Old Men ought to be Explorers

10:58 pm: For these times
  

Hafiz, by Mahmud Farshchian

In a corner of my bookshelves, I found John Bowen's 1948 Poems from the Persian. And leafing through it, I came across this little gem by the great 14th-century poet Hafiz, which sounds as if it had been written after, and about, June 2009.

Patience and Victory
Are friends of one another --
Victory a golden youth,
Patience like a mother.
Patience sedately walks
Somewhat old and blind;
Victory superbly stalks
One step behind.
Unto us who have endured
He bears a golden cup --
And in the evening, Hafiz says,
That step he catches up.

12:12 am: One of Roger's best
   
Roger Cohen has rarely been more outspoken, and more thought-provoking, than in this column. 

Two weeks after Iran’s ballot-box putsch, mysteries still envelop it. Why have a pre-electoral freedom-fest, bring hundreds of journalists to Tehran to witness it, then put on a horror show, throwing them into jail or out of the country? Everything I saw — the sheer brazen clumsiness of the vote theft and its hysterical, club-wielding aftermath — suggest a last-minute decision.

I agree with him, on grounds that are over 400 years old. In working on the life and career of Sir Philip Sidney, I've had occasion to learn a sickening amount about the St Bartholomew's Massacre in Paris (and which spread to other French cities).

In August 1572, the government consisted of the King, Charles IX; and his mother, Catherine de' Medici, the Florentine widow of his father, King Henry II. There was a war of religion going on: the Protestants (now beginning to be called Huguenots, probably from the Swiss 'Eidgenossen' or 'confederates') were led by King Henry of Navarre (on the Spanish border) and Admiral de Coligny, the Catholic hardliners by Duke Henry of Guise.

Charles and Catherine had, they thought, devised a diplomatic way of dealing with the growing divisiveness: arrange the marriage of Henry of Navarre with Charles's sister, Princess Marguerite. It wasn't a marriage very popular with anyone (least of all the bridal couple), but that was how things worked. The advantage for the Huguenots was legitimation, and they flocked to Paris in their hundreds, cutting a dash even though dressed in severe black. 

Paris had always been a hotbed of ultra-Catholicism, and throughout the summer, friars preached damnation and violence on street corners and in churches. It was a hot summer, hatred simmered, and the mob was becoming inflamed.

Then someone, doubtless with high-level backing, tried to assassinate the Admiral with a firearm, but missed. The King, for whom Coligny was a father-figure, visited him and made much of him, which angered the hardliners even more.

On August 24th the marriage took place at Notre Dame cathedral, with the groom and his attendants waiting outside while the Mass was performed. There was an unnerving tension in the air, and everyone sensed something was going to explode.

No one really knows who took the decision, but a certain amount of planning did go on: the Old Louvre palace's doors were locked, and all the boats chained up on the Left Bank. Then, several hours earlier than planned, the great bell of neighbouring St Germain l'Auxerrois church tolled, and the killing began. In all likelihood it was, as Roger Cohen put it concerning the post-election crackdown, a panic decision. Charles and Catherine, basically moderates and realists, were being so hard-pressed by Henry of Guise (nicknamed the 'King of Paris') and his followers that they lurched into violence.

The result makes Tehran look like a picnic. Several thousand people were murdered in the streets and houses of Paris, amid scenes of carnage that would even appal modern journalists. The Admiral was torn from his sickbed, stabbed and defenestrated. Even foreigners were not safe: the British Embassy on the Left Bank collected a couple of dozen terrified English visitors and kept them in some security, but it was a close thing. Sidney and a couple of others, who had been guests in the Louvre, were put in the care of an aide of Catherine's, the Italian Duke of Nevers, who put them behind himself and a few others on horseback, riding pillion, and eventually delivered them to the Embassy, though not before having given them a caustic tour of the massacre in progress. The total cost in lives is impossible to know, but 10,000 seems reasonable to most historians.

What is interesting is also the aftermath. In the first instance, the repression worked. The Huguenot leadership was decimated, the Huguenot presence much reduced. Secondly, Europe's Protestant countries were appalled into greater intransigence (though the Pope, the same Gregory XIII who gave us the calendar, celebrated a Te Deum and thanksgiving Mass in Rome). Thirdly, the effectiveness did not last. Protestantism was not suppressed in France, the fighting went on, in the provinces if not in Paris. Eventually, after another 26 years (things happened more slowly then), a deal was reached for coexistence, the Edict of Nantes in 1598. To get there, it took: Charles IX's death, his brother Henry III's murder of the Duke of Guise and his brother the Cardinal; Henry's own murder by an enraged monk; and Henry of Navarre's -- now Henry IV's -- conversion to a cautious and diplomatic Catholicism.

