Winged Goddesses, disasters, dying birds and the Second Coming!

With an uncertain future and a present so bleak, the past, naturally, might offer an ideal refuge for the disenchanted. And a chance as well to re-evaluate our prevailing hip and oh so “sophisticated” views and attitudes. There have been many exciting discoveries of late.

So we have the news of another successful excavation which has unveiled ancient clay statuettes of fertile goddesses in Haft Tape which also point to the existence of a 3500-year-old temple in the vacinity.

This latest discovery comes in the heel of the recent excavation that led to the unearthing of four winged goddesses that flew over Iran some 3000 years ago—the first ever of its kind, never seen before, not even in Persepolis.

Add to these, the earlier DNA confirmation of the (now indisputable) existence of warrior women in ancient Persia and the ongoing work in what is known as the Burnt City, and we have here some electrifying tidbits that promise to revolutionize our view of a civilization some 5000 years old.

I am not holding my breath, though. What is so disheartening is that despite having everything in front of us, a key ingredient for serious work appears missing from our midst. I mean, if you thought I was crossed with intellectuals generally, you should hear what I really think about us Iranians in particular.

Read a few books and attend college for a few years, and judging by the babble, you’d think the universe owes us. So superior and condescending. As a general rule, never hesitant to belittle and demean everyone and everything that doesn’t tickle our fancy (of the moment).

And incessantly upset about being misunderstood by those “backward” and “unwashed,” millions. To top these already winning attitudes, we also have now the plague of Mammon worship which effectively means only one thing.

Instead of safeguarding and seriously engaging our heritage, there is massive, shameless plunder and destruction of our ancient artifacts.

So it annoys me. Everything has been annoying me lately.

And I read Iranian blogs and look at the reading habits of our trendy elites and I wonder about our future. Always ready to jump at the latest paradigm. Quick to translate—very poorly—the convoluted foreign phrases which make the already ornate Farsi prose that much more inaccessible.

And all without, in some sense, first attempting to appropriate in to the outlook those fundamental pre- prerequisites—awe and wonder—of engaging the world as is given us. As if a few modern gadgets and high-rises and fancy books offer us a way out.

Anyhow, the problem is not exclusively “ours.”

So I thought we might have at a couple of short, old readings tonight. You, of course, have probably seen the alarming talk about all the natural and man made disasters signaling the impending Second Coming of Jesus.

And all the rumored anxiety sort of moved me to go back and re-read my favorite historian Thucydides. Excerpts of his take on omens, disasters, plagues, and some of the social consequences of pessimism:

The same summer, at the beginning of a new lunar month, the only time by the way at which it appears possible, the sun was eclipsed after noon. After it had assumed the form of a crescent and some of the stars had come out, it returned to its natural shape. ..

Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighbourhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether…

But while the nature of the distemper was such as to baffle all description, and its attacks almost too grievous for human nature to endure, it was still in the following circumstance that its difference from all ordinary disorders was most clearly shown. All the birds and beasts that prey upon human bodies, either abstained from touching them (though there were many lying unburied), or died after tasting them. In proof of this, it was noticed that birds of this kind actually disappeared; they were not about the bodies, or indeed to be seen at all. But of course the effects which I have mentioned could best be studied in a domestic animal like the dog.

By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when any one felt himself sickening, for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder; besides which, there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality. On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse: on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence. This was especially the case with such as made any pretensions to goodness: honour made them unsparing of themselves in their attendance in their friends' houses, where even the members of the family were at last worn out by the moans of the dying, and succumbed to the force of the disasters. Yet it was with those who had recovered from the disease that the sick and the dying found most compassion…

An aggravation of the existing calamity was the influx from the country into the city, and this was especially felt by the new arrivals. As there were no houses to receive them, they had to be lodged at the hot season of the year in stifling cabins, where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane. All the burial rites before in use were entirely upset, and they buried the bodies as best they could. Many from want of the proper appliances, through so many of their friends having died already, had recourse to the most shameless sepulchres: sometimes getting the start of those who had raised a pile, they threw their own dead body upon the stranger's pyre and ignited it; sometimes they tossed the corpse which they were carrying on the top of another that was burning, and so went off.

Nor was this the only form of lawless extravagance which owed its origin to the plague. Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honour was popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honourable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offences, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.

Such was the nature of the calamity, and heavily did it weigh on the Athenians; death raging within the city and devastation without.

Do yourselves a favour and read the whole thing.

And in an old box recently, I found a fragment of ancient Hymn about the Second Coming. Sorry about the long post. But, a few lines for your viewing pleasure as I am sure none of us could feel truly fulfilled departing this good earth without at least having seen one genuine Manichean hymn as it appears to us today.

The opening lines of the hymn concerning the Second Coming (Middle Persian with Parthian words):

’w mn gw, šhry’r, ’ry’m’, ’wwm ’bhwm, pws ‘y fryhstwm, ’br

zm’n ‘yt ’mdyšnyh, k’ pd ’bdwmyh ’’yy, bwzygr wzrg, wcyh’gwm,

gw ’br h’n zm’n ’wš nyš’n’n.

[ō] to at in/ [man] ‘think’/ [gōw] ‘speak say’/[shahryār] ‘lord, king’/[aryāmān] ‘friend’ epitaph of Jesus/…/[abhum-] reveal/ [pus] ‘son’/[Ī] ‘who,which’/ [frihstom] ‘dearest’/ [abar] higher /[zamān] ‘time’/ [Ī]+suffix pronoun second sing./ [āmadishnih] ‘coming’/ [ka] ‘when, if’/[pad] ‘in, along, through, on account of’/ [abdomih] ‘end’/

[ay] ‘come’/[bozegar] ‘saviour’/ [wuzurg] ‘great’/[wizehag] Teacher/ [gōw]…/[abar]…/[han] ‘that’ ‘the’/ [zamān] ‘time’/ [ushi] ‘consciousness’/ [nishān] ‘sign’…

The following translation of the fragment from the Gnostic Society Library:

Hymn on the Second Coming of Jesus

- Manichaean Hymn in Persian with Parthian words.

Speak to me, Lord and Friend, and reveal to me, Son
of the most beloved, the time of your coming, when
you will appear at the end.

Oh great Redeemer, my Teacher, speak of that time and its signs.
The speakers, the righteous and chosen ones, who must live
in the Realm of the Lie, Do not accumulate herds and belongings.
Therefore they are persecuted.

Ha, this irate potentate! How long will he continue to rule?
How long will the poor and the Family of Peace be persecuted?
Tell me what reward the wise and righteous ones that are now
persecuted will have.
You of compassionate race, tell of the coming subjugation of
the sinners who are now exalted.
The strong and valiant Son of the Most Beloved taught me what
I asked him:

That time, the coming years and periods, will be different from now,
because of the ensuing battles.
For they (the years) shall flow like water in the rivers,
Now that time is near at hand.
The covetous heretics that now rejoice
shall you then vanquish, you Wrathful One.
They will be persecuted, as they have persecuted,
And they shall do penance for their offences.
Then shall those who have wept be joyful,
And those who now laugh weep.
He who is grieved and belongs to the Family of Peace
Shall be rewarded with prosperity and protection.
Then the righteous religion shall hold sway over the false teachings and nations.
Then shall the springs of Living Water open their mouths in praise.
Lament, give honor and praise, for the time is near,
Of which these are the signs.

