Death to the Dictator!
A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran's 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
Tehran, June 12, 2009. Mohsen Abbaspour, an ordinary young man in his twenties—not particularly political, or ambitious, or worldly—casts the first vote of his life in Iran's tenth presidential election. Fed up with rising unemployment and inflation, he backs the reformist party and its candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mohsen believes his vote will count.
It will not. Almost the instant the polls close, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will declare himself president by an overwhelming majority. And as the Western world scrambles to make sense of the brazenly fraudulent election, Mohsen, along with his friends and family and neighbors, will experience a sense of utter desolation, and then something else: an increasingly sharper feeling—the beginning of anger. In a matter of weeks, millions of Iranians will flow into the streets, chanting in protest, "Death to the dictator!" Mohsen Abbaspour will be swept up in an uncontrollable and ultimately devastating chain of events.
Like Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and Ryszard Kapuscinski's incisive reportage, Death to the Dictator! stuns readers with its heartbreaking immediacy. Our pseudonymous author was a keen eyewitness in Tehran during the summer of 2009 and beyond. In this brave and true book, we see what we are not supposed to see, and learn what we are not supposed to know.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This moving, brutal account of Iranian protests against the 2009 re-election of President Ahmadinejad centers on protestor Mohsen Abbaspour, a recent college graduate with largely literary interests who had not even bothered to vote in the previous election. This book describes how Mohsen evolved from little more than a sympathetic, fearful onlooker (days before the election, he and his mom attended a rally for candidate Mousavi) to a determined participant in the increasingly dangerous protests that followed the announcement of the election results on June 13 (Ahmedinejad reportedly won 62 percent). Mohsen would ultimately be arrested in an inauguration-day demonstration and spend 24 days in jail; the first and final chapters are devoted to the horrifying treatment he endured while imprisoned, including torture and rape. A clear and important record of the human toll imposed by one dirty election and a close look at a national injustice that captivated the world, Moqadam (a pseudonym) can be jarring when attempting to score broader geopolitical points (castigating the Chinese and Russian governments, for instance, for executing Muslims while they simultaneously maintain "strategic alliance with the Islamic Republic").