It does show what happens when those at the centre of power panic.

There is one contemporary painting of the Massacre (including the defenestration of Coligny's corpse), by François Dubois, undoubtedly from eyewitness sources (he was 45 at the time). Click on it to enlarge and see details. Caution: disturbing content.

11:59 pm: Useful background
  
Very thorough and informed background on the Iran situation on the British FT site.

09:49 pm: Quote of the day
   
This from Ship of Fools (see link on left):

Justin Barrett of Oxford University says that current research points to the conclusion that children’s minds are hardwired to believe in God. This is rather frustrating news for us parents, meaning that all the time and effort we put in to indoctrinating our children only achieves what would have happened anyway if we left them alone.

It gives you a whole new level of respect for atheists, though, doesn’t it, considering the amount of work they must put in to reprogramme their kids, without even the help of Sunday school or hell.

09:07 am: Surrealism
  
I can't resist putting up another Christopher Middleton poem.

For a Junior School Poetry Book

The mothers are waiting in the yard.
Here come the children, fresh from school.
The mothers are wearing rumpled skirts.
What prim mouths, what wrinkly cheeks.
The children swirl through the air to them,
trailing satchels and a smell of chalk.

The children are waiting in the yard.
The mothers come stumbling out of school.
The children stare primly at them,
lace their shoes, pat their heads.
The mothers swirl through the air to cars.
The children crossly drive them home.

The mothers are coming.
The children are waiting.
The mothers had eyes that see
boiled eggs, wool, dung and bed.
The children have eyes that saw
owl and mountain and little mole.

08:53 am: Ripples
   

Alexandre Adler

This morning, trying to tune in to an excellent foreign-affairs analyst, Bernard Guetta, on French radio, I hit the wrong station and found myself listening to his colleague, whom I admire even more, Alexandre Adler. This man, whom I've had occasion to mention before, can pack into one column more intelligent connections between seemingly disparate events than anyone. Someone once said of Le Monde, 'it's not a newspaper, it's a university': reading Adler is a continuing education. 

This morning, though, he spoke, on the radio station France Culture, about Russia. Why, he asked, is Russia behaving with such unwonted discretion and politeness toward the West, lately? I had heard that it had to do with oil and gas pricing, but Adler saw a different link. It is, said he, the events and the situation in Iran.

Russia signed a number of, for them, crucial accords with the Iranians, but the Iranians who signed them and whom they consider their allies are not Khamenei and not Ahmadinejad: they are Rafsanjani, Moussavi, and Khatami. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad loathe the Russians, who to them are godless crooks: they want an alliance with Pakistan, with the Taliban, and an Islamist international.

And so, one unexpected event of the Sea of Green is to drive America (and, one supposes, Europe) and Russia closer together, reminding them that in a crucial part of the world their allies, if not always all their interests, are the same.

08:28 am: Not a typical revolution
    

Tehran, 25-6 June

Good analysis here.

06:34 am: Trying to think
  


This picture of demonstrators in Tehran carrying the image of Neda accompanies a thoughtful and moving post of frustration on Andrew Sullivan's blog, which is worth reading at this time, two weeks after the original event: 'Email of the Day' for June 25. It expresses what, I think, all of us feel who have been taken out of our ordinary preoccupations and moved to the core by these people who are showing us daily that 'struggle' is no longer a term of Marxist or Maoist jargon but a harsh, grinding and often bloody reality.

My parents' generation knew this during World War II. Mine has been spared it in our lands. Now we see it happening in a country with which, in spite of its geographical and cultural distance, we can feel so much in common -- much more than, say, with Saudi Arabia. For several years I've seen Persian films by Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf, amongst others, and wondered with delight that the same country that produced Khomeini and Ahmadinejad could engender such sensitivity and openness of spirit. And now Mohsen M., currently living in Paris, is the spokesman for Moussavi.

