Thoughts on the passing of Senator John McCain

Do not take at face value those who claim to be for human rights, as so many of those criticizing the late U.S. Senator John McCain do, if they nevertheless stood silently by as Muammar Gaddafi terrorized & pauperized Libya for decades and, through his support of armed groups like the the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the Tajammu al-Arabi (later the Janjaweed) in Sudan's Darfur, probably killed more black Africans than any one single person since King Leopold.

 Do not take at face value the claims of those who say that foreign policy should be approached from a position of respect, who paternalistically and dishonestly argue that Arabs are subject to "age old" enmities and thus "aren't ready" for democracy in places like Bahrain or Egypt.

Do not take at face value people the claims of those who argue they stand up for the sacredness of national borders but nevertheless, at best, sat silent and often actively applauded as the Assad crime family in Syria invited the Russians, Iranians and Lebanese onto Syrian territory to aid in its ghastly slaughter of people who, when they first rose up in 2011, simply demanded to be able to chose democratically who governs them (and if anybody doubts that, read the reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International from 2011/2012 or books like The Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh or Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab & Leila Al-Shami).

John McCain was a very flawed politician, as he would have been the first to admit, and his flaws were often reflected in his politics. But as the world stood by and watched the dream of Syrian democracy get extinguished by Russian bombing in places like Aleppo, by chemical weapons in places like Talmenes, Sarmin, Qmenas & Khan Sheikhoun, by mass murder in Assad's death camps such asthe Saydnaya military prison, John McCain stood - and remained - on the right side of history, with the people of Syria, who have now seen that flicker of freedom that first grew visible seven years ago all but vanish. It was our generation's Guernica, and most politicians - including Barack Obama, who I voted for twice - blew it. John McCain did not.

So here lies John McCain, imperfect American, Navy veteran, public servant, and friend - when so many of my fellow self-described progressives were not - to the people of Syria. Perhaps when he gets to the other side he can talk to so many of the Syrians already there about what that meant.

Books in 2017: A Personal Selection

 Mohammad Mohiedine Anis, 70, smokes his pipe as he sits in his destroyed bedroom listening to music on his vinyl player in Aleppo's formerly rebel-held al-Shaar neighbourhood.(AFP PHOTO / JOSEPH EID/AFP/Getty Images)

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos

One of the most important - but in many ways least remembered - Spanish-language poets of the 20th century, whose words translate seamlessly into English in this bilingual collection, Julia de Burgos was the often-anguished and sometimes dizzyingly sensual voice of Puerto Rico who died at 39 in New York City in 1953. In her poetry, recurring images - the sea, the stars - lighten to a degree what can often be the bleak inner life of her writing, and, as a committed political militant and passionate anti-fascist, one of her greatest poems, a tribute to the Rio Grande de Loíza remains, years later, a defiant call to an island and a people battered by catastrophes both natural and man-made:

¡Río Grande de Loíza!... Río grande. Llanto grande.
El más grande de todos nuestros llantos isleños,
si no fuera más grande el que de mi se sale
por los ojos del alma para mi esclavo pueblo.

Rio Grande de Loiza! . . . Great river. Great flood of tears.
The greatest of all our island's tears
save those greater that come from the eyes
up of my soul for my enslaved people.

Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania Book by Roland Clark

This all-too-relevant book looks at the foundations and growth of Romania’s indigenous fascist movements, especially Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s Iron Guard, also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael or, simply, as the Legionnaire movement. Facing a crumbling state whose moral equivocations finally eroded its authority, the Romanian fascists blended a wild, faux-mystical antisemitic violence with religious and folk-historical symbolism, including appearing in isolated rural villages dressed as haiduc, outlaws who had fought local oppressors in the 19th century. It is no coincidence that Codreanu’s image appeared on t-shirts worn by some of the far-right protesters who ran amok in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past summer. In addition to assassinations and street violence, the Legionnaires also defined themselves through art – they sold handmade crosses with the words “by sacrificing our lives we will escape from thieves” inscribed beneath them - and by long marches in between Romanian towns that “alerted onlookers that there was something distinctive about the Legion, showing that legionnaires valued hierarchy, order, discipline and physical fitness.” Though not a time in European history that attracts a great deal of attention today, this interwar period in Romania certainly holds a cautionary tale for our present moment.

