Transcript of Oral History Interview with Mehr Shahidi
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Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project Copyright Notice: © 2019 Minnesota Historical Society Researchers are liable for any infringement. For more information, visit www.mnhs.org/copyright. Version 3 August 20, 2018 Mehr “Jay” Shahidi Narrator Kim Heikkila Interviewer May 17, 2018 Mehr “Jay” Shahidi -MS Kim Heikkila -KH KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Thursday, May 17, 2018, and I’m here with Mehr “Jay” Shahidi, who goes most often by Jay. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to Jay about his role in the antiwar movement at what was then Mankato State College [now Minnesota State University, Mankato, Mankato, MN]. So thank you so much, Jay, for being willing to sit down and talk to me about these experiences. MS: It’s my pleasure. KH: So I just said your name but if you could start by stating and spelling your name. MS: Well, my name is Mehr, M, as Mary; e, as Edward; h, as Harry; r, as Robert. My middle name officially is Jay, which is J, as John; a, as Albert; y, as Yvonne. Last name, S, as Sam; h, as Harry; a, as Albert; h, as Harry; i, as Ivan; d, as David; i, as Ivan. Shahidi. KH: Alright. And when and where were you born? MS: I was born in Iran, in Tehran, the capital of Iran, in 1947. KH: And how do you identify yourself racially and/or ethnically? MS: Well, that’s an interesting question because when we were growing up in Iran, we were told that our ancestors were white or Aryan, the Aryan people, but that term became derogatory later, or after 1930s because of what Hitler [Adolph Hitler (1889-1945)] and the Nazis did to Jews and mixed and non-white peoples. They called themselves Aryan but they were racist and bigoted and misused the term. For centuries the light skinned people who had settled in parts of West Asia and Persia which is now—Iran of today is the leftover, the core of it that goes back to three thousand years ago—the people who had settled there were basically white Europeans who had gone from southern Russia and east Europe to the Caucasus Mountains southwest of the Caspian Sea and that area is where the term Caucasian comes from. These nomadic Aryans or Proto-Iranians went as far East 10 as India about four to five thousand years ago. Then, some of these people later migrated south and southwest, some settled in western Iran of today and others settled just north of the Persian Gulf and a group went southwest and I’m presuming this must have been, from what I’ve read, about thirty five hundred to four thousand years ago when the great Aryan migrations—Proto- Iranian migrations, as they are now called—happened. They branched out of the Indo-Iranians who were part of the larger Indo-European group—migrations took place all over west Asia and East Europe. Some of these people went southwest to the eastern Mediterranean; later they became the Greeks and Macedonians and a group went south and settled in western Iran of today, the region of Hamadan or Ecbatana, who developed the civilization of Media. But others went further south to the north of the Persian Gulf, to the region of Pars and became the Persians—later the Greeks called them Persians—-the name Persian is Greek. That area is now called the province of Fars in Iran because when the Arabs conquered the area in 600s CE, they did not have "P" in Arabic language. So they called it Fars and the people Farsi. We, however, were told we were Irani or Iranian or Aryan—but, of course, today’s Iran is a very racially and ethnically mixed country. Iran means the land of the Aryans. Later, throughout history, there were many invasions and migrations by the Semitic peoples to its south and west and the North Africans; from the Indian subcontinent at its southeast; the Hellenistic invasion lead by Alexander The Great in 334 B.C.E. mixed the peoples; the central Asians came for centuries and later Mongolians led by Genghis Khan took over about eight hundred years ago; and, of course fourteen hundred years ago there was the Arab invasion from the Arabian Peninsula after Prophet Muhammad [Muhammad (571-632 AD)] had founded Islam. His successors conquered the Persian Empire of Sasanian Dynasty. And then came the European colonizers: the British, the Russians, the Portuguese took over the Persian Gulf area for some 150 years, and later the Soviets in the 20th century. The Russians and the British never colonized Iran officially but they played The Great Games, as in India, to weaken, divide and control the last Persian Empire which at that period was much larger in size than today's Iran. Then, specially the British, embarked on the exploration and exploitation of its natural resources and found oil in 1901. But when I came to the U.S., I was surprised that I was not really considered to be white. People asked me if I was of mixed ancestry. Probably—now, my father probably was more from Caucasian origin. He had green eyes and very light skin and, as far as ancestry, his father had come from the area of today’s Lebanon, who probably traced his ancestry back to the Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Semitic tribes and Ottoman Turks. And my mother's roots were from northern Iran, near the Caspian Sea and she was somewhat darker, but very mixed. Of course, today most of the people of Iran are darker in skin color because, as I said, there were many invasions and a variety of racial and ethnic groups were brought and settled in the area to be mingled with the local people. So I guess I don’t know for sure. I sometimes put myself as white and sometimes put myself as mixed. I really don't care about my ancestry from a racial perspective. I believe we are all humans. But in the U.S., I know some people just get upset when I say I am white or Caucasian, 11 or they figure, well, Iranians are non-whites. Most people in the US still consider Iranians as Arabs—which is historically and culturally incorrect. But if you go to Iran and ask people on the street, most will probably consider themselves Aryans or Iranian, or Persians, even the ones with very dark skin. Iran is what they called the region for thousands of years. Actually people in some parts of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, countries at southwest of— near Caspian Sea—-Turkey and Iraq of today call the area of their origins Greater Iran. Therefore, these Proto-Iranian peoples, related to Indo-Europeans, were spread on a much larger geographic area where the surviving languages today are also of Indo-European family versus Arabic and Hebrew which are Semitic, totally different roots. Turkish which is of Ural-Ultaic group was developed hundreds of years later. So the Indo-European languages, Sanskrit and Old Persian, later evolved into European languages of Latin, French and English. The Iranian language of today or Farsi is an Indo-European language but since the Arab conquest of the seventh century CE uses mostly Arabic alphabet and many Arabic words. KH: Interesting. These are things I did not know. MS: I apologize to be talking to you like a historian. KH: No, no, no, that is fantastic. MS: But I’m a history buff so— KH: Wow. Clearly. Alright, this is going to seem like a non sequitur, and to some degree it is, just for these introductory questions, what were—when you were here—when you got to Mankato—what were some of the major antiwar events, anti-Vietnam War events or organizations that you were a part of? MS: Well, I was eighteen when I left Iran after finishing high school in 1965 and the US involvement in Vietnam had started in the form of US military advisors and there had been the coup in South Vietnam and its president, Ngô Đình Diệm [Ngô Đình Diệm (1901-1963)] had been overthrown [in November 1963] when John Kennedy [US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, (1917-1963)] was in power. But the massive US bombing of Vietnam started in 1965 under President Lindon Johnson and then in’66, so when I was in Iran in high school, I was very concerned about such wars—possible, possible unjust wars waged by declining colonial powers like France. The French were the colonialists there. And now there was much talk about the US replacing France in Vietnam and surroundings. Kennedy had sent some ten thousand advisors to South Vietnam to prop up the regime there but no combat troops. Now, the American people were being told that they had to engage in military action there to prevent a communist take-over because the French who had colonized Southeast Asia and Vietnam and committed much cruelly there were leaving. And the United States had no choice but to replace them. Americans were being misled into a quagmire. The US was now starting to act as a Neo-Colonial power. This was the wrong thing to do it. I have always condemned colonization by any power, and, under any pseudonym. 12 When I was studying in England for two and a half years, I attended a technical college and became very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and was encouraged by most British young people who were against it as well.