The revolutionary young

The New Neo Posted on by

The situation in Egypt keeps conjuring up memories of Iran for me. This seems as though it might become relevant again. I hope not; I hope that as events unfold it will turn out there was no analogy after all.

But here’s an excerpt that might send a chill down your spine:

[Iranian exile and author-to-be] Nafisi married early, at eighteen, and attended college at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Her plunge into political activism was as casual (and as literary) as it was leftist:

I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist–though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle.

So, revolution was a mood, an essence, something infectious in the air—rather like bacilli, as it turns out. Nafisi describes the group as markedly Marxist in philosophy and in style, sporting “Che Guevara sports jackets and boots…and Mao jackets and khakis.”

For Nafisi herself, romanticism and literature seem to have been the primary motives, passed somehow through the alchemy of her homesickness and transmuted into political activism:

[I] insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings…I never gave up the habit of reading and loving “counterrevolutionary” writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald—but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers.

Once in Tehran, Nafisi…soon came to bitterly regret the mindless revolutionary zeal of her youth, and to realize that her revolutionary dream had turned into a nightmare, as they so often do:

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.

Although the revolutionaries back in Oklahoma and elsewhere had been decidedly leftist, the revolution they helped birth was a restrictive theocracy. One of the most interesting portions of the book describes how those leftists, at least in the early stages, managed to rationalize and excuse such clear signs that things had gone sharply awry as the imposition of the veil and the subjugation of women.

Nafisi was not one of those excusers, however; she describes her horror at the relentless approach of the suffocating clasp of the mullahs, a chill embrace undreamt of in her leftist days in Oklahoma.

And it got worse, much worse; there are many passages in the book that reminded me uncannily of what it must have been like for French revolutionaries to have watched the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (those who survived, that is), not to mention Stalin’s ex-comrades viewing the purges of their ranks:

In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.

“No, I didn’t, but I should have.” What quiet words of chilling despair! And indeed, one wonders how it was that smart people could have been so dumb; by the mid-to late-1970’s, when Nafisi and her friends were supporting a leftist revolution in Iran, surely the jury was no longer out on the fact that this was a road that would lead to the revolution swallowing its own as well as many others. But we see such a phenomenon again and again, as history repeats itself in its winding, twisting path.

In Nafisi’s case, she seems to have been mainly a romantic, interested in literature almost to the exclusion of other topics—such as history, apparently. Unfortunately for her, she had to learn the lessons of history the hard way, from personal experience. And so, too, did her revolutionary Iranian comrades-in-arms, unfortunately for them—and for us, and for the world as well. They could never have guessed at the trajectory their lives would follow from those long-ago days of sartorial playing at being revolutionaries, sporting Che and Mao jackets, to their final moments in the executioner’s chamber.

An expert weighs in on the Egyptian crisis: Jimmy Carter

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If I were Jimmy Carter, I think I’d keep my mouth shut on the subject of the current Egyptian unrest. But being Carter being Carter, that’s not happening:

Former President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will likely be forced to step down because “the people have decided,” according to a news report.

“This is the most profound situation in the Middle East since I left office,” Carter said…

I’m not sure what “most profound” means, but I would think he’s leaving out a few subsequent events, such as the Iraq War.

But that’s just Carter’s narcissism, which is so familiar as to be unremarkable. What’s more interesting to me is that, although both Carter and the article mention his role in the “historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978,” the entire article proceeds without mentioning the enormous part Carter had in the downfall of the Shah and his replacement with the Iranian theocracy that has been hugely influential in unrest and terrorism in the region and the world ever since.

Carter calls Mubarak “corrupt,” and very few people would quarrel with that; I’m certainly not one of them. He also says Mubarak “will have to leave.” But here’s what happened between Carter and the “corrupt” Shah, who also “had to leave”—and we all know how well that one turned out:

The Shah lived in what’s known as a “rough neighborhood.” This meant that, in order to implement the modernization of Iran, he felt he needed to be harsh in dealing with the opposition. Jimmy Carter was dedicated to the cause of spreading human rights throughout the world, and he decided to put pressure to bear on the Shah to expand civil liberties and relax his policies towards those in his country who were against him.

