I did some soul searching and found that I talk too much about being small. This is hardly a very relevant fact about me, especially in a publication that aims to address more serious issues. So why does my mind go there? I obviously have a complex. Not a major complex, but persistent enough to gnaw at me from the inside.

Since the war began anew, February 28th this year, I started shrinking. Very rapidly. Mostly because I didn’t eat and overexercised. Thermodynamics. I didn’t need to lose any weight to begin with, especially not this amount with this speed. In a normal time, in a normal society, this sort of physical transformation would invite concern, perhaps a careful, non-invasive question. In my case, it invited… attention, friendliness, and praise. So much praise. As if getting to the threshold of being medically underweight is some kind of epic achievement only the initiated can fulfill.

The more I shrank, the more the negative space around me grew. And the social fabric reacted positively to this growing negative space, to my gradual disappearance. I often wonder if this is just a function of the Western brand of patriarchy, or a reaction to my particular West Asian body. And it dawned on me, holy shit: they really like it when we disappear.

A long time ago I did a regrettable thing, I read the absolute shitshow that is Nabokov’s unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura. It was so bad I thought I’d never think about it again, but now it’s resurfacing in my consciousness, with all its strange and morbid descriptions of disappearance. The melting, the disintegration. I feel like I’ve been melting too, but my disappearance only invited applause. We’re in the ozempic age, so much has been written about that subject and I really do not intend to add to that noise, but what I want to ask is this: isn’t disappearance the only favorable state for an Iranian woman in the Western gaze?

Look at the representation: a handful of critically acclaimed darlings have their trauma-porn autofiction elevated to the cultural stratosphere. The native informant gets her loot, that’s the bargain. In these works, you don’t always see the heroine physically shrinking, but the element of becoming less is pervasive. Her agency is always stripped in some way, even in self-inflicted ways. Her personhood is diminished. The West likes to read about Iranian women who lose a part of their innate humanity.

That sounds very abstract, so let me be more specific. Satrapi’s heroine in Persepolis. Djavadi’s in Disoriental. The comedy that is Reading Lolita in Tehran (just thinking about it makes me cackle). It is not enough that they really want narratives where the Islamic Republic inherently encroaches on female personhood (that is the main requirement to get published), they want this trend to continue in emigration: so, you must become miserable, you must become addicted, or anorexic, you must lose whatever sliver of agency you had and become, in a way, less than human. Then you are granted conditional humanity.

Iranian “authors” in emigration keep screeching about a double-bind: if they write what is publishable, writers like me (and hundreds of us in the motherland) will pry their little autofiction porno apart. If they write the truth, it simply won’t see the light of day. Either way, they lose. There is another type, the “conscious aristocrat” who, having found out that musings about their grandma’s diamonds and upbringing in a palace with a corps de ballet of totally silent servant girls aren’t popular, will start writing the same shit with a transparent veneer of preemptive self-flagellation. What is the common denominator? The woman must be small, must be powerless and oh, she must suffer. She must suffer so much the Western salivary glands activate. When they hear the drip-drip-drip, it’s no longer salivation, it’s money trickling into their bank account.

And here we return to the same stupid smallness. You know, in the ur-suffering-woman narrative, the heroine is so overcome with mental anguish she stops eating and delicately fades away, like some consumptive West Asian Violetta Valery. Rich, coming from me, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you, I ate myself alive. I didn’t lie on an ottoman, now pale and even more racially ambiguous, limp wrist and all, waiting for some white, long-suffering man to set me free from the prison of my traumatic past, no, I freaking cycled. A lot. Incessantly. And I cleaned, obsessively. And I raged. I got into physical confrontations. I yelled curses. I smashed plates. I let the fire burn me from the inside because my world was burning and nobody gave enough shits to make it stop. Can I read about such wasting? No. It’s not pretty.

Even further? Can I read about an Iranian woman who gets angry and FAT? Who eats her rage and swells and takes up space and becomes more of herself, not less? Can I read about an Iranian woman who, imagine, doesn’t become a carbon copy of so-called princess Leila? No, I can’t, because Iranian women aren’t allowed to be fat, or old or ugly or angry or uninteresting or poor. It’s simply against the rules, you see. Because if you become these things the bargain of your conditional humanity instantly expires.

Meanwhile, actual Iranian men are never granted conditional humanity, so they have to really put in some elbow grease if they want that sweet, sweet proximity to whiteness. They essentially have two choices, either accept that they will be consistently dehumanized, or turn into caricatures. There are several brands of clowning associated with the second choice: the very smart™ caviar gauche leftist, the monarchist nostalgist, the tryhard crypto-fascist. The more outlandish the ideology, the higher chance he will be performatively accepted as the “quirky guy”, and still mocked relentlessly behind his back. And the first choice? First choice leads to reduced economic opportunities in emigration, harrassment, and social isolation. Fun! I really wouldn’t wish to be an Iranian man in Europe, I can tell you that.

For the Iranian woman in emigration, the path towards conditional humanity is pretty straightforward. I can tell you about numerous experiences where these nice NGO aunties come to me at social functions, and just offer me opportunities, because someone had just pointed to me as the token Iranian woman. And look at me! So small and gaunt, poor thing. Surely, I can be helped. Surely, if only I don’t run my giant mouth. But I do run it. And then the house of cards collapses. I say things I shouldn’t say; I use words like “hegemony”, “imperialism”, “unequal exchange”, “Geneva convention article 33”, “collective punishment”, “sanctions”, “overcompliance”, “maternal mortality”, “unequal sanction burden” etc. And let me tell you, the good humanitarian NGO aunties really, really do not like that.

Sometimes, one of them will come and ask me about a movie that “broke her heart”. If they’re old, it’s something like “Not without my daughter”. If they’re middle aged, usually “A separation”. For the younger ones, there are multiple nasty options to choose from, I’m not doing free PR for the “authors”. And then I have to gather my strength and ask, again and again, if the female had any agency. If the movie ever depicted the parallel pharmacy system, currency exchange or buying gold. How many times did the characters talk about inflation in the movie? And usually, this spins off into me giving a lecture on the nature of imperial narrative curation which is not what they came to talk about. They saw someone small and downtrodden, and expected me to prostrate myself and wail: “The Islamic Republic, this evil, evil, evil thing, it did this to me!!!” Well, no. I did this to myself.

The common denominator between the NGO auntie, the fetishist and your annoying coworker is that they’re almost aroused by your negative space. The less you become, the higher your value. It makes you wonder what the ideal narrative outcome is? There is only one. You die. Not as a result of sanctions, overcompliance, or American bombs. No, you spend thirty years lying, and then commit suicide in your Parisian flat. The press salivates. Drip-drip-drip. The money pours in, alas, you are too dead to enjoy it. Doesn’t matter, though.

They’ll say you died of a “broken heart”.

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In this essay I will use a lot of Farsi terminology in transcription. I know some readers may find this jarring or unusual, but the subject matter simply doesn’t allow full translation. That is exactly the topic, you will see shortly that the gap between the word in Farsi and its closest English approximation is the space where all the productive tension lies.

In the last essay, I talked briefly about empathy and hamdeli. Here, I’d like to take it a step further. Perhaps, if you are from a culture that is very individualist, some concepts outlined here will strike you as ‘backwards’, regressive, oppressive, brutal, nonsensical or primitive. I encourage you to stay with me nonetheless, and suspend the value judgement until the end. It is a mark of respect to give concepts you don’t approve of or fully understand the space to be digested before resorting to a knee-jerk reaction of outrage and condemnation.

I will reluctantly use collectivist/individualist terminology. It is flawed and inherently reductive, but any other alternative that came to my mind struck me as worse in both respects. If you have a better idea, let me know in the comments, I’d appreciate that.

Traduttore, traditore. I should know, since my entire life is predicated on these small treasons, of finding approximations for concepts that don’t quite fit. Sometimes the issue is lexical, that is the better case. Sometimes it is much deeper. When it concerns fundamental modes of organizing human relationality, the territory gets very slippery. There is always the western cultural anthropologist with a sledgehammer who swings and screams: “Essentialism! Essentialism!” every time a mode of organization is presented as pervasive. Interestingly, they do no such thing when sorting, ranking and filing our native organisations themselves. So, if you feel the urge to swing that hammer, I’d invite you to do a field study, and observe the patterns I will shortly outline. I am convinced that they absolutely hold in the Iranian rural and working class context.

This mode of relationality that we will shortly explore doesn’t come from a romantic notion of “national” identity as some fixed state of being, nor from some metaphysical arrangement of the Iranian “soul”. In fact it is not limited to Iran at all, but I know Iran, and I know the terminology to illustrate it effectively. My personal theory is that this mode of organization, which to borrow a western framework, could be considered a form of extreme collectivism, is a natural and successful human adaptation to siege conditions. For the past three centuries, we have constantly been besieged by various imperial interests and spheres of influence, but even before that we have been besieged by the nature of our geography. Despite its many natural beauties, it should not be forgotten that Iran is, apart from the Caspian littoral, geographically harsh and largely near-uninhabitable, and so in entirely different ways. For instance, human existence in Yazd is something we take for granted, but the ancient technologies that allowed for it aren’t just isolated engineering feats, but feats of social and communal adaptation. The Iranian plateau in general is one of the oldest continuous areas of human settlement, while being either extremely mountainous, extremely arid, or both. Adaptation to such harsh ecological and geographical conditions carries with itself a particular propensity for a mode of social and relational organization that prioritizes cohesion, cooperation, ritual and suppresses individuation. This is only my theory.

I: The Dyad

The dyad is the smallest possible form of human social organization. Usually, when speaking of relational dyads, we either focus on the mother-child binary, or binary between intimate partners. It is something of a tautology to presume these forms of organization are ideally predicated on love, if they are to stay dyads. However, this is where our first terminological issue comes to light: Farsi dedicates two entirely different nouns to the loves associated with these two forms of dyadic organization. Mehr for the mother-child dyad, and whatever larger organization proliferates from it as the kernel, and eshgh for the intimate partner dyad.

Having multiple nouns that denote various shades of the term love is not unknown to the Western or anglophone reader, at least from the Greek context. However, the Farsi context becomes more complicated and interesting when we stop observing love as a noun, and turn to it as a verb. To love is a transitive verb in the English language; it requires an object and implies agency, directionality and temporality. There is no such verb in the Modern Persian language. To love, as a verb, is simply not a feature. There are phrasal constructions used to express the sentiment, but love itself is entirely conceptualized as stative, rather than eventive. However, being a lover is indeed a verb, and intransitive. You may perform the action of being a lover, but an object is not a necessary precondition.

There is no verb, not even phrasal, associated with mehr. Mehr simply is, as an emergent function of reality. It is always a noun. The fact that one loves their child is so self-explanatory and obvious the language didn’t bother to make it explicit.

When we speak of love as the organizing principle for all dyads, in individualist frameworks it is something that emerges between individuals, an action they undertake. In the Iranian framework it is the state of each entity, refracted through the state of the other entity, producing something emergent that is both and neither. Correlation or causation, I do not know, but both folk metaphysics and established mysticism elevate this act of becoming a lover and losing one’s identity into a sacred category. It has a name, when the Beloved is divine. It is called fana’ and it is, indeed, a foundational Sufi concept. In Arabic, it means something close to “annihilation”. In our classical poetry, which functions as the great reservoir of the collective unconscious, intimate partner love is often a proxy for either the explanation or the experience of the metaphysical form of annihilation of the self.

A person trained in western psychology would read this and start convulsing because this sounds like pathological enmeshment. And, I’d accept that it is enmeshment, but what is pathological and what is adaptive is not up to representatives of one parochial intellectual tradition to decide. You may also ask why I included an Arabic term with such heavy Islamic subtextual meaning, and to that I would respond that Islam entered the Iranian cultural millieu in the 7th century, and had become the dominant form of religious expression between the 10th and 11th centuries; that is more than a full millennium. Comparatively, we are talking about the time of the Norman conquest, wouldn’t you say that affected England for the thousand years to come?

If the dyad already models dissolution of strict individual boundaries as precondition for its existence, then as the social organization proliferates outwards, the pattern dilutes, but remains nonetheless. Functionally, love forecloses the possibility of remaining an atomized entity. It blurs, merges, connects and annihilates containers of the self.

II: The slow climb towards the polity

Very soon upon encountering the basic principle of dyadic organization, we encounter the concept of az-khod-gozashtan, or abandonment of the self. If you are uncomfortable, it goes to show how deeply ingrained the illusion of universality of the Maslow model remains in anglophone consciousness. Az-khod-gozashtan is not viewed as a sacrifice, nor is it a form of relational martyrdom (we have plenty of those, this is not one of them). It is a positive, encouraged mode of relationality. Deference to the collective structure. The collective structure itself is traditionally organized in groups of increasing size and decreasing levels of mutual blurring: there is the dyad, then khanevadeh (roughly “family”), then khaneman (roughly “extended family”), then tireh (lineage branching out to sub-tribe), tayefeh (sub-tribe), ghabileh (tribe) and ultimately ghom (people). If you notice, ethnic markers are not quite as apparent as one would expect, since ethnicity itself is a Western concept that doesn’t map neatly onto the Iranian reality. The terminology differs linguistically between different groups, each nomadic or formerly nomadic group has their own terminologies and particular structures, but the main idea is comparable between them, even among settled, traditionally non-tribal groups. Az-khod-gozashtan is the deference of the individual towards the well-being and peace of the higher organizational categories, and a highly desirable outcome.

How can an individual self-actualize in these circumstances? They can’t. The ladder goes another way. The highest achievment of the individual is full immersion into the collective polity, not separation from it. However, here we encounter a tension, what was productive in the 18th century is no longer as simple today, in the conditions of industrialization and modernity. We haven’t remained in the 18th century state, but have rather found compromising solutions, where deference is largely ritualized. The way patriarchy problematically maps onto this territory is a point of tension young Iranians are finding ways to deal with every day, however: it should be said that in the traditional context, self-actualization as such never enters the equation. It is not a concept at all. How this works in the 21st century, among urban, educated Iranians is very sociologically interesting. The deference gets transformed into a shared ritual performed for the benefit of the larger organizational entity, while the blurring of individuality still persists in the smaller kinship units. If that is so, then are we all actually individualists cosplaying in our ancient collectivist rituals? Not so quick. Even the smaller organizational structures that retain the affective merging function as organisms. In times of crisis (and that, in Iran, is always) they are necessary for survival. The architecture of the extended family as the organizational unit of society, as opposed to individuals, allows for shock-resistance. An atomized Iranian is a bankrupt and dead Iranian. This may sound brutal, but it is an unfortunate truth. We materially, structurally and emotionally depend on the larger, enmeshed structures to support us and absorb the cost of volatility imposed by imperialist violence. In this sense, total individuation is self destructive a priori.

III: The issue of empathy

How does the familial organism truly operate? Is it organized around the will of a despotic elder patriarch, self-organizing, democratic, or something else entirely?

The institution of the patriarch is real, though fading. Traditionally, in many extended families, primacy of decision-making would fall on the eldest or most prominent male, the so-called “bozorg”. This institution is almost entirely obsolete. Many families actually function analogously, with a matriarch at the center. One of the relational realities of Iranian womanhood is female-on-female violence, the relentless hazing and policing of young brides, etc. Not unlike other central and south Asian contexts. But if we zoom out, and accept that pathology exists alongside adaptation, we see that when the organism is healthy and adaptive, it functions on the principle of hamdeli.

And immediately, we have another terminological problem. Hamdeli is often translated as empathy, but it is anything but that. Empathy pressupposes a cognitive process, a conscious understanding of the affective reality of an Other. Hamdeli does the opposite, it is literally “co-heartedness, sharing a heart”. An immediate, automatic and somatic recognition of the shared affective reality. That is why we feel our mothers’ moods in our bodies before we can see their face, a lifetime of Pavlovian reflex adaptations to sharing emotional charge before it becomes a conscious or verbal reality. The organism emerges out of hamdeli, it is a pre-verbal field of emotional charge that is picked up on members inherently attuned to it. If that sounds like a load of mumbo-jumbo, let me illustrate with an example: you are in a mehmooni (a family gathering). There is tension between your uncles, though they are as affable as ever, and very cordial with each other. You do not know why you know, or how you know it, but you also know that everyone else knows, and that whatever it is will be resolved via mediation from another more senior family member before the night ends. You also know that you will likely never know what the exact issue was, or if you do, in twenty years, the content might utterly shock you or prove ridiculously banal. It doesn’t matter. It is important that you do your part in maintaining the conditions where this tension can be overcome without saturating the field with your own unresolved charge.

The healthy relational organism is self-healing. When a member is faced with a difficulty, it is not a choice to help them. It is not magnanimity, it is not even required. It is a given. If you ask someone: “why did you do this for so-and-so?” they may give you a blank stare, the “why?” is not even a matter of conscious decision. This is how the organism overcomes death, destruction, bankruptcy, addiction, and such. In real times of need there is no ledger. There is no mention of “capacity”. Your capacity is a given, because there is no you. There is the organism, it is wounded, and it needs relief. Once you go out, and look at this dynamic from the diasporic lens, some events, some rallies around members in need, some disasters averted strike you either as heroic, extremely convoluted or outright insane. But within the organism you see no such thing.

IV: Infrastructure: the RRR principle (Resistance Requires Redundancy)

Iranian society has been placed under extreme economic pressure due to the relentless sanction regime. This is a direct violation of the fourth Geneva Convention, Article 33, proscribing collective punishment. Every single Iranian citizen, every person residing on Iranian soil is on the receiving end of punishment for the geopolitical and ideological animus the hegemonic forces have for their government, regardless of their opinion or support for it.

The level of economic precarity faced by everyday Iranians is very difficult to imagine for those in the Imperial core. This is by design. Have you noticed that the narratives about Iran that you are constantly exposed to never show the protagonists buying gold, or participating in currency exchange? Do the protagonists ever talk about prices? When in Iran, 80% of our conversations center around this: hedging against inflation, convoluted conversion efforts, and the constant, relentless erosion of our purchasing power. The Iranian middle class is shrinking so rapidly that I sometimes wonder if it even exists, or if it merely hasn’t admitted defeat yet in anything but geste. Two university educated, full-time employed Iranians can’t survive with a dual income in Tehran. It would be exceedingly difficult to raise a child without the financial, logistical and practical support of extended family. In this circumstance, mutual aid, to borrow the hip term, is not a matter of any grand philosophy, but a way to stay alive when the most powerful country in the world tries its hardest to prevent you from doing just that.

In order for any resistance, let alone resistance to a rabid, nuclear-armed superpower to be feasible, redundancies have to be built in. That means a decentralization from any state welfare apparatus, a self-sustaining, or largely self-sustaining network of mutually connected relational organisms that cooperate and manage themselves. It is not the mosaic defence doctrine, it is the mosaic survival doctrine. When you can’t depend on your currency to hold until the beginning of next week, savings are transferred to gold. Gold is then speculated on, traded, hoarded, loaned and circulated in a parallel economy largely running through familial channels. The relational organism is an economic unit. In the Iranian context, resistance often means just survival or resisting destitution, in this sense, this “pathological” enmeshment with your broader family and clan is not irrational or all that pathological. It is how you live to see another day, procure unavailable medications or keep a roof over your head. This system was built from centuries of precarity, from our inhospitable geography, from imperial games and famines. But today, it is still useful and adaptive. Otherwise it would’ve been discarded long ago.

V: Community is a dirty word

In many Western activist spaces, I often see desperate calls for community building that fall flat. Our modes of relationality are inherently different, it is as irrational to expect me to fully understand the nuances of your community building within individualism, as it is for you to understand our hamdeli. However, as we see more and more violent suppression of dissidents in the West, as speech and thought become policed and we slide towards authoritarianism, it is becoming apparent to me that the Western activist class is suffering from an acute lack of relational organism. If you can’t depend on anyone when you get fired for expressing a pro-Palestinian opinion, you’re less likely to take any meaningful action. This breeds resentment, burnout and a whole lot of psychological strain. There are some lessons from our centuries of survival under siege that you can find useful. Because the circle is closing down on you too, it is a matter of recognizing it before you’re caught inescapably.

Nobody can reproduce the full repertoire of another culture’s mode of relation at will, nor should they. But the elements that I’d like to draw your attention to are the following, as questions to ask yourself frankly, sine ira et studio.

• If you’re fighting for a cause, how much of your individuality are you willing to sacrifice?

• If you have comrades, do you feel for them, feel them, or merely understand that you should acknowledge their feelings?

• If you’re faced with a life-altering event, who will catch you?

• Is there a way for you to let go of the idea of reciprocity? What would replace it?

• Do you keep mental ledgers of energy expended from you as an individual, versus energy invested into you as an individual? Why? What would be necessary for this bookkeeping to become obsolete?

• Who are you prepared to catch when doing so would be extremely inconvenient? What level of inconvenience are you prepared to endure before adding to the ledger?

• What is love to you? And do you love what you claim to support more than the comfort of the idea of yourself as someone who loves it?

• Is it more important to you to achieve great individual success in some domain, or to be close, loved and supported by another person, or a group thereof?

  And lastly:

• If you fall in love, really fall in love, would you accept to dissolve, or pull away and enforce boundaries so as not to infringe on your individuality?

As with anything in life, there is always a trade off. For me, the individuation I longed for when I was young and under the influence of gharbzadegi no longer registers as meaningful. This was my road back to the center. Everyone must find theirs and come up with their conclusions. What I’d like to leave you with is an eye for examining narratives: are they truly universal or merely parochial? Were they formed in conditions of hegemony and abundance (like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), then retro-fitted to serve as normative frameworks? And if the things you were taught were universal are merely provincial, where can you diversify your ideas about the reality of the world? And how can you use them to serve humanity in an age of unceasing darkness?

All I know is that love is the only substance in the world that multiplies by division, and that we should invite more of it into our lives, whatever we call it, whether it is stative, eventive, or something entirely alien. How we organize ourselves around that love will determine if we can withstand the onslaught on our bodies and souls.