Los Zetas Inc: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera

Though there have been a surfeit of books detailing the garish violence of Mexico’s drug cartels – organizations whose lifeblood depends on both the ravenous appetite for narcotics and current policies of the United States – no book has delved in such nuts-and-bolts detail into the financial hierarchies and dynamics that inform the running of one of these organizations as does Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s tome on Los Zetas. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to understand the inner working of organized crime and how it integrates itself into the legitimate economy.

Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad

The majesty of one of Iran’s greatest poets – who combines a world and once modern and antique and who writes as frankly and elegantly about female desire as anyone ever has – calls out from the page and evokes a forgotten glory of a national literary tradition that, while perhaps dormant at the moment, waits to be born again.

Family Portrait With Fidel: A Memoir by Carlos Franqui

A memoir of disillusionment and disenchantment with a revolution he once risked his life to support, this memoir by Carlos Franqui, an anti-Batista author and rebel who became editor of the important newspaper Revolución after the dictator’s fall, Franqui’s book shows the betrayal of the Cuban people by the Castro brothers and their allies and the subsuming of hard-fought victories and dreams of progress to totalitarianism. “We carried out all kinds of executions,” Franqui writes at one point. “Real, moral and symbolic.”

Everybody Leaves by Wendy Guerra

A moving elegy to the vanished youth of a Cuban girl’s conflicted and adventurous early life growing up in Cienfuegos and Havana.

Ghost Stories by M. R. James

Classic English ghost stories from one of the masters of the genre, including such gems as “Casting the Runes” and “After Dark in the Playing Fields.” A most enjoyable diversion.

Paradiso by  José Lezama Lima

A complicated, allusive novel of Cuba in the early part of the 20^th century, Lezama’s key work remains one of the greatest achievements of Latin American fiction of his era, and his erotic, poetic prose (“They looked each other over with long pauses of insatiation and a carnality of symphonic progression”) couldn’t be further away from the square, macho military culture of today’s “official” Cuba. A sleeping giant, waiting be discovered.

The End of Eddy: A Novel by Édouard Louis

A beautifully rendered and occasionally brutal and disturbing memoir of growing up poor and gay in  northern France, this book captures the simultaneous ache and occasional truces in difficult, dysfunctional families with great clarity and speaks to anyone who ever felt like a misfit who had to break away into the great unknown.

Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea by Shiraz Maher

A vitally important work in decoding the ideology (cosmology might be a better term) of salafi-Jihadism, this book by a noted British academic (and former radical himself) lays out in minute detail the current jihadi interpretation of such concepts as tatarrus (roughly a theological construct relating to human shields but also expanding into targeting civilians) and their roots in various schismatic schools of Islamic thought.

Mephisto by Klaus Manm

The story of an actor’s seduction by the rewards offered by proximity to power in Nazi Germany, the great German author’s 1936 novel has unnerving parables to the situation here in the contemporary United States, and one wonders how many in the orbit of the current U.S. president and his minions have - or will - mentally echo the performer Höfgen thoughts when, as Mephisto, he meets Herman Goering: ”Now I have contaminated myself…Now there is a stain on my hand that I can never wash off…Now I have sold myself…Now I am marked for life.”

Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction by Elaine Frantz Parsons

The garishly theatrical nature of the early Ku Klux Klan, where elements of minstrelsy combined with brutal violence, is here chronicled in a book that is often revelatory. Formed in Pulaski, Tennessee in May or June 1866 (and not, as is often claimed, by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who only attached to himself to the Klan later), the Klan were defined from the beginning by a relentless repetition of “the portrayal of black people as failed citizens and of white attackers as the people” and sought to destroy black associations and kill their white allies, and to actively and deliberately to destroy familial bonds among freepeople. A vital and important part of U.S. history to be understood.

 Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Perhaps the pinnacle of Syrian dissident literature from a man who spent 16 years in the prisons of the tyrant Hafez al-Assad only to be released and watch the dictator’s son, Bashar al-Assad, take over and level the country, Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s book is a cri de cœur that leaves few unscathed.

Writing that, by early 2012 it was “increasingly clear that the unimaginable situation we had discussed privately - the regime would be willing to destroy the country for the sake of staying in power - was its only political agenda, and that it was already being implemented,” Saleh chronicles massacres in Damascus, Homs and elsewhere and illuminates such critical moments as the July 2012 killing of various Syrian security officers (and the subsequent escalation of the use of barrel bombs) as the moment Iran began taking control of the regime’s defenses.