Yesterday a Twitter on #iranelection led me to a video, undubbed, of Ahmadinejad addressing a group of clerics in Qom, supposedly on the morrow of the election. A French translation had been overprinted on the images. The comments people had written were violent and what one would expect. But Ahmadi himself was, to me, surprising. He was sitting at the table next to his mentor, almost hunched into a corner, speaking softly and with what to me seemed entirely unfeigned and deep sincerity and humility. He seemed not a victor nor a slick puppet crowing, but a man talking almost privately about his faith. One comment said, 'he is the Hitler of our times'. No Hitler this. Whatever sneering he does to the West, I couldn't see the shallowness of Schicklgruber. Simple, yes; shallow, no. 

But. The problem began as the address went on, haltingly, then more fluently, and one read what he was saying. Yes, a sincere faith; but the content of that faith is the problem. It may be true, as he said, that youth is hungry for faith and spirituality. But in the first place they seem to be hungry for obtaining fairness and having a voice (somebody wrote that 'Neda' means 'voice' in Farsi). Moreover, the faith and spirituality he referred to is clearly one imposed from above; and we have seen by what means. I cannot imagine any evolved religion in which it can be considered right to beat and shoot people into faith. Is the fact that 'Islam' means 'obedience' part of the problem?

We have seen the means. Which brings me to the other thought of this time -- nothing original, but still worth a continuing reflection. Boots have always come down on living faces, alas, in the history of our peculiar species. I have worked on the St Bartholomew's Massacre in Paris and elsewhere in August 1572, when thousands of people -- Protestants -- were murdered in the capital alone and the furor spread to the provinces. What makes this struggle special is information. They can block Internet sites, put Moussavi under house arrest, expel Jon Leyne of the BBC, muzzle the MSM, but they can't stop all information getting out. And so we are pulled in daily, and even our distracted, forgetful selves, with cultural and almost congenital ADD, are not allowed to forget that it is going on. This is what makes it different. By now -- two weeks later -- the MSM are starting to react against the Twitter stream, I've noticed: unsurprising, as long as we remember that what they are expressing is their own professional frustration and jealousy. (Even the BBC no longer has a link to #iranelection on its site.) But even when it diminishes, it still goes on. Which allows us, frustrated also in other ways, to continue what the Dutch call our 'medeleven' -- our living-with them.

Finally, one reason this struggle so captures our imagination is that there is a chance. The struggle of TIbet, for instance, is different, and even more tragic: that little country of irrepressibly cheerful mountain folk (I knew some of them in Canada) which also became a planetary centre of spirituality should have been placed under UN protection as one of the world's cores of holiness. But it never had a chance: the Chinese gorilla sleeps where it likes. In Iran there is a chance: the two sides are much more nearly equal. So here we are, so far from the action, both cheering and weeping on the sidelines: feeling a little guilty that those courageous young people (with the Moussavis at their head) are doing all the fighting and suffering, but aware that their struggle -- and the awesomely intelligent man in the White House (what good fortune!) -- is crucial to our near and distant future.  

07:06 pm: Mental health break - forgotten poetry
  
'Edward Lear in February'

Since last September I've been trying to describe
two moonstone hills,
and an ochre mountain, by candlelight, behind.
But a lizard has been sick into the ink,
A cat keeps clawing at me, you should see my face,
I'm too intent to dodge.

Out of the corner of my eye --
an old man (he's putting almonds into a bag)
stoops in the sunlight, closer than the hills.
But all the time these bats flick at me
and plop, like foetuses, all over the blotting paper.
Someone began playing a gong outside, once.
I liked that, it helped; but in a flash
neighbours were pelting him with their slippers and things,
bits of coke and old railway timetables.

I have come unstuck in this cellar. Help.
Pacing up and down in my own shadow
has stopped me liking the weight it falls from. 
That lizard looks like being sick again. The owls
have built a stinking nest on the Eighteenth Century.

So much for two moonstone hills,
ochre mountain, old man
cramming all those almonds into a bag.
 
                                        Christopher Middleton

01:30 am: Pray for them
    
This interview with a hospital worker in Tehran:

I only want to speak about what I have witnessed. I am a medical student. There was chaos at the trauma section in one of our main hospitals. Although by decree, all riot-related injuries were supposed to be sent to military hospitals, all other hospitals were filled to the rim. Last night, nine people died at our hospital and another 28 had gunshot wounds. All hospital employees were crying till dawn. They (government) removed the dead bodies on back of trucks, before we were even able to get their names or other information. What can you even say to the people who don't even respect the dead. No one was allowed to speak to the wounded or get any information from them.

