A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979

4. Massoud Ahmadzadeh: Theorizing Armed Struggle

133 4 Massoud Ahmadzadeh Theorizing Armed Struggle Does this not mean that more than anything we need practitioners rather than theoreticians? —Massoud Ahmadzadeh, Mobarezeh-ye mosallahaneh: ham estratezhi, ham taktik [Armed struggle: Both strategy and tactic] The Fadai Guerrillas emerged as heirs to Ahmadzadeh’s theory of armed struggle, although the new wave of guerrilla movement in Iran originated with Jazani-Zarifi’s Group One, whose loyal survivors launched the landmark “Siahkal Resurrection.” In 1967 the Iranian security forces heralded victory over subversive groups, which they labeled as isolated, delusional, or agents of an international conspiracy. What escaped the security forces was that Ahmadzadeh, Puyan, and Meftahi had in the same year grouped in Tehran and were exploring ways to counter the debilitating effects of the Iranian “police state” (Puyan 1979, 4) on the intellectuals . In actuality, Ahmadzadeh led the largest underground militant network of 1960s–70s Iran, with some fifty individuals recruited in 1969–70 alone. Above all, he is the first theorist to bestow upon Fadaiyan a central political role. What is particularly interesting about members of Group Two is that they belonged to an entirely different generation of activists: half a generation younger than Jazani and his comrades, they were children in 1953 and high school students during the reform years of 1960–63. They had never fully experienced the quasidemocratic conditions of the intermittent periods of crisis (1941–53) or restructuring (1960–63). Unlike Jazani and his comrades, Ahmadzadeh and his peers did not learn Marxism in the school of the Tudeh Party. The founders of Group Two originally held religious beliefs before they discovered Marxism on their own and mainly 134 | A Guerrilla Odyssey through the literature on the Cuban Revolution (Che Guevara and Debray) or by Brazilian (Carlos Marighella) and Uruguayan (the Tupamaros) urban guerrillas. In addition, a few major figures of this new generation of leftist activists were cultural figures—writers, critics, educators, and artists. Puyan frequented cultural gatherings and was a critic who published under the pen name Ali Kabiri. Samad Behrangi was a well-known critic and educator who had written a book on critical pedagogy, authored several children’s books, and gathered the folktales of Azerbaijan. Behrangi did not live to see the influence of his children’s book The Little Black Fish, which became Fadaiyan’s unofficial manifesto—a book that is believed to have attracted more militants to the Fadai movement than any of the PFG or Marxist texts. Behruz Dehqani and Ali Reza Nabdel were published writers . Belonging to a generation of creative resistance, these future Fadai members had little patience for theory, which they treated as a self-indulging apology for inaction. Mehdi Fatapour, a member of Group Two, captures the spirit of this generation when he describes it as “a force that recognized the Shah’s regime as the cause of the backwardness of society, hated America, found the clergy dogmatic, ridiculed the National Front’s Patience and Awaiting [Policy], regarded the Tudeh as a force out of action, and considered the students abroad to be so distant from the scene of struggle, it would not even approve of them” (2001b, 6). While the writings of Group Two are small compared to those of Group One, they capture a generation’s untamable spirit and must therefore be taken as a pathfinder’s affirmation of élan vital over decay in inertia. To fully capture their works, I offer a reading of Puyan’s pamphlet on the rejection of the “survival theory,” followed by Ahmadzadeh’s treatise on armed struggle—a book that instantly became the official theory of the PFG in its first three years. The theoretical popularity of Ahmadzadeh within Fadaiyan, however, was challenged by Jazani and his followers within the OPFG. The two conflicting views of armed struggle fissured into a schism in 1980. To analyze this conflict, I examine Jazani’s criticism of Ahmadzadeh later in this chapter before attending to the internal debates within the OIPFG at the time of the split. Repudiating the Survival Theory Amir Parviz Puyan wrote The Necessity of Armed Struggle and the Refutation of the Survival Theory in the spring of 1970. As a CC member of Group Two, Puyan Massoud Ahmadzadeh | 135 wrote the twenty-page pamphlet to assert the inevitability of armed struggle for social change in Iran. The text was first distributed internally as a summary of the discussions of the CC...