Saleh scathingly critiques “a neo-bourgeois during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, a class that owes everything to the regime and has a lot to lose were the revolution to emerge victorious” who in turn serve a government who views its people “with contempt and disdain, in a manner no different from a colonizing power’s view of the colonized; this justifies the use of violence against the “backward” masses and cheapens the value of the lives, so much so that killing them is a matter of no great concern.” Saleh sees his hometown of Raqqa slide under control of the jihadists, noting bitterly that he was “unable to walk around the city where I had spent years of my adolescence, where most of my brothers lived, and where my parents had lived until their deaths, while some religiously-obsessed, enraged Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians and Europeans roamed freely, unable to engage in anything other than murder.” Detailing the depredations of the regime’s muscle-bound, murderous shock troops, known as shabiha (many with roots in the seaside city of Latakia), Saleh quotes the Syrian-British writer Rana Kabbani describing pro-regime Western writers - especially Robert Fisk - as "shabiha of the pen." Nor does former U.S. President Barack Obama – whose inaction in the wake of Assad’s August 2013 Ghouta must be seen as a turning point of the war escape critique, cited for his “treacherous and dastardly” deal with Russia’s Vladimir Putin on Syria shortly thereafter.

“Those who had appointed themselves the guardians of international law were reassuring a murderer that they might be compelled to punish him for violating international law,” Saleh writes of the toothless response to the attack. “But without affecting his ability to kill people and with no reference to his other crimes…The international community decided mass slaughter of Syrians by regime wasn’t a crime, but the weapon used was.”

The government in Syria, Saleh writes, only ever offered “a cosmetic modernity…without any emancipatory privileges,” whose “real identity” consisted of “ the combination of an obsolete, inhumane political apparatus with a glamorous material façade.”

Today, seven years after Syria’s war began, the international community’s abandonment of the people of Syria has never seemed more complete.

Foreign Correspondent by Robert St. Johh

An extraordinary first hand account of Europe’s slide into fascism, this memoir contains, among other details, chilling eyewitness accounts of the rise (and fall) of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard and of the destruction of Belgrade by the Nazis. A searing and timely reminder of how quickly a society that thought of itself as civilized can descend into madness.

Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada by Zoé Valdés

A novel of a rebel voice living through the hundred daily humiliations of life in an ossifying tyranny, this book sets out to chronicle “the island that in wanting to build a paradise has created a hell,” and in doing so skewers many hoary myths of Cuba.

“There are those who maintain that people throw themselves into the sea over insignificant economic deprivations - can’t get any blue jeans, can’t find any chewing gum - but anyone who says that simply doesn’t know Cuba,” Valdés writes. “Doesn’t know the terror and hunger the Cuban people have known; people who say that are those whose knowledge of the country is limited to the luxury hotels and the government."

Brief thoughts on Syria and the European refugee crisis

I think at this point we must all ask: What are we - collectively as citizens of Western countries whose actions (and inaction) have contributed so much to this mess - doing to ameliorate the situation of these poor people fleeing Syria, Libya and so on? Though I have not reported on it myself, I feel the situation in Syria, more than any other event today, says so much about who we are as a humanity, now well into the 21st century. There is so much dishonesty and hypocrisy surrounding it: The use and betrayal (again) of the Kurds and the blind eye turned to the pummeling of them by Turkey's would-be sultan; the breaking bread with Saudi Arabia even as they flood Syria and Iraq with money and jihadis; the support by Iran and Russia of the Assad regime, the abandonment of the people of Iraq after we leveled their country...Really, what is the solution to all this, to so much violence, delusion, chicanery and grief? I wish I knew...

Amidst turmoil, Iranian exiles seek to be heard

Amidst turmoil, Iranian exiles seek to be heard

By Michael Deibert

PARIS - When hundreds of thousands of Iranians flooded the streets to protest what they charged was the rigged re-election victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, it was seen by many as one of the most significant moments in the country since its 1979 revolution ended the 38-year reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and replaced it with a theocracy based on the teachings of Shia Islam.

However, as is often the case with internal power struggles in the oil-rich, politically delicate Persian Gulf region, the reverberations from the protests in Iran and the government’s response to them have been felt far beyond Iran’s borders, and have stimulated a whirlwind of debate and lobbying activity among Iranian exiles in North America and Europe.