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So, I crashed and burned. Anyone with a set of eyes and a functioning brain could’ve seen it coming, I, however, did not. Story as old as time, isn’t it? All the frantic biking, the compulsive cleaning, the incessant bleach fumes and anxiety and news addiction caught up with me, and I very suddenly came down in the most undignified way. It wasn’t a grand thing that took me out, it was a simple respiratory infection. A virus. It happened, as it often does, completely unexpectedly. One day I had gone on yet another bleaching spree, after having biked 50km the day before that. After 12 hours of nonstop cleaning I felt inhuman fatigue, but it was easy enough to explain away as simply being tired from working too much. It was in fact the prodrome. I woke up with an extremely sore throat (I imagined that fate had bestowed upon me the dreaded strep throat, how ironic that would be since I campaign and fundraise for rheumatic heart disease!). From that point it got worse and I was basically out of service for 48 hours.

I was saved, not physically but mentally, emotionally and practically, by my small but golden community and by pharmaceuticals produced in Karaj (Actocold forever!). Since I was feverish and somewhat intellectually limited, I chose to spend my time reading things from my “Maybe one day” list. And on that list was, naturally, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Misspelled Atusa Moshfegh. Now, I have to be completely transparent here. I have a rule I hadn’t spoken about so overtly, but I try not to consume any cultural products made by Iranians in the hegemonic language. Because, chances are, they are going to be contrarevolutionary propaganda. However, since this work was so Americanized, I thought it would be, at the very least, not as annoying as some overt propaganda. So I read a little and I couldn’t anymore because of the ennui, the bourgeois fatigue… I felt like I knew this character from before. I have literally written about her, except the Iranian, unbleached version. Granted, Moshfegh’s heroine is a WASPy blonde, but she might as well be the “sad princess”. And since I was so TIRED, I couldn’t read about an entirely unnecessary and stupid version of existential fatigue portrayed there.

My fatigue feels more like Kolyma tales than MYORR. And I’m not physically in a war zone, imagine how it would feel to get this dreaded virus in Tehran, or worse, in Bandar Abbas right now? Without electricity and reliable running water? As the terrorist US regime bombed and murdered civilians just last night? Yeah, there is fatigue and fatigue. My privileged fatigue looks a lot more like the ennui of a bourgeois WASPy chick than the fatigue of a person whose life is in peril, but still, they are categorically different. The level of physical exhaustion I’ve felt in the past few days made me realize that I have been exhausted and depleted for a long time, but emotionally and morally. The body finally caught up to the underlying psychological reality.

Can we talk about this moral depletion? There isn’t really an adequate word in English to describe it, but in my mind it is the intersection on the Venn diagram of two Farsi terms: farsudegi (فرسودگی) (deep exhaustion, depletion, fatigue) and estisal (استیصال) (hopelessness, demoralization). When thinking about fatigue, a metaphor appeared to me quite naturally, from materials engineering. Materials experience fatigue too, in fact they have limited cycles of use before they decay past tolerance. Static and dynamic loads affect materials differently, and the cyclical repetition of dynamic loads gradually, imperceptibly causes decay within the material itself, way before it reaches breaking point. This cyclical nature interests me, because I feel like we are all being exposed to cyclical dynamic moral loads.

It started in our childhoods. Either you were brought up in the hegemonic core, or if you were in the periphery like me, you were westoxified [under the influence of غرب‌زدگی (gharbzadegi)]. Through media and soft power we were exposed to violence and gore, from the cartoons onwards. We were trained to view violence, to view shooting and feel… not much, if anything. When the violence moved from the movie to the news (and I remember seeing news about the aggression on Iraq as a child), the circuits that numb the empathy effect were already established. We were primed to consume violence and feel nothing. However, I wasn’t aware that subconsciously there is the static load of unused, unaccessed empathy. And it presses on your psyche. With the genocide, with three years of non-stop intentional gore exposure, our empathy circuits are fried, the dynamic load has definitely caused material fatigue. But also, the static load of unused empathy sits heavy, and we are helpless in the face of our own moral imperatives that have no way of materializing. It is tempting to consider this a side effect of hegemony, but I invite you to think of a darker possibility. Perhaps we have intentionally been rendered useless by overexposure. Perhaps we have been made passive and apathetic precisely due to the repeated, cyclical load of vicarious trauma we were exposed to since childhood.

This produces farsudegi and estisal in equal measure. As an Iranian, I have a very intimate understanding of how these concepts are weaponized in mass psychology, against entire populations. Disagree with me if you want, but the Islamic revolution, for all its imperfections, was an act of decolonization. The hegemon could not forgive its success, therefore we were collectively punished, for nearly half a century, with every possible technique (economic strangulation via sanctions, brainwashing campaigns, demonization, assassinations, and now war and wanton killing of civilians and children). The purpose of this is to wear us out, to trap us within the farsudegi and estisal to the point where we are so spent and apathetic we can’t form organized resistance.

But there is a catch. And it is perhaps the most important insight from my brief illness. A depleted person, whether they are physically or morally exhausted, can not climb out of that pit themselves. They need community, but that itself is not a good word. Here I would reach for the Russian term sobornost (соборность). It is more than togetherness, it is a form of communal, harmonious shared truth. Only through this shared harmony are the depleted able to reach smirenie (смирение), not mere peacefulness, but submission to all that is, with full awareness. Perhaps it is interesting that the Islamic tradition has an equivalent concept, sakina (سَكينة ). The reason why the hegemony and its late capitalist operating system are so hell bent on destroying all forms of communal unity, from the family as the nucleus, to ever larger forms, is precisely because these oases of togetherness are the only antidote to estisal.

And this is why they failed in Iran, even though they tried their darndest for nearly fifty years. Because our culture is inherently communal and horizontal, the antidote is built in. There is no way to atomize an Iranian without them ceasing to be Iranian in the first place. This happened too, as you can see in the crypto-fascist diaspora, but in a very small minority of people. Since our culture operates on a basis of shared ritual, communal celebration and mourning, since we traditionally live in multigenerational households and within somewhat tribal extended family structures, breaking those bonds that proliferate outwards and hold the society together is an extremely difficult task. Resistance is predicated on this shared truth, and community is perhaps not the right word.

Community means having close relations with a group of people, but the American and Iranian understanding of those close relations is very different. You can’t turn community on and off, you are permanently in the service of the shared truth. There is no inconvenience, because you’re not a mere entity in a web, you are a living organ in a larger organism. Naturally, when the leg of the organism faces a problem, the other leg has to take some of its load. This is automatic, because pain is shared. Hamdeli and empathy are fundamentally different concepts, where hamdeli is the somatic sharing, co-experience of the pain of the other.

How ironic that these words would be displayed on the walls of the United Nations that keeps failing at this core mission.

So, in this sense, I have to disappoint you and myself, but rest is not resistance. Building the shared organism is the necessary precondition to survive as an entity that can still resist. And rest comes as a natural product of being a part of an organism that can hold you with your pain, when you inevitably crack under dynamic load.

There is no real way out of this. There is no shortcut, nothing you can do on your own, except being in community. Real community. And that means taking on the pain of others, and lifting them when they are weak. It means service that doesn’t cease and doesn’t take days off. Individuals can be worn out by pressure, either on their bodies or their souls, collectives soothe, reinforce, reinvigorate and revive. It is the task of us, people who want to keep their souls intact from the onslaught, to serve others, and build, in any way we can, the organisms that are antifragile and self-healing.

My cold will pass. It is thankfully already on its way out. The war will continue and so will the onslaught on our psyche. We all have to prepare for much darker days ahead. In order to do that, we have to anticipate the unbearable fatigue that comes with witnessing and resisting the monster. So I call on all of you, all the free people, wherever you are, to build containers for shared truth offline, in your homes and in your hearts. Don’t be afraid of feeling for the Other. If you don’t you haven’t protected yourself from the pain, but merely increased the static load. Feel the pain, and let others carry it with you.

The only way out is through, and together.

*Small note: there is some ongoing debate about this verse, whether it is peykar or digar in the original, i.e. whether the sons of Adam are parts of each other or of one body. But in essence, the meaning remains the same. I chose the “body” version here, although I’m fairly convinced that the more original version is the other. See here for the drama. As you can see we take these things very seriously.

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So we have written about politics, about rubble and missiles and the lines themselves smelled of gunpowder and the metallic residue of blood, and we wept and we raged until our hair turned white and our gait unsteady.

This is what they want.

So I will write different lines, lines that smell of a child’s morning breath and milk, of fresh cut grass and the soft fuzz on top of ripe quinces. I will speak of the giant pomegranates of Kashan that resemble a heart so full it bursts open and reveals its ruby core. I will speak of the sturgeons and their silver gills, and the wonder, the wonder, the wonder of a green paradise by a sea that is not a sea. I will speak of love, only love, because it is the real core that remains when all else is stripped.

Creation has given me many gifts; the greatest of them the capacity to love. And I have loved: I have loved trees, animals, places, people. I have loved with an intensity that threatened to collapse my lungs, desiccate my body, return the universe to its initial, singular state, for that is love at its source. I have loved with such fervor many mistook it for insanity. I have loved, and I continue to love, with every atom of my being.

There is an endless ocean of love inside me, but not a pacific one, tumultuous, boiling, always in flux. As it goes with seas, they have tides, waxing and waning, always changing shape. My love for Creation has found different faces, different objects, different emanations. It has remained throughout the pain, sometimes sharpening it. Love comes with a heavy load; it is a strange bargain. You give away a part of yourself to the one you love, and the contract is signed: I give you the license to cause me pain, and in turn I get to see the ocean once more, as reflected in your eyes.

Love for a land is that same love, refracted through memory that’s older than any of us. Why love a stone? Why love a plant? The cypress tree of Abarkuh, five millennia old and still living, is an emanation of my love, and every particle of dust on the ancient streets of Yazd - my beloved. There is an ocean of love and it does not discriminate. It merely needs to be set free.

The cypress tree, the rice paddy, the glowing minerals of Qeshm, the breathtaking majesty of the eternal bride of the Alborz, they are mirages. The Love is ontologically prior, older than any of them, older than time itself. But Creation decided to drop me among them and it is only through them that I see the vastness and beauty, the strange and frightening transcendence at our long-forgotten core. I have signed a contract with every stone in my land, before time itself, to see Love through it and pay for the privilege in mourning.

Urumiyeh was dying. No human death compares to the death of a small universe, the home of birds and fishes, the livelihood of peasants, the living force itself of a harsh and unforgiving relief. I had tied my love to it, unconsciously, before knowing its or my own name, and submitted myself to the grief of seeing it destroyed. I grieved, and so did all of us, all 93 million, for a miracle that faded before our eyes.

And then the rain came, along with the missiles. As death rained upon the land, so did life. And life, in the end, won this round, as prophesized long ago.

To love anything in a transient world is to mourn its loss preemptively. Some have said that grief is an expression of love that has nowhere to go. I disagree. Grief is love set free from the bounds of the primordial contract, returning to its prior state before the creation of the object. It is a reminder that the only way back is forward, towards the annihilation of the nafs, towards fana. And this echoes the deepest wound of the mortal: “I too, will die.”

Love is the golden residue that remains when the river of life is sieved through by death.

A mother looks upon her child, and the intensity of the love engulfs her. A mother’s love is apotheosis, at unpredictable moments. It is also always tinged with a speck of grief, the terms coming due: this moment of transcendence is never coming back. This child, the soul of your soul, will find another form tomorrow, and an infinite amount of unknowable future forms. The moment of absolute intensity has already passed, and can not be retrieved.

The child changes forms, sometimes day by day. The love remains, and changes shape. Love for a land, love for a history, is similar in this way. You can’t kill the love by inflicting pain on the object. A mother whose child one harms does not abandon it, not in the natural order of things. She hunts, she protects, she exacts revenge.

Those who do not love have no understanding of these things.

Those who were born on stolen land have no covenant with the stones. Those who pillage and murder have no secret language with the thirsty blades of grass. They haven’t birthed their land into existence, in the very same moment they were born of it. They lack a special sense, the texture of an uncountable infinity of history compressed into the carpet one lays their forehead on.

And it is good, perhaps, that death should rain upon us from such incapable hands. It is good, because the covenant holds nevertheless. The missiles destroy and shatter, the secret language of the blades of grass persists. What trace did Genghis Khan leave on the winds of the Dasht-e Lut? Has his presence changed the eternal justice of salt and sunlight?

Our land is born anew every time a child takes its first breath.

It lives in the invisible rhizome that stretches from loom to loom and heart to heart.

Kill, for it is futile.

We have an ocean of love.

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I don’t cry as much these days. Not because the world has become any saner or my grief any easier to bear. It feels between anticipation and numbness. The skin that expects the blow and convinces itself it can no longer feel.

For as long as I remember, I have cried in an ugly way. I remember watching A Cruel Romance, an old Russian film, ages ago and wishing to be Larisa Guzeeva. Not only because she was so beautiful, but because she cried in such a beautiful way. My tears have always come violently: with some sort of involuntary spasming of the larynx, a genuine inability to breathe properly, inability to form a sentence for lack of air. I’ve dubbed that “emotional chorea” – it makes it feel less ugly when I give it a medical sounding name.

When I cry I fall apart. But it’s not cinematic, not curated. It’s the sort of emotional expression that leaves most men confused and repulsed, perhaps even frightened. It doesn’t inspire protective feelings. I hate the way I cry.

So, not crying as much is a relief.

There are points in my life that are eternal wounds. Some dear, departed people. Childhood memories. Pets I lost before their time. Big disappointments that fundamentally changed the way I view the world. Losing parts of my own body, irretrievably.

And then, there is the 12 day war. I can tell you about the morning I woke up, June 13^th 2025, and I realized the war had started. I remember the first bombings in Tehran and that was shocking. I saw the cars flying around Tajrish square at some point and my reality broke down, even though I merely saw it on a screen. These scenes were always things that happen somewhere else, not in my world. Not in the streets that still carry traces of me on some molecular level. You can become psychotic in these sorts of moments, when the internal and external reality depart from each other so much it’s near impossible to continue as a single mind.

When I think back to the 12 day war, I remember mostly being in a deep state of shock, and crying all the time. I couldn’t speak a single sentence without my eyes doing their thing and getting the laryngeal spasms. There were moments when well-meaning but clueless people seriously and firmly suggested I seek urgent psychiatric help because I looked like I was totally falling apart.

Because I was! My city was on fire, my family in danger, and there is no western shrink who can fix that.

It only lasted twelve days, obviously, but what remained was a profoundly broken psyche, and an equally broken social contract. Relationships fell apart. The communities fractured alongside ideological lines. I became truly radicalized, politically, because I could no longer even be in the presence of people who justified the murder of our countrymen, for any reason.

The grief of that too was profound. I survived the 12 day war psychologically by a thread, and by the shovels of diazepam and bromazepam I drowned my system in. The aftermath broke lifelong friendships. Even the relationship with my best friend didn’t survive.

She hadn’t called. For the twelve days.

And we were done.

In my mind, people immediately started sorting themselves into categories. For disposal, for heightened attention, and for keeping. I tell you, very few remained in the third category. Silence was a disqualifying factor, so were self-serving messages. If it took too much energy to ask if my family was still alive, they had forfeited their right to be in my life.

You all met me after this. And the person who emerged on July 7^th to write these essays for an English speaking audience is not the same person from before June 13^th. I was softer then. Weaker, perhaps. Perhaps stronger in other ways. I had both more and less patience. I could still sit on fences, however uncomfortable the balancing.

The war took away my ability to lie by omission. And what came out were things I needed to say but had nobody willing to hear who didn’t already know. What use is it speaking to people who already know every turn of thought because they have been on these mental roads themselves? You can get a shared recognition, but that is all. There is no catharsis. Perhaps it is because I’m Iranian, I genuinely can’t access catharsis, our foundational tradition is not Aristotelian, tragedy doesn’t cleanse anything. We are always in a state of eternal longing and anticipation by design.

Whatever the cause, there is no purification. I still haven’t found it. I do this because I have to. Otherwise it will simmer inside me and turn putrid.

There is guilt in writing these lines. After all, I wasn’t there. I don’t want your sympathy, I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. Any expression of sympathy towards me personally, insults me. I wish I could eloquently explain why that is, but I really can’t. I don’t see myself as a victim. I’m in no need of such affectations. When it rained bombs, I wasn’t there, I was falling apart in a park, just outside my house, because being in my house felt intolerable, and then being in public was even more intolerable. I know my grief is real, I don’t need a PhD in Instagram reels psychology to tell me that, but when it mattered – I wasn’t there. Do I have the right to still write about the experience? Of course, because it’s mine. It belongs to me.

What I did, while putting myself together, was writing this thing. Taking care of my body, as much as I could. Going back to Iran, at the first opportune moment, to reassure myself the axis of the world had not shifted. That helped. That was the balm.

I returned from Iran early in the second week of January, 2026. As the street riots were going on. Now, I was on those streets, even at the Grand Bazaar on January 7^th (of which I have so much photographic evidence, though mostly of bazaar stuff, candied fruits, nuts galore, cats, textiles, kabab etc) when supposedly government forces shot tens of thousands of people. I know that this is a lie, because I am an eyewitness, and there were absolutely no riots on the Bazaar on the 7^th. What happened in other parts I can’t say with such certainty, but this I can, and I have the photos to prove when and where I was. There was a sizeable police presence and the Basij, but no clashes. I ate jujeh kabab in one of the restaurants and bought all sorts of herbs for tea.

When I returned, I was immediately promoted into the role of a martyr who escaped certain death (what?). And required to give eyewitness testimony of atrocities I didn’t see or experience. There had been such a media frenzy outside Iran, due to some information that we now know came out of Fairfax, Virginia while our internet in Iran was shut down. I had no clue about this, because as I said - I didn’t have internet back there!

However, once I started offering my perspective, what I actually saw and did, and the pictures I took, which you can very clearly see the date they were taken…. Nobody gave a shit. It contradicted the BBC, so I was all of a sudden, a liar. I, the non-hijabi, secular woman, became the enemy just because I didn’t accept some think tank’s information overriding my own eyes.

This begs the question: wait a second, now – I’m perfectly acceptable when I’m your token brown person, who conveniently isn’t brown at all, but when I speak of my own experience I’m disbelieved, discredited and relentlessly attacked? What aims is that solidarity serving then?

Would it be nicer if tens of thousands of Iranians actually died that day?

Is that what would satisfy those hungry eyes?

How much more of our blood has to be spilled to satisfy this fetish?

And you already know what came next.

In the morning of February 28^th, 2026, I woke up on a couch in a relative’s house. We sat together in the morning to drink our morning coffee, and continue to talk because we don’t see each other as much lately. Given the bad habit I’ve picked up during the 12 day war, the first thing I did was check the news. Within a few minutes, I had understood that something really bad was happening. That the war had started again. And during that same morning, I remember, I read about a school being struck, but not where it was. And then second by second: Hormozgan. Minab. Five dead girls.

No, eight.

No, fifteen.

By the next hour, there were 22.

Within hours, 55.

Within hours, undetermined.

I returned home, turned off mobile data and the internet at the router.

When I turned it back on:

115.

148.

150.

153.

What came later is hard to describe.

The next day, it was sometime before noon, I sat on the couch in my own house and convulsed in tears because the confirmation came that the Supreme Leader had been killed the day before.

Let me repeat that to you: I, a person who has not once in my life cared for internal Iranian politics to this emotional extent, sat down and disintegrated into a convulsive, snotty mush of a human being, because he was no more, and because a great and bone-shattering fear engulfed me, for what was going to happen next.

Do you remember the night I reported on the strikes on the Gandhi hospital’s neonatology ward? I did that on the bicycle.

That bike saved my life. For the duration of the war, I biked like a nutcase, because I effectively was one. I biked at breakneck speed, through crowds of people, and occasionally shouted abuse at them, in Farsi, words they couldn’t understand. I reported from the bicycle. I read news on the bicycle. I lived, for a good majority of my days, on that bicycle. The only thing that could keep me together was the necessity to spin those pedals, and keep them spinning.

I have lost 15 kilograms since.

Battering my body on that thing was the closest to relief I could get.

Imagine this scene. You are in bed, but can’t sleep. The world is moving according to its own schedule. You have to be at work in the morning, nobody gives a shit about your experience. Your ironed trousers and shirt await, and the agenda is set. At 1 in the morning, CET, you receive a call from your aunt who, interrupted by the sounds of explosions, rather close from what you hear, informs you that your street has been bombed, but that your family is alive and well, unharmed, so you wouldn’t FREAK OUT in five hours, when you immediately see this factoid reported on one telegram channel or another. Now go back to sleep, and trust that when you read about your street in the morning, the reality that they’re all still alive will remain unchanged.

And then, tomorrow, confront yourself with a colleague who watches monarchist Instagram accounts from LA who claim no civilians are dying in Tehran, and it’s all lies. Try to remain professional. Try not to get fired.

And do this for forty days.

I was totally wrung out. From rage, from pain, from helplessness. I even took my well-meaning loved ones up on their offer and went to see a Western shrink. We talked for 45 minutes and not a second over that. He mostly wanted intel on the war. He told me: “You don’t seem afraid, you seem more… angry?” I wanted to hit him in the face. He asked me, since I wasn’t depressed or petrified, what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to go to Iran. He asked why. I said, to be useful. He told me that this is then what I should do, and concluded that he wouldn’t recommend medications.

I paid 70 euros for this privilege.

I wrote about all this stuff, one way or another. Perhaps not as openly, perhaps not as clearly. But you can read these stories, from the bike to the shrink. They’re in the archive.

Since the ceasefire, I haven’t cried much. Only once, actually, in the beginning of June. For a reason that was so stupid it barely merits mentioning. I had to wait for a long time due to poor organization of some work-related event. I overheated. And when I came home there were other minor irritations, so I did my convulsive-puddle-human thing.