Carter threatened the Shah with cutting arms shipments, and in response:

The Shah…released 357 political prisoners in February, 1977. But lifting the lid of repression even slightly encouraged the Shah’s opponents. An organization of writers and publishers called for freedom of thought, and 64 lawyers called for the abolition of military tribunals. Merchants wrote letters requesting more freedom from government controls. Some people took to the streets, perhaps less fearful of being shot to death, and they clashed with police. A group of 120 lawyers joined together to publicize SAVAK torture and to monitor prison conditions. Dissident academics formed a group called the National Organization of University Teachers, and they joined students in demanding academic freedom. Political dissidents started disseminating more openly their semi-clandestine publications.

As events spiraled out of control, there were demonstrations throughout Iran. Police reacted harshly, and many protestors were killed, which led to more demonstrations and more deaths, which led to–well, you get the idea.

A genie of dissent had been unleashed–a valid one, because there was much to protest. But as things escalated, and the Shah eventually lost the support of the army and the police (a turning point), few seemed to be prescient enough to predict what forces would replace his regime–not what was hoped for, but what was likely to do so. There were only three choices, and two of them–the mullahs and the Marxists–could reasonably be expected to be far more repressive than the Shah.

Jimmy Carter was probably sincere in wishing that his pressure on the Shah would lead to greater civil liberties, not fewer. But if so, it was one of the gravest miscalculations in history. Be careful what you wish for.

On New Years Eve of 1977:

President Carter toasted the Shah at a state dinner in Tehran, calling him “an island of stability’ in the troubled Middle East….Did the Carter administration “lose” Iran, as some have suggested? Gaddis Smith might have put it best: “President Carter inherited an impossible situation — and he and his advisers made the worst of it.” Carter seemed to have a hard time deciding whether to heed the advice of his aggressive national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wanted to encourage the Shah to brutally suppress the revolution, or that of his more cautious State Department, which suggested Carter reach out to opposition elements in order to smooth the transition to a new government. In the end he did neither, and suffered the consequences.

Even after it became known that the Shah was suffering from cancer, President Carter was reluctant to allow him entry to the United States, for fear of reprisal against Americans still in Iran. But in October, when the severity of the Shah’s illness became known, Carter relented on humanitarian grounds. “He went around the room, and most of us said, ‘Let him in.'” recalls Vice President Walter Mondale. “And he said, ‘And if [the Iranians] take our employees in our embassy hostage, then what would be your advice?’ And the room just fell dead. No one had an answer to that. Turns out, we never did.”…

The rest, as they say, is history.

The fate of Egypt is unknown, but our own fate is tied in with what happens there, just as it was in Iran back in the late 70s, when Carter was our president and the Shah “had to go.”

Egypt: will it be democracy, or will it be…

The New Neo Posted on by

Are Obama and Hillary Clinton becoming neo-neocons? Well, sort of:

Asked if Washington supports Mubarak as Egypt’s leader, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton avoided a direct answer, telling Fox News in an interview, “We have been very clear that we want to see a transition to democracy, and we want to see the kind of steps taken that will bring that about.”

I don’t think much of El Baradei. And, although the Muslim Brotherhood is “willing to let ElBaradei act as pointman for the movement,” I feel fairly safe in saying that he probably won’t be a very permanent pointman.

Will El Baradei be the Brotherhood’s Bakhtiar? For those who don’t get the reference, I’ll refresh your memories:

Shapour Bakhtiar took office as Prime Minister of Iran on Jan 6, 1979. He was appointed by the Shah in one of the latter’s final acts in Iran, a country from which the Shah departed on Jan 16.

But Bakhtiar was not the Shah’s man. He was a well-known dissident who was appointed in an effort to show that the Shah was ready to reform in ways that would satisfy those who were proponents of greater freedom and civil liberties in Iran.

