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The crowned cannibals: Writings on repression in Iran
Barcelona. 20 cm. 332 p. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial ilustrada. Reza Baraheni. Irán-. Situación social-. S. XX .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario. 8470175394
279 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 1, 2022
I love baraheni poems, I like his style in writing, his fictions. But I wish he had never writed this awful book. The current situation in Iran, with all of the murders and fear, how this man can sleep at night really?
A book of lies, heralded the Khomeini era in Iran with its real tortures and perfect! misery.
Maybe a good book in fantasy and fiction but never ever in history.
.. I feel sorry for anyone who read it and believed its lies, my parents included who participated in 1979 revolution and now are dead sorry.
Awful awful awful.
A book of lies, heralded the Khomeini era in Iran with its real tortures and perfect! misery.
Maybe a good book in fantasy and fiction but never ever in history.
.. I feel sorry for anyone who read it and believed its lies, my parents included who participated in 1979 revolution and now are dead sorry.
Awful awful awful.
April 26, 2026
Writer’s life converged with fighters organizing to build a revolutionary workers party in Iran--Reza Baraheni: poet, novelist, champion of cultural and political freedom
By Steve Clark, from The Militant newspaper.
Reza Baraheni, a world-renowned leader in the fight for political and artistic freedom in Iran, died in Toronto March 24 [2022], at age 86. He was among that country’s most prominent poets, novelists and literary critics of the last half century.
Among the more than 60 books written by Baraheni, in both Farsi (Iran’s official language) and English, are The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran, his best-known collection of essays and poetry; God’s Shadow: Prison Poems; and the novel The Secrets of My Land. His translations into Farsi of works by others include Shakespeare’s Richard III and writings by Czech novelist Milan Kundera, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and revolutionary working-class leaders Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky.
Much has and will be written about these literary achievements, as well as his defense of free expression. This article focuses on the pivotal years in the 1970s and 1980s when his activity converged with Iranian youth and workers organizing not just to topple the Peacock Throne of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, but to advance the unfinished work of forging a revolutionary working-class party in Iran. Initiated in exile largely in the United States, this party-building activity extended into the years opened in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution.
Despite distortion by the shah’s regime and secret police (the Savak) of Baraheni’s political views and activity, intended to justify relentless persecution, he himself was never a member of any communist organization nor proponent of its program. He did, however, cultivate public ties of integrity and loyalty with proletarian revolutionists, who were among the most capable and selfless leaders and organizers of the defense of freedom of expression and association in Iran, North America and elsewhere, goals to which Baraheni committed a lifetime.
Fighting shah’s repression
Reza Baraheni was born in 1935 into an Azerbaijani Turk family in Tabriz, capital of East Azerbaijan province in northwest Iran. After university education in Tabriz and Istanbul in English literature, he took on teaching and administrative duties at the University of Tehran. In 1968 he was a founder of the Writers Association of Iran, whose demand for an end to censorship brought it into collision with the shah’s enforcers.
After teaching in Texas and Utah in 1972-73, Baraheni returned to Tehran and published an article entitled “The Culture of the Oppressor, and the Culture of the Oppressed.” He was already known for defense of his native Azerbaijani language and the tongues of other oppressed minorities, which were banned from being taught in Iranian schools. With Persians comprising some 60% of Iran’s population, the monarch — one of the “crowned cannibals,” in Baraheni’s words — anointed himself “Shah of Shahs” of the Persian nation. He brooked no resistance by Azerbaijanis (16% of the population), Kurds (10%), or Baluchis, Arabs, Turkmen and the rest.
On Sept. 11, 1973, Baraheni was arrested, interrogated about his recent article, and confined and tortured at Comité prison for 102 days. An international campaign demanding his release, including a letter in the New York Times signed by 35 prominent artists, writers, and political figures, won his freedom in January 1974. Baraheni went into exile in North America.
“I came to the United States with the intention of exposing the Shah’s repression,” he wrote in an account of his captivity in The Crowned Cannibals. “I immediately joined the ranks of Americans and Iranians who had formed the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI), which had been instrumental in releasing me from the Shah’s jail.”
CAIFI had been founded in late 1973 to conduct the campaign to free Baraheni. Over the next half decade, it defended numerous targets of the shah’s regime, helping win the release of writers Ali Shariatti, Gholamhossein Sa’edi and others. Baraheni became CAIFI’s honorary co-chair and most prominent spokesperson.