Between two to three million Iranians are thought to live abroad, with the largest percentage in the Unite States, followed by the European Union, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. In the run-up to June's ballot, the official website of Iran's government said that 304 polling stations had been established in 130 countries outside Iran.

Many voters living abroad are thought to have supported Ahmadinejad’s main opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a supposition that appeared to gain weight with massive pro-Mousavi demonstrations held throughout Europe between the June vote and its formal endorsement by Iran’s designated spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, this August, seven weeks after the election.

Mousavi, who served as Iran’s Prime Minister from 1981 until 1989 (at which point that post was abolished), has run afoul of conservative elements in Iran’s clerical establishment, including Khamenei, with calls for greater civil liberties in the country of 70 million.

A sometimes ally of Ahmadinejad’s, Khamenei’s role in Iran’s political life is specified in Article 107 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a document adopted in a 1979 referendum and modified in 1989. It refers to a “leader” (though not a “supreme leader,” which is an unofficial term of respect), outlining that “the Leader thus elected by the Assembly of Experts shall assume all the powers of the religious leader and all the responsibilities arising therefrom. The Leader is equal with the rest of the people of the country in the eyes of law.”

With Mousavi’s campaign supported by other elements among Iran’s power elite, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (who served as Iran’s president from 1981 until 1987), his partisans have been able to marshall a sustained campaign of protests in and outside of Iran that has little been seen since 1979.

The response of the Ahmadinejad government, chiefly through the Revolutionary Guard branch of Iran’s military and the affiliated Basij militia, has been one of extreme violence and mass arrests, with an unknown number of protesters having been killed and hundreds arrested, many disappearing into Tehran's Evin prison. The death of one protester, Neda Soltan, a 26-year-old music student gunned down during a demonstration, was captured on the camera of a mobile phone, and became something of an iconic image of the protest movement.

“What we are seeing is open criticism of the supreme leader and of the supreme leader’s system, and previously that has been the red line that no one has been able to cross,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington DC, referring to Khamenei. “Both the person and the institution of the supreme leader have been above criticism, and that has now changed.”

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, there are an estimated 1 million Iranian-Americans living in the United States, with substantial Iranian-American communities in San Francisco, New York City and the Washington, DC-Baltimore metropolitan area. In Southern California, the most populous Iranian-American enclave (so much that Los Angeles has occasionally received the sobriquet Tehrangeles), community estimates count some 500,000 among the Iranian-American population there, served by 20 Farsi-language satellite television channels.

In addition, the U.S. government also funds Radio Farda, a Persian language radio station based in Washington, D.C. and Prague, Czech Republic. The station's name means "tomorrow" in Farsi, and its content focuses heavily on Iran, a state of affairs which has resulted in its website being blocked by the Iranian government.

Despite their numbers, however, diaspora voices in the United States and elsewhere have yet to articulate a common approach to Iran’s crisis, with opinions spanning the gamut from former monarchists such as Reza Pahlavi, the former Crown Prince of Iran and eldest son of the late Shah, to civil society groupings such as the Washington, DC-based National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Founded in 2002 and partially funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and the non-profit Tides Foundation, the NIAC’s website states that “the organization currently supports the idea of resolving the problems between the US and Iran through dialogue in order to avoid war.”

“As long as we have a state of flux, the proper path is to do nothing,” says NIAC’s president Trita Parsi, of the proper response of the international community to Iran’s upheaval. “Once you reach a position where a greater consensus has formed, however distasteful engagement might appear, that is the only option the United States hasn’t pursued in the last 30 years. And it has worked to the detriment of the forces of democracy inside the country.”

However, Parsi cautions that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama should “not engage the Ahmadinejad government prematurely” as the true measure of current developments in Iran “may take months or perhaps years, not weeks.”

Many critics of the Iranian government’s response to the protests cite what they charge as its failure to honor the terms of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 27 of which states that “public gatherings and marches may be freely held, provided arms are not carried and that they are not detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam.”

In the wake of the crackdown, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the Mousavi campaign’s key backers, told thousands of worshippers at a prayer event in July that the Islamic Republic was in crisis and the Ahmadinejad government had lost the trust of millions of Iranians who didn’t believe that their votes had been counted.

Another former president, Mohammad Khatami, who governed that country from 1997 until Ahmadinejad’s 2005 election, called for a nationwide referendum on the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad government, though not the Islamic system itself.