... the anointed.
The vihidan(?) of the Ruler are called.
Persecution and suppression shall then be recompensed by eternal life.

And many more where this came from.

Needless to say, that we have access to these fragments and are able to decipher them is in no small measure due mostly to the tireless efforts of the likes of Mary Boyce; a Boyce whose single rotten strand of hair-- as one of our many flowery expressions go-- is worth the output of dozens of the rest of us, obnoxious, self-centred, full-of-it you know who!

See what I mean? This post itself is a perfect illustration of why even (and especially) I annoy me.

And the annoying propagandists

A while back, with fanfare and much criticism, the U.S. sponsored Radio Farda began its work of wooing the young and the restless in Iran with a pledge of

the same seriousness of purpose and adherence to RFE/RL's surrogate mission of promoting democracy, covering local and relevant international news, and living up to our Professional Code, embodying the highest journalistic standards of accuracy and objectivity, as have the programs of our Persian Service.

The problem of course is that there doesn’t appear to be such high standard of accuracy at work or much of a professional code.

Some months ago, quite a few of us were furious with the broadcasters for the role they played in throwing Arash Cigarchi to the wolves.

And it just seems to me that they have been unwilling-- time and time again—to present simple and elementary “facts” without shortsightedly spinning all for some perceived petty advantage. Let’s look at a discussion of death penalty as an example.

The headline of a recent broadcast reads:

نود و هفت درصد اعدامهاي جهان در سال 2004 را چین، عربستان سعودی و ایران به اجرا گذاشتند. مصاحبه با دو فعال حقوق بشر

97 percent of (world’s) executions in 2004 took place in China , Saudi Arabia and Iran. Interview with two Human Rights activists.

What you are seeing here, of course, is a free rendition of the Amnesty International Facts and Figures on Death Penalty.

Note what the report actually does state:

During 2004, at least 3,797 people were executed in 25 countries and at least 7,395 people were sentenced to death in 64 countries. These were only minimum figures; the true figures were certainly higher.

In 2004, 97 per cent of all known executions took place in China, Iran, Viet Nam and the USA.

In the world of today, it is not that difficult figuring out who is killing whom or what country has the highest prison population rate in the world (pdf). But that’s not the point here.

What we need now more than ever is a candid and probing look at a host of issues that will shape the future of our globalized life. We are facing many intractable problems. And mere spins or public relation campaigns are not going to make any of them disappear overnight.

So we can observe these wild mood swings at work if we look closely at some of the blogs or the many news outlets covering Iran (and to some extent the broader Middle East)

It is either you are a bunch of zombies/ terrorists/ automatons wanting to wage Jihad, or destroy and ruin [what’s left of the] Western civilization, or you are millions of highly talented, intelligent, educated saints who can do no wrong and are simply being deprived of an easy, opulent lifestyle by a bloodthirsty, irrational regime.

Now think about it.

It seems to me that Iran has become the one country in which all the rapists, thieves, murderers, hooligans and smugglers, drug peddlers or cop killers among a host of other mischief makers have vanished overnight.

No one is responsible for much of anything, apparently, since everyone is a glorious freedom fighter always being set up, and falsely charges, or the victim of concealed motives and a puppet in those hidden hands that perpetually frame the innocent.

It is terribly odd, given that for a society plagued by a crisis of legitimacy where it has become difficult for even family members to trust one another, it might be obvious that what is actually needed--more than ever-- is honesty and transparency in order to help overcome the obstacles in our path.

And that is not exactly the same, of course, as dangling illusions or further encouraging false hopes or merely validating obscene expectations.

Sober, judicious presentations of challenges ahead, I think, might actually do the trick. Democratic life, however understood or defined, is hard and messy and offers no magic solutions. There are no easy outs.

And every once in a while, it might be best to pitch truths for a change. It’s our last best hope long term.

Annoying humans

Have you been keeping count? Me, I am giving up.

Another 40,000 from this lousy quake on top of the 1400 feared dead in Guatemala. Add up the numbers we’ve been losing in the past couple of years alone, from Bam to the tsunami and the hurricanes and now these again, along with the costs of destruction and devastation, plus those countless millions of displaced, homeless, dazed, battered and traumatized.

Now contrast against what you find in this educational conflict map of nobelprize.org listing every one of the many Twentieth century conflicts with at least 1000 military battle deaths, and you’ll know why I find the humans so terribly annoying tonight.

Always wanting more…more of something, more land, guns, bombs, and ships and planes and soldiers, tanks and boots, and prisons, torture devices and torturers and frenzy and fear and bombs and helicopters and more bombs to get even more land.

And the sad part of course, never actually that interested in being responsible for what is under control already. And either unwilling or unable to be there for those who are most vulnerable and in need.

So this report reassures us that teams from UK, Spain, France, Japan, Russia, UAE and Iran are already engaged in relief and rescue operations and help has been pouring in, albeit a bit too slowly. Much work remains to be done as always.

And the same questions: should so many die because of lousy quakes? So routinely? An entire generation lost according to this report with mostly school children having been wiped out.

Such murderous, incompetent, covetous and wretched creatures we are and yet such marvels. You have all probably seen the email going around. Just in case: more about the Weather Wars and those giant, very well hidden Terror Machines.

So we should all know the routine fairly well by now. Every bit helps if you can:

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

Disaster Emergency Committee

Mercy Corp

Relief International

Poets and destruction

Ever wonder how poets manage to do what they do? I mean, they appear able to take some garden variety impulse or an ordinary or mean emotion or any old everyday circumstance we might routinely have taken for granted and drastically alter the way we come to perceive them.

I suppose it has everything to do with how they frame things.

There have been conflicts and wars since time immemorial. Perhaps that’s to be our lot. But conflicts can be managed. And wars can ultimately be brought to an end. Although, those can also be needlessly escalated beyond control and I fear the way this conflict is being framed—as culture wars—might not give any of us a way out. We’ll be at each other’s throats perpetually.

I mean, take my last three experimental posts. As it stands, so far as I know, there is not much of anti-Hindu sentiment amongst Iranians and the cordiality might be mutual. I am sure there are some bitter memories of past conflicts on both sides somewhere, and even possibly a bit of disenchantment--who knows. But nothing too unmanageable. With a bit of assistance, however, from the rest of us, I am sure quite a fiery little frenzy could be managed. Even a little war, perhaps, at some point, somewhere, and over something!

