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Stripped of their moral disguises, the slogans of freedom, peace
and justice are often weapons which those attempting to achieve
hierarchical superiority use to stuff the rest of us into the lower ranks
of the pecking order.  This is true when the slogans are uttered by
individuals.  And it's true when these words are used to motivate
superorganisms.
During the early days of the Iranian revolution in 1978,
Americans were horrified to learn about the Shah's atrocities.  We
discovered that Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, our staunch ally since 1941,
had employed a secret police to deal with his opponents.  The Iranian
covert police force, Savak, had carted Pahlavi's critics off to prison and
treated them in the most appalling ways.  Savak officers had stripped
young women and burned their nipples with cigarettes.189  They had
kept one elderly, arthritic politician in a cell filled with water up to his
waist.190   They had beaten a female college professor for reading
political poetry at a public meeting, broken up gatherings of opposition
groups with goon squads, bombed the homes and offices of civil rights
lawyers, and shot (according to their own admission) 174 urban
guerrillas after secret trials.191   To top it all off, they had been guided
by American advisors.
In 1978, when the Shah was forced to flee his country, the
Ayatollah behind it all192 said the revolution was a passionate grab for
justice.  It was, the Khomeini declared, a necessary movement to free
Iran from tyranny.193  But when Khomeini flew from exile in Paris to
take over the reins of the upheaval he had fomented, it became obvious
just how deceptive the words freedom and justice can be.
Over the course of the next year, Khomeini installed men like
himself in power.  They were Moslem clergymen who had spent their
lives studying the Koran and teaching its ways.  And the power of
these spiritual shepherds--roughly equivalent to our priests, ministers
and rabbis--was soon vast.  In the name of a revolution declared to
bring freedom, the Iranian holy men shut down ten newspapers.
Freedom of speech, they agreed, could lead people to criticize Islam, a
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