Interviews with Nima Rashedan

I think we are the luckiest human beings ever because when you think of my Andrei Sakharov example, for getting out a single statement on the paper, they spent seven months just to take a piece of paper to, you know, to put it somewhere and really hide it from the KGB, and then bring it in Italy, and then smuggle it to France, and then give it clandestinely to somebody in France, and then publish.

Or for example, for Khrushchev’s famous criticizing statement on the Soviet Union, it took the media in the world one year to know the content of the Khrushchev speech. We are living and we were born in the time that, with the help of technology, with the help of the Internet, nothing can be hidden.

Things which are happening in the street of Cairo or Tehran, no matter, are being filmed and streamed simultaneously. So, I think we are lucky; I think we have it much easier. On the other hand, yes, these facilities also allow our opponents, the suppressing regimes, to have their five-cent cyber army to come and post, you know, comments in the website: Western website, Persian website. They are also doing that.

But nobody, nobody really can silence us because the technology and time is in our side. I think it’s a very good time to be a democratic activist. I think you’ve got it all; and just be the movement and I hope these struggles between totalitarianism and democracy is once forever ended, and the spirit of democracy all around the world; and then we can work on more issues like, you know, the quality of life of people, the quality of the race issue, the religion issue in different countries after, you know, the winning struggle of totalitarian regime who are just standing against people and shooting and killing people, like in Iran and Syria, just because they have different opinions.

Nima Rashedan was among the first Iranian cyber-activists. Born in Tehran in 1974, his father was a leftist opponent of the government headed by the Shah, so the family was forced into exile in the United States but returned to Iran after the 1979 revolution.

Upon his return, Rashedan became a member of student organizations and worked as a journalist, becoming one of the first writers to publish articles in Farsi on the Internet. In the late 1990s, after the election of President Khatami, he began writing pro-democracy articles.

In 1998, Rashedan was arrested and served time in prison, including a month in solitary confinement. After his release, Rashedan immigrated to Switzerland. He now lives in the Czech Republic and continues his work as a cyber-journalist and advocate. A frequent focus of his work is the similarity between the methods and objectives of the current Iranian regime and those of the former Soviet Union.