The committee’s central initiators were Iranian students in the U.S., as well as George Novack and other Socialist Workers Party leaders. Since the 1960s, members of the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance had joined with Iranian students and others to organize protests — in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. — whenever the shah traveled here to do the bidding of his chief underwriter and arms supplier, the U.S. imperialist government.
CAIFI organized well-publicized defense meetings in cities, towns, and on campuses across the U.S., at many of which Baraheni spoke and read his poetry, sharing the platform with other well-known individuals. These events were frequently met with provocations and disruptions by thugs from ultraleft Maoist Iranian student organizations, sometimes wielding nail-studded clubs, knives and other weapons.
These Stalinist groups slandered Baraheni and CAIFI leaders as agents of the shah. Meanwhile, actual Savak agents, with FBI and CIA aid and comfort, were also hurling smears and death threats against Baraheni. Many writers, artists and other CAIFI endorsers signed letters condemning these attacks on freedom of speech and assembly.
Baraheni and other CAIFI leaders were not silenced by these assaults. By 1978 their effective exposure of the shah’s tyranny and resounding demands for cultural and political freedom were converging with rising street actions, strikes and other mass protests in Iran itself.
Struggle for a proletarian party
Many young Iranian opponents of the shah in the U.S. joined the Socialist Workers Party and gained valuable experience and education in communist politics, proletarian propaganda activity, and mass work. In the mid-1970s, in collaboration with the SWP, they established an Iranian organization in exile, named by them the Sattar League.
They produced a magazine, Payam Daneshjoo, and established the Fanus Publishing House to make available in Farsi basic Marxist works, which members of the new organization circulated widely. These books included The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution and The Young Lenin by Leon Trotsky — each translated into Farsi by Baraheni — as well as titles on the fight against national oppression, for women’s emancipation, and the working-class line of march toward the conquest of power.
Several weeks prior to the revolutionary overturn of the shah’s regime on Feb. 11, 1979, this initial cadre returned to Iran. Just hours after landing in Tehran, at a Jan. 22 news conference widely covered by the Iranian and world press, they announced the founding of a proletarian party, the Hezbe Kargaran Socialist (HKS/Socialist Workers Party). The organization was renamed the Workers Unity Party (HVK) in January 1981, after a couple of years of class-struggle experience, political debate and leadership clarification and realignment.
Baraheni, who had flown back to Tehran with HKS leaders, opened the press conference, saying that although he was not a party member, “full freedom of speech and expression must be restored in the press and in culture and literature.” There should be free elections, he said, with all associations and political parties able to contest for support.
The party’s program for working people in Iran was presented by HKS leaders Babak Zahraie, Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh and Parvin Najafi. They called for the Iranian people’s participation in decision-making through the democratic election of a constituent assembly. Pointing to the October 1917 Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and the January 1959 mass insurrection and general strike in Cuba, Sayrafiezadeh said that working people in both revolutions had learned “it was not enough to overthrow a dictatorial regime. It was necessary to continue the struggle until power was wrested from the ruling class and a workers and peasants government established.
“This will also be true in Iran,” he said. “A socialist revolution is necessary.”
Members of the new party — those returning from exile, as well as workers, soldiers and students who soon joined — were active on many fronts of the class struggle. They were workers in oil and petrochemical refineries, garment and textile plants, and other industrial workplaces. They were militants in factory shoras, councils set up by workers to combat capitalist sabotage and the bosses’ speedup, assaults on job safety, and low or often unpaid wages.
Jan. 22, 1979, press conference announcing formation of the Socialist Workers Party (HKS) of Iran was covered by Tehran dailies, as well as foreign press. Speakers included (clockwise from top left) Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh, later HKS candidate for president; Parvin Najafi; Babak Zahraie; and Reza Baraheni, who called for free elections, with all parties being able to contest for support. HKS leaders focused on the fight for a constituent assembly to draft new constitution, and for a workers and peasants government.
The HKS called for land distribution under control of peasant shoras, as well as national self-determination and language rights of Kurds and other oppressed peoples. They joined with women workers fighting for equal pay for equal work, childcare and against compulsory veiling or any other degrading treatment.
From the outset, there was repression by the new bourgeois government, as forces loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought to play on the cleric’s influence as a decadeslong opponent in exile of the shah. Their aim was to consolidate a Shiite-based bourgeois-clerical regime, in order to stem and reverse advances of the revolution.
The balance of class forces between working people and the oppressed, on the one hand, and what was soon ratified as the Islamic Republic, on the other, shifted with stops and starts for nearly four years.