And that’s what annoys me most about this “war on terror.” I’ll write more about some of the obvious negative consequences of the usual rhetoric our “respectable” pundits offer us in my next installment of culture wars. For now, I want to go back to the poets and their take on what we have been experiencing.

So much of what I hear as commentary from various people these days—all normal, thoughtful, upright folk of decent upbringing, no doubt—is a curious mix of justified fear, legitimate grievances, blind rage, pedestrian bigotry and some vicious desire for widespread destruction and mayhem. Which is not that odd, really!

Blame it all, if you must, on encounters with the Middle East although the problems appear much more fundamental to me.

I don’t think there has ever been a generation—especially among those who’ve called the cursed place “home”—that hasn’t struggled with this intense yearnings for extirpation—all for a chance at a fresh start, and renewal or redemption.

But when poets articulate those desires in verse, it all feels so different and even appealing to our sensibilities. Let’s take Omar Khayyam as rendered by Edward Fitzgerald (XCIX):

Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire!

I do like the French translation a bit more as that Love bit is so terribly out of place. The following version is closer to the original, although I can’t figure out why there are no traces of it anywhere (that I can find):

Si, comme Dieu, j’avais en mains le firmament,
Je le démolirais sans doute promptement,
Pour bâtir à sa place, enfin, un nouveau monde,
Où pour les braves gens tout viendrait aisément.

A good poet can do that with almost anything. In what follows, I think, Alfred Housman does wonderfully with his “mercenaries,” even when we might have no clue that the term refers to a non-conscript army. Here he goes:

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay’
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

And of course, Siegfried Sassoon’s take on the plans of the mighty

General

“Good-morning; good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Which brings us to another of his poignant war poems:

Attack

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun
In the wild purple of the glow’ring sun
Smoldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one,
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire.
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,
Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of gray, muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

And as no post about poetry of war and destruction is ever quite the same for me without my favorite Homer, here you go: an excerpt from Phoinix’s speech, book nine of the Iliad.. The best of the best poets, of course, can start with particularities and get to the universal. All of us should carefully note the dynamic of rage, unyielding hearts, Folly (or Ruin) and those wrinkled, lame daughters of Zeus.

So, Achilles, subdue
your giant passion. It's not right for you
to have an unyielding heart. Gods themselves
are flexible, and they have more honour
than we possess, more power, too. Men pray
when they go wrong or make mistakes,
propitiating gods with offerings,
gentle prayers, libations, sacrifice.
Prayers are the daughters of almighty Zeus.
Lame, wrinkled, cross-eyed, they try to follow
behind Folly, who, because she's strong and quick,
runs far in front of them, appearing
all over the world, bringing harm to men.
Far behind, Prayers carry on their healing.
If a man honours these daughters of Zeus
as they come near, they will help him greatly,
paying attention to him as he prays.
If someone spurns them, rudely rejecting them,
they go to Zeus, son of Cronos, begging
for Folly to pursue that man, who then
harms himself and suffers punishment.
For that reason, Achilles, you should give
Zeus' daughters your respect. They have changed
the minds of other men, even great ones.

culture wars 3: Reality and the gods

A fellow blogger, the enchantingly inquisitive explorer Irina points out that she keeps forgetting about the role play part. That’s because, I suspect, aside from the particularities of my caricature of the Hindus, the language used in the last post was very familiar as it has been in vogue of late amongst some very “respectable” pundits and more popular bloggers.

So, I’ve agonized over whether or not I should continue the role-play. There is enough incivility as it is already. I decided that I would continue just for one more post while toning it down a bit. I’ll atone for the nastiness as best I know how. In the meanwhile, I take heart in that our Iranian Nazi-wannabe-in-residence—no hyperbole, as he does truly fancy himself some National Socialist—calls me, in his eminently learned, articulate way, another Jew influenced S@#T while also happily reproducing the last post in full!

So I continue today with another reminder that if you are easily offended, you should please move on.

Since no genuine petty-spirited, acrimonious “anti-idiotarian” rant is ever complete without those two omnipresent, unimaginative cries of “where is the outrage,” and “that’s hypocrisy,” I am going to proceed with the latter first.

As a Persian nationalist, it does occur to me that I am uncomfortable being surrounded by so many nuclear weapons that can potentially wipe out all life from the surface of our planet. The Pakistanis have them as well as our Northern neighbors and Israel among host of others. But I am now merely fixated on India. Especially, as they’ve voted against my objectives in an international arena when I expected from them otherwise.

So I go on to argue that I really don’t have any problems with the Bombs per se, but merely with who controls them. Those Indians can be so hypocritical since they not only have nuclear reactors themselves, but also many Bombs and missiles and yet, they have the audacity to reject another nation’s need for peaceful nuclear energy.

How can we trust those hypocrites, given that their sense of reality is nothing like us? How can any of us ever hope to understand those Indians? To prove my point, I then invite you to join me in briefly examining one of their ancient texts-- the celebrated Bhagadva Gita!

This Book, in the grand tradition of the epic of the Mahabharata, begins with a picturesque account of the battle scene between two families, the Kuuravas and the Pandavas. Two conventional armies arrayed against one another in battle:

[t]he many-shaped banners of your men, king of the people, bearing royal insignia of gold, sparkled like fires. The shining rainbow color of your troops and the others were bright as in Indra’s mansion. (1.5)

But there is nothing “normal” about these two armies. Appearance is a mere illusion. And the moment our hero, the famed Arjuna, pauses to think things through, the essential logic of the conflict presents itself with heart-wrenching clarity:

The Partha saw them stand there, fathers, grandfathers, teachers, maternal uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, friends, father in law, and god companions in both armies. Watching all his relatives stand arrayed, he was overcome with the greatest compassion. (1.26)

So now our Arjuna has a dilemma about fighting and begins to have second thoughts. Arjuna’s “limbs” begin to “falter,” his body begins to “tremor,” and his “hair bristle.” (1.30)

Arjuna is now effectively paralyzed:

The very men for whose sake we want kingship, comforts, and joy, stand in line to battle us, forfeiting their hard-to-relinquish lives![…] I do not want to kill them, though they be killers, Madhusudana, even for the sovereignty of the three worlds, let alone earth. (1.33)

He has become a stranger to his universe and the split between the world of appearance and that of reality is too much for him to bear. In other words, something in the world of appearance deeply disturbs him and divests his real world of meaning. He has a crisis of faith.

The root of his problems appears to be the following:

With the destruction of family the eternal family Laws are destroyed. When Law is destroyed, lawlessness bests the entire family. From the prevalence of lawlessness the women of the family become corrupt, Krishna: when the women are corrupt, there is class miscegenation, and miscegenation leads to hell for family killers and family…Woe! We have resolved to commit a great crime as we stand ready to kill family out of greed for kingship and pleasure. (2:40)

Even on the basis of this limited excursion, you could probably intuit that my next move could be in many different directions. I can go on to highlight the beauty of the text in myriad ways. I can point out how the text can resonate with us given the anguish of political life in modern societies. Or I can emphasize a narrative that highlights our common human predicaments which appear not to have changed much in eons. Or many other approaches—traditional or hip and coolly (post) modern.

