Republic bee republic
I detest all republicans: communistis, socialists and democrats
By Amir
February 26, 2002
The Iranian
Dear Mr. Mirfendereski,
I find myself writing to you, because I sense in you the inkling of an ability to
read a letter from me. I am also writing to you, because of your obvious open-mindedness
in that you profess in your letter to Bahram and to us ["Keeping
an open mind"], to care more about the content than the form or the
name of a particular government.
Since you are a republican through and through with a hand raised high and facing
a flag with the intention to keep it as straight as it can be, I'll try to do some
straight talking as well, and see if I can protrude through the inherent lie in language
to attempt to allow my will to come through. This will, of course, is beyond
debate, and I am by no means naive enough to make-believe it has some sort of objective,
academic, provable weight in the world: I detest all republicans in all the forms
they appear in: communist, socialist, or the so-called democrat (for want of a better
word.)
The reason for my nausea in the optimistic shinny-happy nature of the herd who believes
that by leveling the pyramid from the bottom up, and by radically violating the rights
of the stronger in the interest of the mediocre caught in the center of the bell-curve,
they can be just, or right, or righteous is that it is essentially a pragmatic lie
as an instrument in the hand of word-mongrels who hope to come to power through a
sophist-icated advert designed to fool the eye-candy-addicted populace in the year
of election.
But I do recognize the need to go easy on the pubescent when attempting to tell
them about the birds and the bees, or enlighten them, and in that sense, I am absolutely
for a slow-moving reform. In that vein, if the name Republic makes it go down
easier, then I am all for rationing and rationalizing the truth in small doses and
I respect and begin to talk to you as an equal with that in mind.
I have already alluded to the some of the basic problems
of republican democracies, but to start at the beginning, let us look back at Democracy
and at the Republic. The advantage of going about it this way is that we will
simultaneously begin at the origin of the specific case we are talking about: Iran.
As I am sure you know, Iran came first to signify a name for a newborn, the child
of Paars and Maad, its pedar o maadar as the tribes united and found their commonality
in their Aryan (aristocratically great) roots, hence the name Iran. The ignoring
of this very simple fact can very easily come to haunt and it is therefore that I
mention it now.
At the fall of Babylon and the first declaration of human rights -- no, it wasn't
the Hebrews with their twisted anti-enlightened, self-centered tradition which later
came to give birth to Islam and Christianity who did it, and it wasn't the now-in-vogue
racist isolationist "democrats" in their back-water village who did this.
It was declared by a Shah, and let there be no doubt about that. Yes at the
time when the affirmation of the will to power and greatness, and a strong belief
in the morality of the stronger brought an all-encompassing empire that provided
religious freedom, a strong infrastructure not to mention some of the up-to-now truly
unsurpassed feats of architecture and art through honor (honar) to all its subjects,
Iran o Aniran, the village dwellers in Athens offered sacrifices to the forces of
nature, and the Europeans were far from understanding that central factor to the
dialectics of enlightenment, namely, that if there is something to be called a God,
it should be none other than the God of Wisdom, and that ultimately wherever there
is to be a cut between the creator and the created, the artist and the artwork, it
is an arbitrary one: God of Wisdom is the wise one, the greatest wise one, and as
we in Persian, still today express greatness in terms of Shah (shahrah, shahrag,
shahcheragh, shahdaaneh, shah...), the Shah should be the wisest one:
"Darius the King says: Ahuramazda bestowed the kingdom upon me; Ahuramazda
bore me aid until I got possession of this kingdom; by the favor of Ahuramazda I
hold this kingdom."
So then we have the Golden age of Athens come about as the Empire was defeated,
something that didn't really mean much to the empire, but was a great feat for the
Europeans. As the result of it, they performed tragedies, some of the best
the world has ever known, through which they reflected the ultimate pessimism as
strength. A Persian-war veteran and the wisest man in Greece (perhaps partly
because of it) however, was put to death through the democratic process as its first
great crime against wisdom. The hoi polloi just could not understand Socrates
and his boys. And none of them did anything to further knowledge anyway, they
didn't care, they were democrats. If they lived today they would probably argue
about the same nonsense that our republican democrats argue about: mediocre nonsense.
