But it also included hard-liners, intent on sustaining and using the hostage crisis as political leverage within Iran. 

As things turned out, the newly minted supreme leader would embrace the hard-liners’ agenda. “This action has many benefits,” he said to the then-president of Iran, Adolhassan Banisadr. “This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty.”  

So Khomeini would use the hostage crisis as a weapon against moderates in the Iranian revolution …  just as President Ronald Reagan’s team would use it to counter our peace movement’s “Vietnam syndrome” of resistance to war and militarism.

It took years for the details to come out. But in April 1991, Gary Sick, President Jimmy Carter’s top advisor on Iran, published a New York Times op-ed describing the secret deal struck between Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey (by then, director of the CIA), and the Iranian government after our delegation’s failed visit to Tehran.

The terms of the deal: The Iranians would not release the hostages to Carter but rather keep them imprisoned until after Reagan was inaugurated. In exchange, the new Reagan administration would supply Iran with missiles, guns, ammunition and aircraft, helicopter and tank parts.  

So the hostage crisis, and the covert alliance formed to take advantage of it by hard-liners both in Iran and in the United States, proved a turning point for both of our countries. The decade that followed brought the consolidation of Islamic theocracy, on the one hand, and unleashed a Reagan agenda that included revived militarism and much more, on the other. 

The consequences haunt us today.   

Collapse in Azadi Square

One scene from Tehran stays sharp in my memory as a metaphor for what became of the Iranian revolution. It happened on Feb. 11, 1980, at the celebration of the first anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution. 

Our buses inched through jubilant chanting streets to the vast Azadi Square, where 10 massive marches converged in a sea of humanity. There, a crowd our hosts claimed numbered over 20 million surrounded the white marble Azadi tower, facing and surrounding a tall reviewing stand. 

We were shepherded through the chanting crowd, mounted the big reviewing stand and were guided up to the highest tier, above and behind Iranian leaders: personages such as Yasser Arafat, then chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and other Arab and Muslim dignitaries from across the Middle East and around the world. 

As the event began, the crowd surged around us. And then slowly the stand began to sway. And then it collapsed, folding sideways. We on the top row went down to the ground, deposited into tumult. 

Miraculously, our group suffered only one minor injury, an ankle sprain. We were whisked away before I could learn what had happened to people who I thought surely must have been trapped under and beside that crumpled structure. 

For me, that structure’s crushing implosion remains an image of the tragic course of the Islamic Revolution. 

I do not mean to suggest that the Islamic state structure itself collapsed upon the Iranian people. That might someday happen. But in those early months, a course was set toward a different collapse, as brutal repression combined with corruption to deflate the buoyant vision that had inspired our student hosts. 

And collapse represents to me a deeper failure, a turning point within Shiism itself. That tradition was shaped by events soon after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, as his family and companions fought over succession to the ruling power of the caliphate. The Shiite tradition that emerged among the losers in those struggles mourns and honors the martyrdom of spiritual leaders at the hands of illegitimate rulers. It formed a faith that for more than a thousand years remained withdrawn from political life, identified with the poor and oppressed, considered all earthly governments illegitimate, and awaited the messianic return of the hidden 12th Imam. Clergy were explicitly forbidden to engage in political activity.

Rejecting this tradition, Khomeini asserted that the most qualified Islamic spiritual leader has the obligation to rule, and all Muslims have the obligation to submit. In doing so, he would sideline and ultimately repress other senior Shiite clerics. He inserted this mandate into the new Islamic constitution adopted in the fervor of those early days of the hostage crisis. 

Thus emerged a theocratic dictatorship to crush the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people. 

On the ayatollah’s death 10 years later, the ascent of Khamenei – a skillful political operator but third-rate cleric, lacking religious credentials – was only enabled by ignoring that claim to spiritual legitimacy. And now, another betrayal of Shiite religious principles: with the elevation of Khamenei’s own son Mojtaba as the new guardian, the revolution that toppled one hereditary dynasty enthrones another.

Looking back on my brush with the Islamic Revolution, I don’t regret our effort, futile as it was, to seek peace in Tehran. But my heart aches for the young Shiite students and other idealists of the early Islamic Revolution in the same way that it does for the young communist militants in Russia and China, whose utopian movements similarly merged with state power to produce rivers of blood. 

I do hope that this time, unlike the time of the hostage crisis, our Vietnam syndrome will flare up with positive effect. 

It seems clear that, as in 1980, Tehran is a fulcrum point for our own course as a country. Once again, a hinge of history.

And we can do no better than to do what we have done before, again and again. Seek peace.

Paul Johnston is a sociologist and a member of Veterans for Peace.