I could also probably see it as another example of how humans no matter what culture they grow up in have always strived to understand the meaning of human suffering in their own unique ways.

But no!

I am now too blind by either fear or loathing to notice the similarities. I am too closed minded to learn anything new. I am now out to make the Indians look as “alien” and “abnormal” to our “normal” sensibilities as possible. So I go on to highlight the class miscegenation bit.

I am an “anti-idiotarian,” you see. All the wisdom of the world for me is limited to those few books I normally read and the language I am most comfortable using in the particular country I inhabit and my time zone. I am too lazy to be inquisitive and too obnoxious to sympathetically engage with “other” texts. That’s multiculturalism you see. It is almost as nasty as those Hindus to me.

Multiplicity petrifies me. And--horror of horrors--those Hindus are dazzlingly diverse. Some are theists, or believe in personal salvation while others are not or don’t. All I am interested in now is to show you how the Hindus either are adamant believers in a cast system or that they have this odd notion of a dispassionate, disinterested conduct. So I am going to demean their gods now in order to accomplish what I set out to do.

So, enter Krishna. Who is He? What kind of a God?

Krishna is the creator, the sustainer, as well as the destroyer of the world. He is the “foundation of Brahman,” (12.27) and under his “tutelage” are born all creatures “standing or moving” (9:10) Krishna is the “eternal source of all creatures” (9.40). Krishna is the Alpha and the Omega of existence—the syllable OM. (9.18) As such, the world is “stung” on him and “all creatures exist in” him (9.5)

And He is also the author of the society of four classes, a society created to reflect the three Gunas-forces, or constituents-of nature. A person, or an embodied soul, is said to be as good as his/her faith, which is of three types, “satva, rajas, or tamas” (17.3) Remember those millions of poor. That’s their nature working; I go on to point out. They deserve what they get.

I can try to explain many things a bit more. Or at least reflect a tad more carefully. But as an intellectual, I want to have just the right mix of clarity and opacity, so my dear readers remain mystified about my level of “expertise.” Any, old trick just as long as it works to discourage everyone from independent thinking. Real thinking, I mean, will put me out of business. What’s really going to happen when we finally figure out what is required to cultivate and practice desiring to grapple with difficult problems and questions on our own?

It’s all in the nature of the game, you see.

So, I use just the “right” dose of scary, unfamiliar phrases to tantalize others while at the same time letting myself feel important. So, I am going to leave it at that for now and return to examining what Krishna tells Arjuna to cure him of his paralysis in order to help him regain “his wits” (18.74) and to re-join the battle.

Krishna counsels Arjuna to get a grip on himself. Arjuna should not be despairing because compassion is not the appropriate emotional response in this context. There are simply no justifiable causes for sorrow. Krishna adumbrates four reasons why Arjuna should not be “sorry for either the living or the dead.” (2.11)

The self—the embodied self—is eternal, “never was there a time when I did not exist, or you, or these kings, nor shall any of us cease to exist.” ( 2.11) Just as there are cycles a body goes through-childhood, youth and old age-so too does the self go through cycles of rebirth, and in doing so, takes “passage to another body.” (2.13)

Given the imperishable nature of that on which our “world is strung”,” there can be no meaningful way of speaking of killing and being killed:

He who thinks that this being is a killer and he who imagines that it is killed do neither of them know. It is not killed nor does it kill. (2.18)

Second, just as it is natural for the body to go through different cycles, so too is natural for that which is born to die and for that which dies to be born again. This transformation is inevitable and should therefore be no cause for grief, “for to be born death is assured, and birth is assured to the dead” (2.27)

Third, if the self happens to be an embodied baron, then he will have to conduct himself in accordance with the Laws of barons and not waver. Hence, sorrow is still an inappropriate reaction here. The agony Arjuna is feeling is merely a distorted reaction to a win-win proposition, “either you are killed and will then attain to heaven, or you triumph and will enjoy the earth.” (2.37)

Last, but not least, in a move that should be familiar to practically every one of my readers, since we hear echoes of it all the time these days, Krishna argues that Arjuna’s refusal to fight could be viewed as an act of cowardice, which would then lead to the questioning of his abilities as a warrior, resulting in the vanishing of the glory of his name and in an “undying shame”:

Your ill wishers will spread many unspeakable tales about you, condemning your skills-and what is more miserable than that? (2.36)

In Krishna’s universe, all players are “in bondage to the Karma of action” and should act “to hold the world together.” (3.26) The embodied souls of the society of four classes here should strive to perform their acts in accordance with the prescribed Laws, with no desires or emotions, utterly disinterested, and without any expectation of rewards or fruits of their acts (18.2-4)

They should all mind their own business and dedicate themselves to their own tasks since “one’s own law imperfectly observed is better than another’s law carried out with perfection.” (18.47)

In short, if an embodied soul were to follow his natural tasks and relinquish all his acts to Krishna, he would find through Krishna’s grace the “eternal abode with is ultimate peace” (18.57) By Krishna’s grace, even if an embodied soul were to embark on a path of butchery—so long as he butchers with a “disposition not dominated by ego,” and “understanding not obscured,” he “does not kill and is not bound by his act were he to kill off these three worlds” (18.19)

From here my next move is really simple enough. I want you to forget about different textual interpretations. I ask you to be oblivious to nuances, subtly, poetic ambivalence or allegorical readings. I’ll encourage you to overlook diversity. Let’s also ignore the desires, fears, anxieties, and all those normal contradictory human impulses and emotions of real, living, breathing concrete Indians. We’ll simply continue to think of “them” in abstract. A caricature, so utterly devoid of all particularities and individualities.

So finally I will ask you: Are you going to trust the Bomb in the hands of a people who are dispassionate about butchery of their own families? Do you feel secure while such a destructive arsenal remains in their hands of those who are expected to have no compassion, and feel no grief?

Do you feel safe knowing weapons are in the possession of those who are encouraged to not feel sorry for “either the living or the dead?” Those for whom there is no meaningful way of talking about killing or being killed? And those who are not bound by their acts were they to kill off the entire world?

Now, we can finally close the circle.

Where is the outrage about the Hindu Bomb?

Thus begins a dirty war

A reminder that this is role play and if you are easily offended, you should please move on. And so we continue. The half resourceful Persian nationalist that I am, I proceed to re-evaluate my encounters with India and all things Indian.

What is annoying me, of course, is the meanness of that Indian fellow blogger and my impression that the Indian negotiating team misrepresented their position about this ongoing nuclear standoff judging by how surprised the Iranians were with the outcome of the vote. But I am now merely lashing out.

Technically, the Indian move could be viewed as diplomacy proper. Or we might choose to call it pursuing one’s own best interest--call it what you will. I will choose to call it masking true intentions. Would it really qualify as cunning manipulation? And lying or deception?