“This is not a prelude to a revolution, but a specific demand for civil liberties,” says Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York and a native of the city of Ahvaz in Iran’s southwestern Khuzestan province. “The ruling elite is seriously divided...Everybody has known that there were divisions of opinions and factions within the body politic of the Islamic Republic, but it has never been so open.”

Indeed, as opposed to the Tiananmen Square protests which rocked China in 1989 and were met with a more or less unified iron fist by the Chinese Communist party (and initially, according to the Chinese Red Cross, 2,600 fatalities), today’s dissent in Iran appears to be echoed at the very highest levels of the country’s clerical establishment. Expressions of discontent have be voiced not only by former presidents such as Rafsanjani and Khatami, but also by influential religious leaders such as the long-dissenting cleric Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, based in the holy city of Qom.

The risks run by the clerics and protestors have been signifiant, as Ahmadinejad and Khamenei have tried to label the current power struggle as little more than treason being orchestrated by foreign governments. Staring down at those moved to act, as well, is Iran’s grim human rights record, which, according the New York-based Human Rights watch, has led to Iran being the world’s leader in overall executions, executing more people than any other country except China, with executions having undergone a 300% increase since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005. Iran also leads the world in executing juvenile offenders, persons under 18 at the time of their crime.

Of all diaspora centres in Europe, France has historically been the most vibrant nexus of expatriate Iranian political and cultural life.

Perhaps Iran’s best known author, Sādeq Hedāyat lived off and on in France for much of his adult life, drawing deeply upon the influence of French writers such as Guy de Maupassant before gassing himself in his Paris flat in 1951. Buried in the city's storied Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Hedāyat’s most famous book, Boof-e koor (The Blind Owl), has been heavily censored in modern-day Iran.

In 1978, following his expulsion from the holy city of Najaf, Iraq (where he had lived since 1965) by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s Islamic revolution, spent four critical months strategizing and plotting his return to Iran in the village of Neauphle-le-Château, just outside of Paris.

Today, the Tehran-raised and now Paris-based graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi chronicled her experiences growing up in the Islamic Republic and in exile in Europe in her much-praised works, Persepolis and Persepolis 2.

Following Iran's disputed ballot this year, Satrapi and Vienna-based filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (whose 2001 film Kandahar won the Federico Fellini Prize from UNESCO, and who serves as the the spokesman for the Mousavi campaign abroad), met with Green Party MPs in the European parliament in Brussels. The pair presented what they said was a document from the Iranian electoral commission showing that Mousavi had won the ballot with 19 million votes, a far cry from the official tally that showed 24.5 million votes for the victorious Ahmadinejad and 13.2 million votes for Mousavi.

“We,the Iranian nation, have been taken hostage by the government of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei,” Makhmalbaf said in a speech to the European Parliament in July. “We call on you, the nations and governments of the world, not to give official recognition to the hostage-takers.”

Beyond the passionate artistic dissent of Satrapi and Makhmalbaf, France is also the base for one of the murkiest and most controversial of the exile groups opposing the Ahmadinejad government and Iran’s conservative clerics, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

Founded in Paris in 1981 by Massoud Rajavi, a former supporter of Iran’s Islamic revolution who had fallen out with the Khomeini government, the NCRI grew directly out of the role of Rajavi and his wife, Maryam, as leaders of the Mojāhedin-e Khalq (People's Mujahedin of Iran or MEK, sometimes also abbreviated as PMOI).

With its roots in the firmament of university opposition to the Shah in 1960s Iran and a large portion of its membership female, the MEK blend a peculiar mix of Marxist and Islamic fervor with a rather pronounced and somewhat eerie focus on the Rajavis as objects of public adoration. Leaving Paris in 1986, Massoud Rajavi set up MEK military bases in Iraq for the next two decades with the blessing of Saddam Hussein.

When Massoud Rajavi disappeared in the wake of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (he is now thought to be dead or in hiding), responsibility for the day-to-day running of the NCRI fell to Maryam Rajavi. Following the U.S invasion of Iraq, the MEK was largely disarmed, though its sprawling camps in Iraq’s Diyala Province remained until a violent July 2009 incursion by Iraqi security forces sought to dismantle the camps and evict their residents.