This morning the faculty and the students protested by gathering at the lobby of the hospital where they were confronted by plain cloths anti-riot militia, who in turn closed off the hospital and imprisoned the staff. The extent of injuries are so grave, that despite being one of the most staffed emergency rooms, they've asked everyone to stay and help--I'm sure it will even be worst tonight. What can anyone say in face of all these atrocities? What can you say to the family of the 13 year-old boy who died from gunshots and whose dead body then disappeared? This issue is not about cheating (election) anymore. This is not about stealing votes anymore. The issue is about a vast injustice inflected on the people. They've put a baton in the hand of every 13-14 year old to smash the faces of "the bunches who are less than dirt" (government is calling the people who are uprising dried-up torn and weeds). This is what sickens me from dealing with these issues. And from those who shut their eyes and close their ears and claim the riots are in opposition of the government and presidency!! No! The people's complaint is against the egregious injustices committed against the people.

No comment needed, or possible.

04:10 pm: Resistance
      
I was born under German occupation. This weekend -- of Bloody Saturday in Tehran, of courage and blood, and of mainstream Western media getting tired of it all after ten whole days -- I was at a reunion of my family-in-law on the Plateau of Glières, in the French Alps of Haute-Savoie, where just below our chalet stands the monument to a few hundred French resistance fighters who held off 4,000 German soldiers with heavy artillery for two weeks in 1944 and made the 'Battle of Glières' a symbol of the stubborn will to freedom.


Glières today                                click on pictures for larger versions

It's peaceful now, with wild flowers in profusion and the sound of cowbells day and night (the cows are driven by a man in a small white car, out of which his dog springs periodically to chase them through a gate). The monument, erected in 1974, thirty years after the event, when writer André Malraux was Minister of Culture, is far from beautiful. 



But step in through the base, and there are simple, stark reminders.



The story is told in this panel and its continuation, in hard, bloodred letters. On the opposite wall, in huge black capitals:

VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR

Carved in the steel entrance door, the Cross of Lorraine; and at the room's end, a simple figure with an arm raised in protest:



And outside, the French tricolor raised on a mast in honour of commander Tom Morel, betrayed to and shot by the Germans at the end of the battle:




Burial of Tom Morel, in 1944, at this site

Normally, this would be a simple, impressive visit that gives one to think about past and present and political and moral principles. But seeing it on this weekend, both near to and far from where resistance against fearful odds was happening, brought tears to my eyes. 

Glières helped give us a freedom the precariousness of which has been forgotten.

Someone wrote that 'if it succeeds, it's a revolution; if it fails, it's a revolt.' Yet the birth of my native land, which succeeded by any standards, is now known to historians as the Dutch Revolt, not the Dutch Revolution. What will this month's events in Iran be known as? The Green Revolt? The Forgotten Uprising? Or the beginning of a rebirth, a Renaissance of that wonderfui country that produced Firdausi, Omar Khayyám, and, in its word for 'garden', gave us Paradise?

1944 photo from http://www.glieres-resistance.org/

11:26 pm: Far away
  
I'm in Annecy, in Eastern France, with a French keyboard, trying to listen to Tehran. This is not conducive to up-to-date reactions, or thinking, especially after 600 kms of driving and 4 hours sleep. But what I have seen on Andrew Sullivan looks disastrous. Apparently Khamenei managed a Dick Cheney performance. The only good outcome could be that the movement continues. But with what results? Whose grave is being dug?

11:51 pm: The sound of Farsi
    

I've always loved the sound of languages I can't (yet, I like to delude myself) understand. I must be one of the few people in the South of France to have the audio site of Eesti Raadio (Estonian Radio) Bookmarked on my Firefox, just for the pleasure of listening to the news in Estonian. And now all this comes together. Via a few links I found myself listening to this video, not yet translated (just 4 hours old) of what looks like a collage of recent speeches by Mir Hussein Moussavi. And what I found most moving was the seriousness of his listeners. Old, young, male, female, all those black hijabs with intense faces and green armbands, yet not a whisper of fanaticism anywhere. Not in the face; not in the tone of voice. Moussavi comes across as a tired but game professor who has been catapulted to the head of an unstoppable movement, and needs to ride it and bridle it with great care, but seems quite up the task -- a sort of Obama, who does not lose either his cool or his energy. How different from 'the Arab street'! One could love these Persians. Andif that were to be the main result of this so visible and audible revolution, it might be enough, to be going on with. 

