Living the Iranian Dream

My father worked all his life for the world's biggest terrorist organization to get money and prestige. With blood on his hands, he now watches everything he had go up in smoke

My Father’s Life

My grandfather’s life was defined by his desire to escape poverty. Born a serf, he was pulled from school because he didn’t own the land he lived on. He spent his entire life doing crushing manual labor to buy a single plot. He had one ambition: a roof of his own and a better life for his five children. He succeeded. He was a man who ever wanted one thing, and whose life was effectively over once he achieved it.

My father had much higher ambitions, and he sacrificed everything for it.

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I should say, before I continue, that I am not revealing my father’s identity solely because of my family’s safety. Even though I have nothing but contempt for him, my little brother still lives with him in Iran. And until I save my brother, I have to change certain details in this story to keep them anonymous.

The truth is: my father spent the peak years of his life in service to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. While he never gave military orders, he nonetheless helped generate the profits that funded their operations. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was not coerced. He didn’t even particularly believe in the regime. He joined them for money and status. And he sacrificed everything sacred in his life to get them—even his own family.

He became a villain. And his story serves as a cautionary tale for all of us.

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Growing up poor in a slum to a peasant father, my father was ashamed of his low social status. It drove him to work doggedly to achieve distinction. Distinction among heroes or criminals—it did not matter. He decided young that he would be respected, that no one should talk to him the way they talked to his father.

He was a social climber. He enrolled in a low-level college and found a way to transfer for a semester to the most prestigious local university. There, he convinced the university administration to show him the address book of his classmates. He sorted the women based on how nice of an area they lived in and approached their fathers to ask for their hand in marriage. That’s how he chose my mother. She was the best one he heard a “yes” from.

He used that marriage as a steppingstone into the right circles. Through my mom’s uncle, who knew people who knew people, he was recommended a job.

The job was a driver’s position, but it was the place he had his eyes on, not the job. It was Bonyad-e-Mostazafan—the Foundation of the Oppressed.

Climbing “The Foundation”

I want to be precise about what the Foundation is, because it matters.

It is a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. It controls the majority of Iranian farms, factories, hotels, roads, and industries. It got them by expropriation and theft. It is the economic arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the militia that tortures protesters, funds proxy wars, and executes dissidents. But since it is technically a separate entity from IRGC, everyone pretended it was the Amazon of Iran. It did business internationally and imported otherwise sanctioned machinery and know-how. It exists outside the law. It pays no taxes. No one can touch it—not even the government. It just tells the authorities what it wants and gets it.

My father worked in the agricultural division. I remember visiting one of its facilities as a child—cows in clean lines, automated pumps, equipment so modern it looked like it had been borrowed from a different country entirely. It had been, in fact. My father told me with pride that he bought it on his last year’s business trip to Germany.

My father drove for them. Then he supervised. Then he managed a farm. Then a region. Then he sat on one of the main boards. In the span of less than two decades, he went from the lowest position to one of the highest. How he rose to that rank, I never really understood.

I know that he was very good with people—he became small in front of those above him and enormous in front of those below. I watched him transform on phone calls, yelling curse words or meekly, almost reverently, praising the person on the other end based on their status. He had a gift for it—for reading the room, seeming to work hard, and saying what people wanted to hear.

He collected a wall of different professional certificates. He bribed a university to produce an MBA degree for him—no studying or researching, just showing up to defend a thesis someone handed him—a process that took 10 minutes.

At some point, it was a liability that he hadn’t completed his Hajj. So he took a pilgrimage to Mecca. Meanwhile, his assistant came and adorned the facade of our house with large placards calling him devout and congratulating him on his pilgrimage.

He was a good person, he would tell us, unprompted. We never asked or questioned. But he felt the need to say it. “I’m not like the others. If I wanted to be corrupt like the other board members, I would be swimming in money!”

Meanwhile, he came home at times with layers of gold coins and neat stacks of American dollars, which disappeared into thin air the next day.

He was paranoid about being seen as wealthy. He kept us in deliberate poverty in order not to raise any suspicions—suspicions that could be used by the people under him to pull him down. So we lived in moderate poverty. I had daily back pains because at sixteen, I was sleeping in the cradle I used as a baby. It was my grandmother who eventually felt pity and gave me her old guest bed.