But that’s once.

I don’t really know if I have tears left to spend. It feels sometimes like my tear glands have stitched themselves shut. Like I really have nothing left to give.

So I don’t cry as much anymore.

But in that place I have rage and hope. So much of it, it feels like it could be a legitimate renewable energy source and light up the entire planet. Hope that fills me up and gives me courage. It makes me stand taller, however tiny my frame and face this world head on. It makes me say the words “Iranian” with a different cadence, not fear, not the expectation of rejection, but pride. I am of a people that have risen.

The millions on the streets back home, during bombardment, gave me no excuse for weakness. The women, hijabless and hurling the flag, on motorcycles. A new Iran was born from all this blood and rubble, one I couldn’t even imagine a year ago. An Iran I can fully belong to. In these past days, we saw the majesty of Agha’s funeral. I assure you that a good portion of the tens of millions who came to pay their final respects used to curse the government and system just a year ago. But this was fundamentally different, it was unity. It was a people uniting to say, in no uncertain terms, that they will not be defeated. Therefore, in this terrifying pride, in the tremor that engulfs the body, I found not consolation, but the living spring of a different sort of hope.

I have trust in my countrymen. They are awake.

So, I don’t cry as much anymore.

Tears are cheap. They cost a bit more if they belong to Larisa Guzeeva. Someone should make a statistic of the hectoliters of tears Palestinian and Lebanese women have wept in the past years. Now, us too. In the grand scheme of geopolitical chess they are entirely irrelevant.

Don’t waste your tears on us. If there is any humanity left in you, turn it into hope and rage.

You, my dear western friends, have not nearly raged or hoped enough.

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The youngsters have a different subculture than us. My childhood was marked by schoolwork, playtime, and Western media on VHS tapes and later DVDs my parents brought me, often hilariously dubbed in Farsi. I am not a “digital native”. I am a VHS native. Computers were present during my childhood, as was pirated software, but as a child I had very little access to these things, let alone the internet. When we got a family computer, I immediately became obsessed with Paint. For some reason, we had pirated Photoshop too. Here is one of my early artistic works “asbosetare.psd”.

One of my older cousins had access to a computer that even had Sims! Going to a mehmooni to their house meant riotous fun with this game.

Of the cartoons I watched, the most famous ones in the West were present, but often wouldn’t take off so well on the black market of cartoon VHS tapes and DVDs. One of my favorites was Open Season (2006). I was already probably a bit too old for it, and my sister too young, but the dubbing was so over the top it remained a family classic. Me and my sister still call every chocolate or candy bar “shookoooool” like the deer in that cartoon.

Economic difficulties were definitely present. But as a child, when you’re within them you don’t really perceive them as much. Does a fish know the water it lives in?

All this to say, my childhood was probably more normal and more similar to yours than you imagine. As I grew older, the media and culture I consumed started changing. After 2009, the onslaught of foreign cultural war reached us in full swing, and so did the very silly and misguided attempts of the state to curb them. This produced a sort of revolt in my generation, where we instinctively started rejecting everything native or natively produced in favor of foreign cultural exports. But some native media, especially a bit older, still broke through.

One of the cult films of my childhood is certainly The Lizard (2004). This comedy occupies a very particular cultural spot in our collective memory. At least in my family, we all basically know the movie by heart. And it’s funny to us. It’s impossible to watch it and not laugh. What is Mimino to some, The Lizard is to us, you can find a quote for any situation from the screenplay. It was supposed to be banned but a direct intervention of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution prevented it from fading into obscurity. And that was a calculated gesture to show that the Islamic Republic can laugh at itself. Afterwards, the doors had opened. If you want to understand the irritations of our life from our own perspective, and if you want to laugh with us, not at us, I advise you to watch it with an open mind.

Then there is “The nights of Barareh” (2005). It’s a comedy series set during the reign of Reza Khan, with an imaginary village called Barareh and its colorful inhabitants. We watched every episode with such burning anticipation, and then later over and over and over again. The villagers of Barareh have their own imaginary dialect of Persian, and this has become such a cultural point that me and my dad still occasionally talk to each other in the Barareian style. It’s funny, but some references from that remained so ingrained in us that I can’t imagine asking my dad to try something I cooked without saying: “Khoob biiiid?”

Barareh is in it essence, very delicate social satire. As a kid, that aspect of it totally went over my head. But rewatching it as an adult, I see what Mehran Modiri was doing. And it’s still funny! It has stood the test of time. To understand the mindset of a generation that grew up in a dual world, Barareh is your starting point. I really wish that everyone who wants to know us would put in the time to watch at least an episode. It might not be funny to you, humor is culturally hard to transmit, but you will understand a lot. Honorable mention to Zir-e Tigh that aired every Wednesday and that we were not allowed to watch, because we were too young. Also, the classic of classics that also influenced dad-speak for perpetuity: the TV adaptation of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel Dear Uncle Napoleon. That has to be on your reading or watching list.

It is impossible to talk about Iran without talking about poetry. And here you must truly let yourself be surprised. We are engulfed in poetry. Everyone knows poems by heart. People are often surprised when their taxi driver or fruit seller quotes the Shahnameh from memory, but this is deep cultural code. As a child, I was a moshaereh prodigy. I wasn’t forced, I loved it, but I was given “training” and encouragement. Iranian girls are generally encouraged to do well academically – that is probably why 60% of our university graduates are women. When it comes to poetry, I will have to disappoint you but you can throw your Barks and Ladinsky in the trash. I will attach an accessible list of translations you can read. Why is this important? It is important because poetry means an entirely different thing to us than in the west. It may be a sign of sophistication or erudition to you, or an unimportant pastime for the pompous, but for us it is a mode of communication. Poetry recitation events attract large crowds. Criticism of the government, corruption, nepotism etc is regularly woven into verse; or ancient verse is repurposed for modern pains. This is how we talk. It helps that our language hasn’t changed much for a thousand years.

When it comes to music and youth culture, this is where the culture war took off the most. Domestically, the attitude towards music has become pretty lax in the last years, but for a long time there was no investment and no coherent policy towards domestic artistic production. It seemed like we had gone stagnant, and there is only so much of the elder Shajarian you can hear before you start going mad, however sublime his singing. So, via the CDs and then later on the Internet, trash production from the LA diaspora started spreading like wildfire. And we all listened to it. For a while it was directly inspired, and sometimes genuinely lifted, from Glendale rabiz (yes, that is a thing). Then, with the merger with American pop culture, we got the basically worst residue on the bottom of the barrel repackaged and sold back to us. But domestic music production reinvigorated, and now you have really cool Iranian bands of all genres, working from inside Iran.

The best way to know the unknowable is to see for yourself. Many people tell me: “I wish I could see Iran!” It is not all that difficult, in 99.9% of the cases. You can. If you let go of the primal fear associated with Iranian embassies and consulates (that generally host kind, professional and responsible staff) – you can have your questions answered right at the source, myths dispelled and concerns alleviated. I invite all of you to come and see the country for yourself. Not only for the architecture (and truly, the concentration of “must see before you die” sights in our land is incredibly high), not for the nature (that is indeed varied, and often breathtaking). For the conversation with your taxi driver, or people on the street. For the warm barbari bread and the chat with the baker. For the supermarket and prices with too many zeroes. For the society that gives a card and shouts out the PIN several hundred times per day, because cash is useless.

For the medicines, for the successes and failures. For the chemical engineering PhD you will meet in the metro, or the housekeeper.

There is no real substitute for seeing for yourself. For living what we live. For tasting the bitterness of economic warfare and the joy of still making do. And making do you will see a lot. In the most ingenious, funny, and sometimes dysfunctional ways.

Iran is far from perfect. But it is a country endlessly, viciously abused for nearly half a century. So, try to open your eyes. Try to see the human.

We’re not that different after all.

WHO TO READ IN TRANSLATION

Hafez:

REZA SABERI only then Arberry or Avery&Heath-Stubbs

Mowlana:

JAWID MOJADDEDI for the Masnavi, only then NICHOLSON, if you must

Sa’di:

THACKSTON for the Gulistan, WICKENS for Bustan, KATOUZIAN as palate cleanser

I do not recommend Davis, other than passing glances.

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In the name of the Most Merciful and Compassionate.

Peace be upon the one who has reached the station of eternity.

Peace be upon the one who has polished the mirror so thoroughly even his own reflection disappeared.

Peace be upon the one who has burned with the light of lights, the light from whose brightness the sun veils itself.

The Holy Qur’an commands the believers:

وَلَا تَقُولُوا۟ لِمَن يُقْتَلُ فِى سَبِيلِ ٱللَّهِ أَمْوَٰتٌۢ ۚ بَلْ أَحْيَآءٌۭ وَلَـٰكِن لَّا تَشْعُرُونَ

Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead, in fact, they are alive! But you do not perceive it.

And yet, our human hearts are small, and easily shattered. So, we weep. We weep even though we have heard it a thousand times. Separation is bitter, even the arif of arifs, even our Teacher himself mourned his separation from Shams, from the Sun he spiritually orbited.

Our Shams too has been taken from us. And we spin, like dazed planets, around the absence in our core, around the void where a presence once was. Human hearts are fragile.

Tajallī is by definition inaccessible to us, bound within this world of phantasms, light and shadow, prisoners to nafs, trapped within the bounds of three-dimensional space. We are Earthly beings, clay figurines animated by something not of this world. But the clay pulls towards clay. It is difficult for it to wish to become dust and scatter in the wind.

To grieve separation is human. It is a cry of the clay. But a Man is not only that.

In the past days, we have been saying goodbye. In our language, we say goodbye by invoking divine protection. But the one we are parting from needs no such thing, for he is in a station where all selfhood is erased. There is no he, as separate from Hu. But the fickle human heart, overcome with the bitterness of loss and the longing for union, forgets that a grave is a door that closes on our side, but opens on the other.

So, within our mourning, within the bitter flood of sowda, we must hold another truth. It is not only a time of parting, but a time of greeting.

If we were to transcend, if only for a second, the boundaries of clay, we would rejoice. Our Teacher knew it too.

ای که ازین تنگ قفس می‌پری

رخت به بالای فلک می‌بری

زندگی تازه ببین بعد ازین

چند ازین زندگی سرسری؟!

در هوس مشتریت عمر رفت

ماه ببین و بره از مشتری

دلق شپشناک درانداختی

جان برهنه شده خود خوشتری

جامهٔ این جسم، غلامانه بود

گیر کنون پیرهن مهتری

مرگ حیاتست و حیاتست مرگ

عکس نماید نظر کافری

O soul that from this narrow cage takes flight,
and pitches your tent on heaven’s radiant height
look now for life renewed, beyond this dull,
this fleeting, false, and temporary lull!

Your years were spent chasing Jupiter’s glow
turn from that planet, and the Full Moon know!
You’ve sloughed the ragged cloak of louse and grime
your spirit, bare, now soars beyond all time.

This fleshly robe was slave’s attire, but see
now don the shirt of royal majesty!

Death is but life, and life itself is death
a mirror image of the infidel’s faith.

This death is but a shedding of the prison of clay. He, who has passed the threshold, is no longer bound by our rules. It is a station where contradictions melt off and disappear. Ibn Arabi described it this way:

عجبتُ من بحرٍ بلا ساحل

وساحلٍ ليسَ له بحرُ

وضحوةٍ ليس لها ظُلمة

وليلةٍ ليس لها فجرُ

وكرةٍ ليس لها موضع

يعرفها الجاهلُ والحبر

وقبةٍ خضراءَ منصوبةٍ

جاريةٍ نقطتُها القهرُ

وعَمَدٍ ليس لها قُبةٌ

ولا مكان خفي السر

I wondered at a sea that had no coast,
And at a coast that had no sea;
At a forenoon without its shadow,
And at a night without its daybreak;
At a globe that has no location,
Which the ignorant and the learned both know;
At a green dome firmly raised,
A sphere whose center is overpowering force;
And at pillars that have no dome,
Nor any place concealing their secret.

Presence and absence seem like contradictions in our plane of existence, but on the other side of that threshold? There is only the singularity of being, beyond our human notions of existence. We weep for ourselves, for the veils in front of our eyes that prevent the dissipation that comes with true witness of Oneness.

We weep for he has passed through the gate of seeing, and we must remain in this world of opposites.

Our tears are not for the Living Martyr, for he has arrived. We are the ones left behind. In these moments, we must remind ourselves that presence is not proximity, and death is never really absence. It is merely perception of the clay that clings to what is of its kind. But we are more, we must be more. The Breath courses through all that is, for all that is is of his Will. Within this breath, within the silent music of the celestial spheres, we must, in the bitterest mourning, remind ourselves that we belong somewhere else, and are merely trapped within a mirage.

He who is now free needs no farewell, but a greeting to the other side. So let us for a moment wipe our tears and say, heartbroken as we are.

Not Khoda Hāfez. Khosh āmadī. Marhaba. Salamun ‘alayka.

Welcome, O living martyr.

Welcome to the station of eternity.

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It was sometime right before the pandemic, and I was at the Splendor in Amsterdam, listening to yet another odd HIP-lite concoction with the newest hot mediterranean singer. It was some sort tango-Monteverdi mashup, I distinctly remember an attempt at Piazzolla’s Yo soy Maria and then, in dizzying succession, Lamento d’Arianna. If I remember correctly, it was during this disaster of a concert that I heard Barbara Strozzi’s famous “Che si puo fare?”

Despite the performance of this little aria being beyond awful, and the singer beyond disturbing in her overplayed grimacing and affectations (no expert here, but bleating does not a trillo make), it interested me enough to go and search for it. And find less offensive versions (an extremely difficult endeavor, and somewhat futile!).

On the surface of it, it is really as simple as it gets. You get the simplest continuo in existence. A bassline descending from the tonic to the dominant in d, and then repeating that on a loop, ad infinitum. Tonic minor, sixth degree sixth chord, sixth chord on the fourth degree with the standard 7-6 schema before setting in on the dominant. Boring passacaglia, a lament seen a million times.

But the melody and the words are far from boring.

Let me start with something pertinent: I love Monteverdi with a burning passion that is incomparable to any other affection I’ve ever held to any foreign artistic output. I love Monteverdi’s Madrigals as much as I love an exquisite Hafez ghazal in the original, or Sepehri’s gentlest verse. I am utterly, completely and incurably in love with almost everything that man ever composed. When I see the name Monteverdi on a poster, I buy tickets. I do not care. There is a hunger in me for a madrigal I haven’t heard that will never be sated.

I’m not sure how this came to be. If anything I was raised in a totally different musical tradition, one of dastgahs and radifs, one of what Westerners consider microtones and homophony. And I truly do love Iranian classical music, make no mistake, I worship ostad Lotfi with a truly passionate veneration. But as far as the invisible strings inside a person are concerned… they vibrate in resonance with L’incoronazione di Poppea.

This is hard for me to understand at times. I have searched myself for the answer and came up empty handed. Why? And why Monteverdi? I can appreciate the standard Pantheon. If you haven’t been exalted when listening to the Matthew Passion, or the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, or Isolde’s Liebestod… you have missed out on life. But at the same time, give me anything, any masterwork, and I’ll choose the fourth book of madrigals in its stead.

Sometimes, when the conditions are right, my closest ones, loved ones and friends, have tried to make sense of this. Perhaps it is that I like dissonance, but only framed in such a way that it makes sense to my mind? Perhaps that is why I like Gesualdo too, but significantly less? Perhaps it is the unconscious training of my native musical tradition, where dissonance is often harsher, and there is no equal temperament, and tritones live freely?

We don’t have an answer.

As with many things in life, our preferences are mysteries. I love nomadic rugs of nearly all types, but I’d never submit the floor of my house to the terror of a silky Isfahan or a precious Naein. Perhaps it is that I’m an odd person, perhaps just one from a different sphere. Until very recently, my philosophy was simple. The barriers between our worlds need to become more porous, we need exchange, we need true transfer, not despicable native informants engaging in propagandistic warfare-by-art. When I started this project, the tagline of the publication was, and still is, “Womanhood, empire, resistance.” And I stand by that. So this musing is about all three, and being indebted to a world and tradition that has deformed itself and now wants to expel you as a foreign body.

And within this philosophy, there was Barbara Strozzi, a student of a student of Monteverdi’s, illegitimate child, abused woman, most productive and published musician of her time, the forgotten 17^th century composer lifted from obscurity by the sheer force of her melodies, and the texts that sear themselves into your soul.

Così va rio destin sorte tiranna,
Gl’innocenti condanna:
Così l’oro più fido
Di costanza e di fè, lasso conviene,
lo raffini d’ogn’hor fuoco di pene.

That’s how it is with cruel destiny
the tyranny of fate condemns the innocent:
thus the purest gold
of constancy and faithfulness, alas,
is continually refined in the fire of pain.

I connected with this. It was instant. Musically, she never reached my Monteverdi obsession but there were traces. There is the opening of Lagrime mie that gives me a full body shiver every time, when done right. When the singer leans into the dissonance, unafraid. When it is sufficiently ugly. If I could, I’d take Strozzi to Tehran. Perhaps one day, the time will come for that. But for now, the porosity, the transfer seems insulting. The philosophy of colorful exchange is no more.

What happened to it?

Three Tomahawk missiles killed it.

Once I may have bought the silly maxim that beauty will save the world, incidentally taken out of context and practically misquoted ad nauseam. Now I have no such belief. Beauty is what makes life worth living, but it doesn’t prevent heaps of charred children’s flesh on the ground of what was once the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab.

Among the decent people who dedicated their lives to beauty, not one – not one!- stood up to say that the wanton murder of children is wrong. They can’t, naturally. These contracts, these systems of glances and envelopes and good words put in and “my agent knows your agent” depend on the very prosaic reality of the terror of the Dutch “doe normaal” philosophy. And that means – you do not rock the boat. Privately, you may express to me that it is a travesty, it is a crime, it is grotesque and awful, but in public? You will say no such thing.

The Iranian in Western cultural space can only exist as a monarchist inflicted with the incurable pain of nostalgia, which is actually only bourgeois comprador grief, or as a faux-rebel of sorts. Especially as a woman. That sells, that can get you in rooms, that can suspend the viscerally negative reaction to a curly black head for a while, enough to get your business done. You are then useful. But when not, you are an active impediment to that mirage. And you must be eliminated from view.

None of that is conducive to real artistic work that requires an excavation of the self, and transcending the self. Real work is apotheosis, not digging into compost made of lies, projections and misinterpretations. But it seems the rot is no longer only confined to us; the West itself has lost the compass. Instead of venerating the absolute, we see constant competitions in its deformation. A recent staging of Rusalka, where Rusalka shoots up heroin on stage. Rusalka, for God’s sake! The newest set design that defies all laws of logic and scenography. The baroque musicians hiding their poor technique behind meantone-comma-god-knows temperament, and when confronted with criticism spitting out: “But have you read Zarlino?” Or worse, the abominations of Holland Baroque and such efforts to resuscitate a scene that has been clinically dead for ages. It is not dying, it has already died. There is nothing to save.

A beautiful woman on stage strained to expel “Le stelle rubelle non hanno pieta…” some years ago. This vomitous rendition has made a home in my brain, unfortunately. Now, when I find myself in situations where words utterly fail, when there is nothing left to say, when I am empty, wrung out of all sense and meaning, in my head I hear that abominable barking.

Because this is what has remained of the West. Of the shining universe on the hill, the aspirational paradise (a Persian word, by the way!) all us, “backwards”, oriental and occidentalized people were supposed to aspire to. Bleating, deformation, geste and grimace, and missiles.

So, so many missiles.

So, what is there to say? What is there to say in a world that doesn’t even extend you the mirage of shared humanity? If this art belongs to such a world then I have no use for it. But we know that’s not the truth. And Barbara knew this too; in moments when there is nothing more to say all that is left is to scream and wail.

But in such a way that the wailing remains art. Unfortunately, art and artifice are never far away.

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Perhaps you were taught that hatred only hurts the one who hates, like I was. This is a neat maxim, one that makes a lot of sense on the surface. We’ve all experienced hatred in different shades; due to betrayal, injury, injustice or oppression. It is a rather unpleasant emotion, one that is difficult to describe because we instinctively lump together a whole array of states and sensations. No two hatreds are the same. The object of your hatred could be totally oblivious, walking through the world without as much as a faint idea that you’re marinating in these awful, psychological digestive juices, eating yourself from the inside. They just move about their day, while you seethe and suffer.

This happens every day, to most of us. In that sense, this old idea absolutely has some merit. We also know cases from our lives, people whose hatred has consumed them, calcified, and gradually turned them either into monsters or into shadows of themselves. This is a perpetual danger.

Most of us were told to hide our hatred, if we can’t fully suppress it. In western, largely liberal discourse it is an automatic disqualification from polite society if you do as much as admit that you have, at a point in time, experienced the sensation. Hatred is taboo. Due to our lack of vocabulary surrounding the state, the mindspace of hatred, all forms of it get inadvertently confused. Hatred of the oppressed towards their oppressor is just as unacceptable as bigotry. No nuance is allowed. Hatred can be acted upon by the hegemonic powers freely, but never openly stated in words. This creates a strange situation where even approaching the topic laterally feels risqué; for fear of being misconstrued it’s easier to just avoid the subject entirely. We unconsciously submit to the moralizing posture that sees all hatred as pathology and fail to ask ourselves: if this is purely a self-destructive phenomenon, why does it persist? Why is it a mainstay in human nature since its inception? And does it have a place, a function, a reason for being? Is hatred a technology?

Naturally, the story about the person consumed and destroyed by hatred still comes to the forefront, and it is real. I have met such cases many times over my life, in many post-conflict situations. But this story is not the whole story, or the only one; the reality I want to explore with you is darker, more unsettling and sometimes downright horrifying.