So I begin to take liberties with the language which should have ideally helped me put problems in context. Babbling is what I am used to as an intellectual. It gives me power. It makes me feel superior.

Yes, it must have been a ruse all along. Now deep down, I know I have had my share of encounters with cheating, lying, deceitful domestic politicians. I have also seen children lie. I have seen students offer excused about not having their homework on time and have heard their creative stories about their papers having been eaten by animals.

I have heard husbands lie about their whereabouts or an affair and have seen their wives conceal the truth about the cost of those red shoes or the Chanel perfumes or a dress. And I have certainly seen colleagues twist the truth a little and offer tall tales, or many a lying whiteness as the expression goes after a few drinks.

But boy, do those Indians now get on my nerves. There must be something inherent to their culture that allows them to toy with their interlocutors so deftly, I begin to argue.

Well, now that I have had time to think about it, the premier text that is all about cunning, treachery, deceit and how to accumulate wealth and power by sowing dissention and discord in my own society is a book called “Kalilah wa Dimnah” which uses the technique of intricately woven tale within tale to deliver a message.

The book is a translation of collection of ancient Indian fables written down in Sanskrit -- popularly known as Panchatantra. The first tantra features the exploits of a lion and a bull and narrates the prominent role played by two jackals called Damnaka and Karattaka or Kartak and Damanak, take your pick. It is full of wisdom about eating others lest you be eaten -- a variety of what is categorized as practical wisdom. Most ancient cultures have sophisticated renditions.

But again, I am now in bending the truth business-- just ever so slightly. Our own ancient culture, I go on to argue, must really not have had those tales or someone wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of bringing those gems back from India. And as everyone must know-- because Herodotus said so-- we Persians used to learn early on “to mount the horse, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth.”

But Indians, you see, must have always had problems with the truth all along. As a matter of fact, they have a history of abandoning their neighbors—the Indians do, after they fall for new gods so it must be in their genes to follow a lie each and every time.

Remember how I alluded to having been once joined at the hips. Well, one of the reasons my ancestors chose to emigrate was because the forefathers of those who are now Indians decided to worship the younger, more hip deities who appeared the victors in a war of gods, while we remained faithful and chose to honor the more ancient Ahuras. That’s why in our old literature we have such a serious problem with the follower of Lie, or Druj!

We are nothing like them.

What’s wrong with those Indians anyways? What ails their society? How can you expect them to care about their neighbors when they don’t even care about their own people! They rank in the 127^th position on the Human Development Index report. They fare even worse than Iran in terms of fighting poverty.

In point of fact, as the NGOs report, they have the highest concentration of poverty anywhere in the world with 350 million living below the poverty line. And they tolerate so much violence against the people they call untouchables. Their very own citizens.

Why do they reproduce at such high rates, anyhow? So I begin to offer alarming statistics. Here is the latest Indian census figures of 2001 putting the population at 1,027,015,247 and another and yet another here giving us three different models put out by Harvard projecting future population growth for the years to come.

What else can we expect from a people who worship genitals? Lingam and Yoni they call them. Besides, we should never trust anyone who also deifies some potentially yummy shish kebob!

And they always keep to themselves and eat their own food. Have you ever notice how Indians eat? And the smell that comes from their places of residence? And why do they dress the way they do anyways? Heck even the Chinese have begun to dress like the rest of us "normal" folk.

And boy do they know how to migrate, don’t they? Both internally and externally. According to their own figures, 307 million migrate by their place of birth (pdf) within the country and there are 20 million Non resident Indian Nationals all over the planet.

So now, remember those Christian porn peddling terrorist of the last post? As it turns out, they operate in a contested region whose inhabitants are an ancient people called the Boro. And it’s just like those Hindus to come settle en mass in regions that belongs to others and they create conflict wherever they go and threaten the natives.

So now, I choose to highlight the plight of the Boro and begin to also draw attention to the latest anti-Christian disturbances. Then I begin to look again at the history of the Persian community in India because you just know that if an opulent, learned and successful community has lived around poor people of many different religions and ethnicities for centuries, chances are, there have been sporadic conflicts. Now I want to show how intolerant Indians have always been.

Those Hindus are at everyone’s throat all the time. They are always rioting. In the big ones a few years back between 500,000 to 1 million got killed. If it’s not the Christians they attack, they are after the Sikhs or some others. What’ wrong with them any ways?

You know, they must seriously have problems with woman as well. Because women hating, grotesquely patriarchal cultures are the ones that exhibit these symptoms of the widespread malaise we are witnessing among the Indians.

Look closely. Rape is as frequent as traffic accidents. There is sexual harassment and kidnapping and female infanticide galore. And violence and corruption and prostitution.

Indian women don’t have an easy time. 60 percent of women are anemic. 50% of women are illiterate. Maternal death in India counts for almost 25% world wide child-related deaths. There is corruption and crime and so much violence, but thankfully women are fighting back.

Indians have women problems because as their ancient text make clear, women are kind of merchandise and some (by nature or habit) are gained over by striking. As a matter of fact, despite their licentious sexuality, there is a morbid fear of women’s desires. Just go and pick up the latest edition of Kama Sutra at your local bookstore.

The older layers of commentaries make clear that women’s sexuality should be viewed with suspicion and should best be controlled. That’s why Hindus are counseled to see to it that women keep busy with housework and other domestic tasks. Because, you see, men’s sexuality is cyclical and a woman’s oceanic—she comes to have orgasms in waves. And as one of the chapters makes clear, the moment a man is fatigued, some “manly” women will chose to sodomize him to end up on top. Their whole cultural history can be viewed as an unfolding of a morbid fear of women.

So now, I am feeling pretty good about myself and so superior to boot. I have successfully overcome the last vestiges of shame and so I freely utter the vilest of thoughts while patting myself on the back for being an “anti-idiotarian,” or so audaciously “contrarian.”

I never cower before the “politically correct” crowd. Ain’t I special?

Now, I am ready to take the next step and go after some of their canonical texts in order to settle the affair with their false gods and to highlight their tenuous hold on reality.

Intellectuals and Culture Wars

There is a streak of anti-intellectualism in me that I try to keep under wraps. Occasionally, though, it gets the better of me. Deep down, I can see myself just giving in and unabashedly loathing “them,” in a serious sort of way. Actually, to be frank, I do dislike intellectuals already--myself included. And I am going to try playfully to show you why in the next two or three posts.

So we are going to role play tonight. We’ll make nice to begin with and subsequently grow to be nasty. If you are easily offended, please move on.

And we are going to do it without demonizing Muslims and Jews, or Israelis and Arabs. Too much of that already going on everywhere! It’s going to be Persians and Indians for a change. And I am going to elicit the help of an Indian fellow blogger who has a wicked sense of humor and someone with whom I have lightheartedly jousted in private correspondence. I think he’ll be happy playing along.