Placed on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations in 1997, the MEK was also placed on the European Union's list of terrorist organizations in 2002, but removed it in early 2009

In a 2005 report titled “No Exit,” Human Rights Watch wrote that former MEK members at the camps “reported abuses ranging from detention and persecution of ordinary members wishing to leave the organization, to lengthy solitary confinements, severe beatings, and torture of dissident members.”

As a measure of the devotion of the group’s followers, when Maryam Rajavi was arrested by French police in June 2003 along with 160 MEK followers on the basis of a court order accusing them of preparing terrorist acts and financing terrorist enterprises from French soil, the group’s supporters staged noisy protests in several European capitals, with several partisans setting themselves ablaze in protest. Rajavi was subsequently released.

The NCRI has apparently taken a page out of the book of the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi exile group whose assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction gained it great influence among Washington’s power elite even though they were later proved false.

In February 2008, the NCRI held a press conference where they charged that Iran was still actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, a claim that ran counter the assessment of the US National Intelligence Estimate - the collective wisdom of all 16 U.S. spy agencies - that Iran halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

Though the group’s links with Saddam Hussein during the vicious 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war are said to have cost it dearly in terms of support on the ground in Iran, the group still has its admirers in Washington.

Tom Tancredo, former Republican member of the United States House of Representatives and failed 2008 presidential candidate, was a vocal supporter of the group during his 10 year stint on Capital Hill, while California Democratic Congressman Bob Filner addressed an NCRI rally in Paris in June 2007, praising the group and Maryam Rajavi in particular. Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee under George W. Bush and a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq, and Florida Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen are also viewed as being sympathetic to the group.

Among quieter voices in the Iranian exile community, however, is the recognition that Iran is currently passing through a supremely delicate and painful moment in its political history.

Above all, they say, the significance of what is happening in Iran now should not be lost on outside observers of the region, and foreign governments should approach this crisis with a new set of eyes, avoiding a repeat of such infamous moments as the ill-fated 1954 coup against Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (carried out with the complicity of British and American intelligence service) or the 2003 Iraq invasion.

While some political players in the West appear genetically disposed to throw their weight behind fire-and-brimstone military scenarios when confronted with the crisis, and while some of those of the intellectual left wrap themselves in ideologically bankrupt slogans about U.S. hegemony far removed from the reality of Iranian risking their lives on the ground, voices in the Iranian diaspora continue to urge, above all things, caution and moderation.

“Any principled person who has a venue and who has a position where they can inform has to be supple intellectually, politically and morally, and be open to the possibility that things can happen beyond our expectations, beyond our theories, beyond our political positioning,” says Hamid Dabashi. “To not allow the facts on the ground as they are unfolding to inform politics and theories, this to me is irresponsible.”

“I think what we are witnessing is not only the rise of national politics into the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf region, but the rise of a civil rights movements quite beyond ideological persuasions or formations.”


Michael Deibert is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

“Freedom always has a price."

For about two hours this afternoon, I found myself transported to revolutionary-era Iran, Vienna, and back again to Paris under the aegis of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s stunning new animated French-language feature, Persepolis. The film depicts the evolution of a Bruce Lee-worshipping, Iron Maiden-listening young girl in Tehran concurrently and in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution that ousted the Pahlavī dynasty and replaced it with a theocracy under a sheen of democracy. Based on Satrapi’s comic book of the same name, both film and book take their titles from the name of an ancient Persian city. We follow the trajectory of the main character through the years of the anti-Pahlavī uprising, through the terror of the Iran-Iraq war, an alternately eye-opening and desperately lonely time at school in Europe and back to Iran.

I must confess that, in the wilderness years between watching Bugs Bunny as a small child and the advent of The Simpsons in the early 1990s, I missed out on the whole comic book/graphic novel thing, preferring “real” books, playing guitar in a series of bands and generally being a working-class roustabout. But I must agree with Variety’s Lisa Nesselson when she writes of Persepolis that the animated feature is an “autobiographical tour de force (that) is completely accessible and art of a very high order."

Today, on a blazingly hot summer’s day here in Paris, in movie theater off Boulevard Saint-Germain, I was duly impressed. The movie’s fluid visual vocabulary, its witty skewering of European youth subcultures, its expert juggling of comedy and pathos and most of all its depiction of the fate of fragile humans in the face of powerful, brutal and unyielding state machinery makes it a very rewarding and thought-provoking cinematic experience.

“Freedom always has a price,” a character says at one point. Indeed, but as this film shows us, it if often a price worth paying.