Ali Shirzad was young and enthusiastic to bring freedom to his nation when he left Iran to join the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO/ MEK/ PMOI/ Cult of Rajavi). He walked through Iran-Turkey border for eight days to go to the group’s headquarters in Iraq via Turkey, in the Fall of 1987.
As a knowledgeable educated and artistic man, he dreamed of the MEK camp as the ideal world where he would be able to read more books and to have more thoughtful discussions for his personal growth and for the growth of his society. But, soon, he realized his dream would never come true in MEK.
“As I arrived in Iraq, I was shocked to see that there was no time left for studying and thinking,” he writes in his detailed memoirs of living in MEK. “I was deprived of thinking in any way.”
Ali Shirzad
According to Ali Shirzad, MEK leaders admire two types of members, the ideologic ones and the trusted one. The former are those who ideologically are close to the leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, the later are those who are always trusted because they never question the orders; they just obey the leaders.
“What happened to me in the Cult of Rajavi?”, Shirzad wonders. “Not only I did not learn anything, but also I forgot everything I knew. When I left MEK my brain had no Gray Cortex!”
Despite his passion for poetry, arts and music he was not able to go for them for some time after his defection. “I was not in the mood for them”, he writes. “I found myself a shallow person without soul and emotions.”
That was why he did not contact his family until a few months after his departure from the cult-like system of MEK. “I had to wait to rebuild my personality and to cope with my animal nature”, he asserts. “That disaster had been caused by Massoud Rajavi. He had killed the human inside me.”
Ali Shirzad believes that if a person even has a supernatural wisdom, he will turn into an idiot under the ruling system of the Rajavis.