One of the old man's boys, the aristocrat Plato however took up the task of furthering
thought. And that's where we get to our other big term of these depeche mode
times: The Republic. Well, all those who have casually glanced over the book
and exercise their democratically given right to babble about it would tell you -
if they were clever enough to see it, - that it is at best a very misguided, tradition
less attempt at duplicating the greatness of the empire, - with the wisest on top,
- and the pyramid format and all that good stuff. It is indeed a precursor
to all of the good stuff that has come out of the republican discourse in Europe
of the century we finally seem to be ready to leave behind, (may Wisdom be with us):
I am of course referring to Communism and Fascism, European style, as they came to
destroy their own kingdoms and declare war on the world, twice.
Of course the greatest attempts at stopping time, the most solid structures that
exist in geometry on this geo, and apart from the religious lies and promises of
another promised one (promised by none other than the priests of resentment no less)
incorporate the pyramid. No matter how many jumbo jets the thugs fly into it,
a pyramid will hold, and the affirmation of this structure in America today and on
our promissory notes is what has turned me on to this Empire and its affirmation
of the truth of what it is (although carefully, because one does not want to agitate
the impressionable.) And it is therefore that I have also stood in that auditorium
and stared at the spread eagle with all its pomp and circumstance that tries to duplicate
Rome, but perhaps unlike you, Mr. Mirfendereski, the whole time I was seeing the
eternal farvahar, and not simply a bald-head.
But let us talk more about this democracy, this republic. If you, sir, seriously
believe that any citizen can go through the process and be elected to an office in
this republic, or any other for that matter on this planet, you have been watching
way too much television. What are the houses of Gore and Bush, Rockefeller
and Kennedy, if not aristocratic powerhouses of this essentially cloaked system that
has only remained powerful and therefore fair to most of its citizen, among which
I count myself?
With the realization of this fact: the fact that most people don't and shouldn't
treat politics as more than simply a sport or hobby, and remain content where they
are and try to advance but not at the cost of the system; it is with this realization,
albeit it unconsciously perhaps, of this fact, that this empire endures and hopefully
will thrive until its eventual overtaking by another, more powerful one in order
to affirm the eternal recurrence of the same, things as they are and ought to be.
Only by looking straight and unobstructed at things in themselves and as they (we)
are, and by avoiding an idealistic sugarcoating of the Is in the name of the Promised,
do we truly have a chance to make advances on the process of enlightenment.
Now there are the discontent, and amongst the lowest ranks of them, the priestly
caste -- and with this I mean to indicate both those who propagate the lies of the
slave-morality openly in mosques, churches and synagogues, and those who are undercover
in academia and profess to think of humanity with their art of sophistry, e.g. the
leftist intellectual and of course the most pathetic of them, the Marxist, - who
try and argue against power, against the nature of things as they are on this planet,
against the Daad (both as the given, and as justice, in one) against the will
to be proud, to raise up high and want to be the best and reach the pinnacle of the
pyramid. These two forces were of course the deciding forces of the fall of
the only Persian dynasty to rule Iran in more than a millennia at the hands of stupidity
and allegiance to foreign and opposing forces, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Along those lines let me add a few words about these pathetic examples of loss and
ignorance, yes the ones who took to the streets during the revolution. What
I resent most about this group of lowly imbeciles is that even today, 23 years later,
among all the empiric as well as rational evidence that they have fucked up royally,
they won't shut their trap. Occasionally I read their pathetic confessions
on Iranian.com and it turns my stomach. I and many others of my generation
are the direct victims of these bastards (drinking Champaign and all no less on the
eve of that horrible winter of darkness) and even today, despite all the French phrases
they steel to appear more susceptible to a good fist-fuck than a Foucault or more
Marxist than Engle's asshole, they have not fully realized what kinds of idiots they
truly are, and think that if only we call the whole thing a Republic all will be
fine. These dunces of the highest grade, pretending to be intellectuals because
of a few half-read books and a despicable taste in revolutionary aesthetic in American
Army coats and Che-scarves no less, who never should have been given the freedom
to act up their adolescent rage against power remind me of 35 year old retards who
still haven't realized that Metallica is crap and has always been and still walk
around in a defiant "kill 'em all" T-shirts.