The HKS’ first public meeting, held March 2, was assaulted by gangs of both Islamist and Maoist thugs. Brandishing switchblades and chains, the attackers bellowed smears of Baraheni and HKS leaders, who were at the meeting. More than 2,000 people had turned out, including delegations of cement workers, workers from the General Motors and Iran National auto plants, teachers, students, rail workers and others. Although marshals prevented the goon squads from provoking a bloody clash, meeting organizers suspended the event and launched a public campaign demanding enforcement of the right to assemble and carry out political activity.
Less than a week later, tens of thousands of women, workers, and youth took to the streets of Tehran and other cities on International Women’s Day to push back Khomeini’s initial decree that female government employees be compelled to wear veils and other traditional clothing to work. Demonstrators defended themselves in face of government-instigated attackers, forcing the regime not only to back off for a period of time but also to concede to women in factories and other workplaces the right to participate and hold office in workers’ shoras.
Working people in cities, small towns and rural areas — oil and petrochemical workers; sugar workers and teachers; small farmers; Persians, Arabs, Kurds, Azeris and others; young and old; women and men — have time and again taken to the streets in their thousands and tens of thousands. They’ve demanded unpaid wages, water rights, affordable fuel prices, dignity for women and oppressed nationalities, and the freedom to speak their minds, organize and act in their own class interests.
Above all, more and more workers, farmers, and their families are sick and tired of Tehran’s counterrevolutionary wars waged to serve Iranian capital’s expansionist aims. They want no more military adventures, stretching from the Afghan border, across Iraq, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula to Lebanon’s Mediterranean shores. No more body bags and funerals. No more enforced sacrifice at working people’s expense and the rulers’ enrichment.
In a congratulatory message to the Hezbe Kargaran Socialist in January 1979, Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes hailed the party’s founding as “an historic and inspiring event,” one prepared through “patient propaganda” and “painstaking tasks.”
From the assembling of a cadre in North America and Iran almost half a century ago, through today’s social crises and mobilizations, the patient and painstaking effort to translate, keep in print, and distribute the programmatic lessons working people need has never stopped. It continues in the growing catalog of books produced by Talaye Porsoo and other publishing houses in Iran. It continues in the wide circulation of those publications, including two translated by Reza Baraheni, in bookshops, stalls at the Tehran International Book Fair, among students and within the working class.
That work continues to this day.
* * * *
Marxist philosopher and historian George Novack's review of The Crowned Cannibals was in this issue of Intercontinental Press:
https://www.themilitant.com/Intercont...
By Steve Clark, from The Militant newspaper.
Reza Baraheni, a world-renowned leader in the fight for political and artistic freedom in Iran, died in Toronto March 24 [2022], at age 86. He was among that country’s most prominent poets, novelists and literary critics of the last half century.
Among the more than 60 books written by Baraheni, in both Farsi (Iran’s official language) and English, are The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran, his best-known collection of essays and poetry; God’s Shadow: Prison Poems; and the novel The Secrets of My Land. His translations into Farsi of works by others include Shakespeare’s Richard III and writings by Czech novelist Milan Kundera, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, and revolutionary working-class leaders Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky.
Much has and will be written about these literary achievements, as well as his defense of free expression. This article focuses on the pivotal years in the 1970s and 1980s when his activity converged with Iranian youth and workers organizing not just to topple the Peacock Throne of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, but to advance the unfinished work of forging a revolutionary working-class party in Iran. Initiated in exile largely in the United States, this party-building activity extended into the years opened in 1979 by the Iranian Revolution.
Despite distortion by the shah’s regime and secret police (the Savak) of Baraheni’s political views and activity, intended to justify relentless persecution, he himself was never a member of any communist organization nor proponent of its program. He did, however, cultivate public ties of integrity and loyalty with proletarian revolutionists, who were among the most capable and selfless leaders and organizers of the defense of freedom of expression and association in Iran, North America and elsewhere, goals to which Baraheni committed a lifetime.
Fighting shah’s repression
Reza Baraheni was born in 1935 into an Azerbaijani Turk family in Tabriz, capital of East Azerbaijan province in northwest Iran. After university education in Tabriz and Istanbul in English literature, he took on teaching and administrative duties at the University of Tehran. In 1968 he was a founder of the Writers Association of Iran, whose demand for an end to censorship brought it into collision with the shah’s enforcers.