So, I am going to be a Persian nationalist who adores India to start with. All things Indian, from people to movies and food and culture to the ancient texts and philosophy, literature and languages which is easy enough, really. We used to be joined at the hips, so to speak.

Our common heritage is hard to miss. Soma or Haoma, Rta or Asha, Daevas or Devas and Ahuras or Asuras, you name it, we both have it. And I have studied a bit of Sanskrit to boot-- a beautifully complex and rigorous language and I have also enjoyed my limited exposures to their famed grammarian, a Panini who wrote about the subject when most of the rest of the planet had no clue what grammar was. The studies have helped me better grasp the structure of our own old ancient languages which hardly anyone pays attention to anymore. And for those opportunities I remain grateful.

Exposures to other cultures do that for you.

If you sympathetically engage with other cultures and their rich heritage--with an open mind and with your critical faculties fully operative, chances are that in due time, you will not only come away awed and humbled, but also will grow to appreciate the elements of your own culture which you might have been taking for granted all your life.

So I have enjoyed laboring over some of the original texts of Hinduism, The Rig Veda and the Upanishads which have helped me better understand our own ancient Zoroastrian tradition as well as Manichaeism and I have learned a great deal from those formidable Indian logicians such as Nagarjuna, and Dharmakirti.

I have been moved by the sensual poetry of Kalidasa and marveled at figures like Shakuntala and my body and mind feel a bit healthier and more serene after encountering Pantajali and heck, even my love life—what little I still remember of “normal” sex at any rate-- has been rendered more enjoyable thanks to those celebrated Kama Sutras.

And of course, even a brief exposure to the magnificent and complex epic of the Mahabharata with so many engrossing concepts such as Brahman, Avatars, Maya and Karma along with seekers and myriad duty bound with exotic names such as Brahamacharya, Grihastham, and Vanaprastham could be sufficient to rock anyone’s world.

And on a more personal level, I remain grateful to our Indian neighbors for having offered sanctuary to those purest ancient Persian communities—the much loved and respected Zoroastrians, after they were forced to migrate in order to escape the hordes of invaders who changed the face of our culture forever.

And gratitude has a way of pulling at one’s heart.

So the emotional attachment colors everything positively for me. Indians might have their own set of problems, but they can do no wrong as far as I am concerned. I am on their side.

Even the more obscure news items rile me up and move me to offer support. So when I read some group is using Christianity to undermine the influence of Hinduism in a region with a history of ethnic strife, I remain vigilant and when the news briefly hits of this same group producing “revolutionary pornography” to fund their struggles, I highlight the report put out by the Tripura Police to show what despicable creatures the Indians are up against. Shame on those porn peddling Christian terrorists in India, I say.

I just love and adore Indians. They are my allies. I wish them success. I am rooting for them. I want to see more jobs for them. And easier access to universities and educational opportunities for their students. As well as greater mobility for their workers and my endless, profuse praises for their democracy, tolerance and hard work. More power to them everywhere, I say.

But there is a catch.

Remember I am a Persian nationalist. What’s good for me I feel grand for everyone else. If someone is nice to me, naturally that means the person is obviously O.K. Everyone is great as long as I get my way and just so long as I get to hear what I want to hear.

But something odd begins to happen.

India votes against Iranian aspirations to harness peaceful nuclear energy. This, I find, especially offensive as they have been trying to gain access to “our” cheap oil. I know my country. I represent my country. What I think is good for my country, I know is really good for the country. Dastardly Indians.

And then some Indian blogger shows up to my blog and writes a comment on my post about the eight years of a devastating, brutal war. He writes:

In terms of Reagan’s support for Iraq, Iran somewhat reaped what it sowed by first humiliating Jimmy Carter and then deliberately waiting till he lost the presidential elections before releasing the hostages on the day Reagan took office.

Which is, indeed, perfectly reasonable, I know. He has kindly reminded us of a chain of events which has been no secret to anyone. Iranians took some Americans hostage. Then some Americans got tired of a president they deemed weak and indecisive. They voted for Reagan and wanted him to act on those nasty feelings most everyone had come to develop for the Iranians. And when the war dragged on and on, Reaganites didn’t think twice about siding with Mr. Hussein.

But the war and revolution were also particularly difficult for my family, friends and classmates among so many other millions. Loved ones died and some were poisoned and others were purged and some landed in jail or were executed or assassinated. It wasn’t the best of times for any of us.

So his comment doesn’t sit well with me at all. Is he implying that my family and friends deserved to be gassed and bombed and killed simply because some other miscreants took a few diplomats as hostage?

So my festering wounds break open. All the negative emotions that all of us have which remained under control for so long are suddenly set loose. I don’t know what they are exactly or where they come from. But it is all focused now on India.

Perhaps it is all those movies I saw when I was a kid with Indian foot soldiers under the leadership of British officers trying to wreak havoc on my country. Or perhaps it is a few bad encounters I have had with all those Indians who seem to be everywhere these days I visit or am ever likely to visit-- from Europe to the Americas and Africa, Asia or even Guyana.

Indians are taking over.

Perhaps I got sick one day eating at an Indian restaurant. Or maybe the Indian Goddess I adored dumped me one day and my inner masochist is feeling deprived of the spanking she used to administer mischievously. Who knows, really, why any of us come to finally snap and react the way we do?

Now India is on my manure list. And so is my fellow Indian blogger. Perhaps, finally that last of one too many callous comments from a brash young Australian of Indian descent about Persians has gotten me so annoyed that I am now fed up with all Indians in toto.

So, from here on, you will notice, “objectively” as the old Soviets used to say, nothing much has changed.

Only now my perception of Indians has. But it’s not “politically correct,” to come out and say exactly how I feel in public. So being a half resourceful intellectual, I’m going to pull at the threads of my universe--one strand at a time-- until there is nothing left of that colorfull tapestary which was my love for India and Indians.

I am going to radically reconstitute my experience of the Indian presence in our universe and you’ll see how in my next post.

Mashad, weasels and stupid laws

This item annoyed me no end. Especially since I repeatedly argued about the whole matter with a bunch of my compatriots last year. Back then, the number stood at 32,000.

There are close to 40,000 children without birth certificates in the “holy” city of Mashad, notorious now because of the public hanging of those gay youngsters. That’s because (mostly) Iraqi pilgrims, among others from bordering Arab countries, (according to the report) have brief liaisons with some poor women and then skip town after impregnating them thus abandoning their lovers to fend for themselves.

And by law, children born to Iranian woman and foreign men or those whose paternity can not be established have difficulties getting birth certificates.

While I have nothing against the much tormented Iraqis engaging in a bit of responsible R & R while on pilgrimage in the “holy” city—and this, especially as our Iraqi neighbors are having such a rough time of it regaining a sense of normalcy at home, it really irritates me that they don’t take the necessary precautions to avoid leaving a child behind.

It isn’t as if there are no condoms or other methods of birth control easily accessible. They are ruining some woman’s life as well as that her offspring.

