Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
Azar NafisiRead
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.
Interpretation
Totalitarian regimes compel individuals to participate in their own oppression, which is a profound moral failure.
In this quote, Azar Nafisi highlights the insidious nature of totalitarianism, where the systems of power not only oppress but also force individuals to be complicit in their subjugation. The metaphor of 'dancing with your jailer' and 'participating in your own execution' illustrates the brutal reality that victims become unwitting supporters of their own oppression, emphasizing the psychological and moral violence inherent in such regimes.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the consequences of authoritarian rule.
Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.
After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effective tool used by the West, especially America, to corrupt and incite Iranian youth, and finally closed down all the Humanities departments in Iran's universities.
I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
Today we continue a never ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.
Everything in the world is purchased by labor.
How often are the perpetrators of hate-crimes discovered to be self-loathing? Valued individuals do not strike out against strangers.
We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.
Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.
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