After teaching in Texas and Utah in 1972-73, Baraheni returned to Tehran and published an article entitled “The Culture of the Oppressor, and the Culture of the Oppressed.” He was already known for defense of his native Azerbaijani language and the tongues of other oppressed minorities, which were banned from being taught in Iranian schools. With Persians comprising some 60% of Iran’s population, the monarch — one of the “crowned cannibals,” in Baraheni’s words — anointed himself “Shah of Shahs” of the Persian nation. He brooked no resistance by Azerbaijanis (16% of the population), Kurds (10%), or Baluchis, Arabs, Turkmen and the rest.
On Sept. 11, 1973, Baraheni was arrested, interrogated about his recent article, and confined and tortured at Comité prison for 102 days. An international campaign demanding his release, including a letter in the New York Times signed by 35 prominent artists, writers, and political figures, won his freedom in January 1974. Baraheni went into exile in North America.
“I came to the United States with the intention of exposing the Shah’s repression,” he wrote in an account of his captivity in The Crowned Cannibals. “I immediately joined the ranks of Americans and Iranians who had formed the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI), which had been instrumental in releasing me from the Shah’s jail.”
CAIFI had been founded in late 1973 to conduct the campaign to free Baraheni. Over the next half decade, it defended numerous targets of the shah’s regime, helping win the release of writers Ali Shariatti, Gholamhossein Sa’edi and others. Baraheni became CAIFI’s honorary co-chair and most prominent spokesperson.
The committee’s central initiators were Iranian students in the U.S., as well as George Novack and other Socialist Workers Party leaders. Since the 1960s, members of the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance had joined with Iranian students and others to organize protests — in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. — whenever the shah traveled here to do the bidding of his chief underwriter and arms supplier, the U.S. imperialist government.
CAIFI organized well-publicized defense meetings in cities, towns, and on campuses across the U.S., at many of which Baraheni spoke and read his poetry, sharing the platform with other well-known individuals. These events were frequently met with provocations and disruptions by thugs from ultraleft Maoist Iranian student organizations, sometimes wielding nail-studded clubs, knives and other weapons.
These Stalinist groups slandered Baraheni and CAIFI leaders as agents of the shah. Meanwhile, actual Savak agents, with FBI and CIA aid and comfort, were also hurling smears and death threats against Baraheni. Many writers, artists and other CAIFI endorsers signed letters condemning these attacks on freedom of speech and assembly.
Baraheni and other CAIFI leaders were not silenced by these assaults. By 1978 their effective exposure of the shah’s tyranny and resounding demands for cultural and political freedom were converging with rising street actions, strikes and other mass protests in Iran itself.
Struggle for a proletarian party
Many young Iranian opponents of the shah in the U.S. joined the Socialist Workers Party and gained valuable experience and education in communist politics, proletarian propaganda activity, and mass work. In the mid-1970s, in collaboration with the SWP, they established an Iranian organization in exile, named by them the Sattar League.
They produced a magazine, Payam Daneshjoo, and established the Fanus Publishing House to make available in Farsi basic Marxist works, which members of the new organization circulated widely. These books included The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution and The Young Lenin by Leon Trotsky — each translated into Farsi by Baraheni — as well as titles on the fight against national oppression, for women’s emancipation, and the working-class line of march toward the conquest of power.
Several weeks prior to the revolutionary overturn of the shah’s regime on Feb. 11, 1979, this initial cadre returned to Iran. Just hours after landing in Tehran, at a Jan. 22 news conference widely covered by the Iranian and world press, they announced the founding of a proletarian party, the Hezbe Kargaran Socialist (HKS/Socialist Workers Party). The organization was renamed the Workers Unity Party (HVK) in January 1981, after a couple of years of class-struggle experience, political debate and leadership clarification and realignment.
Baraheni, who had flown back to Tehran with HKS leaders, opened the press conference, saying that although he was not a party member, “full freedom of speech and expression must be restored in the press and in culture and literature.” There should be free elections, he said, with all associations and political parties able to contest for support.
The party’s program for working people in Iran was presented by HKS leaders Babak Zahraie, Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh and Parvin Najafi. They called for the Iranian people’s participation in decision-making through the democratic election of a constituent assembly. Pointing to the October 1917 Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and the January 1959 mass insurrection and general strike in Cuba, Sayrafiezadeh said that working people in both revolutions had learned “it was not enough to overthrow a dictatorial regime. It was necessary to continue the struggle until power was wrested from the ruling class and a workers and peasants government established.