And the Iranian authorities should really be forced to take the appropriate steps to change some of these anachronistic, stupid laws. A more open approach to sex education might not exactly hurt either.

A much welcome additional advantage to changing the laws, of course, is that our irresponsible citizens will be deprived of that omnipresent luxury of blaming foreigners for the consequences of their own indiscretions and false hopes. I am sure quite a few people can intuitively appreciate how easy it can be to scapegoat some non-existent Iraqi or Arab pilgrim when faced with a difficult, embarrassing predicament while stuck in a needlessly intolerant milieu!

It’s called the “Sacred Defense Week”

September 22 is the anniversary of Mr. Saddam “Hitler” Hussein’s attack on Iran. So much of what Iran is today, I think, is the unfortunate outcome of those devastating eight years of a needlessly protracted war.

This is how some veterans of those years look like dying years later. This is what the victims of chemical warfare look like curtsey of Mr. Hussein and partially made possible, of course, by the (mostly) European, and the American involvement and subsidies.

Some more pictures of the war years here and here.

And the military marches go on to commemorate those events just like every other year. More pictures here, here, here, and here. More young men likely to die in case there is another conflict only to be soon forgotten again as we all move on with our own merry lives.

So you see, I really don’t hold any of the unkind characterizations of Iran and Iranians against the pundits. People are fully entitled to feel superior if that’s what sets their shorts on fire. But I fear some are drawing all the wrong conclusions thus dragging us even deeper into an abyss. All of us.

Iranian revolution came to an end with that war I think. I know the revolution is forever associated with the despicable Islamic form cemented during the war years. But that was never inevitability. Revolutions are funny that way.

Revolutions tend to release the imagination as well as powerful new forces which then often become impossible to comprehend and control.

Before the Iranian revolution, you will recall, we were all being lectured about how all we could do was to make the only possible choice available. It was either the Soviet tyranny as a model for the third world or those American backed strongmen—brutal and vainglorious rulers like the Shah. That was not all too palatable for many everywhere.

No third alternative was even deemed probable. Either “them” or “them.”

And we Iranians said no. We broke out of a suffocating construct. But then we failed miserably in finding our way through all the tortuous aftereffects.

In the midst of the war, there were massive terror campaigns initiated by the MEK activists who killed the President and many other prominent figures which resulted in a murderous, brutal backlash that cost us thousands of our idealistic youth. There were massive student unrests brutally suppressed and a civil war in Kurdistan and elsewhere taking a heavy toll while some of our most promising men and women were dying on the battle fronts.

The confusing atmosphere and all, in retrospect, proved too much for a people who had come to feel liberated from a Bastille of imagination, and who yet lacked the experience or the tools necessary to make possible a more humane alternative.

But judging by the venom and the bloodlust evident in the “civilized,” portion of our planet after a bit of pressure, I am not quite convinced any other people in our shoes would have been any less of a failure.

That’s why, you see, in my less despondent moods, I remain (guardedly) optimistic. Iran is an ancient nation and this too shall pass.

The crash

A companion of many years which has felt more like an extension of my body—dearest laptop—began to make curious noises one day and then it suddenly died. And it took along thousands of photographs and pages up on pages of notes about various books and articles and many other files I had managed to accumulate over the years.

Of course I have back ups, but they too are sitting inside assorted boxes (which remain) scattered around different cites across four continents. Mr. BP, you see, isn’t the most stable of fellows. So we have been brooding a tad more dejectedly of late.

And we have also been interviewing for jobs. But of course that too isn’t going anywhere. We have lost our taste for the “respectable” society and we half suspect the disdain to be mutual.

Living the life of a semi-literate vagabond in the margins of our great cities has a certain charm, I must admit. But it would get terribly tedious intellectually, I fear. So, I am thinking I should really take a long break soon to put my own affairs in order.

Before I go, though, I would like to finish a number of conversations which I’ve never managed to develop to my satisfaction. So, I intend to do a series of posts on Mr. Pollack’s book, The Persian Puzzle, which might also offer an opportunity to rethink some of the issues I have broached in the past.

At least two reviewers from the opposite sides of the political spectrum haven’t been too terribly kind to the Gentleman.

Mr. Amir Taheri, our famed, old “Emissary of the Apparatus,” comes to pull a Juan Cole on Mr. Pollack, charging our author with suffering “from the fact that he has never been to Iran and does not know the Persian language,” while complaining further:

Pollack has an amazing arsenal of adjectival bullets with which to shoot his hated Iranians. He writes that Iranians are "stupid, naïve, paranoiac, delusional, unreasonable, and obtuse." And that is only for starters!

And that, of course, makes a rational discussion of the conflict that much more difficult.

Mr. Kaveh Afrasiabi, on the other hand, an author who is the closest there is to a thoughtful fellow traveler, has almost identical set of objections:

Pollack indulges in criticizing Iranian emotionalism, xenophobia, exaggerated "self-importance", "considerable ignorance of many of its policymakers", etc, thus making a mockery of objective analysis bereft of such abstract generalization smacking of what the late Edward Said labeled "Orientalism".

The crux of the matter, for Mr. Afrasiabi, appears to be the following:

Pollack unfortunately proves incapable of breaking free from a CIA school of thought that, in addition to denigrating Iran's national character, consistently predicts the imminent demise of the Islamic regime in Iran.

I have been reading Mr. Pollack’s book and I like it. It is nowhere written in stone that an analyst should like Iran or Iranians. By that standard, almost everything anyone ever writes these days about Iran could be easily dismissed.

But it is terribly unfair, I think, to highlight a few unflattering characterizations out of 539 pages of a book instead of thinking about some of the more important assumptions and conclusions presented by a writer.

Any how, I was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Pollack’s attempts at being fair minded and his efforts in seriously grappling with a number of fundamental difficulties and challenges that Iranians and the Iranian regime pose. This is not to say that I don’t have misgivings. But since when has agreement become the sole standard for judging a book?

I’ll tell you about some of Mr. Pollack’s more interesting observations soon. This especially since--as our Spirited Poetess rightly points out-- after the election of Mr. Ahmadi Nejad, and faced with the brewing (potentially) catastrophic conflict, some of the loudest (Iranian) observations are reducible to a variety of the shallowest sartorial, or boring and banal rhinological, fulminations.

About Beslan.

A year passes. No end to fury and grief and still more talk of blasphemy. Edited repost from last September.

*********

What is it about Beslan? It haunts and infuriates, leaving us dazed or baffled although practically every one of the impulses, deliberations and miscalculations leading to this calamity can be accounted for. I have been trying to avoid discussing Beslan for fear of sounding like an absolute lunatic.

Is it Islam?

Of course it is. At least a particularly repugnant strand of Islam even when overly generous! “Who are we trying to kid?” I am thinking. The Beslan barbarity is a reminder of the sort of dystopia awaiting us if the Islamists succeed. The stakes are high indeed.

