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Why did the regime put me in prison in the first place? I was put in prison for six years and it has been all illegal.

Akbar Ganji

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Akbar Ganji
Age: 54
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Ghazvin
Akbar Ganǧī
First
Years
Regime
Regimes
Illegal
Six
Prison
Place
Firsts

More quotes by Akbar Ganji

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Three of our provinces have seen mass uprisings. The three provinces are Khuzestan, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan. Recently, we witnessed massive demonstration by Iranian woman in the 7th of Tir square, and it was brutally suppressed.
Akbar Ganji
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Let me begin by saying not only you can't have democracy with $75 million. You can't even have it with $750 billion.
Akbar Ganji
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I went to the front, but I never participated in the war itself.
Akbar Ganji
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If you look at the discourse before the revolution, whether it is the left communist, whether it is the right secularist...the entirety of this discourse was such that it encouraged the kind of ascendancy for a man like Ayatollah Khomeini.
Akbar Ganji
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I, too, am against the dismantlement of Iran.
Akbar Ganji
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There is no possibility of a public demonstration [in Iran] of such defiance, but these defiant acts are certainly going on.
Akbar Ganji
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What I'm worried about is that, in case that happens [nuclear explosion], then the Iranian people are the ones who are going to pay the heaviest price. But none of the Western countries have seriously talked about this.
Akbar Ganji
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The number of the opposition has certainly increased [in Iran]. There is more disgruntlement, but because there is no media, the voice of this opposition is not heard outside Iran.
Akbar Ganji
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The regime kept saying that all of my opponents are lackeys of the United States. We used to say that this is all lie, that we are lackeys of the United States.
Akbar Ganji
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You cannot bring democracy to a country by attacking it.
Akbar Ganji
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Today, as a result of a miraculous set of circumstances, Iran is going to get between $50 to $55 billion in oil revenue, which is unheard of in the history of the revolution.
Akbar Ganji
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Supporters of the national front, Mosaddeq, believe that in Iran, we don't have a nationalities problem, we don't have an ethnic problem. It is like living with your wife, with whom you are in love and you are intensely involved in, but you also have tensions. And their position is that they want to deny that these tensions exist.
Akbar Ganji
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I did join the Revolutionary Guard, but I was simply a simple Revolutionary Guard, never a commander.
Akbar Ganji
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Revolutions invariably don't solve the issue of justice, and in its place, suppression and limiting freedom replaces that idea.
Akbar Ganji
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It was universal pressure on the regime to secure my release. International pressure was certainly helpful in my release.
Akbar Ganji
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The difference between us and the other side is that they use populist and...kind of slogans that are...they fool the people. They are the kind of dishonest and populist slogans that we are not willing to use.
Akbar Ganji
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The Shah's regime was an incorrigible regime and after a while, when the revolution happened, the situation began to change, revolutionary conditions was created...we simply wanted to change the regime.
Akbar Ganji
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We must struggle for creating a democratic system that is dedicated to democracy and human rights.
Akbar Ganji
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In the West, when all of these reactors, nuclear reactors, are matters...part of the public domain, there are all kinds of supervision over them. We see that the ecological movement, environmentalist movement, organizes all kinds of demonstrations against these. They lie on railroads, they tie themselves to the gates.
Akbar Ganji
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Khomeini obviously had many problems, but he had one clever side to him. He never made economic promises to people and as a result, he never led to dissatisfaction in this perspective. Because they need to get votes, they use misleading slogans. And this leads to rising expectations. I had a personal experience.
Akbar Ganji