Letters

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Tuesday
June 19, 2001

No middle ground

I've read some of the letters written about Leila Pahlavi. Somebody said: "Why some of us Iranians have to bring ourselves down to such lowest depths of humanity? ... Why do we have to prove that we are still a bunch of treacherous, inhuman and deeply callous characters?"

Isn't hatred one of the features of Irannian culture? In theory, we hear a lot that:

- Irannians are 'noble' Aryans
- pendaareh nik, kerdaareh nik, goftaareh nik
- Muslems are kind & don't even step on ants
- Irannians often brag & look down at Americans/Canadians/Australians: "inhaa messleh maa taarikh nadaarand"
- Many articles with so much kind words in them: "nassihat", "azizaaneh man" , "khaaharaan / baraadaraan"...
- If you fly, you'd be a bird; If you walk on water, you'd be a stick;

Love & be loved if you want to be somebody. But in practice:

- In the early days of the Bahai faith, some were paraded in the city with lit candles inserted in holes made in their bodies. What kind of 'creatures' would do this?!
- It was said that SAVAKIs were imported from Israel (coz mardomeh sharifeh Iran wouldn't torture fellow Irannians!).

Surely they must all have gone back by now, so there should not be any torture in Iran, right?

- Look at the chat forums of Irannians. It's all swear words & hatred. Goftaareh nik? And most of them have fake ID's or names, WHY?!
- They can't even organize a poetry night outside Iran due to hatred / ego / arrogance / division.
- So much lies & hatred & division & killing. My Western friends make fun of me by mimiking me "I Killl U", which made me realize that I say it too often (jokingly) & this is not common in the West.
- Every party/group HATES every other party/group.
- They always find a scapegoat: Shah / Fallaahian/... 'They' caused / forced the hatred / killing / torture. NO, it wasn't Stalin who killed / tortured millions of Russians, it was the Russian people who did it.
- Millions of them think all their female singers are whores. Others think they are filthy rich, yet others love their female singers to death.

Can we expect more from a culture that brags & takes pride in "Boro kaar meekon magoo chist kaar"? BUT in reality everyone knows that "Kaar maaleh khareh": If you work hard, you are KHAR-kaar if you study hard, you are KHAR-khoon. The word for a laborer is an insult: amaleh!

They either love you to death (usually after you are dead: the things they said / did to Neemaa; then they made him a hero after his death), or hate you to death. One way or another it's always DEATH.

Look at how they treated their KING. I heard nothing but "Javid-Shah" for years & years. Everybody had his picture in their shops / offices, then all of a sudden blind-savage-hatred. Now somebody else's picture has to be in every shop / office (till another cycle of hatred starts?)!

I still remember seeing on TV some people holding & kissing pictures of Valiahd, but look at them now? Can they be trusted? They are full of emotions that can be easily changed over night & explode & cause so much harm.

I remember some Irannian guy saying years ago to his kids "iraninaa hamisheh poshte aadam harf dar miaaran" Once in a park I saw an Irannian father telling his child, who was trying to touch a bird, "nah baabaa joon dast nazan, sang bendaaz behesh."

They burn a cinema full of people to blame the opposition! They start a bloody / savage war & fight it blindly & almost destroy the country. Then they go around blaming each other for starting it (or blame the Brits/U.S. Why were you stupid to be fooled?). They write books later & call each other names, but their 'facts' are so full of bias that you don't know who to believe.

Even big / super revolutionaries now write books saying they were so "hysterical" with the 'fever of revolution' that they didn't see what was happening / coming. And accuse others of stealing the revolution.

It all seems to be full of hate, begging (holy Imams to fix their everyday trivial problems), mocking others (Torkeh, Rashtieh, etc. So even oustside religion they don't have 'unity') and mourning / azaadaari over & over & over.

Even the music is so sad religious chanting one minute, then it explodes into dancing (read sinful) rythem.

There is no middle ground. It is either too hot, or too cold. Everything is a sin: laughing, singing, dancing. But in a wedding anything goes & people go crazy: dance / sing / cry /... for hours. Nothing is serious & there is no integrity: you lie, you cheat, you bribe, you beg. "Sakht nageer baabaa, khosh baash, dammet garm."

In late 1978 people used to say "come to my house tonight for 'Allaho-Akbar-Baazi'" (going to the roof & shouting AA). As if it was a joke, people going to demonstrations & laughing & not having a clue what they were doing. Same people who used to shout with all their being 'Javid Shah', now say 'Marg bar shah'!?

I have met many who went to 'tazaahoraat', but now live in the West with two passports (which is not allowed) & say "maa nemeedoonestim". All lies / emotion / ego / gheyrat / mardaanegi / fanaticism / hatred / hysteria & no brain! Then they blame the West for manipulating / fooling them for over a century! Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

To make things worse, the 'facts' seems to depend on whose side you are on. I saw one documentary where they showed a film of a young Russian woman lecturing peasants in 1924 during Stalin rule. Then she was shown in her old age talking with pride how she used to wear birch-bark sandles & didn't have anything, but the revolution gave her everything, so she loved Stalin. Then another guy was saying how he suffered in the camps for years & how he hated Stalin because of it. Yet in another documentary, this Russian guy says "no wonder we are a nation of thieves & murderers; we killed all our intellectuals & educated people in cold blood."

The scorpion wants to cross the river and asks the frog if he can climb onto his back and have the frog swim across the stream. The frog says, well no, because you will get excited & sting me. The scorpion says, no I won't. So the frog tells him to jump on his back, and together they swim to the middle of the river. Sure enough the scorpion gets excited & stings the forg. The forg says: see I told you this would happen, now we are both gona die, why did you do it? The scorpion says: We are in the Middle East; you're looking for logic?!

AdmZad

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