    63

    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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