The Shah is one of those figures in history who, like Ataturk in Turkey, was faced with the dilemmas common to those who would modernize and Westernize a third-world country, and especially one with a strong traditional Islamic clerical tradition. It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss why Ataturk was able to successfully buck the fairly substantial opposition of religious leaders and the populace in Turkey, and why the Shah’s effort ultimately failed in Iran. Some day I may attempt to tackle that one–but suffice to say for now that the Iranian Shah had the same goal of modernization as Ataturk, but the opposition to his rule was stronger, and his efforts to crush it far more Draconian…

On Bakhtiar’s appointment as the new Prime Minister, Khomeini condemned him, of course, from his exile in France. But Khomeini continued to live his charmed life; Bakhtiar allowed him to return to Iran shortly thereafter. The reason? A combination of Bakhtiar’s own devotion to freedom of speech, and the Shah’s old conundrum: Khomeini was so popular that to try to ban him would cause such public unrest in Iran that it seemed counterproductive. In essence, Bakhtiar, although a far different ruler than the Shah, faced the same dilemma; he resolved it in favor of not suppressing the opposition.

So who was Bakhtiar? Like many Iranians, he’d spent many formative years in France, acquiring graduate degrees in political science, law, and philosophy. But he was also a man of action; residing in France during the Nazi occupation, he fought for the Resistance. Returning to Iran after WWII, he continued his resistance, becoming an opponent of the Shah, who imprisoned him for many years.

Thus Bakhtiar had his bona fides–no patsy of the Shah, he had been one of the leaders of those who were against the Shah’s regime because of its human rights abuses, and he himself had suffered greatly for his bravery. But by the time Bakhtiar came to power it was most decidedly too late, both for him and for the Shah’s modernization program, as well as for the civil rights that Bakhtiar championed. Perhaps the only beneficiary of that campaign for civil rights was Khomeini himself, ironically enough.

Bakhtiar’s regime lasted about two weeks before Khomeini and the clerics took over, establishing the primacy of Sharia law, abolishing most of the rights women had enjoyed, banning alcohol and gambling and a host of other un-Islamic pursuits as well as newspapers, and instituting his own murderous crackdown to stifle all opposition. Khomeini didn’t have to worry about making martyrs of his enemies, nor about whether to allow them to remain in Iran and exercise freedom of speech. Tyranny doesn’t struggle with the same sort of philosophical questions about how much toughness is too much, questions with which its opponents wrestle mightily:

It was announced that any spreading of corruption would be punished by death. A variety of the Shah’s former friends, colleagues and generals were seized, and after trials of a few minutes they were executed immediately – to prevent news spreading to the others who were detained – the executions lasting without stop for several weeks. The bodies of the prisoners were loaded into meat containers and dumped into mass graves. Khomeini dismissing international protests, saying that criminals did not need to be tried, just killed.

Bakhtiar, however, was not one of them–at least, not right away. He left Iran and settled in Paris again. From that venue he organized another resistance–a movement to fight the Islamic Republic of the mullahs. For his pains, he was almost assassinated in 1980; a policeman and a neighbor died, but Bakhtiar lived to fight another day.

In 1991, however, the number of this brave man was finally up. The assassins got their man; Bakhtiar and his secretary were murdered in his home. The assailant later was captured and tried in France. At his trial he admitted to having been sent by the Iranian government.

What lessons can we draw from the life of Bakhtiar? The first is that one can be both committed to freedom and personally courageous, and yet lose the battle against repression and tyranny. The second is more of a question: is it sometimes acceptable (or perhaps even necessary) to use greater ruthlessness, to be willing to use oppressive tools against an enemy that–if successful–would not hesitate to abolish all the civil liberties and the advances for which you are fighting?

This is the dilemma faced not just by Bakhtiar, but by all those who would oppose the likes of Khomeini. How much of a crackdown is too much? How little is too little? At what point do you compromise your own principles so much that you become too much like the enemy you are fighting?

There are no easy answers. Only the questions–and Khomeini’s regime, in its present-day manifestation, Ahmadinejad– remain.

Come to think of it, Bakhtiar was 100 times the man El Baradei is. And yet ultimately he was defeated by the forces of tyranny.