What compelled me to write this piece, despite my own struggle with understanding the concept fully? I recently traveled to Sarajevo for work. I’m in there often, and every time I go something new and unexpected opens before me. Unfortunately, the city has become a metaphor itself, but it’s not really sure which metaphor it wants to be. On one hand, there is a persistent glorification of the Ottoman period that I find very difficult to stomach. I’d say that per capita there are more Armenian genocide deniers among Bosnian Muslim intelligentsia than in Turkey. People get comfortable and say what they mean. It is important that it remain a site of Convivencia, a Ladino word chosen to emphasize Sarajevo’s Jewish history. What is also forgotten is that most of that Jewish population ended up deported to Croatian death camps during WWII. And the confusion truly sets in when it wants to be a site of tragedy. This tragedy directly undermines the Convivencia myth, and nobody can resolve it.

Let me just say that I adore Sarajevo. There is something magical about the city, even with all its contradictions. People are genuinely kind and colorful. They have a natural curiosity and warmth that is impossible to find elsewhere. I have tried, and nothing truly compares. There is a humanity to the place, and the way it haphazardly grows into itself, restricted by the surrounding mountains, mirrors how the people keep adding layers of sediment to their identities and political views. Sarajevo is both frozen in time, and in perpetual motion. You feel time passing differently inside it, a very otherworldly experience.

When you spend a bit more time in it, you realize that Sarajevo also wants to represent reconciliation. Except – there is none. The three ethnoreligious groups are largely segregated. The Serbs have mostly left to East Sarajevo, the Croats experienced a migration wave post-2013, when acquiring Croatian citizenship suddenly meant an EU passport and mobility in the EU labor market. You can’t reconcile with people who are no longer in your daily life.

Naturally, the prerogative is to maintain polite neutrality at first, but in Sarajevo the masks slip very quickly. If you sit long enough with people they will inevitably unleash a torrent of trauma, violence and buried pain. It is only the threshold that differs.

And underneath that, something else peeks its head. Hatred. Total, absolute, visceral hatred.

Not in every case, although I’m inclined to say that even those who seem to have transcended the interethnic hatred merely transferred it to more impersonal, larger entities. There was an elderly lady I met, who told me her entire life story. It is not mine to retell, but there were gut-churning details, things that make your blood run cold. She struck me as a saint in her total absence of generalized hatred for any group. And she’d have a perfect reason to hate all of them. But then, just when I canonized her in my head, she told me that she’d have the High Representative, and the entire OHR shot in public, “in the middle of Marijin Dvor”.

The hatred was there. Just moved upwards, to the diplomatic vehicles, to the faceless men who block and make decisions, to the foreign “guardianship” that she perceives as “occupation”. A child of WWII, child of Partisans, having a German with a say in the internal workings of her world struck an older wound. And the old hate was able to override whatever new one could’ve developed.

In another meeting, a lovely man, a very pious Muslim who goes to Turkey for work often, after I asked him about his recent trip to Erzurum, told me unprompted that the Armenians were the same as “Chetniks”, and that they are genetically “this way”, liars and manipulators. He had absorbed Turkish state propaganda, and grafted his own pain onto it. He has not met a single Armenian in his life. He maintains that the “Chetniks” will attack the Muslims again, that it is as inevitable as the sun setting, because they are “genetically this way”. He expects this disaster to happen any day now, for over thirty years. But these things aside, he is a very kind, very lovely gregarious gentleman who would give you the shirt off his back to help out, and a highly intelligent, consummate professional. But you must always mind the gap. This is precisely the horror, that hatred crossing over into bigotry lives in genocide survivors who aren’t overt monsters. It can live in perfectly “normal”, lovely people, and you’d never be the wiser if you don’t strike the right note that unleashes the destructive interference.

There is so much hate, and yet, all the NGOs, all the Endowment for Democracy financed institutions try to convince you, over and over again, that there is actually none. The attempts to temper it, hide it or sublimate it have not been successful. It brews under the surface.

So, having once again participated in these conversations, in these moments when the entire world, and all its complexity collapses into the shape of a single mortal wound, I have started to truly wonder about hatred as such. What is it? How does it grow? Is it one thing, or many? Is it curable? And should it be?

The False Consensus

Let me start with a confession, as per usual. I have hated randomly. Here I don’t mean the simple hatred of betrayal: the lover who lied, the friend who stole and such personal matters, banal or profound. That kind at least has a sort of receipt attached to it. You can point to the date, the hour, the exact sentence that broke things. I mean the other kind of hatred that materializes almost out of thin air before the person even opens their mouth, or very shortly after, without giving them the time to be known.

I had this experience with a random group of American tourists on a street in Sarajevo, on the day Bandar Abbas was struck just recently.

I have hated people simply for being American with the unearned ease in their shoulders, and the excessive volume of their voices. I have hated them knowing nothing about them: not their politics, not their childhood, not whether they cry at funerals or make a decent cup of tea. Nothing. None of that mattered to me at all. The category had already done the work. It is of course easy to rationalize in stupid ways: “if they weren’t a jerk, they wouldn’t be living there/they would’ve renounced their citizenship/they wouldn’t advertise it.” All bullshit post-hoc rationalizations.

This is embarrassing to admit. In European polite society, we are not supposed to say such things. We are supposed to have transcended. We are supposed to judge each person as an individual, to see the light in every soul, to quote freaking Martin Buber while sipping fair-trade coffee. Naturally, these feelings don’t last. Within 15 minutes I had snapped back, and a wave of shame overcame me. Even though initially, upon seeing the American, all I could think was how much this person contributed to the Tomahawk missiles that killed our children, eventually the feeling evaporated.¹

This is not an apologia of hatred, but my attempt to simply talk about it. Unfortunately, the English language does a pretty poor job of distinguishing between different types of hatred: its overlaps with rage and contempt are curious and fuzzy. Still, if we are to stay whole in unprecedented times we need to be able to honestly talk about it, because it exists, and it isn’t just one thing. Yes, hatred generalizes and that’s a real danger. But in extremity, the danger of not hating, of failing to act with sufficient violence to stop evil, is greater. This is a tragic choice, never a clear moral victory. And we are at this point right now.

So let us abandon, right now, the comforting fiction that hatred only hurts the hater. Hatred can be kind of like a wrecking ball. Destructive, certainly, but also very effective.

The Anatomy of Hatred

Let me try to take this hatred apart, perhaps it would also warrant a lexical examination because I find that “hate” and “hatred” are such vague umbrella terms that hide a disjointed family of affects. Here I’ll try to dissect it conceptually, in layers that we will try to examine under a microscope, like a histological specimen.

Layer One: Hatred as Collapse of the Particular

Philosophy calls this problem “the problem of universals.” How do we group things? When is a category useful? When does it become a cage?

Hatred loves categories because categories are cheap. A person is expensive in terms of mental labor, because it takes time, attention, the willingness to be surprised to truly know one. A category is free and always available. Hatred says: I do not have the energy for your uniqueness. You will be what I need you to be.

The random American in Baščaršija is not John from Ohio who plants tomatoes and misses his dead mother. The random American is the American. A totally flat, homogenous surface. A target that does not move at all. The British man is not a specific person with a specific biography and personality. He is the Brit. The colonial administrator’s grandson, even if his grandfather worked in a coal mine. The stamp has been applied before the Other gets to open their mouth.

I have also been on the receiving end of this. Walking through European airports, I have watched faces tighten when they see my name. The category arrives before I do. I am not a person with a normal-for-my-culture name and a favorite color and whatever else makes a person. I am the Iranian. The hostage crisis. The nuclear program. The REZHEEEM. I have been hated randomly, efficiently, at first glance. It is not pleasant at all, I can tell you that. But I understand the mechanism because I have used it myself.

This is the uncomfortable symmetry. The hater and the hated are not two different species of human divided by some evolutionary dam. They are mirrors. Both can collapse the other into a category and decide the particular is not worth the effort.

Layer Two: Hatred as Frozen Empathy

Some hatreds have a record attached to them. You loved someone first. Then they broke something irreparably, and the betrayal calcified. The warmth drained out, but the shape of something that was once there remained. This hatred is profoundly sad because it remembers its own opposite, and that makes it run hot. It is the hatred perhaps best described by what happens when passionate marriages go south and culminate in extremely difficult and bloody divorces.

I think that the first layer is more dangerous than the second, because it is practically irrevocable. When hatred is aimed at a person you once loved, it can be bloody. It can be awful. But, and this is perhaps a naïve opinion, I like to believe that there is also the possibility of repair. And if not repair, then simply – indifference.

What I see in Sarajevo, every time I go, is a gravely dangerous transfer between the first and second layer. If there had been no “brotherhood and unity”, if the Yugoslav state had not pushed this narrative framework so powerfully, maybe the rewarmed hatred of the nineties wouldn’t be as vitriolic. Now we see a sort of situation where the layers are porous. Because a category is hated, then every particular individual is hated with Layer Two intensity. And similarly, hating any particular individual with whom you had some sort of transference automatically explodes into category level hatred if the conditions are right. This is such a frightening circumstance, in my opinion, because it becomes a constantly reinforcing loop with no kill switch, and potentially disastrous consequences.

Layer Three: Hatred as Failed Translation

You hate what you cannot assimilate, understand or participate in. Hatred is the tantrum of a mind confronted with a grammar that takes effort to learn. The hater says: you are not a language I speak. You are just worthless noise, and therefore soil everything with your presence.

I have watched this happen in real time. A Dutch acquaintance of mine, otherwise reasonable, cannot speak about Islam without his jaw tightening. You can literally see the dude’s jaw muscles clench. He has never read the Quran or had a real conversation with a practicing Muslim. He avoids the Haagse Markt or Escamp. He simply can’t translate the prayers, the rituals, the way a woman in hijab might feel equally free as his mother with the kort pittig kapsel. So he hates with a subdued rage. Not because he is evil, but because he is lazy, and society affords him the privilege of remaining lazy. This sort of hatred is the lazy person’s hermeneutic.

Layer Four: Hatred as Terrible Intimacy

This one is a bit creepy, even to me.

A sort of hatred that requires sustained, obsessive attention. The hater spends more time with the hated than the lover spends with the beloved. In some particularly possessed cases, the hated is their first thought upon waking, and the last before sleeping. This is a sort of grotesque one-sided marriage.

I have been there once. An academic supervisor seriously wronged me, and I rehearsed conversations with him for months in my head. I built entire monologues, flowcharts for how I’d respond. I knew what he would say, and I knew what I would say back, and I was always more clever, more cutting, more devastating. Verbal Bruce Lee, but only in my head! Meanwhile, he was out living his life and I was in a dark room, fuming, foaming at the mouth, imagining a reckoning that, in the end, never happened. How I hated that poor bastard at the time! And how irrelevant this whole story feels five years later!

But in that moment, this is not even hatred, but already going into possession territory. And the possessed person does not know they are possessed. They think they are simply right.

Layer Five: Hatred as Prosthetic Meaning

When your own life feels thin, random, unjustified hatred offers thickness. A plot or a sort of purpose. The world becomes legible: they are why you suffer.

I have seen this in our diaspora. Iranians in the West who have not set foot in the country for forty years but who can recite every supposed crime of the Islamic Republic as if reading from a freaking Iran International teleprompter. Their hatred of the system has become their entire identity. Without it, they would be just... people. Retired. Bored. Facing the void. So they keep the hatred burning because it is masking how empty and loveless their actual lives are.

I am trying not to mock them, though it is hard not to respond to their hate with hate, because it gets us killed. Hatred gives you a story to live inside, and any story is better than silence. A story has a villain, and a hero, and a plot that moves forward. In every story, you yourself must be the hero, and you have plenty of villains to choose from at any given moment.

It’s easy to fall into this trap too. Many unfortunate events that shaped my life can be traced back to US sanctions and the economic decimation the Iranian middle class experienced as a result. If I squint hard enough, I can find a way to tie in every bad thing that ever happened to me to that reality, but that is obviously absurd. If one does that, they’re no better than the monarchist.

Layer Six: Hatred as Cleanliness

There is a pleasure in hatred that no one admits. The pleasure of purity. Of knowing exactly where your line is. Of having a well defined enemy, and a solid definition of what is beyond the pale.

When you hate someone enough, everything becomes simple. The world is divided into Us and Them, and You are on the right side, and You do not have to wonder at 3 AM whether you are the bad guy, or where the complexity lies, or what the nuance of the situation is. I’ve seen this a lot in revisionist narratives. We like our enemies totally irredeemable, one-dimensional and cartoonishly, purely evil. In reality it is almost never like that, and acknowledging the complexity makes these super pure categories untenable. If you totally collapse the humanity of your enemy, you are above reproach. Always and without fail.

The Paradox of Utility

This is an uncomfortable proposition, but hatred sometimes works.

It is not always useful or clean and never without collateral damage, but still at certain times, it functions. It moves things and changes equations. It has a track record that the one-sided liberal forgiveness industry would prefer you forget.

I was taught the opposite. I was taught that hatred is a cancer, a poison, “a hot piece of coal you hold in your hand”. This is a useful lie because it keeps people docile. It turns the oppressed into therapists, forever asked to manage their own rage so the oppressor doesn’t feel uncomfortable. But it’s still a lie.

Let me take an example that will anger everyone equally.

The Red Army didn’t defeat the Wehrmacht with the power of “love and equality”. I’m fairly sure they didn’t meditate on the shared humanity of Nazi soldiers. They hated. There was a specific, trained, weaponized hatred of the fascist invader who had burned their villages and starved their cities.

Listen to the songs they sang. They’re not gentle or forgiving. Here’s an example of poetry from the time:

“Так убей же немца ты сам,

Так убей же его скорей.

Сколько раз увидишь его,

Столько раз его и убей!”

“So kill the German yourself

So kill him quickly

As many times as you see him

That many times, kill him!”

Konstantin Simonov, Kill Him!, 1942

The Soviet Union did not apologize for teaching its soldiers to hate. It encouraged hatred. Hatred was a weapon and it worked.

Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet journalist, wrote a piece in that same 1942 called “Kill the German.” It was not subtle or nuanced at all. It said, explicitly: kill the German, not the Nazi. Because, Ehrenburg argued, the German had allowed Hitler to rise, had benefited from the plunder of Europe, and had looked away while the camps filled. The hatred was total. It was also, in the context of Stalingrad, where the alternative was extinction, effective.

The Red Army soldier who charged with the machine gun was not thinking about reconciliation. That hatred propelled him forward. It made him braver and capable of things that love could never produce, perhaps most importantly the willingness to die so that the fascist would die first.

Does that hatred look beautiful? No. Does it look moral? No. Does it look useful? Ask the survivors of Leningrad. They will not tell you hatred is self-destructive. They will tell you that hatred, when disciplined and aimed, saved their world from something unimaginable.

There are plenty of examples of this nature, and all of them involve violence. Algeria would be an interesting example, because contrasting that struggle and Fanon’s reading of violence as necessary to liberation make the case for the utility of this forward propulsion. Hatred may not be explicitly named, but as humans, I think we can infer what was going on. But then again, the issue arises when it takes a life of its own, beyond its initial liberatory purpose.

So, having said that, let me try to define something.

A technology is a tool that extends human capacity. A hammer extends your arm, a microscope extends your eye, a computer extends your brain etc, etc...

Hatred extends your will in extreme situations when violent rupture is vital. It allows you to do things you could not do otherwise. It allows you to leave a marriage, survive a siege, protect a child, or fight a stronger enemy. It is not the tool you are likely to need to reach for in a well-ordered, boring, domestic life. But realistically a well-ordered life is a luxury most humans have never enjoyed anyways.

The question, then, is not should you hate? The question is: can you use the hatred you already have without being used by it?

This is the same question we ask about any technology. A knife can slice bread or slice throats. Hatred can free you or destroy you. The difference is not in the tool, but in the hand that holds it. The problem with this comparison is, naturally, that a knife doesn’t have a will, and hatred can change you to the point where your motivations aren’t exactly the ones that bred it in the first place. This is where the danger lies, because hatred is propulsive, but it also deforms.

Some of the men I met in Sarajevo didn’t stop, not even after thirty years. Their hatred became kind of like a prosthetic limb. Now they can’t imagine movement, existence or normal life without it. They are not holding the knife, the knife is holding them. In this sense, hatred is a technology with a fatal design flaw: it has no off switch and it rewrites its own user manual in ways you can never predict in advance.

Here is where I end this meditation, for now.

Hatred is not useless. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been truly desperate, or truly oppressed, or truly afraid. Hatred has a place and a function. It has saved lives and besieged cities.

But hatred is also not safe. Once you learn to hate, you never fully unlearn it. You can try to redirect it or contain it, but you can’t ever fully discard it. It lives in the basement and waits to be reawakened.

The question is not whether you will hate. You certainly will, at some point in your life. The question, for me, is whether, when you open that basement door, you will still recognize your own face in the dark. Whether you will control the technology that allows for violent resistance, or whether you will find yourself deformed by it and rendered unrecognizable.

1- Disclaimer: if you intend to take this part out of context, to prove I hate Americans in general, well… that’s not the point, is it? I do not have a generalized hatred of any group, so read on. Maybe you will understand the text differently in its totality.

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Recently, I posted a note in reaction to the death of a controversial Iranian-born author, and although the significance of the defunct is very minimal in my life, the fact that she was born in Rasht, in November 1969, within a week of another very important woman has stuck with me.

This other woman is a talented visual artist, a consummate professional, a very complex, sometimes contradictory figure. Incidentally, also my own mother.

I’ve written about my father a lot on here, and about my paternal grandfather too. It makes sense, this publication is about the intersection of three things: philology, anthropology and politics. All three I got from Baba. He was the first to teach me how to work with a text, the first to teach me what making the strange familiar and the familiar strange actually means, and the first to introduce me to actual political theory. But there is an undercurrent running through all this that wasn’t his gift. My mother taught me about class consciousness. Not in abstract ways or by giving me books, that was Baba’s style. By teaching me by example, her own example, what it means, and how, even when some measure of social mobility is achieved, weights remain on one’s legs in perpetuity.

My mother was, as you already know by now, born in 1969, in a family of manual laborers and subsistence agriculture workers. I.e. fishermen and peasants. Her father, who is thankfully still with us, in great health and of sound mind, and celebrating his 90^th birthday in a few days, is a famine survivor. He very nearly starved to death in the ‘40s. His younger sister wasn’t so lucky, she did actually starve to death. My grandfather survived to become a very strong and physically imposing man, but retained a sort of famine mentality throughout his life. To this day, you will never see him eat more than one egg for breakfast.

My mother is the first person in her lineage to get a university degree. Not the first woman, the first person. And this was already a harrowing feat under the circumstances surrounding her childhood. Independent and headstrong, she met my father during the war after his demobilization. They fell in love, and it was a romance extraordinaire. However, she had a condition: he would either support her education and independence or leave. He agreed. Thus, we came into existence.

My parents’ marriage was always curious. Because it was a truly egalitarian marriage before such a thing was ever discussed in the Iranian context. My parents loved each other passionately, fought passionately, but gave each other space to be. My father cooked, washed dishes, and actually probably did most of the childrearing. Times were tough. Despite both of my parents being highly educated, money was always tight. Actually, when I think back to my childhood, it seems that one of them was always unemployed, and penny pinching was the constant in our life. Nothing unusual, simply the standard life of the decimated Iranian middle class during various waves of economic collapse. We had a lot of cultural capital, but very little real capital. Perhaps that is why I’ve always felt this connection to people who grew up in post-dissolution Soviet Union republics: those conversations na kuhne, where your uncle talks about non-Euclidean geometry, and your family friends discuss Hegel, and your father quotes poetry, while everyone is in circumstances of despair and economic impossibility… those were my life.

I’ve always had a very complex relationship with my mother. Perhaps it is because I look like my father didn’t participate in my creation at all, as if I was produced in some sort of parthenogenetic way, a total and absolute clone of hers. But with a different personality architecture. She was not the doting, overbearing mother so often replicated in our media. She was strict, the disciplinarian, and with no patience for incompetence. “I can’t” and “I don’t know how” were forbidden phrases. For her daughters, she wanted radical independence. She wanted us to stand on our two feet and make our way through the world on our own terms. Authenticity and labor were the name of the game: she refused to lose her provincial accent, and still continues to refuse, even when it causes friction. In her mind, you can overcome anything by simply working harder than anyone else, becoming indispensable, the expert of experts. In my younger years I heavily resented her lack of warmth, a lack of female nurturing. During one of our fights when I was a teenager (and there were many!) I cried out that I have “two fathers and no mother”. This she still quotes to me, from time to time, as a joke.

Art, in my mother’s opinion, is a pastime of the aristocracy. Which is kind of ironic, because she is a painter herself. Not professionally, though there were many opportunities for that. Our house was always a museum of her work. The walls could never hold everything she produced. When guests came, they would get transfixed on something, and always ask who the artist is. Nobody ever had an idea that she also paints, and so well. She never had an exhibition. During her student years, she supported herself by selling the paintings, but never after that. Her reluctance to make it a professional endeavor always struck me as strange; she always explained that she has “better ways of making a living”. I still think this is a sort of class-blockage, a deeply engrained belief that crossing into “their world” would be a betrayal of her origins.

My mother is a dynamo. A woman of inexhaustible energy who can’t stay still. When she became an empty nester in her mid-fifties, she got a PhD. Because why not? When that was done, she started a massive reconstruction of her childhood home overlooking the sea. With no money. We all thought this was absolute insanity, but in her characteristic fashion, she’s made unbelievable progress. In our family, Baba was the dreamer, the slightly lost-in-the-clouds intellectual, and Maman, though no less intellectual, made the world run on schedule.

Books could be written about my mother. About her wartime years, about her family history, about what it means to be the child of famine survivors, a PhD and a secret artist. But these books will not be functional for any Western publishing house, because my mother, although she is fully secular and with a markedly socialist bend, refuses to be a victim. In fact, she has such disdain for people who make victimhood their identity that she has a gesture for the type. She will put her hand on her forehead with the palm facing out and drop her shoulders with a sigh. This gesture is known to us as “naneh, man gharibam!”