I don’t have conclusive evidence about whether or how much he embezzled, as he never talked about business at home. But I know given the organization he worked for, stealing was the least of his sins. He produced profits that flowed upward into an organization that spent them on terror. He helped pay the salaries of the men who pulled the triggers on innocent protesters—young, idealistic people like me. He called the dead protesters idiots, saying that they should “know their place,” and blaming their plight on their “hotheadedness.”

His True Home

He was an abusive tyrant at home. He’d beat us whenever my mother or I challenged him. His soul and ideas were the diametrical opposite of mine. So I grew up hating him, and when I was younger, I felt some guilt about it.

I thought I was judging him without understanding his context. That life in Iran is brutal. That he was doing this to help his family survive, as survival is extremely difficult in a declining dictatorship like Iran. Maybe I should understand him as a tragic man who did everything he did for his family.

But I was proven wrong when he turned down a golden opportunity to save his family from the dictatorship and redeem himself.

When I was fourteen, one of his colleagues received a job offer from a Canadian agricultural company. The man offered to refer my father for the same position. There was a real opportunity for my father to get a work visa. A way out—not just for him, but for all of us as well.

I remember the hope I felt. It seemed so obvious. More money, more freedom, a future for his children. No more censorship, morality police, inflation, poverty and decline. I thought surely he would say yes.

He said no.

I begged. I promised I’d do anything to change his mind. He didn’t budge. He initially said it was because he’d miss my grandmother. But one day, as I kept insisting for a reason, he looked at me with contempt and revealed his true intent: “I have two hundred people under my command,” he yelled. “I call them and they come running. I go abroad and become someone’s employee? Never!”

That was the moment I understood my father completely. He wasn’t doing this because he had to. He did not want a good life, or to save his family. He wanted a throne. And a throne is only a throne if there are people below it. A free country had no use for him because no one there feared him. Iran, on the other hand, was able to satisfy what he really wanted—power over people, having desperate employees whose livelihood depended on them pleasing him.

“I can’t live here. This country is a prison!” I’d tell him. “Then go wherever you want! Less I see your face, the better!” he’d reply.

Later, he offered me a job at the Foundation, thinking it’d extinguish my desire to emigrate. It was an easy job, with real prospects. Push papers, barely work, rise by proximity to power. When I refused, I think he genuinely could not understand why.

When he realized I was serious about escaping Iran—that I would rather die than stay—he took me out one night for a talk.

“Just be honest. Why are you so attached to abroad? What is it that you can get there but not here?” he asked.

“Freedom,” I said.

He pursed his lips and looked away, annoyed, as if I was not telling the truth. He turned his face to me and said with the disgusting expression of a criminal conspirator: “You want drinks? Parties? Whores? No need to leave Iran for those things. Just tell me—I can arrange them for you.”

I did not talk to him for the rest of that night.

No Father, So I Chose My Own

I escaped Iran without his help. An unlikely miracle. When I reached safety, he refused to send me money. And since working as a foreigner is illegal everywhere, I had to sell my body to a human trafficker to survive—in exchange for a visa and a work permit. That is the price the world charged me because—for all intents and purposes—I was an orphan.

The people he worked for had blackened his soul so deep that he found himself having no desire to help his starving child who was alone on the other side of the world. Meanwhile he was enriching himself by grifting and stealing from the already dirt-poor Iranian people.

It did have a toll on him, all that work. He lorded that over us, saying that we should kiss his feet because he was making sacrifices for us. But that was a lie. As soon as I refused to obey him and stay in Iran to join IRGC, I was dead to him. He no longer cared what happened to me—how I was paying for my expenses abroad, or even whether I was dead or alive.

When I moved to the United States, I found that many children here see their fathers as heroes they look up to. That experience used to be very foreign to me. As long as I remembered, father was an ugly, oily, hairy, bigoted brute. A formidable force, hungry for domination, ready to crush you if you questioned his authority. That was the only image of masculinity I had ever known. And that caused me to dislike manliness in others and suppress the manly parts in me, causing me a lot of internal anguish.

Later, at 22, I found myself captivated with the writings of three men: two philosophers and an entrepreneur. Despite their limited online presence, their personalities shone through. Even though I was observing them from an ocean away, I saw in them the man whom I wanted to become. Their independent mind and fierce spirit were oriented, like mine, to human greatness. They, like me, loved it, and where I sought that greatness by migrating to it, they sought to bring it about in people by education. That was so rare to me. They felt like other me’s—with the same unrelenting drive, but older, wiser, and with more grace and mastery.