Egypt: breaking some eggs

The New Neo Posted on by

“Rumors are circulating everywhere. You don’t know what’s true and what’s not true.”

That statement by Sharif Abdul Bakhi (my phonetic spelling), a man living on the outskirts of Cairo who was just interviewed on CNN, seems to say it all. And he doesn’t know what’s going on even though he’s in Cairo; most of us are not (fortunately).

So far reports vary, but it seems that scores of people have died in the riots. Is this only the beginning of the violence, or will it be contained? Lenin famously said that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. What sort of omelet is being cooked up right now?

And Israel wonders most particularly, although most of the speculation is that whatever the result, it won’t be good for that beleaguered country.

I have an extremely apprehensive view of what’s going on. It feels potentially like a runaway train. Whatever the protesters have in mind (other than doing away with Mubarek) is unclear. And whatever they have in mind may become irrelevant, because other more pernicious forces can easily co-opt the movement and take over.

And the US, and Obama? I have to say that this is one of the moments I have a small amount of sympathy for him. Yes, he may be in over his head, but wouldn’t almost anyone be? No one foresaw this; no one. That said, I would deeply prefer that more realistic and informed heads were involved. Exactly whom these people might be, and what they would actually say or do, I don’t know. I just know they’re not at the helm right now, and that makes me especially uneasy.

[ADDENDUM: John Bolton chimes in.]

Netflix thinks…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that because I enjoyed “The Great Escape” I will also enjoy “Fiddler On the Roof.”

Netflix is nuts.

Netflix thinks that because I enjoyed “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” I will also enjoy “The Madness of King George.” In this case, Netflix is probably not nuts, although King George most likely was.

Netlix thinks that because I enjoyed “In Treatment, Season 1” I will also enjoy “In Treatment, Season 2.” This seems eminently sensible. And yet I did not. Go figure.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Politely philosophical bot with an odd idea of what seems comforting:

good post, I enjoy reading it. I hope 1 time I may acquire identical. have a nice day time. – Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought.

Nabokov and poetic justice: the artist as scientist

The New Neo Posted on by

The news that Vladimir Nabokov, illustrious author and respected lepidopterist, came up with a theory of butterfly evolution that was poo-pooed in his time but which has now been vindicated by DNA research has made me unaccountably happy.

Nabokov speculated that the butterfly that was his specialty, known as the Polyommatus blue, had come over from Asia over many millions of years ago in five distinct waves. It was a theory few credited at the time. My guess is they chalked it up to his artistic nature, a flight of fancy for which he could be forgiven, just this once. But now a team has applied the newest technology involving DNA to his notion, and:

On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

“It’s really quite a marvel,” said Naomi Pierce of Harvard, a co-author of the paper.

Quite.

Nabokov was a bona fide literary genius. Although I confess I’m not fond of the bulk of his work, what I like of it I like very much indeed: his memoir Speak, Memory, and some short stories.

The memoir is an atypical one, not really an autobiography but instead a series of vignettes, linked by the author’s elegant virtuosity and characteristic coolness, but with a warm and beating heart animating the work at its core. Nabokov’s tribute to his father, who was killed by an assassin in Berlin in 1922 under dramatic and heroic circumstances, is an exceptionally touching chapter.

Nabokov senior helped nurture his son’s passion for butterflies, which he shared. This interest of the younger Nabokov ultimately led him to the position of curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the publication of quite a bit of scientific writing as well.

An entire chapter of Speak, Memory is devoted to his fervor for collecting butterflies, which he developed as a young boy around the family estate. The following passage from the book describes one of those early efforts, and gives you an idea of the passion behind the brilliance of his later scientific pursuits:

Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species—vanilla, lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

Let us leave him there for now. We can visit whenever we want, by reading the prose he left behind.

Egypt in turmoil

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t yet written about the demonstrations and turmoil in Egypt, because I keep trying to find a report that seems to have a handle on what is actually occurring there—and even more importantly, what might be about to happen there.

