Year 2096: Weird How Everyone’s Grandparent Was In The Resistance, None In The Basij

by Reza Mashadi, amateur historian, Federal Republic of Iran

Isfahan, March 29 – I’ve been collecting family stories for the new National Museum of the Great Awakening here, and after six months of interviews I can report a statistical miracle: in the entire Islamic Republic of Iran (may its memory be erased with extreme prejudice), apparently zero people ever joined the Basij. Not one. The volunteer militia that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, that crushed protests, policed hijabs, and volunteered human waves in the war with Iraq? Poof. Vanished into the mists of history like a particularly inconvenient sandstorm.

Everyone’s grandfather, on the other hand, was practically a one-man Woman, Life, Freedom movement.

“Baba Bozorg smuggled dissident pamphlets under his prayer rug,” my neighbor Hassan told me last week, eyes misty with pride. “He once hid three women without headscarves in his basement for a month. The Basij came knocking and he told them to go inspect their own mothers.”

Hassan’s family album shows Grandpa in crisp Basij fatigues at a 2029 parade, arm around a Revolutionary Guard colonel. “That was irony,” Hassan explained. “Deep cover. He was mocking them.”

My cousin in Qom swears her grandfather was the one who spray-painted “Javid Shah” on the wall of the local morality police station in 2025. The fact that he was photographed beating protesters with a baton the very next day? “Performance art,” she said. “He was infiltrating from within. Very dangerous work. The family is still waiting for his posthumous medal.”

I’ve heard variations of this from taxi drivers, university professors, shopkeepers, and even the guy who sells stolen satellite dishes. Every single one had a grandparent who risked everything for freedom. The math is flawless: if the resistance really was that widespread, the regime should have collapsed sometime around 2010. Instead it limped along until the Great Awakening of ’25-26, at which point the entire population apparently flipped the switch overnight from enthusiastic enforcers to lifelong secret democrats.

It’s exactly like the stories my French colleague told me about his own country after 1945. Every Toulouse resident had been in the Maquis. Every waiter in Lyon had hidden Jews. The collaborators? Vanished. The Vichy regime ran on fairy dust and German tourists.

Here in 2096 we are more honest, of course. We admit the regime was terrible. We just insist that our specific bloodline had nothing to do with it. The Basij, we are told, were all orphans. Or robots. Or imported from North Korea. Definitely not anyone’s beloved Agha Joon who used to bounce us on his knee while telling us how the Jews and Americans were behind every protest.

I asked my own father the other day, just to test the waters.“Dad, what did Grandpa do during the protests?”

He smiled the serene smile of a man who has already rehearsed this answer for seventy years. “He was in the resistance, of course,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

I nodded. Of course he was. Funny thing, though. When I went through the old family trunk last month I found Grandpa’s Basij ID card tucked between his prayer beads and a faded photo of him saluting the Supreme Leader. I put it back. Some miracles are better left unexamined.

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