I
do realize that any good formation needs to have both its Bishop of the right, mainstream
religion, and Bishop of the left, the intellectual-wanna-bes, - still caught in the
old schemes of the slaves who have replaced the proper name Messiah with Revolution,
- working in reverence and deference to the king, and the powerful vizier. But
the sad reality shows that these half-educated dunces will do all they can to provoke
the pawns to attack and scare away their own king, ultimately if not in the service
of the opponent, then in absolute stupidity.
Now I am rambling, and I think my position is clear enough to leave it at that.
But let me conclude by what I think is an important point to keep in mind whether
you think that I am a complete fuck-head or not. The very fact that every time
anyone plays chess (Schach) he or she pays homage to where once was called Iran with
a golden Lion and Sun to signify it, and now has fizzled out into the Islamic Republic,
-- as if Iran needed adjectives -- with a red spider in the middle of its flag; every
time one thinks about the origins of great civilizations beyond the perhaps mythical
Atlantis; whenever one speaks about Wisdom and the project of the enlightenment;
whenever one talks about mastery (pahlavani); whenever ... There will always be a
few of us who feel the blood pumping into the heart and tears welling up in the eyes.
Now whether today's Iranians are ready for a renaissance, or are going to sabotage
it amidst their dark ages by calling it a regression, whether they are going to reform
and update and affirm their traditions, or simply import some more foreign words
to cover up their fundamental misunderstanding and loss of self (i.e. thinking that
foreign words such as "rais Jomhur" or "Republic" are going to
make them enlightened and make all the political power struggles go away,) one thing
must be kept in mind, and that is: no group, not even Iranians who think they are
something more than only Arabs, can be swept under the flying carpet. There
can be no free Iran, unless all points of view can be represented, even those who
still recall the daastaan and the baastaan. If this repression takes place,
it is bound to come back and haunt us again. The fact that in today's Iran,
one almost has to hide one's Iranianness, is very clearly a symptom of a disease
lurking hidden and deep within.
This all is of course not meant to downplay the Islamic tradition, or negate the
Arabic invasion of our language, that in turn also needs to be affirmed and understood:
if growing beards and weeping in rooms filled with the smell of sweaty feet and rosewater
to the declamation of ancient Arabic verses bespeaks one's aesthetic ideals, he or
she (the bearded one!) should absolutely be allowed to get their kicks. But
to make pawns think that they are equal to kings and viziers is not only wrong, it
is irresponsible and cruel. These poor people have gone from not having any
financial means, to being mutilated and murdered (martyred)
through the workings of the idiots who think they could march through Jerusalem after
killing and chasing away all their Generals of the army.
Now as it pertains to the Pahlavis, Reza the first was truly great. I especially
enjoy the anecdote about him personally going down to the mosque and bitch-slapping
a mullah who had called his wife and daughter whores for not wearing the veil.
I think Mohammad Reza should have done the same instead of deportation and SAVAK.
I would have liked to have seen great bitch-slapping ceremonies in which the head
maladapted intellectual would be slapped by the king on national television, with
children given the day off from school to enjoy the festivities. Of course
he was too soft for that, and that was his downfall. If Reza is to come to
power, he is also going to be a liberal softie full of Tropicana orange juice and
that worries me, but the prospect of having a Queen called Noor in the next generation
makes my heart smile as it hasn't happened for at least a millennia and a half in
Iran.
Be yaade far, faryaad!
Amir
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