In 1977, Iranian Islamists and leftists joined forces in Paris to bring down the Shah. Two of my uncles took opposite roads for the same revolution. One was a radical Maoist who went to China to learn to handle a weapon so he could bring down the monarchy. The other went to Paris to study, where he became a radical Khomeinist. Fresh out of the Maoist camps, my communist uncle moved to Paris in 1978 to join his brother. Once the clerics had seized total power, they put him and his comrades against the wall of a white-tiled room and executed them. In the following years, thousands of communists who had believed they were using the Khomeinists for their agenda learned how naive they were. The regime sent my family photographs of my uncle’s bullet-riddled body. The family had to pay so-called bullet money before they were allowed to bury him. I found the pictures years later, snooping through my mother’s things. My zealous uncle went to war, leading one of the units the regime sent into Saddam Hussein’s minefields. The Islamic Republic sent young boys ahead of them as human mine-clearers, plastic keys to paradise dangling from their necks. My uncle stepped on a mine and came home in a small box. Read the full essay, “The Red Prayer That Killed the Left,” on my Substack, and subscribe if you want to follow my work. The link is in the comments.