And then there was a child crying under my window this evening, shouting at the top of his lungs: “Divaneh, divaneh, nazan mano.” Roughly translated, “maniac, don’t hit me.” In all likelihood, echoes of his mother's pleas. A child of no more than 5 or 6 profoundly perturbed about being battered. Children finally managed to find a way onto my heart. Shortly after my sister’s first born.

Look, when I used “daze” and “baffle” at the beginning, I wasn’t playing clueless. It is easy to be sanctimonious about such a brutality. But, at the end of the day, isn’t it really all about inhibitions? And apathy, coarseness of spirit, and helplessness?

Why is it that I didn’t rush down to beat the living daylight out of the bastard who made the young boy cry in agony under my window? Why is it that everyday I pass by all the pathetic, poverty stricken street children peddling in this land of obscene expenditures only to occasionally hand them money when “touched” by something "extraordinary?” Why is it that we tolerate child abuse, child prostitution, widespread hunger, and systematic killing of children everyday?

The World Food program ran an advert on BBC the other day. Hunger kills 776 children every hour on the hour, every day. Do the math. Seven Hundred Seventy Six.

Sometimes, silly stupid questions become an obsession with me. Look at the conflict that the majority of us tend to focus on compulsively because it might be “closer” to home-- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why is it that children in buses and pizza parlors are blown to bits, incinerated and dismembered while it is not “O.K” to serve their soulless bodies in a deep dish pizza? We eat almost every thing else that moves, don’t we?

Why is it that some get vasculitis when a cartoon of Sharon drinking the blood of children shows up in print somewhere, but the same people can stomach hearing or watching children’s blood being spilled practically everyday on the streets of the occupied territories? And they almost always insist on a “firmer” policy, don’t they? It is in the news everywhere, isn’t it?

I have been avoiding Chechnya for years. I don’t understand it. I was terribly disgruntled with various “National Liberation” movements to begin with. But they are not going to go away simply because I don’t wish to deal with the questions. We have the basic facts in front of us and can all do the math. Prior to Beslan, the “score” stood at 80,000 Chechens to 4000 Russians. Can you count that? 80,000 out of a population of a little over a million, I think.

How many of those 80,000-- are you willing to wager--were children? Had you heard of the “black widows” some 10 years ago, before Crozny, when the same Jihadists were running around being the same murderous miscreants they have always been?

But then I think about “us” again. Of all the many years that we—the Persians—have abused our own various national minorities and in particular the Kurds—and I use abuse here to encompass all of our various shameful deeds such as withholding oil money for regional development, preventing them from studying their own beautiful, ancient language in schools and universities, and putting their children to work in backbreaking construction jobs, or the ongoing de facto economic blockades, as well bombing their houses and cities , tormenting their families, and torturing their activists, never once, to my knowledge, have they ventured to seek us in “our” cities or schools in order to kill and to avenge their mistreatment.

Why not? What is it that holds them back? They are both Muslims and an abused national minority, aren’t they? What causes the inhibitions? How long will it last?

I know the Chechens have been brutalized, but what kind of a society will they create even if “liberated” from the brutal yoke of the Russians? What did the poor Ossetians ever do to deserve this? What control do these wretched Ossetians ever have over the decisions of this supposedly “reformed” KGB strongman Putin? Or those of an ex-Communist Party apparatchik, Yeltsin? Did they help Stalin forcibly exile to Serbia all those Chechens years ago? Did they exert any kind of an influence on the Tsars before that?

Why is it that it is O.K. to take children hostages, to torment them, to force nudity upon them, to imprison them in a hot gym, to starve and dehydrate them, to shoot them in the back, give them urine-soaked cloths to suck on, to scar them permanently for life, and yet it wasn’t “acceptable” to feed them some barbequed teacher?

What held them back?

Regardless of the “tribal” idiosyncrasies involved, the various Jihadists have a very particular notion of the dystopia they try to impose on the majority as well as specific means in mind to get us there.. Every one of their (mis)deeds is a harbinger of what they wish to bring us. And they must be resisted, and methodically defeated, their ideas discredited and their methods repudiated.

Here in Iran, for instance, the first sign of their activism was spraying acid on the faces of women deemed improperly dressed in conformity with their understanding of the Islamic etiquette. They are doing their best to drive women out of public spheres in Iraq, and we know how they forced women to retreat inside imprisoning them in various Afghan homes, and denying them education.

And well Saudi Arabia has always been Saudi Arabia. So now they ride the wave of the agonizing misery of some Chechen women to open a new front in their tribal war of ruin.

The fight involving women and children is a central battle front. Women are the primary educators of children. Aside from suffocating their teachers and caretakers or killing and imprisoning them, what else do they promise children?

Whether it is by killing them in a school in Beslan, or brainwashing them and destroying their humanity in various religious madresas in Pakistan or in other intellectually stifling places like Saudi Arabia and Iran or by distracting them from learning in France, or by killing the joys of learning through fear in the likes of my little friend in Tehran thousand of kilometer away from Beslan, they have very specific objectives in mind.

What do they really want?

A new vicious tribalism, widespread fear, pacifism and inaction, I think. And in this goal they are united with those authoritarians who acknowledge “weakness” only to distract from the issues of right and wrong.

The authoritarians whose own weak case is being bolstered further by their natural allies who never tire of talking “Carthagian” tactics, “Jacksonian Economy of Force” and nuclear weapons as means of forcing “cultural adjustment” on Arab and Muslim lands!

Both groups feed on each other’s energy while complementing the other’s activity. They must know that not all of us have the desire or the stomach for collective retribution and widespread murder and mayhem. They want the majority of us out of the way so they can do what they want. And they must be resisted, and forced to retreat.

A lot easier said than done, though.

At the end of the day, I think, YES, in a sense, it has everything to do with Islam. I was wracking my brain trying to think “devouring of children” theme in mythology.

I stopped reading Russia related material years ago. So much to read and so little time. I couldn’t think of anything on that front. But we have all the usual Greek stuff about Kronus, and various child-eating dragons in the Japanese and Chinese literature as well as the Indian Demon which I think Krishna slays.

But what about us?

Isn’t it true that we live in region where one of the very central formative “myths” is the ten plagues? Isn’t it true that our shared heritage postulates an omnipotent deity who repeatedly “heardens the Phraoh’s heart,” (Exudus 9:12; 10:20; 14:10) only to do this:

At midnight the LORD smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. 12:29

Perhaps, so long as we continue to celebrate our heritage mindlessly—our sanctimonious prattle notwithstanding--- we don’t really get to have much of an inhibition when it comes to killing children.

Then the first thing we should think about doing is to let go of whosoever insists on not being under our yoke before we end up losing a lot more than our first born.

That and bolstering our inhibitions when it comes to assorted barbarities.

Something a lot akin, I suppose, to tapping whatever it is that accounts for our dislike for munching on a barbequed human hand or a thigh.