I learned a lot from them, and I had the mind-bending fortune to not only meet them—but to become their friends. And they made me feel, for the first time, proud and at peace with being a man. They were the real proof that a man could have a fierce and loving spirit and master a field without becoming soulless and domineering. I feel incredibly indebted to them for erasing my decades of associating manliness with abuse by showing me what I thought was a square circle. They gave me the thing a young man needs most—a true role model. When I talk to them, I see glimpses of the man I will become. And for one of them in particular, I feel the love and respect a man ought to feel for his father.

I was not born with good parents, but through my efforts, I am now living with my chosen family who, through their example, love, and support, enrich me with the warmth of a thousand suns.

I have done many things wrong during my 26 years of life, but I know I’ve done more right than wrong. Most people in my position would have stepped into my father’s shoes. But instead, my decisions have led me to where I am today. And I am proud.

He Lived the Iranian Dream

Meanwhile, my biological father was promoted even further since I left. He had risen close enough to power that he could manipulate the Iranian stock market. He knew when the dials would turn, and he made the first move.

Seeing the shadow of war descend on Iran, he took an early retirement to save himself from the U.S.-Israeli targets list, or a potential revolution.

He became free to show a bit of wealth—still, not too much. No one, not even my mother, knows exactly how much money he has. I just know he has a luxury car and four different houses around the city.

Most of his wealth is in the bank, but I’ve heard that the Iranian banks have plundered their safes and are refusing to let their customers withdraw too much money.

He said that he wanted to escape Iran with his family now that he’s free of that organization. But according to my mother, he hasn’t done anything to escape Iran—not even pay for an immigration consultant—and instead shoots down all ideas my mother and I give him, labeling them “too risky.”

Over time, I was able to positively influence my mother over our calls. And with the help of recent events, she’s had a transformation. She, who was a faithful slave to my father all her life and refused to question him, now sees him as a monster as well. Soon, I will be able to help bring her and my brother here, where they can have another chance in life—but never my father. He will stay at his true home—the cannibalistic country he built. He will die in Iran hated and alone.

The Root of Our Difference

My father and I were both ambitious. We both worked hard to get the life we wanted. But whereas he ended up in misery and complicity, I reached a level of happiness no one could expect—and still have much further to go.

The difference is not in our intellect. My father was smart. The board meetings, the sanctions-circumventing, the starting as a low-level driver and becoming a top-level board member of the Foundation—it all required a lot of cunning and scheming over decades.

The difference is in our souls. Or to be more exact, in the things we desire.

While he did a lot of thinking to reach his desires and ends—the ends he was seeking were left entirely unexamined. He was blind to the sublime in life.

He was dumbfounded that I did not want the money and status his IRGC job offer could give me. He thought everybody desired what he had. But our desires are the result of our thinking, and a lot of thinking and experimenting is required to conceive of and feel the right desires. His desires were frozen at the level of an adolescent who wished he was respected by his classmates. He spent the remaining 50 years of his life chasing that juvenile desire without pausing to ask if there were bigger dreams out there.

The thinking that he needed to do was not only to recognize Iran was a sinking ship of a country run by bloodthirsty dictators, but to also look at how lives are lived abroad—to open his heart up to seeing how much better life is under freedom. To not selectively focus on the free countries’ flaws, but to also see the endless list of affordances they provide to their residents.

I did a lot of thinking about what kind of life I want. Distinguishing truth from religious propaganda, discovering the world abroad, falling in love with American pop stars, realizing their limitations, looking for other living examples of a great life, adopting new ideas and ways of life, revising them, and repeating this process over and over again.

That is the work a human being needs to do, in my opinion. To conceive of a life—a complex set of desires that does not yet exist, especially in conservative echo chambers like Iran. When I refused his offer of a job at the Foundation, it wasn’t just a whim. It was me seeing a whole life in a glance and judging it unworthy. I chose the difficult, jagged road of escape because I desired survival, and saw that my survival required a different world—a fact that is more evident now than ever as Iran collapses into another war.

My father became a footnote in the Islamic regime’s book because he refused to be an author of his own.

He had the gold coins and the villas, but he never achieved the one basic thing every human needs: a life worth living.