My mother has an abundance of vital energy, and no patience for perpetual victims. She also has a sort of x-ray vision and a very sharp tongue: if you cross her she will know all your weak spots in a millisecond and hit them all in rapid succession, a sort of verbal martial art that I’ve never seen elsewhere. When someone wrongs her, they pay, and she goes to the very end to get what was her right. In this sense, she can’t be the oppressed woman. She is temperamentally unsuited for that.

Diasporic Iranian authors almost never come from my mother’s background. If you take Djavadi and Satrapi, that’s fairly obvious. Some incredibly tone-deaf statements came in the works of the latter, like claiming that almost every Iranian has some measure of “blue blood”. That is not only completely false, statistically verifiably false, and this blue blood is not some neutral thing that makes no difference. What one considers blue is either from usurpers, or from decadent Turkic monarchies. In the context of the Iranian north, it’s rich to lump people who descend from the constitutionalists, jangalis and other antimonarchy groups with their oppressors. Wasn’t it one of these feudal landlords who severed Mirza Kuchik Khan’s frozen head? It shows such lack of self-awareness that it’s beyond insulting. Do the maids in these works have lives that don’t serve as the protagonists’ moral education? Do they have true interiorities? Or is it the Ghulam, feudal system, repackaged? And as for the socialism, it would be nice if every aristocrat could reinvent themselves as Maryam Firouz, but unfortunately the record exists, and even with her the Tudeh folks had significant issues. You can’t just claim the history without adequate receipts.

All this to say, as the Western consumer, you will never encounter the story of my mother in print. Because the people who can get published get published for a reason, and that reason is denying that tens of millions of variations on the theme of my mother exist. Who simply live. Work. Raise children. Fight with their husbands and love them passionately. Are bad at cooking with no desire to learn. And invest every penny in restoring a house overlooking the sea, the house built where a hut once was, where their aunt starved to death in 1943.

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The puzzle of Iranian unpredictability

For decades, Western policymakers and analysts have struggled to model Iranian diplomatic behavior, sometimes with comical and often with tragic consequences. The pattern is well known by now: patience that stretches for years, followed by abrupt walkouts; redlines that shift seemingly without “explanation”; several instances of rhetorical whiplash that leave Western so-called negotiators uncertain whether a deal is imminent or dead.

Standard Western frameworks have utterly failed here. Realist accounts, which assume states pursue material interests with rational consistency, cannot explain Iranian behavior. Rational choice models, which privilege explicit preferences and transparent communication, break down when confronted with silence and sudden rupture. Even “culture as politeness” approaches, which claim to recognize Iranian courtesy but treat it only as a superficial layer, miss the structural logic beneath. All in all, the Western diplomatic understanding of Iran has always been in a very sorry state.

In this essay, I would like to open a small window into this seemingly impenetrable structure. Iranian “strategic ambiguity” is not a veil over fixed interests, that is, in my opinion, a fundamentally inadequate reading. It is the native condition of a civilizational self ordered by a triadic structure: taarof (tactical decorum), adab (strategic propriety), and farhang (dynamic deep culture-code). The productive tension between adab and farhang that appears particularly through the civilizational honor categories of gheyrat and namous produces a structural opacity that precludes outsider modeling. Understanding this architecture is not merely an academic exercise, at least not in the current circumstances. As the world hopefully moves toward a multipolar order in which Iran, China, and Russia play their roles, the ability to recognize different civilizational logics of diplomacy will determine whether that order is stable or not.

In here, I will try to explore my native understanding of the subject in five parts. First and foremost, we have to establish a necessary terminological firewall around the concepts of gheyrat and namous. Second, we will unpack the triadic model of taarof, adab, and farhang. Third, we’ll apply the model to two empirical case studies. Fourth, we’ll compare Iranian logic to Chinese li and Russian Westphalianism, introducing the high-context/low-context distinction as a predictor of multipolar compatibility. Fifth, we will conclude with implications for future order-building. In here, I’d like to acknowledge that the text is very long, I find it an important subject. However, if in a rush, I recommend you focus your attention on sections two and four.

1. Terminological note: gheyrat and namous as civilizational categories

Before proceeding, a necessary clarification. The Arabic-Persian terms gheyrat (غیرت) and namous (ناموس) have entered Western Orientalist discourse primarily through their most reductive interpersonal and gendered meanings. This essay uses these terms in their civilizational, not interpersonal, senses.

In Iranian culture, namous refers to the inviolable sanctity of the collective polity: the nation, the revolution, the faith, the historical memory. An act that violates Iran’s namous is not an insult to a woman; it is an act that denies Iran’s standing as a sovereign, dignified civilization. The 2018 United States withdrawal from the JCPOA was perceived as a violation of namous because it treated Iran’s word as worthless and its agreements as reversible at the whim of a single signatory.

Gheyrat refers to the non-negotiable, honor-bound refusal to accept subordination, humiliation, or asymmetric obligation. A state with gheyrat does not calculate costs and benefits alone. It also asks: “Does this agreement make us appear as supplicants?” The willingness to walk away from a materially beneficial deal that is framed as a concession is gheyrat at work.

Crucially, these civilizational categories are reinforced by a deep and sadly little-known poetic-psychological fact: Persian discourse imagines the land itself (Iran-zamin, colloquially Iran-khanoum (Lady Iran)) as a female entity worthy of gheyrat and protected by namous. This is not a reduction of politics to gender. It elevates the defense of territory to the same moral register as the defense of a family’s inner sanctum. The familial analogy descends from the land to the family, not the reverse. When an Iranian negotiator perceives an act as dishonoring Iran’s namous, he is responding to a violation of the land-as-khanoum, a category that is emotionally real, structurally coherent, and diplomatically consequential. The outsider who dismisses this as “primitive honor culture” misses the civilizational logic entirely. It should perhaps be noted that in Farsi, rape and aggression (in the military sense) are the same word.

Throughout this essay, gheyrat and namous are used in this civilizational sense. The structural logic operates identically whether the object of honor is a family or a nation-state; the scale is what matters, not the gendered content.

2. The triadic model: taarof, adab, farhang

Iranian diplomatic behavior is ordered by three interacting layers. They are not merely cultural “traits” but a coherent architecture of strategic action. In here, for simplicity, I have devised a simple pyramid schema, this is my original contribution.

A. Taarof as operative ritual

Taarof is the most immediately perceptible layer, and one every person who has interacted with an Iranian has experienced. It refers to the ritualized system of polite deference, offer-refusal cycles, and face-saving that governs everyday Iranian social interaction. In diplomacy, taarof serves several tactical functions: it buys time, tests an interlocutor’s intentions, avoids blunt refusal, and preserves a positive relational atmosphere even in the absence of agreement. In the most basic sense, with two social actors, taarof functions as a mechanism in which both emerge from the interaction with their social standing mutually improved.

Most analyses of Iranian social mores end at the taarof level, which is frankly really absurd. The absolute limitation of taarof is that it is very shallow by design. It can, and must be suspended by higher layers when necessary, because otherwise it’d contradict the postulates of adab. A diplomat operating purely at the taarof level would be entirely inconsequential.

B. Adab as regulatory superstructure

Above taarof stands adab: cultivated propriety, the ethics of role and relation, and crucially, the knowledge of when to deploy or suspend taarof. Adab is strategic where taarof is tactical. It governs patience (sabr), indirectness, hierarchy, and the long-term management of relationships.

A key insight of this triadic model is that superior adab can suspend taarof. The host who waves away ritual offers of tea and insists that a guest eat first is not being rude; he is demonstrating a higher mastery of propriety. Similarly, an Iranian negotiator who abruptly interrupts pleasantries to state a core demand is often operating within adab, not against it because he has judged that the moment requires directness in service of the larger relationship.

C. Farhang as absolute, dynamic deep code

At the apex of the triad is farhang: civilizational memory, language, Shi’a narratives of justice and martyrdom, and the deep values of haya (modesty), gheyrat, and namous. Unlike adab, which is normative and rule-governed, farhang is existential. It defines who Iranians are as a civilization.

The crucial mechanism of the triadic model is that farhang can even override adab. When gheyrat or namous is triggered, what appears from the outside as bi-adabi (rudeness, rupture, abruptness) is actually a higher fidelity to farhang. The 1979 revolutionaries who refused communication with Western diplomats were not failing to be polite. They were performing gheyrat and demonstrating that the new Islamic Republic would not perform deference to powers that had subordinated Iran for a century. Similarly, a contemporary Iranian negotiator who walks out of a session after a perceived slight is not losing control. He is signaling that the situation has moved from the realm of adab (where patience and indirectness apply) to the realm of farhang (where honor requires rupture).

D. The productive tension

The adab-farhang tension is not a flaw in Iranian diplomacy. It is an asset. It generates what earlier scholars have called “strategic unpredictability” (do you feel the imperialistic undertone in that?). Here I prefer structural opacity: the permanent possibility that the rules of the game may shift.

An Iranian actor can operate legitimately in either mode, be it patient adab or disruptive gheyrat, depending on perceived honor threats. A foreign negotiator therefore rarely knows whether a given statement or action will trigger the adab response (patience, indirectness, continued engagement) or the farhang override (rupture, walkout, public denunciation). This is largely due to their willing ignorance. The system refuses to resolve the ambiguity because the tension is the resilience. To demand that Iran choose between modes is to demand it cease being itself.

Strategic ambiguity is therefore not the absence of decision-making, nor is it an attempt to “dupe” or “con” the interlocutor, as so often presented by ignorant Western analysts. It is simply the practice of creating negative space, where each actor is given room to maneuver and maintain honor, while pursuing a mutually beneficial settlement.

3. Case Studies

Case 1: The 2019-2021 JCPOA gradual rescission

Following the unilateral United States withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018 and the reimposition of sanctions, Iran faced a dilemma. Pure adab would have meant full compliance with the deal despite United States non-compliance which is a posture of infinite patience that would have been read domestically as weakness and even submission. Pure gheyrat would have meant a spectacular, irreversible breach: withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expulsion of inspectors, or a dash to weapons-grade enrichment.

Iran chose neither. Instead, from July 2019 onward, it announced stepwise breaches of the JCPOA’s limits, gradually exceeding the enriched uranium stockpile limit, then the enrichment level limit, then deploying advanced centrifuges… Each of these steps was announced on a predictable 60-day cycle, each paired with an offer to reverse course if European signatories fulfilled their commitments.

This is adab managing gheyrat. The 60-day cycles performed gheyrat domestically: the government could show that it was responding to United States aggression. But the predictability of the cycles, the reversibility of the steps, and the continued presence of IAEA inspectors were all adab characteristics. Iran remained in the deal legally while violating it politically. The strategic ambiguity of “are we in or out?” was the desired product. Western powers could not decide whether to treat Iran as a violator or a negotiating partner, and that ambiguity preserved Iran’s options while satisfying domestic honor requirements.
As the European Parliament formally noted, the Joint Commission “continued regularly” throughout this period, which is a fact that would have obviously been impossible had Iran truly ruptured the agreement.[i] Even as European powers formally challenged Iran’s compliance, the diplomatic channel remained open. Iran continued to participate. The agreement was neither fully abandoned nor fully respected, but held in a state of managed ambiguity.

Case 2: The 2023 China-brokered Saudi rapprochement

In March 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic relations, severed since 2016, in a deal brokered by China. The agreement was announced without prior consultation with the United States or European JCPOA signatories. From a Western diplomatic perspective, this was bi-adabi of a high order, a studied insult to the existing framework of Middle East diplomacy.

Compare the language of the Chinese MFA spokesperson to rhetoric coming from the West:

“This will help regional countries to get rid of external interference and take the future into their own hands. Saudi Arabia and Iran reaffirmed their adherence to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms in international relations including non-interference in internal affairs of states. This is in line with the trend of the times. China applauds this and congratulates both sides.”[ii]

My triadic model interprets the move differently, not as a snub or insult, but as a redirection. Iran was not rejecting diplomacy at all. It was reorienting the civilizational frame within which diplomacy occurs. Choosing China as mediator was a farhang signal: “We are legible to Eastern civilizations, not to those who dishonored us, and we only grant legitimacy to those we see worthy of it.” China largely treats Iran as an equal civilization unlike the United States, which Iran perceived as having violated its namous through the JCPOA withdrawal and maximum pressure campaign. Now the perception is, naturally, even more negative.

Domestically, the deal was framed to different audiences using different layers of the triad. To some: “We restored namous by bypassing the United States and dealing with an Eastern power that respects our revolution.” To pragmatists: “This is adab-driven patience paying off, reducing tensions without concessions.” To the general public: “Iran outmaneuvered its enemies.” The same act was simultaneously gheyrat (rupture with the West), superior adab (patient cultivation of Beijing), and farhang affirmation (Islamic Republic standing tall).

I want to briefly go back to the Chinese MFA spox remarks here:

“I want to stress that China pursues no selfish interest whatsoever in the Middle East. We respect the stature of Middle East countries as the masters of this region and oppose geopolitical competition in the Middle East. China has no intention to and will not seek to fill so-called vacuum or put up exclusive blocs. China always believes that the future of the Middle East should always be in the hands of the countries in the region. China always supports the people in the Middle East in independently exploring their development paths and supports Middle East countries in resolving differences through dialogue and consultation to jointly promote lasting peace and stability in the region. China will be a promoter of security and stability, partner for development and prosperity and supporter of the Middle East’s development through solidarity. China will continue to contribute its insights and proposals to realizing peace and tranquility in the Middle East and play its role as a responsible major country in this process.”

Can you compare this to the vile rhetoric coming out of the US establishment today? The unhinged, rabid and tenuously rational acts from the US President (who calls himself a pirate, among other things), who sends his son-in-law to negotiate on matters he is absolutely unequipped to comprehend… they do not inspire confidence, they breach trust a priori, and therefore, no productive communication is possible under these circumstances. After the mass of war crimes committed by the US establishment and their proxy against Iranian civilians, any dialogue is bordering on a violation of gheyrat, and the Iranian citizenry is in a heightened emotional state, demanding accountability and reparations. When faced with an opponent who is profoundly uncivilized, maintaining adab is bi-adabi. Therefore, the diplomatic rationale switches into honor preservation mode.

4. Comparative civilizational logic

If my triadic model is correct, Iranian diplomacy is not an isolated case. It is one instance of a broader civilizational logic that includes other high-context societies. Understanding how Iranian logic compares to Chinese and Russian diplomatic cultures is essential for predicting the stability of any future multipolar order, and there will be issues in this future integration.

A. The Iranian pyramid and the Chinese concentric circles (Li)

The Iranian model is hierarchical and layered, a pyramid in which higher layers can override lower ones. The Chinese model, rooted in the classical concept of li (ritual propriety), is organized differently. As the sociologist Fei Xiaotong famously described it, Chinese social relations are concentric circles radiating outward from the self, like ripples from a pebble dropped in water.

Fei Xiaotong’s concept of chaxu geju, or the “differential mode of association,” provides the foundational model for understanding Chinese social and diplomatic structure. Fei contrasts the Chinese pattern with the Western “organizational mode” (tuanti geju), which he likens to “bundles of firewood” where there are discrete groups with clear boundaries and uniform rules for members.[iii]

The crucial difference for diplomacy is that concentric circles have no outer edge that is absolute. There is no conceptual category for “beyond the pale” in classical li, only degrees of distance. This means that Chinese diplomatic culture precludes foreclosure. China rarely breaks relations permanently, rarely walks out without a path back, and rarely forces an opponent into a position where they must choose between humiliation and rupture.

This structural difference makes Iran and China highly compatible partners. Iran supplies the revolutionary heat, the capacity for gheyrat-driven rupture that keeps adversaries uncertain. China supplies the civilizational cooling, the li-based continuity that prevents that rupture from becoming permanent foreclosure. Iran can rupture with the West while China provides a stable economic and diplomatic backstop. The partnership works not despite their differences but because of them. The systems at their base level, in the tactical sense, function almost analogously, while the superstructure remains complementary. Any Iranian who has interacted with Chinese knows that taarof and li are completely mutually intelligible, and not only that, but sometimes even equivalent. Therefore, at the outward level, communication is smooth, understanding is instantaneous, while the differing superstructure allows for mutual benefit.

B. The Russian wild card

Russia presents a different case. Russian diplomatic culture, inherited from Imperial and Soviet traditions, is far closer to the Westphalian-European model than either Iran or China. It is characterized by blunt, legalistic directness; stated redlines that function as actual lines; and a willingness to engage in foreclosure (breaking relations, withdrawing from treaties, walking out permanently).

This creates two points of friction in any Iran-China-Russia alignment:

Iran-Russia: Both can rupture, but for different reasons. Russia’s rupture is legalistic and transactional (”You violated the deal; the deal is therefore void”). Iran’s rupture is honor-based and relational (”You dishonored us; we must respond”). These can misalign. A Russian diplomat who treats Iranian sensitivities as “irrational” or “emotional” has just violated Iran’s namous potentially triggering rupture.

China-Russia: China’s concentric circles cannot accommodate Russia’s binary (friend/enemy, deal/no-deal) logic. Russia sees Chinese ambiguity as weakness or bad faith; China sees Russian directness as impropriety. The relationship requires constant management.

Russia is thus the wild card. Not because of bad faith, but because of civilizational mismatch. It sits in a liminal space: higher-context than the United States or Germany, but lower-context than Iran or China. This liminality is the source of its unpredictability within any non-Western coalition.

C. High-context vs. Low-context: the multipolar imperative

The preceding analysis can be generalized. Iran and China are both deeply high-context societies. Meaning resides in relationship, silence, and what is not said, trust precedes contract, face preservation is paramount. Both underwent radical revolutions (Iran 1979, China 1949 and 1978) that changed the content of their political systems but left the form of high-context communication intact.

Low-context societies (Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the United States to a significant degree) operate differently. Meaning resides in explicit language, contracts are the gold standard, trust follows performance.

If a multipolar order is to include Iran and China as major poles, the burden of adaptation falls asymmetrically on low-context societies. Iran and China cannot become low-context. Their civilizational deep structures preclude it. They can perform low-context diplomacy in technical settings (WTO, IAEA), but the underlying trust and strategic ambiguity will always revert to high-context norms. Low-context societies can learn to tolerate higher context. It is costly and uncomfortable, but not structurally impossible.

The United States and Europe face a choice. They can continue to demand that Iran and China adopt low-context, Westphalian norms which is a demand that has failed repeatedly. Or they can accept a permanent position at the periphery of a high-context multipolar order. Russia, as the liminal case, must decide which civilizational pole it belongs to. Currently, it tries to play both. What we have seen since 2022 suggests that is unsustainable.

5. The unresolved tension as resilience

Here, I’ve argued that Iranian strategic ambiguity is not a tactic but a structure. It flows from the productive, unresolvable tension between adab and farhang . The triadic model explains patterns that Western frameworks fail to grasp.

The model can also make some predictions about the multipolar order. Iran and China will deepen their alignment because their civilizational logics (pyramid and concentric circles) are structurally complementary. Russia will remain a wild card because its Westphalian logic fits uneasily with both. Low-context societies will struggle to find stable footing unless they develop a higher tolerance for ambiguity.

The broader implication is that the coming multipolar order will not be built on universal rules or converged norms. It will be built on civilizational tolerance and literacy: the willingness of different diplomatic cultures to inhabit the same room without demanding that others vanish. Iran’s triadic architecture is not a problem to be solved by Western “experts”. The question is not which civilization is “rational,” but which ones can learn to recognize the rationality and internal logic of the other.

We have been learning your ways for centuries. Are you willing to learn ours?

[i] European Parliament, “Answer to Question No E-001094/20,” July 3, 2020. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2020-001094-ASW_EN.html

[ii] Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Remarks on Saudi Arabia-Iran Talks in Beijing, March 11, 2023. Available at: https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/fyrbt/fyrbt/202405/t20240530_11349765.html

[iii] Fei, Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Translated by Gary G. Hamilton and Wang Zheng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

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In twenty years, our children will no longer hold the atrocities of WWII as the etalon for the human capacity for cruelty. The dark twenties will be taught in schools and universities. One day, our children will inevitably ask us: “Where were you when all of this was happening, and what did you do about it?”

This day hasn’t arrived yet. We’re living in the age of raw, unmasked evil. For those in the imperial core life mostly continues as usual. Allowing it to go on like this, disregarding the soft coercion, the daily blackmail by other means, is morally reprehensible and increasingly technically impossible. So we suffer, we organize and we collectively deceive ourselves that we’re contributing our share. Unfortunately, right now the score can only be settled by fire.

The hegemony is in its agonal throes, and thus more rabid than ever. It has exhausted its own capacity for deceit. If we take into account that it is only a form of mass psychosis that still allows it to function internally, the image is dying rapidly. The image always dies before the empire dies functionally. The second death of Britannia; the host is kept on life support and severely diminished, dying, and so is its malignant, metastatic outgrowth called the United States.

The curtain is closing on the Anglo world order. But it will not take its final breath without taking the rest of us with it and exerting its trademark vice: total and absolute cruelty.

For students of history, this kind of cruelty is nothing new, it is in fact the operating system of the British empire, and now its metastasis. Merged with a saprotrophic capitalist class, aware of the limits of the new global ecosystem, it must outdo itself. It must cross every boundary, break every covenant, and expand into depravity with such dizzying speed one can hardly keep up.

Thus dies the sustaining myth of the European ethos, along with its final Anglo incarnation. Remember these wise words by John Stuart Mill?

How does that bode in 2026, in the imperial core? How about Kant? Surely, we must remember Kant.

No, that is not applicable to this moment either.

In such historical moments, the most depraved are the most functional, therefore they naturally rise to the top. Whether or not there is a widespread kompromat operation is, in this case, irrelevant; there is substantial circumstantial evidence tying much of the US and UK power structure to the vilest acts of cruelty against the most innocent: children. And this is, within the calculus of cruelty unleashed from any braking mechanism, completely expected.

In any case, the definition of cruelty itself is curious, and so is the word.

Cruelty is a Norman addition to the English language. It comes, ultimately, from the Latin adjective crudelis, most often translated as “rude” or “hard-hearted”. However, this word didn’t arise out of a vacuum either. Crudus, the root adjective, denoted something raw and bloody, as in raw flesh. It’s cognate in Greek is κρέας, /ˈkɾe.as/, flesh. We soon get into the common Indo-European root that also gave Slavic languages the word for blood, such as кровь, /krovʲ]/, in Russian.

The root of cruelty is flesh and blood. This is what so often gets lost in debates, in articles, in analyses.

In a recently produced short documentary by Prof. Helyeh Doutaghi, titled “Still, Minab”, the father of two students who were at Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab (one of whom was seriously wounded, the other martyred) recounts entering the wreckage and being overwhelmed with the nauseating smell of human blood. (6:10)

The pictures at the vigils are beautiful. The documentary is painful to watch, but it still looks dignified. You can’t transmit smell through a screen. The effects of cruelty, the natural byproduct that is blood spilled, in huge quantities, remains beyond reach.

The Collins dictionary defines “cruel” as: “causing or inflicting pain without pity”. Pity is a curious choice. In my opinion, this definition is fundamentally wrong. It is not without pity, for pity is a hierarchical posture. It is not even without “mercy”. It is without conscience. Cruelty is the definitive pathognomonic feature of psychopathy.

In the age of cannibals, human dignity is a fiction. The hegemon feasts on the body of the periphery, and the poor, frightened peripherals thank it for its service in cleaning their bones. Learned helplessness has accumulated. However, we should be warned: cannibalism comes with heavy consequences. Mad cow disease originated from a morbid practice of feeding cows meat-and-bone meal made of, you guessed it, other cows’ carcasses. The prion then infected their brains, incubating for years, eventually culminating in ataxia, aggression, panic and death. We are in the ataxic and aggressive stage; the hegemony stumbles and bites left and right. However, the disease is incurable. Eventually, the host must die.

In this infected, aggressive stage, the dying hegemony is willing to cross even the boundaries of reason itself. That is no surprise, for there were precedents for it in human history. Mad rulers of dying empires, decadence, rage and cruelty on a smaller scale. We’ve seen this movie play out before, but with less destructive weapons. However, the issue is not outside, in the lair of the cannibals, but within us. Within the supposedly free people of the world who reject being conscripted into this vampire ball. If the cannibals are willing to cross all boundaries, we still remain shackled to the plausible and achievable, even in our thoughts. The cannibals have plans, we have stickers and whistles. The cannibals have propulsion, we have inertia. It is true that this propulsion is a terminal rally, but if we don’t resist it, we may find ourselves destroyed anyways and our world rendered uninhabitable.

The issue is that the terminal hegemony is willing to set the world on fire before it lays down and sighs its final breath. Know this, internalize this knowledge. It is, and always has been, a zero-sum game.

It is our job, our ultimate job, to claim the propulsive power of madness without getting morally annihilated. Without resorting to cruelty. Without becoming cannibals ourselves. To imagine, boldly, freely, and without hegemonic blinders, a different world.

It is our duty, in the age of cannibals, to resist like humans. To retain the conscience that is the only antidote to total dark.

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We sat on the balcony in Laakkwartier five and a half years ago, commenting on the corona panic. We were very young, very bright and still relatively unscathed. He jumped from topic to topic, in his characteristic fashion.

“Did you know that the Lyapunov from Lyapunov stability’s, yes, my Lyapunov stability, yes, his brother, yes, that one was Alexandr, but the brother Sergei, yes, Lyapunov, composed that beautiful piece you like, sirelis, the Variations and Fugue on a Russian theme, in d sharp minor, yes, his born brother! And did you know that Prigogine had a framed portrait of Lyapunov, no, not Sergei, Sasha, the one who offed himself, yes, the function one, yes he did off himself, sirelis, framed on his desk? At the ULB, naturally. I just heard that. Ha? No, that is too much. You think so? No, I don’t think he slept with Stengers. She could be his daughter, vah! You don’t think that ever prevented anyone? No? Ha-ha! Maybe he did, old Russian fart? What do I know?”

And I just looked at him, at the way he can’t hide his enthusiasm at all, how his eyebrows betray him at every point. A few months before that we invented a system for classifying the bushiness of eyebrows. The unit we devised was 1 Brezhnev, and the average European had anywhere from 1-5 microbrezhnevs in eyebrow potency. With Dutch people you can start to get into the pico and femtobrezhnevs quite quickly. I sit at the uncomfortable 1 centibrezhnev mark in my natural state, comparatively small score for an Iranian. And he himself at the 30-50 centibrezhnevs. Young people find the stupidest things to amuse themselves. After this, I remember collecting the cups and that we went inside.

The next morning, September 27^th, the war would start. February 28^th of this year was an ugly, ugly déjà vu. This war would last for forty-four days and lead to a crime against humanity, the forced expulsion of 120000 people three years later.

You may ask me, what does it have to do with the subject?

I can tell you about my ancestors generations back. Generational memory fails sometime in the Zandian era on both sides of my family. I’m not of any noble birth. On the very contrary. There is no written trace of most of my ancestors, but the generational memory persists. Through wars and famines and genocide, the memory of those who didn’t survive was carried over by those who did. Perhaps because even though there were seasons of death, there were no seasons of expulsion.

He knows his grandmothers. The grandfathers died early; basturma, chain smoking, stress, and an obvious predisposition to early coronary disease. He knows of his great grandparents in murky terms. Both sets of grandparents were child repatriates from Bulgaria and Moldova during the second repatriation wave (1948). Scattered once, already missing chunks of their family history. Even his surname is an invention, after the name of his great-great-grandfather, supposedly, because the great-grandfather who eventually made it to Moldova was a small child in 1924, orphaned, and didn’t know if he had a surname. But he knew what his father’s name was. And this was the surname recorded in the Nansen passport.

Where were they before 1915? When did that child’s mother die? Where? He doesn’t know. Nobody does.

And this knowledge can’t be recovered.

On September 27^th 2020 another cycle of destruction started. In September 2023 that cycle too was completed.

The knowledge that it happened once didn’t prevent it from happening again. Genocide denial is less common these days, even among younger Turks of a particular type. There was a friend, one of those hippie types from Izmir, who took a picture of her father’s study for me, with a library dedicated to “debunking the Armenian lie”. She couldn’t tell him she believed the “lie”. The topic remains untouchable for the boomers. But their children? Their children no longer hold it sacrosanct. Which is no satisfaction to anyone, really. It’s happening, it has happened and nobody did anything to prevent it. Those fancy NGOs? Civil society? European Union? A few months ago, the nice civilized people from the EPP, good Christian democrat types, were frolicking in Baku. And if the butcher of Baku got inclined so, and launched an offensive against Syunik, well, we all know without any doubt that nobody would stop him. The other artificial genocidal entity needs its oil.

So, what does it mean to love an Armenian today, 111 years removed from the Genocide? And by extension, what does it mean to love Armenia? Especially when you come from a culture that isn’t neutral?

Yes, my origins within the Iranian context may be provincial, but a centralized state has always collapsed that to some extent, especially when it comes to the pure North. When many Iranians from an older generation meet a bright, charismatic Armenian, the reactions is the same: “Oh, well, they’re basically ‘shomali’, they just forgot the language.”

Is that so? Or is it the old imperialism rearing its ugly head? Whose uncle is going to say that Turkmenchay was a disgrace next? From what I know, they have a hell of a language on their own.

It’s painful to call yourself out. To stand in the light and see where the old tentacles of imperialism still attach. It happens to me daily. When I taste any rice with vermicelli, I call it reshteh polo, a northern, familiar, springtime food. When I read Sayat Nova and it escapes my mind “well, this is nearly readable to a Farsi speaker without knowing much Armenian!” because of the heavy load of Persian loanwords. I’m learning. I’ll be learning as long as I’m alive.

For us as otars, however invested, it is absurd to presuppose we can understand the Armenian condition. No amount of education or genuine personal investment can act as a surrogate for what one is simply born into on the other side of the Araxes. How can I understand what it meant to be a child during the blockade? Merely ignoring this fact leads into the same homogenization impulse that is inherently imperial. So how do you hold the unknowable gently? By trying, and failing, and doing it all over again. By refusing the easy paths out of the contradiction.

So much has already been lost. We can’t know what we don’t know. The lost memories, the lost names, the lost histories are never coming back. If you have an Armenian in your life, call them and tell them you love them. Without qualifications. Tell them you’re happy they exist.

That was not a historical given at all. The memory, or absence of it may be distant, but something within them knows they’re improbable survivors. It comes out in the dark humor, in the misplaced joke at the funeral, in phantom aches in the perpetually tense body, silently endured. In the knowledge that what is, remains eternally incomplete. Especially for the men, the little boys with their giant eyes who are gradually tempered into steely solidity. The street has no mercy, neither do the fathers, neither does the military service. It is perhaps the job of those who love them to allow for the silly little boys to come out. Those lost in the internal maze, on an eternal bus ride from Yerevan to Martakert, in the stench of barracks and a forever interrupted youth. The early knowledge that nobody in this world is coming to save them, so they must save themselves.

To remember means to love the living. To put yourself in service of the continued existence of what was almost lost. The perpetually scattered, like so many of us, are in need of anchors. And if a place can not provide that, you can make one together. A set table on a balcony, a taxonomy of eyebrows, and a boy showing off to a girl. The place is anywhere you step on, as long as the love and respect remain alive.

Some homeless will never find a home. It is a given for many of us, not just Armenians. Empires play with our lives, scatter us left and right, destroy our homes or render them uninhabitable. The small peoples, small in numbers and area but gigantic in spirit, always get the worst end of any imperial bargain. And their lot is often homelessness.

Սիրտս նման է էն փլած տներ,

Կոտրեր գերաններ, խախտեր է սներ,

Բուն պիտի դնեն մեջ վայրի հավքեր։

Երթամ՝ ձի թալեմ էն ելման գետեր,

Ըլնիմ ձկներու ձագերացն կեր։

Ա՜յ, տո լա՛ճ տնավեր։

But the homeless can raise a tent wherever they are, and claim a corner of this green Earth for themselves. And perhaps, in that liminality, in this impermanence we find the truth of what it means to love those who survived against tall odds, and who still find it in themselves to laugh. To wear a leather jacket in May, spill out their erudition in the kitchen and clasroom alike, curse like a Taxi driver in Gyumri, smoke too many Marlboro Reds and insist on staying alive and good.

To remember the Great Crime is to love the living. Fully, completely, with all their contradictions.

And to guard what little of memory remains with your own life.

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I do not recommend reading Baudrillard in wartime conditions, especially not when you’re awaiting news clarifying the fate of your family.

I’ve recently taken up reading The Transparency of Evil, the book I started reading during my 7-day water fast, the not-hunger-strike I went on last September in solidarity with Palestinian hostages in administrative detention and victims of imposed famine. (You can read about that here.) Unfortunately, by day 3 my brain was malfunctioning so hard it was impossible to concentrate on anything of substance. Even the “nice” books I had chosen for myself (Abgaryan, Melashvili) were far out of my reach. And then, afterwards, there were other books, other more pertinent things.

I don’t know which devil made me read this cursed pile of steaming shit right now, perhaps I wanted to keep up with my fancy friends from sociology departments whose mouths are always full of his quotes. I wanted to have some smart and pertinent things to say about simulacra in the current age of metanarrative warfare, and the evil edge seemed appealing in a time of absolute, unqualifiable evil. I did read Simulacra and Simulation a long time ago and found it interesting, though tedious to think about. Baudrillard presupposes you’re just along for the ride, and if you try to apply any sort of predicate logic to his verbose (but punchy!) writing, he overtakes you and warns that the argument is somehow unamenable to predicate logic for reasons that just are because he says so. The French intellectual version of “trust me, bro.” But when you’re young and West Asian, and in need of academic and intellectual legitimacy, you just accept what some white European dude says, because God forbid you use that prefrontal cortex.

I suppose you already know quite well where this is going.

The orgy, yes, I even liked the metaphor of the orgy. There is something about the explicit sexuality that he uses to describe things that could do without that. But I suppose for a Frenchman, and an intellectual of a certain generation, the sexual metaphor trumps all others. It’s a shorthand for the most radical thing imaginable. An eastern mind would not have thought of an orgy, not because we don’t know what those are, or because we are somehow prudish, but because it would cheapen the intellectual argument. I’m not uncomfortable reading this, I just find it fascinating. Baudrillard, as an intellectual phenomenon, is all effect. All punch. And when the layers are stripped away, internal contradictions breed like cockroaches underneath the floorboards. I know at least one Slovenian pseudo-psychoanalyst-pseudo-philosopher who has a similar approach to effect.

Baudrillard’s writing is unapologetically ahistorical. Some of you know how much I hate Fukuyama, and the same stands. If the West enjoyed the fruits of US hegemony for 70+ years, it made the grave error of mistaking it for an eternal and unchangeable order of the world. A whole theoretical apparatus was pieced together haphazardly to describe the conditions of decadence and decline in its final three decades as some supposedly permanent stage of postmodernity and thus an immutable and empirically relevant function of reality. What appears to the comfortable salon-dwelling European intellectual as clever, strikes no less intellectual peers in other places as obscene. The privilege to gloss over the obscenity is very unevenly distributed. I suppose you already catch that despite all the verbosity and the evasion of why the title (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place) of that cursed work doesn’t mean what it says, the Gulf War did happen, and that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children that Mrs. Albright claimed were “worth it” equally did, actually, no, factually, happen.

What is a simulacrum as seen through your TV screen is a bloodied shroud, and very material, to others.

In Transparency of Evil he speaks of Khomeini in such vile terms that I want to reach through the book, shake him awake and ask: “Who are you? What are your credentials to make value judgements on decolonization? Oh, right, you have none.”

If you think we should separate the speaker from the spoken, then so be it: I just find it curious that I don’t hear much about French imperialism in the works of Baudrillard. How about the Vichy government? Where is that in the Transparency of Evil? And if a fatwa, however misplaced, can be called obscene and evil, why can’t Mrs Albright’s admission of all-but-genocide? Isn’t there an asymmetry? And wouldn’t a harsher critic find reasons to reach for the racist undertones beneath?

Now, let me play devil’s advocate. Surely, Baudrillard wrote about what he thought were universals. He spoke neither Arabic, nor Farsi. He was a Germanist by trade (a point often forgotten, one of my very own rogue philologists – we should understand that we are simply out of our depth sometimes and that no matter of digging on De Saussure makes for a compelling universalizing argument). He never claimed to be a moral philosopher. But for such a mastermind, such an intellectual giant, surely it appeared that his vantage point was paid for in Algerian blood? Or did it not? Did he ever consider that his ability to write about simulation, hyperreality, and the disappearance of the real was itself conditioned by the material reality of Algerian blood?

It doesn’t matter, right? Let bygones be bygones. Even when they’re happening right now. Even when South Lebanon is getting bombarded as we speak. Even when Maqam Shamoun Al-Safa is destroyed. We live in an ahistorical, or even antihistorical reality, never mind that history is currently happening, being denied and being destroyed. Sure, let’s talk about the simulation of meaning. I’m sure that his perfectly universal reading explains the experience of the Lebanese mother who is burying her infant, with the explanation that Hezbollah “put her in harm’s way” during a funeral procession for her own goddamn father in Tyre. Sure, sure. Yes, go on. And if you have issues with the emotionality of the argument, first, screw you. Second, emotionality is a material truth when actual history is happening, and when the ivory tower is acting as if that child’s shroud is a prop. A simulacrum of a dead child, as seen through a small rectangular screen. As if we’re all Schroedinger’s people, living and dead at the same time until proven definitively. And when we’re definitively proven dead, then fuck it! It’s all a simulation to extract your emotional reaction, right? We die in perfectly choreographed ways so as to extract maximum pity from an ahistorical system that, as we’re told, never moves towards anything, and keeps amorphous masses of nameless, paid-actor West Asian corpses on eternal rotation.

Let me provide you with a quote:

“The negation of all Western values - of progress, rationality, political ethics, democracy, and so on. By rejecting-the universal consensus on all these Good Things, Khomeini became the recipient of the energy of Evil, the Satanic energy of the rejected, the glamour of the accursed share. He alone now holds the tribune because he alone has upheld against all comers the Machiavellian principle of Evil, because he alone is ready to speak Evil and exorcize Evil, because he alone allows himself to incarnate that principle on the basis of terror.” – p.82, Transparency of Evil, translated by James Benedict

Fun, isn’t it?

Sure, let’s riff on Khomeini.

The guy said some pretty stupid things about Bach and Beethoven too.

Shall we talk about Operation Ajax, Mr. Baudrillard?

Shall we talk about the two great famines the British caused in Persia?

Shall we talk about how your government still owes the Islamic Republic money for two reactors paid for by the Shah, but never delivered, separate from the Framatome deal?

Shall we talk about how Saddam got his hands on chemical weapons?

Shall we talk about sanctions?

No, we should talk about a fatwa. Satanic energy, that’s right. Last time I checked, Khomeini didn’t kill half a million children.

The theatricality of this steaming pile of shit, the Western values (spare me!), the Christian theological melodrama… I just don’t have the stomach for it. Terror? Mr Baudrillard wants to talk about terror? Let me ask, this Satanic man, what terror did he commit? A war was imposed on him, that much is historical fact. He kept American “diplomats” hostage. He did not hang them all off cranes. Yes, the young Islamic Republic was repressive: but terror? Terror, Mr. Baudrillard, has a definition. And you don’t get to retrofit whatever offends your bourgeois sensibilities into it. But perhaps that is not the point, because everything is a simulation? And there is no truth? And no history? And no cause and effect? And the stochastic, immobile but convulsive postmodern universe just exists, and will continue to exist ad infinitum?

That is unacceptable. Logically, philosophically and materially absurd.

One might say that I’m misreading the point, though it’s hard to misread tasseography by excrement. They would say the claim is not that nothing in the historical course changes materially. The claim is that even real events are immediately turned into spectacle, precisely that this former “real” is inaccessible except through simulation. Have you seen a dead child?

No, this is the obscene evasion stemming from the privilege of assuming a position so far removed from any actual historicity that you can get such awful prose without any insight. It is a privilege to rest so far in abstraction that everything becomes a surreal nightmarish “orgy” of simulacra. To sit so far inside of the abstraction of an abstraction, that even your own alienation from material reality becomes invisible. It is a symptom of decadence, not a universalizing view. Not even in media studies.

It’s a pity this is still taught in universities. It’s a pity that bright minds are expected to internalize this profoundly diseased worldview in order to think of themselves as intellectuals. Whatever the West had intellectually seems to be decaying under the weight of its own contradictions. To the young sociologist or communicologist, or even rogue philologist, I would advise: skip this, read Fanon. Read Al-e Ahmad. Read Glissant or Spivak. Try to escape the prison of your comfort instead of bending the material reality into a shape that confirms its inescapability.

If you won’t, you had it coming.

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He took pictures of unveiled Kurdish women in remote villages. Of Talysh laborers with hardened hands and peasants selling produce. He even managed to catch images from secretive dervish circles… in late 19^th century Persia.

He had an eye for perspective. The images are stunning, the subjects alive, even over a century later. When I look at the eyes of the little Shahsevan girl I feel like she could be my own child, alas, she is already long gone. When we speak of the visual memory of an entire nation, more precisely, an entire civilizational sphere in one of its most vulnerable, convulsive and unstable periods, the evidence upon which we base our understanding of ourselves and our progenitors is intrinsically tied to one man’s camera.

And yet.

Most of his life’s work has been destroyed, twice over.

And what remains is largely out of reach to us, sanctioned peoples from the “axis of evil”, as it resides in the Smithsonian.

Who was this man who took upon himself, consciously or unconsciously, to preserve the memory of a nation in labor pains?

His name is a mystery. And that is indicative. Anton, Antoine, Antoin (as he styled himself), Sevruguine, Surugin, Souroughuine, Sevrugian… There are many more variations. It is almost as if the region’s indigenous and imperial influences cooked within the same cauldron, seasoned with some good old occidentalitis, to produce a man simultaneously entirely singular and perhaps the best representation of this era of our joint history.

He was born in 1851, in Imperial Russia, or more precisely, on the tiniest differential element of its soil within the Guarded Domains of Iran – the Russian Embassy in Tehran. His father, Vasily, or Vassil, according to popular and often slightly “wrong” fashionable “French” versions of names, was a diplomat. His mother, Ashin-Khanoum, has no attested surname. But despite that lack, her historical footprint is much clearer than her husband’s. After he tragically died from a horse fall, she fought to receive his pension. There are two versions of the story: in the first the Russian Embassy denied her request, in the second, by the time they approved it she was sufficiently slighted to refuse it and take her children to her homeland.

Ashin-Khanoum was Georgian, and so, the family settled in Tbilisi. We know young Anton was talented, and that he studied painting before growing up to be a very handsome, and very industrious young man. His favorite medium quickly switched from painting to photography that could support his mother and siblings better, via producing postcards. In Tbilisi, a fateful encounter happened. The three brothers, Anton, Kolya, and Emmanuel, all interested in photography, became acquaintances and disciples of none other than Dmitri Yermakov.

The man who kindled the Russian imagination with his photographs of Persian life. The quintessential orientalist of the time.