“This will also be true in Iran,” he said. “A socialist revolution is necessary.”
Members of the new party — those returning from exile, as well as workers, soldiers and students who soon joined — were active on many fronts of the class struggle. They were workers in oil and petrochemical refineries, garment and textile plants, and other industrial workplaces. They were militants in factory shoras, councils set up by workers to combat capitalist sabotage and the bosses’ speedup, assaults on job safety, and low or often unpaid wages.
Jan. 22, 1979, press conference announcing formation of the Socialist Workers Party (HKS) of Iran was covered by Tehran dailies, as well as foreign press. Speakers included (clockwise from top left) Mahmoud Sayrafiezadeh, later HKS candidate for president; Parvin Najafi; Babak Zahraie; and Reza Baraheni, who called for free elections, with all parties being able to contest for support. HKS leaders focused on the fight for a constituent assembly to draft new constitution, and for a workers and peasants government.
The HKS called for land distribution under control of peasant shoras, as well as national self-determination and language rights of Kurds and other oppressed peoples. They joined with women workers fighting for equal pay for equal work, childcare and against compulsory veiling or any other degrading treatment.
From the outset, there was repression by the new bourgeois government, as forces loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sought to play on the cleric’s influence as a decadeslong opponent in exile of the shah. Their aim was to consolidate a Shiite-based bourgeois-clerical regime, in order to stem and reverse advances of the revolution.
The balance of class forces between working people and the oppressed, on the one hand, and what was soon ratified as the Islamic Republic, on the other, shifted with stops and starts for nearly four years.
The HKS’ first public meeting, held March 2, was assaulted by gangs of both Islamist and Maoist thugs. Brandishing switchblades and chains, the attackers bellowed smears of Baraheni and HKS leaders, who were at the meeting. More than 2,000 people had turned out, including delegations of cement workers, workers from the General Motors and Iran National auto plants, teachers, students, rail workers and others. Although marshals prevented the goon squads from provoking a bloody clash, meeting organizers suspended the event and launched a public campaign demanding enforcement of the right to assemble and carry out political activity.
Less than a week later, tens of thousands of women, workers, and youth took to the streets of Tehran and other cities on International Women’s Day to push back Khomeini’s initial decree that female government employees be compelled to wear veils and other traditional clothing to work. Demonstrators defended themselves in face of government-instigated attackers, forcing the regime not only to back off for a period of time but also to concede to women in factories and other workplaces the right to participate and hold office in workers’ shoras.
Working people in cities, small towns and rural areas — oil and petrochemical workers; sugar workers and teachers; small farmers; Persians, Arabs, Kurds, Azeris and others; young and old; women and men — have time and again taken to the streets in their thousands and tens of thousands. They’ve demanded unpaid wages, water rights, affordable fuel prices, dignity for women and oppressed nationalities, and the freedom to speak their minds, organize and act in their own class interests.
Above all, more and more workers, farmers, and their families are sick and tired of Tehran’s counterrevolutionary wars waged to serve Iranian capital’s expansionist aims. They want no more military adventures, stretching from the Afghan border, across Iraq, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula to Lebanon’s Mediterranean shores. No more body bags and funerals. No more enforced sacrifice at working people’s expense and the rulers’ enrichment.
In a congratulatory message to the Hezbe Kargaran Socialist in January 1979, Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes hailed the party’s founding as “an historic and inspiring event,” one prepared through “patient propaganda” and “painstaking tasks.”
From the assembling of a cadre in North America and Iran almost half a century ago, through today’s social crises and mobilizations, the patient and painstaking effort to translate, keep in print, and distribute the programmatic lessons working people need has never stopped. It continues in the growing catalog of books produced by Talaye Porsoo and other publishing houses in Iran. It continues in the wide circulation of those publications, including two translated by Reza Baraheni, in bookshops, stalls at the Tehran International Book Fair, among students and within the working class.
That work continues to this day.
* * * *
Marxist philosopher and historian George Novack's review of The Crowned Cannibals was in this issue of Intercontinental Press:
https://www.themilitant.com/Intercont...
June 6, 2021
Excellent Writing about how intellectuals were treated by the uneducated Thug Shah. Nobody could not say anything about anything. The sad part was when the torturer who was a real thug was calling this educated guy a donkey. The whole book is a window revealing the hard life of people in the seventies.
April 24, 2010
Very brave of Mr. Baraheni, well done......so proud of you......
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews