The Calm before the Storm

January 24, 2006 iranian.com

NEW YORK -- To be perfectly honest, the Islamic Repulic of Iran has an "inalienable right" to acquire nuclear weapons like an unrepentant, convicted and paroled lifetime pedophile has an inalienable right to Viagra.
Today, it appears that the delusional IRI fanatics are brazenly testing the limits of tolerance and inaction of the seemingly feeble Western liberal democracies with their lust to acquire nuclear weapons. With fond recollection of the wartime glories of their massive human-wave martyrdom, they appear quite capable of dragging the entire meek and incapacitated nation to an apocalyptic come-what-may showdown.
However, in the somber new moral calculus formulated by awakened and hardened proactive conservatism in the post-9/11 West, such adventurism can lead to incalculably dire consequences.

One of the lessons of the Islamic revolution in Iran was that 50 years of secular progress did not change the nature of our people.
An analogous argument might be stated for the peoples of present day Western liberal democracies who only 60 years ago unleashed immeasurable, no-hold-barred horrific death and destruction on each other before settling in their cherished but fragile freedom and humane stability of the present day.

For the Western world, the precarious context of the IRI's most alarming adventurism, is the (perhaps exaggerated) threat of Islamofascism in their own midst and in their own lands. With their existential fear of a ticking cultural and demographic bomb, ironically imported and subsidized by their own naïve multiculturalism, one can only speculate what bellicose sentiments could be percolating through the collective minds of the far more powerful peoples of the West. the rest of it.In the face of all this, it is impossible not to sense the heightened fatalism and withdrawal of Iranian people about their dangerously imminent collision with the rest of the world.

Fatalism, amnesia, insincerity and hypocrisy are all hallmarks of traditional Iranian-Shiite culture. For us Iranians the formality of a make-believe ordinary life, however low and diminished, must go on until it is no longer possible. And then, no one knows better, no one saw the end coming and all blame, and ironically all hope, is directed at outsiders...

Now that Iran's violent and crazed quest for identity has finally proven a disastrous failure and has led it to its most isolated, checkmated, indefensible and inexcusable present state of looking into the abyss, the nation appears to be finally facing up to the long overdue reflection for what may be wrong within its own soul. Let's hope that it is not too late to discover gravity...

Having had the privilege to grow up in our ill society, and subsequently the luck to spend half a lifetime to informedly and independently reflect on it from outside, I have a few hopes and insights as to what this soul searching might yield. Figuratively speaking, steadfast Muslims eat their young in the name of god. The gist of Islamic upbringing is about whipping the young to conform and bow to their loser parents, so that every generation is as degenerate as the previous.

The advantage of this discipline is that the faithful are never humiliated, as it is not expected of them to rise to any real challenge, except maybe through jihad and ultimately martyrdom. In turn, the advantage of Jihad is that it fills the place of meaning in life and is cause for unity. Finally the advantage of martyrdom is that one does not survive to get a chance and question the hypocrisy and futility of their lost existence.

Needless to say, no form of progress or achievement ever figures in this degenerative cycle of mediocrity and death wish where the sole purpose of education is indoctrination of faith. To bluntly summarize life under this discipline, one is physically, emotionally and mentally circumcised, veiled, mourned and terrorized from childhood onwards in order to submit to a life of suppressed longings, self-loathing and inconsequence, in return for the lifetime approval of an elder generation of dimwitted losers.

Countless taboos, combined with an elaborate, juicy pornography of sadistic punishments (such as public lashing, stoning, mutilation and execution) are devised to make sure anyone otherwise destined to rise above the commonest admissible form of life becomes the subject of sick psychosexual entertainment for the masses. Anyone still surprised where the crazed want-to-be martyrs and necrophilic suicide/genocide bombers come from?

The uniqueness of us Iranians is that somehow in our collective subconscious, we are aware of the fact that this vile discipline was forced upon us by primitive Arab conquerors in the Middle Ages and even though we, in our own way, did not wholeheartedly buy into it, we nonetheless adopted it with signature docility and have lived with it until today.

That is the essence of the extraordinary self-loathing that paralyzes the Iranian mind and saps our self-esteem and confidence. We, the people who outrage at any hint of being subject, pray (five times a day!) and put faith in a book written in the tongue of our low, despicable conquerors!
For analogy's sake, if Iran were a man, he would be a transsexual, hysterically crying rape and violently ranting at the world over the injustice of his self-mutilated manhood and forgone mojo in the same breath.

To seal our destiny, during the Islamic revolution, we Iranians destroyed or diminished with violent passion and enthusiasm, every symbol, option and institution of rationalism and independent national identity, such as a constitutional monarchy, a patriotic military, a budding modenity and a new national self-esteem derived from our glorious ancient mythology and history.
Instead we invented enemies, demonizing the more rational, prosperous and far more powerful non-Muslim world which has had little to do with our present day moral bankruptcy and impotence.
At this juncture it appears that there is no recourse, no solutions and no ideas from within and once again our fate might have to be dictated with deadly force from outside.