And for Anton, something probably shifted. He felt a pull to the old home, where his late father served. Soon, in 1870, a 19-year-old Anton and his brothers moved to Tabriz. He proved socially skilled, adept in flattery, and quickly made friends in high places. He soon became the favorite of the Crown Prince Mozaffar ad-Din Mirza, even his personal confidante and protégé. The Crown Prince, known for his taste for luxury and everything European, showered young Anton with gifts. He even bestowed upon him the lordly title of “Khan”. And when it was time for him to prepare to assume power, Anton followed the Prince back to Tehran.

It is no coincidence that the new Shah, once the governor of Azerbaijan and Anton’s patron, became so invested in photography. Within the decadent, heavily indebted late Qajar dynasty, he was the Crown Prince in title, but known as a weakling, a pushover, or more generously, a gentle and curious man who cared more for art than for governance. Like his father, he had a hunger for everything French. During his visits to France, he became obsessed with cinema. As he was plagued with numerous physical ailments, most distressingly heart failure that afflicted him since his youth, he sought a second, more expansive life through the silver screen. As an excerpt from his diary states: “...[At] 9:00 p.m. we went to the Exposition and the Festival Hall where they were showing cinematography, which consists of still and motion pictures. Then we went to Illusion building ....In this Hall they were showing cinematography. They erected a very large screen in the centre of the Hall, turned off all electric lights and projected the picture of cinematography on that large screen. It was very interesting to watch. Among the pictures were Africans and Arabians traveling with camels in the African desert, which was very interesting. Other pictures were of the Exposition, the moving street, the Seine River and ships crossing the river, people swimming and playing in the water and many others that were all very interesting. We instructed Akkas Bashi to purchase all kinds of it [cinematographic equipment] and bring to Tehran so God willing he can make some there and show them to our servants.”

Akkas Bashi, or “head photographer” was Mirza Ebrahim Khan, the son of the late Shah’s photographer and the official cinematographer of the court who produced the first film in Iranian history. A short clip of the Shah leisurely walking around in Ostend, Belgium.

Although he was no Akkas Bashi, nor held official court position, things were going great for Antoin in Tehran. He established his atelier on Avenue Ala ad-Dawla, and it soon became a hotspot for westerners in search of postcards depicting “Persian Types”. This is also the time of his nearly unlimited access to the court, perhaps precisely because of his lack of official ties to it. Reviewing the Shah’s correspondence, we can infer that Antoin’s presence in the harem wasn’t incidental or clandestine, it was, quite simply – requested. The Shah wanted western, orientalistic pictures of his own world taken in the same style he admired in France. Antoin, trained by Yermakov, knew how to produce just that. The image of the unveiled Circassian concubine is not an aberration, it is an artifact of a profoundly split psyche of the late Qajar era, so enamored with both the West, and the oriental, magical undertones the west painted it with.

This is perhaps an uncomfortable and necessary point to ponder. In discourse about orientalist art we are usually confronted with a clear case of an European outsider “usurping” the naivete or good will of native subjects, and producing art that serves European libidinal functions, by virtue of showing them the Orient of their imagination as fact, rather than projection. However, in the Qajar case, the case is significantly more complex. It is not that the Qajar court was full of victims of European orientalism, not in any pure sense. It was full of its consumers. Mozaffar ad-Din Shah saw himself both as a fascinating oriental despot, and as a consumer of fascinating oriental pictures that would be worthy of his “refined”, “European” tastes. The desire to produce an orientalized version of the court, even the andaruni, was rooted in this double desire; to show oneself to the Other as the Other, and to collapse the distance between the observing civilization (West) and the observed (East). I refer the reader to Al-e Ahmad’s usage of the parable of the donkey in lion skin. It is a fascinating psychological study in a deep internal colonization of a psyche on an individual and social level.

And this high would last for a decade.

The eighties and nineties would bring another personal success to Antoin. He would meet Louise Gourghenian, the mother of their seven children, who all survived into adulthood.

The studio on Ala ad-Dawla Avenue and the adjacent home were soon overrun by children’s footsteps. It was all well. He was a wealthy man, a respected man, a cosmopolitan. He still declared himself to be Russian, which gave him a particular mystique in late Qajar courtly society. The fact that his wife was very much Armenian didn’t register in the same terms we would think of today. Vasily, his Russian diplomat father who died tragically young, was himself Armenian after all. The surname Sevryugin merely denoted a connection to a prestigious sort of stellate sturgeon that produces expensive caviar. Perhaps Vasily had named himself that upon entering diplomatic service. The name of the fish, севрюга, is Kipchak or more contemporarily, Tatar in origin. All that cosmopolitan flair was in its essence – a rather stinky fish. The Caspian doesn’t let go of its peoples.

Those were the golden years of Antoin Sevruguin’s career. He was prolific. He photographed everything; from field photography in villages, to courtiers, to concubines, to landscapes, to the Royals themselves. The Golden Age of the atelier, sadly, wouldn’t last much longer. The Shah was ailing. His heart condition had become a public secret. Around the same time, the nearly-bankrupt state had to impose tariffs to repay a Russian loan granted personally to the Shah so he could go on yet another luxurious tour. The people, particularly the merchants and later the peasantry too, rebelled against this: in 1905 mass protests broke out. The government responded with brutality. The situation escalated out of control. By 1906, the Shah, already dying of cardiorenal failure, caved in to the requests, and the first Constitution in Iranian history came into power. Elections were held.

The Guarded Domains now had a Parliament.

It is unclear what Antoin’s political opinions were before the death of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah. However, after his death in 1907 and the violent ascension of Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, who rendered the Constitution null, his political side seemed to shift. The Russians, aligned with the moribund monarchy at all costs, became an uncomfortable political burden, when the “other” side was that of Khetcho, Yeprem Khan, Arshak Gavafian Keri, and Sako Sevkaretsi.

From 1907 onwards, Antoin Sevruguin was no longer Russian. At the very least, he no longer referred to himself as such.

He referred to himself as “Iranian”.

And then – fire.

Tragedy distorts reality, that is why, perhaps, we have two different versions of the same event in 1908. In the first, Cossack militias had been dispatched to firebomb the Tehran residence of a rogue constitutionalist governor of Rasht, connected with the activities of Armenian and Jungle militias in Gilan. In their rabid onslaught, they set fire to the adjacent house too, and Antoin-Khan’s atelier on Ala ad-Dawla Avenue paid the ultimate price. Thousands of glass plates, and the vast majority of his life’s work were destroyed by accident, or misfortune of proximity.

There is a second story, championed by the photographer’s illustrious son, Andre. That his father was, in fact, a Dashnak in secret, and that he clandestinely financed the ARF. That he was then betrayed and that the fire was vendetta for his supposed clandestine activities.

However, other than these verbal accounts that still live on in the Parskahay community as legends, there is practically no evidence that Antoin-Khan was ever politically active, neither as a constitutionalist, nor as a Dashnak.

A third story, the least interesting but perhaps most indicative of the fate of mercantile minorities in dying empires appears to me as speculation. It is neither that the fire was an accident, nor that he was targeted because of some particular political stance. The Cossack brigades weren’t composed of intellectuals; as even their most famous member would later show, they were comprised of brutish, largely illiterate youngsters from Iran’s equestrian minorities. When given the task to firebomb the governor’s residence, they noticed a wealthy Armenian’s shop adjacent, and just went ahead and burned it too. The destruction was widespread, that much we know. Dashnak or not, a wealthy Armenian was guilty by association, and if not – who cares? No amount of cosmopolitan sophistication could save Antoin-Khan’s glass plates. No spelling of his Russian surname, no manner in which he styled his moustache. It didn’t make a difference that at this time there is no evidence of him considering himself Armenian at all! Whatever he thought he was, the fire made the decision for him. Such were the times of violence and madness.

But his spirit was not broken, on the contrary. Largely barred from the court, he turned his lens to different subjects. The rural series in the North commenced, and it is the only good ethnographic evidence we have for some groups in the early 20^th century: Shahsevans, Tats, Talyshes, Gilaks. His images of Kurdish women garnered some fame, and some controversy: widely denounced as orientalist imagery and products of an “European” imagination.

Back in Tehran, he photographed the Armenian and Assyrian community extensively. Some of the best evidence of urban Armenian dress in the 1910s in Tehran comes from his images. He traveled extensively, and from his folios surviving to the present day that can be accessed a particular series of portraits of itinerant dervishes stands out.

There is a particular image I’d like to show you, one of a young dervish in religious ecstasy.

Now, given the photographic technology of the time and the long exposure… keeping such a pose would’ve proven exhausting even for a skilled actor. And from the ample pictographic evidence of Sevruguin’s interactions with the dervishes, it seems more likely that they were friendly, his regular subjects, and that he was somehow allowed into their usually secretive and elusive circles.

No small feat for an Armenian.

It is perhaps the reason why his son, Andre, styled himself “Darvish” as a miniature painter.

In the 1910s, he briefly tried to branch out into cinematography. That didn’t work. His business had already established a niche. He produced postcards with Persian types, and was the best in the trade. European diplomats and travelers from the orient hoarded his folios, and they were the preferred souvenir to take back home.

It mattered not that what he depicts remain totally ethnographically accurate. Such as in Mozaffar ad-Din Shah’s French infatuations, the spirit trumped literality, and the Orient was a hot commodity. Antoin-Khan had seven children, his studio had once already been destroyed, and he was no longer in the absolute mercy of the court. Beggars can’t be choosers.

The orientalist criticism levied against him is perhaps not only anachronistic but deeply misplaced: he was not only a product of his time, but already Othered, already a member of a mercantile minority in grave danger. Perhaps Sevruguin’s biggest crime is that he performed cosmopolitanism and European sophistication too well; what made him beloved at the Qajar court in his glory days made him suspect afterwards. And mislead a generation of art historians into judging him by standards reserved for outsiders looking in. The truth of the matter is that Sevruguin was an Oriental man by all standards, just one adept at performing in European garb.

We don’t know much about the rebuilding of the atelier and the recovery in the last decade of the Qajar monarchy. These were the difficult years, perhaps most difficult in Parskahay history. In 1915, the Armenian genocide happened just across the border, in Eastern Anatolia. A mass of refugees fled to the Guarded Domains. Two years later, de facto British occupation would cause a genocidal famine in the country. By some accounts, over half of the Persian population would die by 1919. In those same difficult years, the October Revolution happened, and Armenian Bolsheviks branched their activities out into the Iranian North. The jangalis, the former allies of the Dashnaks and other antimonarchist factions, started disseminating materials and uniting.

In 1920, in Anzali, Ferqe-ye Edalat, or the Communist Party of Persia was born. The political landscape would never return to a monarchistic status quo. As the British installed their preferred puppet onto the now-completely decadent Qajar throne in order to combat the Soviet threat, a puppet who was one of those same illiterate Cossack firebombers, the atmosphere would shift once again. British tradesmen, diplomats, spies and travelers would sweep through the decimated streets of Tehran… and suddenly… there would once again be a need for orientalistic postcards.

But the bliss was short-lived.

In 1924. The semi-literate Georgian-Tabari Cossack officer, now styled Shah, found issue with “backward” depictions of Iranian life. Iran was to become modern and western. All evidence of its former “backwardness” had to be erased. Even if it was all a charade performed for European eyes. All of Sevruguin’s Qajar glass plates were confiscated… and supposedly destroyed.

The photographic atelier survived once again. It kept working. Producing portraits, though not much is known about its later years. In Iranian art history, the magnifying lens now shifts to Andre, “Darvish”, who was Ostad Behzad’s classmate, and one of the more illustrious miniaturists of this generation.

Antoin Sevruguin died in 1933, aged 82. The atelier still produced photographs even after his death. One of his children likely took over, though that I can not confirm. At the time of his death, a large number of previously lost glass plates and folios got rediscovered by some Yank, and taken to the Smithsonian. Out of reach for the descendants of the people depicted.

Thus, a third death for a work that survived two assassination attempts. Two empires have tried to destroy it once it became inconvenient, because witnesses always are.

And now a third prevents the descendants from gaining access unless they sell their souls for a green card.

The little Shahsevan girl is trapped behind glass, seen only by eyes who would’ve authorized her killing if she were alive today.

The Armenian girls are shown to those who keep bombing their granddaughters in Isfahan.

Like many of us, they remain stolen. They aren’t coming home.

Such are the circles of life in this haunted land. And yet, curious eyes always find a path.

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The first victim of tyranny is hope.

In the Sassanian times, our ancestors looked quite similar to us today, and kept many of the same rites. In those times, Armenians had not yet accepted Christianity, and the peoples of the Plateau and littoral had not yet differentiated. The religion shared between all of us was Zoroastrianism. A particular interpretation of it, called heresy by some, and Truth by others, had gained courtly prestige. In this olden age, philosophers debated the oldest and most fundamental of human questions: the origin of evil in the world. Is evil just the absence of good, like darkness is the absence of light that dissipates into oblivion once a candle is lit, or is it an active force, with a will?

Let me tell you a story over one and a half thousand years old: in the beginning, when all things were one and none, only Time existed. And Time, in Middle Persian, is Zurvan. Time had no gender, but they had a will. For an eternity, Time remained alone, and sacrificed in solitude, for they knew that if they reproduced, they’d create both heaven and hell. In that single eternity, a doubt set in about the utility of this sacrifice, and the doubt impregnated Time. They birthed twins: one made of sacrifice, and the other of doubt. One made of hope, and another of despair; Ormuzd and Ahriman. All that is good and fertile in the world came of the first, and all that is evil and destructive of the second. Since the beginning of time, the twins have been in a battle. Equals, borne of the same womb, and the same parent.

For centuries this story has lived on in our psyche. In the Zurvanist doctrine, fate is predetermined, and victory of Light is inevitable, but so is suffering and the destruction of the world. It is perhaps the reason why all our peoples call fate “what is written on one’s head”. Still, it is the free human’s duty to align oneself with Light.

When this is your unconscious operating system, one built for millennia, then hope itself is a duty. It is not an accident, not a byproduct, it is worship. It is bringing one closer to the force of Life, and distancing oneself from the force of Death.

Hope is the twin sister of despair. It is not a passive emotion, it is life-giving. It is an agent in this material world and beyond it. Hope is sacred. And this we need to remember, for it is buried beneath centuries of pain. But with the pain, there is an ancient secret: hope does eventually prevail. Perhaps not in this moment, but if you keep it alive, if you pass it on, it grows.

When tyrants assume power, they look for any and every way to destroy Hope. People revert to their pettiest, basest impulses. Neighbors snitch on neighbors. Words, even thoughts are policed. Movement is restricted. People are made to live in virtual panopticons, in large-scale, complex reenactments of the learned helplessness experiment. Hope is methodically excised and restricted to the mundane and inconsequential. It is incarcerated in the prison of the “rational” and “possible”. It is made to wear ridiculous flamingo suits and dance in frog costumes. It is reduced to a parody of itself, neutered, and rendered harmless.

Once a people lose their capacity for active, living hope, they fall into the claws of Ahriman. They cease being alive in the metaphysical sense, and unwittingly become agents of Death.

Hope is the antidote to this spiritual death. Hope is the only thing that can temper fear into resolve. That can surpass narrow ideological boundaries, link hands and bring forth a force capable of standing up to tyranny.

It is not something you feel in solitude; it is something you all collectively birth into the world. It spreads and reproduces. It is contagious. Action is implied, and required. So is sacrifice, for they are the same. Hope without sacrifice is nothing at all. But when they work in tandem?

There is no hope stronger than that which overcomes despair. Hope of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the dispossessed. The mustazafin of the world. If it can flourish under bombs, under rubble, it can be a hand grey from dust reaching out to Life, then it can live in your home, in your community, on your street. You can bring it to life. It is your duty and it demands sacrifice.

This Hope is inherently maximalist. It demands more. It demands everything.

You have a sacred duty, as the free people of the world. To demand from yourself, and those around yourself, absolute, radical hope. To reject voices that restrict it, that bind it in the chains of the respectable and achievable.

You have one job. To hope actively. To spread the virus, wherever you can. To reject limits imposed on your imagination. And to act in sacrificial ways, whenever suitable, to keep it alive.

Go and do the work, for it is sacred.

Hope must, and will, prevail.

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Praise, O soul, praise the pure Creator’s name,
Who gave life to faith and entrusted it to earth’s domain.

He founded the Throne upon the water’s face,
And set on wind the earthly ones’ brief space.

The heavens He established in their station high,
The earth He kept in lowliness thereby.

To one, He gave perpetual motion’s flight,
To the other, everlasting stillness and quiet.

(translated from the Prelude by yours truly, as Davis and Darbandi (from here on D&D) apparently didn’t like it very much)

In that time when tongues were many yet understanding one, the birds of all the world, from the soaring eagle to the hidden sparrow, gathered in a great conference. They came from every corner of the earth: from the gardens of Persia where nightingales weep for roses, from the courts of India where peacocks dance in jeweled splendor, from the distant shores where seabirds ride the restless winds. And they came because they were troubled, for they had no king.

The assembly stirred with hundreds of thousands of voices, a symphony of complaint and longing, until the Hoopoe rose among them. She wore upon her crest the crown of wisdom, for she had been messenger to Solomon. The other birds fell silent as she spoke:

“The Simorgh lives, the sovereign whom you seek,
And He is always near to us, though we
Live far from His transcendent majesty.
A hundred thousand veils of dark and light
Withdraw His presence from our mortal sight” (tr. D&D, line 710)

She told them of the Simorgh, that mythical bird whose wings darken the mountain of Qaf, whose feather floated down one moonless night upon China, and from that single feather all the birds of earth descended.

But when she spoke of the journey, the seven valleys that must be crossed, the thousand perils that must be endured, a great and terrible cry arose. Each bird stepped forward with its excuse, its attachment, its beloved sin.

The Nightingale came first, drunk on moonlight and love:

“How can I leave my garden? The rose is my Beloved; her crimson smile opens for me alone. All night I pour out my soul in song, and she blushes. Without her, I am nothing.”

But the Hoopoe answered: “Foolish lover, you are enslaved by passing beauty. The rose blooms and fades in a single morning. Her smile is brief; her thorns are sharp.

Each spring she laughs, not for you, as you say,

But at you – and has faded in a day. (tr. D&D – line 776)

The true Beloved does not wither with the dawn.”

The Parrot, green as spring, renewal and immortality, pleaded:

“I have heard of a fountain, the Water of Life, that flows in a dark and foreign land. Let me seek that instead. I desire eternal life, not this Simorgh of yours.”

And the Hoopoe said: “You seek to live forever in this world of dust? Foolish bird! What is eternal life but a longer prison if the Self remains unchanged?

The waters of immortal life are yours,

And you must always live; life is your cause

As death is mine – you wish to live, whilst I

Impatiently prepare myself to die;

I leave you as quick birds avoid a snare,

To soar up in the free, untrammelled air. (tr. D&D, line 820)

Die to yourself, and you shall live indeed.”

The Peacock, glorious in his thousand glistening eyes, stepped forward with a sigh:

“I remember Eden. I walked those gardens once, before the Serpent deceived me. I was beautiful there, and innocent. Let me return to Eden, let me find that lost perfection.”

The Hoopoe’s voice grew stern: “You cling to a memory, to a self that no longer exists. Eden is not a place you can find again by looking backward. The Simorgh’s court is not in some lost garden, it is ahead, through suffering and surrender.

The home we seek is in eternity;

The Truth we seek is like a shoreless sea,

Of which your paradise is but a drop.

This ocean can be yours; why should you stop

Beguiled by dreams of evanescent dew?.” (tr. D&D, line 836)

One by one they came with their excuses, and one by one the Hoopoe answered. Some birds, hearing the severity of the Way, died of fright in that very instant. But others, a great flock of thousands, finally bowed their heads and said: “Lead us.”

So they began.

The Valley of the Quest first opened before them; a wasteland where all signs vanished, where the paths of dogma and disbelief alike crumbled to dust. Here the traveler must walk without a map, without certainty, without even the comfort of knowing what he seeks. Many turned back.

Those who remained entered the Valley of Love. Here reason was no compass, for love mocks logic. The sun burned twice as hot, and the birds flew without thought of destination, drawn by a fire that consumed even the memory of self-preservation. Some perished of pure longing, their hearts too small for the immensity of what they felt.

The Valley of Knowledge followed, but this was not the knowledge of books or schools. It was the knowledge that comes only when all worldly learning proves useless, when the scholar becomes as ignorant as the child, and the child sees what the scholar cannot.

In the Valley of Detachment, the birds let go of their last possessions: not only gold and feathers, but desires, attachments, the very sense of having a self to detach. What they had called “reality” dissolved like mist. Nothing remained but the journey itself.

The Valley of Unity revealed that all things are connected: that the seeker and the sought, the lover and the Beloved, the bird and the Simorgh are not two but One. Yet this unity was not rest, for it led directly to the Valley of Wonderment, where even unity dissolved into perplexity. Here the birds understood that they had never understood anything, that all their knowing was ignorance, and this ignorance was the only wisdom.

Finally came the Valley of Annihilation, where the self disappears utterly, where time ceases its tyranny, where the traveler exists in all moments at once and in none. Here there is no “I” left to say “I have arrived.”

Of the thousands who began, only thirty birds reached the end. They stood at last before the court of the Simorgh, before a great and magnificent lake of light, still as mirror, deep as time itself.

They looked into the reflective surface of the water and saw... themselves.

Thirty birds and thirty reflections merging into something larger than the sum of its parts. And in that moment, they understood the Hoopoe’s final riddle: Simorgh in Persian means “thirty birds” (si morgh).

They had traveled across the world to find what they had always carried within. The divine was not some distant king, but the totality of their own transfigured being. The Simorgh was not other than them; the Simorgh was them, reflected in the water of annihilation, raised to subsistence in the One.

‘I am a mirror set before your eyes,

And all who come before my splendour see

Themselves, their own unique reality;

You came as thirty birds and therefore saw

These selfsame thirty birds, not less nor more;

If you had come as forty, fifty – here

An answering forty, fifty, would appear;

Though you have struggled, wandered, travelled far,

It is yourselves you see and what you are.’