 

11:29 pm: The voice of the mothers
   
From the Guardian Newsblog, these excerpts from a letter a group of mothers of young people beaten and killed by the militia have written to the Ulema, the group of ruling clerics in the holy city of Qom:

'We're from God and we return to him.' [A verse from the Koran with which Mousavi started one of his recent statements, for it is
considered very powerful and usually used at the time of mourning. It conveys that one is not afraid of death, so it can also be threatening]
'O, you Ulema [chief clerics], save Islam!' [A quote from Imam Khomeini]

To whom should we plead, we mothers of this country? Today, that our
daughters and sons in universities, dormitories, alleys and streets are slapped in the face and killed or beaten with electic batons, sticks and mace, and lose their lives. This is while they have stepped in to resist and defend their rights, their vote and the nation's vote.

Dear Ulema, to whom should we plead when all this injustice is perpetrated in
the name of religion and Islam? What can we do, we who have brought up our children with the love of God and Islam and taught them to resist tyranny as [Shia saint] Hossein did, and today? Exactly when they are carrying out these teachings, they have become the target of attacks by those who claim to be pious.

What is with the Islamic Republic that it is devouring its own children and what can we do, we who are devoted to this revolution and its sublime ideals, but at the same time, cannot watch in silence when the rights of the people and the Ummat is trampled underfoot?

'For what sin were they killed?' [This is a verse from Koran, seen frequently these days in the demonstrations. It originally addressed the pagan Arabs who buried their daughters alive. It is repeated many times in this text in original Arabic.]

We have learnt that the houses of Ulema was historically a refuge for the oppressed and in this critical historical moment, we want to convey this to our children who understand, better than ever, the difference between pure Mohammedan Islam and the Islam of Taliban.

Today the youth should come under the protection of Islam, and the authentic people's movement and their glorious presence (which increases the legitimacy of the regime) should be recognized or else tyrannising the oppressed will have a severe repercussions for the government and the people.'

03:38 pm: One to read, for wider view
  
Andrew Sullivan today pointed me to this marvellous article by Johann Hari in Britain's Independent. It is especially valuable because of its inclusion of the whole Middle East -- especially Israel --  in its view of what ishappening in Iran, and because of its thorough historical perspective. Well worth taking a few minutes over.

07:36 am: Thoughtful
  
As usual, Roger Cohen provides the New York Times with a passionate but balanced eyewitness and thoughtwitness view. Much needed after an earlier piece by an American and an Iranian that rather pooh-poohed what was going on but which, if one read the fine print at the end, emanated from the neocon American Enterprise Institute. And as one Twitterer put it, the neocons, like Netanyahu, want Ahmadinejad. They need a proper devil in Iran, who will justify their black-and-white thinking.  But Cohen, and a fine analysis on Andrew Sullivan's blog, show that the outcome that is both likely and desirable is a modifying, not an overthrow, of the system. 'This is more like the American revolution than the French one. They are asking that the regime live up to its own commitments.'

Also worth looking at: Nicholas Kristof's piece mentioning a new software called Freegate, developed to evade Chinese government censorship of news about the Falun Gong sect, which has recently added a Farsi version. It is 'small enough to carry on a flash drive. It takes a surfer to an overseas server that changes I.P. addresses every second or so, too quickly for a government to block it, and then from there to a banned site.'

11:42 pm: Green Rising
  
This may be temporary, but if Andrew Sullivan and the Atlantic, and the Middle East BBC website can go green, so can this old grizzly.

11:27 pm: A thousand words
   
A moving set of photos from Tehran on this Flickr site, The burning motorcycles and the stone-throwing youths are not what impresses most -- it's the ocean of quiet humanity, of intelligent people willing to be part of a crowd of a quarter million, flowing through the city quiet and disciplined, not giving anyone an excuse to treat them as hooligans -- as one Twitterer wrote, 'a policeman smiled at me -- now I know this is not just a protest but a revolution.'

06:06 pm: Summing up
    
#iranelection led me to this wonderful cartoon by Rex Babin in the Sacramento Bee:

05:57 pm: A tipping moment?
   
Do NOT miss this report from the Independent's courageous Robert Fisk in Tehran, who has seen Iranian Special Forces protecting protesters from the Basij thugs, and replying, when asked if they would take care of the protesters, 'With God's help'. This sounds to me like a crucial moment. When the regime's uniformed guys start fraternizing with the young in the streets, it's no longer a revolt, but a revolution. 

Now, the big question, and the big prayer. As someone wrote this afternoon: 'Bang-Bang trumps Tweet-Tweet'. Please, God, let the tanks not roll.