By Paul Iddon
Even the most optimistic among us cannot help but to feel cynical in light of recent developments over the course of the last few months. With the Iranian economy in shambles, the regime in Tehran continuing to murder young Iranians for the smallest of what they deem “offenses”, and the looming threat of an attack on the country's growing ability to develop nuclear weapons and the possible escalation of a war that may engulf the entire region one finds the mere idea of optimism as palpably and delusionally naïve. Nevertheless one is reminded that throughout history it was through the more devastating and dire of circumstancest that the most humane of things happened and ultimately prevailed.
Right now the people of Iran are being strangled by international sanctions because of the policies of the brutal regime that rules over them. The majority of those suffering are the ones struggling to make ends meet, are wholly innocent people who just want to live their lives without violent intrusion. They don't want to and would never dream of harming another person. Their goodwill and resolve is evidently not reflected in their regime, which has consistently undermined them in front of the world and made their lives tremendously difficult. That regime drowns out their desperate pleas for help with its propaganda outlets, which constantly points the finger elsewhere. Which tries to use the genuine compassion its citizens have for the likes of the discriminated Shia majority in Bahrain to masquerade as if they stand up for truth and justice. When that regime in itself is a corrupt minority 'kleptocracy'. A 'kleptocracy' that has turned Iran into an obscurantist theocracy and away from its traditional history of promulgating equality and tolerance of other peoples and religions. If that Persia were allowed to prosper then the Iranian peoples heartfelt compassion for the oppressed of Bahrain and other minorities of the region could be translated into a sober foreign policy that could positively influence these countries, and help them change their ways for the better of those oppressed. For the real underdogs.
Instead we have a regime that manages to undercut all these good deeds and make Iranian people look, in a lot of impressionable peoples eyes, like a bunch of backward bigots. It's hard to think of a similar example of criminal billionaires so palpably plundering their country's wealth, culture and enormous potential whilst pretending to care about inequality elsewhere. The stifling hypocrisy would be almost laughable if it weren't so serious.
I often speak warmly of Persian culture and civilization. As ancient as it is one firmly believes that the values inherent in the likes of Cyrus's Cylinder is still very relevant. The tangible heritage sites of that old empire may be eroding away due to time and neglect, but the simple intangible values inherent in Persian culture is something that will never truly go away. No matter how much it is neglected, degraded or distorted. It is in dark times like these that such inherent truths become wholly relevant. It is in times of despair, when people are driven to limits they did not know they are capable of reaching that they realize who they truly are. What it truly means to be a citizen of a country and what responsibilities a true patriot has. To tell the truth in times of mass deceit, and stand firm and steadfast in defending it from systematic campaigns of defamation.
History teaches us time and again that it is the few who tell the truth, and the manipulated masses who distort it. The most supposedly civilized countries of their days in Europe attest to this rule. The large right-wing element of French society that through antisemitism and bigotry harshly discriminated and sought to degrade the Jewish people after the false charge leveled against Alfred Dreyfus (these were the same elements of French society that would later collude with the Nazis and consequently send Dreyfus's son, among many others, off to die in the Nazi camps). Similarly, in times of great difficulty and uncertainty, Germany, one of the most progressive societies in the world quickly devolved into a fascist police state that used its many abilities not to go forth and prosper but to go forth and kill millions of people. The diaries of Victor Klemperer serve as a great source of education for anyone who wants to see what is essentially the day-by-day documentation of how the most advanced of societies can be rendered into the most backward and barbarous in a relatively short period of time.
There are countless examples of this, suppressed peoples and cultures reemerging against all odds. The Irish people suffered hundreds of years of oppression and cultural suppression. Half the country's population was gone (mostly through immigration) and a million perished in a horrific famine, the survivors of which were left beggared and impoverished. Yet from that, and after six-hundred years of Anglicization and official denial of that islands heritage did a cultural revival take off in less than a generation which ultimately led to that country's succession from what was then doubtlessly, in most peoples minds, the most powerful and immovable empire in the world.
In World War II the people of the city we now know as St. Petersburg were subjected to a brutal military siege at the hands of the Nazis. The sieges intent was to starve the city's residents, and it did indeed success in starving a large part of them, reducing them to sheer abjection and many to depraved and animal like acts to survive. Yet in the midst of this several citizens, starving, cold, feeble, half-dead, mustered together the last of their inner strength and dressed in what was left of their best and went to see a live orchestra of Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad” as if everything was still normal. As if a society of law and order was a tangible reality and not an obscure and abstract idea. It was revealed years later by veterans on the German side who were besieging the city that once they picked up the orchestra on their radio, they knew that was it, they would never break the spirit of the Leiningraders.
Disenchanting as the situation in Iran may be today, with the looming threat of war, the repression and the sanctions one can see latent comparisons to the cases I just outlined. In the broad overview of things and in the worst and most despicable of outcomes, that one doesn't dare to even imagine or speculate about, one knows that in the end these people I speak warmly of will win. Their spirit may be a dying and almost extinguished flame, but it is still a flame. The Persian people have thousands of years of history and civilization behind them that will ultimately overcome any criminal obscurantists and we are continually obliged not to lose faith in the goodwill and resolve of these genuinely good people. Persia may seem to be awash with despicable and traitorous hucksters at present, but underneath all that exists a people whose heritage will prevail and will enable Iran to take its rightful place among the nations of the world, where it can teach others and be a force for good, for its own people, and the people of the world.
As for today's seemingly ubiquitous loud voices that are making excuses for the regime in Tehran today. They will be mere footnotes in the history books along with the criminals they are shamelessly trying in earnest to exculpate.
