Finding Zahra

Questions/Leads:

• What was the controversy over the presidential elections? Who was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before he became president? What are his policies?
  
• Is there something unique about the cemetery "Zahra's Paradise" and why is this well suited to the story? Are many revolutionaries buried here?
• What happened in the Islamic Revolution and how does it tie in with the Iran of today?
  
• What is the Freedom Square? Is the implied governmental promise more than tacit?
• What is the Revolutionary Guard, a guard made up of revolutionaries or guards against revolutionaries?
  

Connections:

• Disappearing when arrested - similar to Nazis with concentration camps, the Stasi with political prisoners, or USSR with the gulag.
  
• Restrictions on the Internet - censorship/propaganda, similar to China hiding searches about Tibet, and book burnings conducted by the Nazis
  
• Hospital scene - like during a war, but this is supposedly a country at peace
  

Gut Reactions: I feel for the revolutionaries that were suppressed, while I my feelings for the government are not so kindly. Why?

• The first sentence that a child (too young to respond intelligently to a question) will regurgitate is "The nation would rather perish than accept ignominy." From the way the comic went following that caption, it seems that it will both perish AND accept ignominy.
  
• The government seems to be ignoring the human side of their people - they will remove injured revolutionaries to be incarcerated while other citizens look on in shock and families still search for lost loved ones. If they are not considering that their actions will bring grief and desire to rise up, then they intend to suppress the people by means of fear and force.
• In the article, the protests by the revolutionaries are described as peaceful, while the government responds with violence. It is as if they were trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. This defensiveness says to me that the government is suspect and feels that it has something to hide or protect.