And the Hoopoe, (or was it the Simorgh? or was it each bird speaking to itself?) sang the final truth:

Then, as they listened to the Simorgh’s words,

A trembling dissolution filled the birds

The substance of their being was undone,

And they were lost like shade before the sun;

Neither the pilgrims nor their guide remained.

The Simorgh ceased to speak, and silence reigned (tr.D&D, line 4265)

Thus ends the journey, and equally begins the real Journey. For the birds who arrived were no longer birds, and the Self they sought was no longer Other, and the Way that seemed so long was the length of a single breath.

The breath that says “I” and means “Thou” and equally means “Us”.

Why have I chosen to tell you this story?

Because a pride, horrible and magnificent, fills me as I write these words. For the first time in my mortal existence, I have witnessed the story become real, material. And not in some dargah, takya or Hussainiyah. It has happened on my street, on the square near my family home, and every other street and square in every Iranian city.

Attar composed this parable in the 12^th Century. Nearly a thousand years later, I bear witness to it coming true in the most unexpected of ways. I will explain why this is such a reality-bending historical moment for me, but first, I have to tell you a bit of background on the cultural significance of this fairytale.

This is one of the foundational tales that every Iranian child grows up with. Your mother retells it to you, in simplified terms, before you’re even old enough to read. As you start stringing together your first letters, many different picture books tell the story in an age-appropriate way. A child doesn’t know it was written by Attar of Nishapur, but learns soon enough, in school. This is one of the stories you don’t remember hearing for the first time, it just is, as a load-bearing element of the psyche. Do you remember the first time you heard Cinderella? Probably not. It is quite same for us. The spiritual and religious undertones come later, that is the whole point of the allegory. Later on, you learn the significance of Khidhr and Hallaj. But for a young child, it is a fascinating story. In my family, it was my dad telling the bedtime stories, and the story of the Simorgh was one of the classics. However, I was lucky: my father had such a repertoire of narratology, that I could pick and choose what type of story I wanted, and he’d create one for me on the spot.

For a very long time, I lived with the complete certainty that “Simorgh” is indeed “si – morgh”, or thirty birds. But this is retroactive etymology. Attar noticed the coincidence and made use of it, later on as a historical linguist I could track the word to Middle Persian and further and affirm that this was not in fact, the original etymology. The simorgh is a product of the general Indo-European psyche, one that would also create Zhar-Ptitsa, Sirin, Hazaran Blbul and the Phoenix. In some of our other fairytales, it is indeed a magical sentient bird, who raises abandoned children (such as Zal the Albino), offers its feathers to be burned when the hero needs intercession and aid, and has otherworldly healing properties. Much in the tradition shared between us and Russian skazki. The word itself traveled. The word “peacock” in Armenian (սիրամարգ, siramarg) is a direct descendant. But the Conference of the Birds overwrote this early folklore. I can’t conjure any image for the Simorgh, however, other than one of a magnificent body made out of thirty dissimilar birds melting into a whole mid-flight.

The early stories we grow up with leave a trace. They are the symbolic repertoire we unconsciously draw on. They inform the internal architecture of our thoughts, and our ways of relating to the world. This is why Attar’s Conference of the Birds is so incredibly significant.

Last Saturday I sat across my acquaintance, a nice Yugo man of a certain age, who asked me why the people weren’t in bomb shelters. He wanted to know, and he could find no better source in the moment. He had seen the videos of the streets overflowing in mourning and pride, in gheyrat, an Arabic word we adopted that can’t quite be translated without losing the essence.

I told him to imagine ants. When the nest is attacked, do the ants go and hide underground? He nodded in approval. We talked about collectivism and individualism, as if those had anything to do with the subject. Only later on, I realized what I said was essentially stupid.

The ants have a queen.

Even if the Supreme leader could be imagined as a queen ant, a central element, a brain of the Islamic Republic (ridiculous!) – after the 28^th of February he was no more. And the attacks went on, we retaliated beyond any anticipation, in a way that filled me, a normal citizen, with unimaginable pride. And there wouldn’t be another Supreme leader for a long time, for days on end. There needn’t be one. All the different army branches did their thing, and the streets never emptied. The people, openly saying: “Yes, we protested, we have grievances, but this is bigger than that.” Young, old. Hijabi, secular, chadori, half-naked. Everyone with a flag, and with gheyrat.

Some time ago, I wanted to explain the Persianate condition to a friend. You already know that I have serious problems with the label “Persian” and that in my mind, it only applies to natives of the Fars province in Iran. But Iran is broader than that. If I had to explain this cultural sphere beyond the borders of modern Iran, I, as a lifelong Trekkie, would go for the metaphor of the Borg. Naturally, in a mass -produced entertainment commodity from the West, the Borg are villains. But if you look at some other aspects, Mongols invaded Persia, and ransacked Baghdad. Within two generations they were no longer Mongol, and wrote exquisite poetry in Farsi. The Arabs did the most lasting damage, and yet: the language survived, unlike almost anywhere else. And the surviving structure became the thorn in the “Arab world’s” eye. We take our invaders, we assimilate them, and neutralize them through transfiguration. In the very same way, we are individuals, but also parts of an interconnected whole. Not as Borg “drones”, but entities that retain their personhood, while also merging and bleeding into others. That is why central governance is a fantasy in the Iranian context, both historically and presently.

On February 28^th, the Supreme leader no longer existed.

We needed no Supreme Leader to retaliate. We needed no Supreme Leader to organize us to get out on the streets and stay on them for 20 days, without interruption, in our millions, through carpet bombing.

The Western media will not show you Iranian youths, the hijabless girls on motorcycles hurling flags and pledging allegiance to the land. For the older generation, this is nothing new. They had lived this in 1979. They lived this spirit, this defiance, this unity during the eight years of hell, as the Sacred Defense was ongoing. It is difficult to explain this feeling, this merger, this unity. None of the people of the streets are individuals anymore, that has been rendered entirely irrelevant. They’re not even “patriots”. Iran is not patria in the Latin sense. She is more than that; she is the distillation of our civilizational identity. When you damage chehel sotoun, when you bomb musea, when you kill children, you threaten that underlying principle.

And the people revert into birds. Thousands and millions of birds, out on the streets, forming a web, a structure beyond any individual identity in any individual political entity. The people become greater than the sum of their parts. Shi’a ethos and martyrdom play a big part in this, that is absolutely true. But there is a deeper layer.

When you grow up hearing a story about the ultimate merger of thirty bodies, about their trials and tribulations and this unity as the ultimate ideal, the purpose of existence itself… it remains dormant in your operating system. Until that file, that architecture, gets recalled.

And then you are not yourself anymore. One of thirty that is one, or one of tens of millions that is, after all, still one. The hive mind takes over. Call us insects if you will, but without a queen, we are damn hard to eradicate. What happens to the Simorgh when the Hoopoe is gone? Absolutely nothing, because it exists beyond any individual, even if the individual is revered and wise.

In the same spirit, we, the Iranians, the real natives, no longer exist as individual entities. We are many and we are one.

Recently, President Trump put out one of his concerningly incoherent statements, declaring that even the name “Iran” would be eradicated. Naturally, his post was much less concise and literate.

This is my message to you, the citizens of the Collective West. This escapade is certain to fail. You can not kill a people that doesn’t mind dying. You can kill individuals that no longer exist at all. Can you kill 92 million of us? If the answer is no, I warn you: stand back.

Else, you might just get assimilated, like so many other invaders in the thousands of years of our history. Else, you may cease existing. For us, it is no big problem, since we never existed in your sense of the word at all. But for you? That would be intolerable. And if you are stupid enough to go down this path?

Remember that you can’t inflict suffering on the one who invites it, nor eradicate a people who find the highest honor in death. I hope you have advisors willing to tell you this. For your own sake.

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The Khatoun Journal has always been free to read, and it will remain so.

That is not because it is without value, but because I refuse the idea that access to thought should be determined by one’s ability or willingness to pay with money. If something is worth writing, researching, and thinking through, then it should be available without condition. Paywalls exist to limit who gets to participate in the circulation of ideas. I reject that fully on ethical grounds.

But “free” here does not mean costless, not to me.

Every essay published here is the result of time, attention, and sustained effort. Some of the essays are very long, very meticulously footnoted and cost me tens of hours of labor. From a material perspective, this is labor like any other sort of labor. It has an opportunity cost. It could be spent elsewhere, on work that is more easily legible within existing economic structures. I.e. work that I could more easily exchange for money.

Therefore, this is not free in the sense of being gratis, or appearing out of a vacuum, because it has an actual cost in my life. It is free in the sense of open access, that is a deliberate choice to contribute that labor without asking for money in return.

I do not and will not monetize this work. I do not accept subscriptions, tips, or donations. This is partly an ethical refusal to participate in certain financial infrastructures, including those mediated by Stripe. But even beyond that, I would not place this work behind a paywall or tie it to personal income. Doing so would change my relationship to what I write. It would introduce incentives that I do not want to shape the thinking itself. I am a human being. If something started making me a bunch of money, can I trust my nature not to be swayed by that? I’m not sure.

This is not a rejection of value produced by my labor, nor of exchange in general. It is simply a rejection of one specific form of exchange: monetary transaction as the condition of access to ideas.

Instead, I understand this publication as part of a different kind of economy, one grounded in intellectual and interpretive labor.

My writing is obviously labor, as we’ve established. But so is reading seriously. So is thinking with a text, questioning it, extending it, or sharing it with others. Real engagement is different from passive consumption; it is equal labor of a different kind.

If there is an exchange here, it is this:

I contribute the labor of writing.
You, if you choose to, contribute the labor of reading, thinking, and circulating these ideas.

That might mean:

• Taking the time to read closely rather than skim, to follow the breadcrumbs, to ask questions and further your own research

• Returning to an argument and testing it against your own thinking

• Sharing a piece with someone who would genuinely engage with it, then discussing it with them

• Referencing or building on these ideas elsewhere

This form of reciprocity is not measurable in the way payment is. It is uneven, often invisible, and can’t be externally enforced. But it is the only kind of return that feels appropriate to the work itself. It is the only exchange I am willing to accept.

If you have ever felt the impulse to “support” The Khatoun Journal financially, I ask that you redirect that impulse. Help the work circulate. Share it with someone who will read it seriously. Or, if you prefer, support causes and organizations that align with the principles outlined here, including those connected to movements such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

This is, on my end, a voluntary contribution of labor.

The Khatoun Journal is not sustained by monetary transactions, but by the belief that ideas are most meaningful when they move freely and when they are met with equal seriousness on the other side. So, share, spread the articles in your communities. That for me, is the point and the only fair exchange.

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I’m sure our alarm clocks must sound similar.

I think about this a lot, lately. Most of you are probably quite like me. Not many people enjoy getting up early in the morning and getting ready to go to their commute. I’m sure, in that exact moment when your phone rings, we feel quite similar sensations. „Just give me a couple more minutes!“

Except that in those early minutes, the first thing I do is check if you’ve murdered my family overnight.

Harsh statement, isn’t it? I get it. Accusatory, right off the bat. I’m sorry – you must understand that niceties are cheap and also insulting when your world is on fire. So let me take a step back: I know you are not your government. Many of you don’t want this. Many of you didn’t vote for this. But they still made you pay for it. If you stick with me, through my bitterness, you will understand that we are both victims. The products of your labor may be killing my family right now, but they’ve been killing yours too, for a long time. We have both been done dirty by the hegemonic system.

I apologize for the terminology. I know „hegemony“, „imperialism“, „imperial core and periphery“ and „unequal exchange“ may be triggering words. Perhaps they make your hairs stand up, perhaps they reek of a sort redness that makes you uncomfortable. I implore you to stay with me nonetheless.

We are similar, more than we are different. We wake up in the morning and go to our jobs. We pay increasingly absurd amounts for rent or mortgages that seem to get heavier every year. We check our bank accounts before buying groceries (at least I do!).

You maybe also worry about medical bills, about emergencies, about childcare and your kids’ education. Maybe like me you wonder if you will have any retirement savings, if you even live to retirement age. None of this is unusual, it is just how things are. We are told it’s just the nature of the world, as if this system kind of emerged from natural law. Like gravity. We’re told that it’s complicated and that we just don’t get how it works. That perhaps, along the way, we made wrong choices and therefore didn’t become millionaires but simple parts of the hoi polloi.

See, this is the thing, you live in the richest country in the history of the world. And yet your leaders keep telling you that social programs are expensive, or difficult, or unrealistic. That it’s your own damn fault you didn’t emerge on top of a system that was rigged from the start.

I see that. And I see you living in this slow-motion, low-intensity hellscape.

And yet. This very same government that can not and will not fund your basic services, your rails, your public transport, that will not subsidize housing, that will not even consider forms of universal healthcare, however flawed, that will not invest in your children’s safety and education… somehow has funds to strangle the globe with military bases. Its currency anchors the global financial system. It is everywhere on the globe with its Patriot systems and THAADs and boots. All of this costs money, and money is just the measure of value produced by labor. All of this costs labor, your labor.

Something in this equation doesn’t compute.

The usual explanation from your leaders is interesting. Security, because the world is so dangerous that for your protection they have to use your money in places you’ve never heard of, will never see, and mostly don’t even know exist. Now, without being facetious, we could spin this into a tragicomedy, a farce, because certainly, for your protection it is necessary to pepper every Gulf petrostate with your bases, boots and billions of dollars of logistics and equipment. The war on terror lie faded long ago.

In reality, to understand why such extraordinary resources are devoted to maintaining global power, we have to look at the structure of the world economy itself. We can imagine a global economic system divided between wealthy “core” countries and poorer “peripheral” ones. Raw materials, agricultural goods, and large portions of the world’s industrial labor come from the latter. Finance, high-value services, and the largest corporate profits concentrate in the former. Naturally, this is a simplification, but in principle, I believe it stands. This is not some natural order of the world, it developed through centuries of colonial expansion, industrialization, and geopolitical competition on unequal footing. Over time, certain countries secured positions that allowed them to command a disproportionate share of global wealth. Low wages and industry in the periphery, high wages and services in the core.

The United States sits in the center of that structure.

When wages differ dramatically between countries, goods produced with low-wage labor are traded for goods produced with higher-wage labor. The result is a structural transfer of value from poorer regions of the world to richer ones. In other words, part of the wealth circulating through affluent economies is generated by workers elsewhere who are paid far less for their labor. This is called unequal exchange.

Corporations capture a lion’s share of these gains. Your financial institutions channel profits through global markets. Your government, the enforcer, collects tax revenue from the economic activity generated by the system. I.e. from you.

Maintaining the stability of this extractive system requires power and coercion. It requires boots and aircraft carriers and missiles and the implicit threat: “do not disrupt, or you will be annihilated.”

The cost of that infrastructure is immense. And much of it is financed by taxpayers at home.

This brings us back to you.

It would be comforting to believe that ordinary people living in wealthy countries stand entirely outside this arrangement. After all, you did not design global supply chains or negotiate trade agreements. You don’t control military deployments to places you can’t even show on a map. You wanted none of this, I know.

But comfort and truth are rarely the same thing.

On February 28^th, 2026 someone in your government authorized a double tap strike against an elementary school in Minab, Hormozgan. One of the poorest and most underserved provinces of Iran.

Your government killed 185 identified children.

I will not argue that killing children is morally wrong or even strategically useless. I know you feel me on that matter and hammering it in serves neither of us any purpose at this moment. The children are already dead. Outrage won’t revive them.

I want you to think about this.

There were two Tomahawk missiles used to accomplish this. Each one costs about 2.5 million USD. So 5 million in total, just to kill a bunch of kids, teachers and Red Crescent workers.

These 5 million dollars disappeared in a split second. However, as we already established, money itself is value and the representation of value. It doesn’t appear in a vacuum. Even if your government printed out the USD 5m, there would still be the issue of labor that produced these missiles. Even if 5m could appear out of thin air, labor, steel, fuel, rare earth minerals and engineering expertise can’t. Every missile represents not just money spent but the direction of labor. The opportunity cost is immense. The engineers who designed it could have designed medical equipment. The factories that produce its components could produce trains, renewable energy systems, or housing materials, or whatever...

Things that you actually need!

If the average worker earns 60,000 USD a year, two missiles are 83.3 years of labor. Evaporated in an instant.

Please, without thinking of the futility of murdering children, just think about that for a second.

The taxes deducted from your paycheck do not become missiles directly, it would be disingenuous to say that. But they do sustain the budget that pays the contractors that manufacture them, Raytheon in this case. The labor you perform contributes to the pool of resources from which the state decides what will be built and what will be destroyed. You don’t get a choice in this matter any more than we get a choice in whether we’re blown up or not.

The culprit is not you, for you were fed a lie from the start. Work hard, and civics will take care of themselves. You vote, you are a responsible citizen and yet you have absolutely no control over where or how the value extracted from your labor and from artificially subjugating the periphery ends up spent.

While you’re commuting to your job for hours, like me, because rent is insanely expensive, wealth is being transferred. The bodies of children are piling up. The material consequences of the system are becoming impossible to ignore. It would be easy, and, again, comforting for me to say that you have nothing to do with these arrangements. But let’s leave the fairytales to children. Every society rests on a structure of production and exchange that ties its citizens to the wider world. We are extremely interconnected. You may struggle with rising costs, insecure employment and declining social protections, but even amid these struggles you benefit indirectly from global inequality and hegemony. It doesn’t make you a villain, but it does mean that the system is in large part predicated on your silent participation.

Has the time come for your silent participation to end?

In the past 13 days, your government has blown nearly 19 billion USD on a war that is so senseless even your administration can’t agree on why it’s being fought.

Your money is being spent carpet bombing Tehran as I’m writing this. 19 billion USD. You know how big that number is?

19,000,000,000.

It is hard for me to even understand this number, so I played around with it.

By today’s prices, if we bought 19B worth of gold, we’d get about 154 tons. That’s not too understandable. So, let’s imagine that as a perfect cube with each side spanning about 2 meters.

You could buy about 35,000 Rolls Royce Phantoms with this money. That means, in a row, you could line them up from New York City to Philadelphia, if my calculations are correct.

Still not understandable? You’re not alone. It’s ungraspable to me too.

How many schools? How many hospitals? How many dying public services could this money invigorate rather than killing my family?

Should we fantasize about what could be done with these funds if they were spent for your benefit? The labor that produced them obviously exists.

Here’s my main contradiction:

If the wealth generated by the global hegemonic economy is immense, why do you and so many people within the most powerful country in that system feel so economically insecure? Why does a society capable of projecting power across the planet struggle to guarantee basic stability for its own citizens?

Can you call an ambulance when a loved one has a medical emergency without fear of the cost?

Do you have the certainty that if you get laid off tomorrow, you’ll be able to pay rent next month?

Perhaps the time has come for you to stop complying with this.

Not for me, not for some anonymous brown kid blown into smithereens or even some Black kid without access to proper education.

Perhaps the time has come to fight for yourself.

We have a common enemy. And we aren’t that different after all.

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For the past 24 hours I thought of doing a reprise of the Open letter, now in wartime circumstances. I can’t find the motivation for that. Also, I find it really difficult to write in the hegemonic language, I simply do not feel it is morally appropriate for me to continue doing so.

The Khatoun Journal was founded right after the 12-day war, in order to try and educate, start conversations and dispel myths about the condition of womanhood in an Iranian context. It has been, from the start, an anti-imperial and anti-hegemonic effort. For this purpose, the language that allows me the most reach was chosen pragmatically.

The target audience wasn’t chosen consciously, in fact nothing I do is very orderly. I write in breaks from work and family obligations; I tried for a while to be active on the stupid notes section of this platform in the hope that it would redirect traffic towards the important things.

It mostly didn’t. Because the Western reader, even the Western leader conscious of anti-imperialism in theory, can’t accept the basic tenets of Third Worldism. Even your so-called Palestine supporters end up being extraordinarily propagandized and functionally useless.

In here, I’d like to turn to the Americans, and by that I mean people paying taxes in the US; even the staunchest defenders of Palestine have disappointed beyond measure. The performative anguish, the fans and the pearl clutching, the donation campaigns and the incessant blowing into whistles, figurative and literal, has produced zero collective benefit for the Palestinian people. And when it comes to Iran? I guess now that they’ve graduated from “condemning Hamas, but…” they ought to do the same ritual of “condemning Iran, but…” until it becomes materially obvious that this sort of stance is embarrassing. That’s still a few months away.

Truly, in the three decades of my life I have seen no person more self-righteous and simultaneously useless than the American Leftist.

I don’t know how you live with yourself.

I do not wish to know.

I know, however, that a certain number of smartasses will reach out to ask me what exactly I expect them to do, or to have done. It is very difficult for me to answer this question without resorting to profanities. Perhaps you would like me to write you a “Manual for the disaffected American taxpayer: how to overcome learned helplessness”?

Whatever I say, you will find an excuse on why it can’t be done.

The good men of the Sacred Defense made no such excuses. They did heroic deeds with not even as much as barbed wire. Eight years of hell, hell that, by the way – you also financed.

But perhaps we indeed aren’t human, since human rights and international law don’t apply to us (not my words!). Perhaps we should take some truly human examples, as in, some white people?

The People’s Liberation Struggle, Yugoslavia. World War Two. You lot are certainly better equipped than they were, dying of tuberculosis, typhus and frostbite.

There are many other examples. But you don’t read history until it’s too late. Several friends have just recently reached out to tell me they’ve started reading Abrahamian. Well, it is too late for that now. It is too late for reading and for theory. It is the time for different things, things you will not and can not do. So drop the act.

I don’t want to see “I stand with Iran” posted anywhere. You don’t. In fact, your existence financed the Tomahawk missile that killed children. Your existence is going to give my family members cancer from blasting an oil refinery in Tehran, if they even survive the overt hostilities.

Your existence is paying for our murder.

You don’t stand for anything other than death.

You had a chance, you blew it.

Live with yourself, if you can.

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