Mild Warning for the General Reader: This post has no ‘mocko’ in it. It’s just bloody serious. If you expect funny stuff, get out of here right now and come back later.
Serious Warning for the Homo Politicus: I follow politics because I live in this world as it is. Commenting on politics is not my cup of tea. If you are a politician or a politician’s henchman, get out of here after reading this post and please don’t come back. You won’t get the message anyway.
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When I write my usual stuff, it normally comes to me and I just write it and in the end I have to look for a title. When I decided to write on this subject, the title came to me first. It was ‘People Die in Iran’. I changed it to ‘People Live in Iran’ because I find the ones that are alive infinitely more important than the other ones. And this includes the martyrs.
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Let’s just set the background a wee bit:
I was born, I grew up and I was educated in the European Communist Block. It was dictatorship all right: the kind of regime that would send your mum to jail for cracking a joke about how you couldn’t find milk at the supermarket. If you think that’s a joke in itself, piss off my blog right now!
The communists always referred to what they were doing as The Revolution. Guess what?! Another revolution came and threw them out. I was a student then. People were shot in the streets big time. Mates of mine were beaten, mates of mates of mine were run over by tanks and mates of their mates got bullets through their young intellectual heads. It took years to tell good from bad and the murky waters have not cleared yet, nearly one generation after.
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Now let’s have a look at the stage overall as the actors have a dress rehearsal:
We have a tiny planet, the only one we’ve seen up close. There are loads of us, of different colours, beliefs and ambitions, but generally speaking a pretty murderous lot altogether. We shoot our neighbors in the name of our border, we poison our cousins in the name of the wealthy deceased relative and we cannot help hunting down our ideological foes. Of course, some of us get better at this game and acquire more powerful ammo and softer tactics, while others just like it to be basic instinct-based and they do whatever it takes to keep the fight on their ground, as they know it better. Well, this is only a low resolution picture of our reality. In fact not only that the picture is very highly defined and conflicts can occur between some pixels that happen to live close enough to each other (see the former Yugoslavia in the 90s) but the picture itself lives not only in our synchronic present, but also in the diachronic realm of history. It’s like:
“Good morning! I came to – err, look at this knife, I sharpened it – I came to stab you today.”
“Why, you are my best friend? By the way, it looks really sharp indeed! Good work, my friend!”
“Shut up! I WAS your friend! Don’t ever call me that again! ”
“But – why?”
“Your ancestors spat on my ancestors’ shrine!”
“Yes. That was five hundred years ago.”
“I’ve only found out last night on the news!” (Stabbing action follows.)
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Centre stage:
Iran. These days it’s Iran.
I now live in a Western country and I have a lot of concern about what’s going to happen in the future. Not the diet thing, I know I’m getting fatter and every week I spend one minute less on the court and one minute more in the Lawn Tennis Club’s bar; I mean serious stuff, the kind of stuff that’s on Fox TV or Google, where smart people gather. I can read. Believe you me: I can do it a notch better than I can write and much faster than I can spell. I am also watching TV (I’m big on watching TV; I’ll challenge you any day at a TV-watching competition!). I can listen to a bit of radio in my car and I’m even coming to grips with this computer-Internet funky stuff. I hear about this Iranian business and I remember I heard about Iran many years ago, when they were fighting the-then-good-guys from Iraq. But I had also heard of Iran even before that: The Iranian Hostage Crisis – remember? And even before that: there was a revolution – The Islamic Revolution.
You know, the world I live in today and the world I used to live in many years ago are so different. Yet MY world is pretty much the same. Even after the media bombardment I see it quite the same. Perhaps it is because I have both angles. But think of those who only see one. Are you in Iran? – If yes, you’ve seen the same kind of stuff for the last thirty years or so. Are you in the States? – If yes, you might have seen what you were expecting to see every day of your life. Now try to put yourselves in the other guy’s place!
I simply can’t. If I were in Iran these days, would I be on the Ahmadinejad side? Would I rather be with the opposition? The American way is to be on the firing side of the gun, not on the receiving end of the bullet. However, the Obama administration is quite soft on Iran. He has loads of military stuff to move out of Iraq. It’s like when you play chess: touch a figure, lift it up from the board and you must put it down somewhere: retire or attack are not choices; to put that damn thing down is your only choice once you’ve lifted it!
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A back stage dialogue:
When I was a student in my other country, the communist one, I met an Iranian guy at a party. This is the only Iranian I ever saw save the TV ones I see shot in the streets of Tehran and their more publicized leaders. He was studying law and he told me he already had a diploma in medicine from some US school and a masters degree in whatever else from Oxford. Judging by age, he could have been my father. Judging by his spending habits, he could have been my life-time sponsor (so I wouldn’t have to write this for elusive money that never comes from advertising). We were having beers. He was paying. I liked the guy. With all due respect, I’m not gay, but I just liked the guy, the way he was buying me drinks and not chatting up my girlfriend. I asked him how come he’s studying when he could be teaching or practicing medicine. This is the answer he gave me twenty yeas ago:
“My family was very rich and powerful. My family was one of the top families in what you call Iran and what is in fact Persia, by its true name. This is the country where we believe civilization was born. Persia was and still is the richer country in the world. During centuries the Persians were influenced by the Arabs. Our religion, Zoroastrianism, became threatened by Islam but it still remained the same. When the Islamic Revolution imposed Islam over the whole country, my family was slaughtered or imprisoned for being rich and for being of the old religion. I was a student overseas then and I still am. I have access to their accounts that were not seized by the Islamic regime. I shall be a student until I can go back to my country as a free man. There may be a price on my head as we speak and you may be the very one who gives me in.”
Indeed I was. Two decades later I let people hear about this conversation. I was a coward then. Sobering up and going to the authorities would have deported him and surely thrown me out of University, if not having me run over by a black official car with the number plate covered in mud.
I don’t even remember the name of this Persian guy. But I remember I told him to get another couple of beers and I asked him why was he in my country then, as mine was a bloody autocratic regime anyway. The only Iranian guy I ever met laughed:
“You too live under dictatorship, but yours is an ideological one. Nobody believes in communism. In my country, call it Iran or Persia, they have the worse form of dictatorship: the religious one. Many believe in it. When you die in communism, nobody is happy; one has to kill you. It’s in the job description. When you die in a religious regime the one who kills you is happy because he knows it’s done in the name of God.”