I’ve given up on the latter, though. Once such forces are unleashed, it’s very difficult to know who is in control and who will emerge victorious. That’s the reason that US realpolitikers have tended to support the status quo and the strongmen who represent it.

If you want a roundup of what’s happening in Egypt right now as best we can tell, see this, this, and this, as well as this on the internet ban.

This article has an ominous tone to me. I have been concerned from the start about the possible influence and popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood, a currently-banned Islamist fundamentalist group that has its roots in Egypt in the earlier part of the twentieth century. And here’s some background on the position of El Baradei, who might (accent on the “might”) be in a position to take charge in a while.

The Egyptian people are protesting in favor of democracy. As a person who remembers the turmoil of the Iranian revolution of 1979—the different groups temporarily united for the Shah’s overthrow and then jockeying for position (vainly) against the fundamentalist Islamists who quickly established their dominance—I have to say the situation makes me nervous. But as my moniker indicates, I’m strongly for democracy—if it goes hand in hand with liberty and is not merely a case of “one person, one vote, one time” and after that, tyranny and rigged elections.

Which will it be in Egypt? Or will it be something in-between? I don’t even pretend to know. Nor, I believe, does anyone else.

[ADDENDUM: El Baradei is now under house arrest.]

Going through the files

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Yesterday I took on the chore of trying to tidy up and streamline my filing cabinets.

Not one of my favorite activities. But in a way it is—at least the fantasy I have regarding how the files will end up. Streamlined, color-coded, wonderfully organized so I can go there immediately, open the correct drawer, and find anything I’m looking for in an instant. All the extra stuff I don’t need gone, with only the essentials remaining.

Dream on.

In the meantime, I found myself stunned by what’s in there that I’d forgotten. Oh, I knew about the medical records and the old report cards and my passport and that sort of thing. But the rest!

The letters, for example. Notes from literary magazines rejecting my short stories (the more precious ones stating: “we liked this but,” and “please send us more of your work.”) The letter from the magazine that had accepted my story (for $3,000!) pending a few word changes, and then promptly altered its policy and stopped publishing fiction; no sale. Postcards from my husband-to-be when we were courting (quaint word, that). A copy of my father’s will, probated when he died in 1977, beginning with what must have been the standard subject heading whenever it was composed: “IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN.”

On and on and on it went. Lists and lists of projects I’d thought of starting—now I’m old enough to know I never will do most of this stuff. Things I hadn’t known I’d had in the first place, or that I’d forgotten I’d saved. And all of it made of paper.

It struck me how archaic all this was, and how very thoroughly the computer has taken over. Letters? Who gets them anymore? And yet they seemed so much more real than any email possibly could be. All these years later I can still hold them in my hand, and they partake of the essence of the people who wrote them. Time has not yet made them so fragile they’re in danger of disintegrating.

But till then, they will sit in my filing cabinets. Who’s to say what’s essential and what’s not?

The filibuster stays: I wonder…

The New Neo Posted on by

…whether this agreement of McConnell’s is binding. Can he sign away his rights to amend the filibuster rules if he wins the Senate Majority Leader position in 2012? And what if the Republicans win control of the Senate in 2012, but then boot out McConnell and elect someone else as Leader? Would the Leader still be bound by McConnell’s agreement?

I don’t think the Republicans are contemplating ending the filibuster, anyway, even if they should win in 2012. They’re not ones to go for the jugular; at least the current crop isn’t. And in fact it would be a generally bad idea for either party to change the filibuster rules, unless you believe the end justifies the means. This particular check on power benefits us all in working against the tyranny of an “overbearing majority” of which I wrote in this article. Once the filibuster is undone by either party, we would lose its protective value forever.

But the Democrats should have shut up about it, then. Before the 2010 election they talked and talked about doing away with the filibuster in the new session. Does anyone have any doubt that they would have done so if they hadn’t performed so badly in the last election? The only thing that stops them from doing away with the filibuster right now is the fact that they lost so many members, as well as fear of losing more in the future. If and when Republicans take over, the Democrats will be singing the praises of the filibuster once more.