Pity the country that needs heroes

After a while, one rapidly becomes accustomed to the painful fact that the internet is swarming with people, some of who are suffering from some fairly unpleasant personality disorders. Combine this with the other well-known fact that religions seem to equally be attractive to the sane and the clinically deranged alike; and one is left with the uncomfortable conclusion that if one is going to meet the loony online, it is most likely going to be during some sort of discussion about religion. Politics often acts as a similar magnet for the unhinged, offering boundless opportunities for paranoid personality disorders to manifest as conspiracy theories of one order or another. For this reason, for centuries perhaps, the unwritten rule of social interactions between strangers in England has been the ban on talk of politics or religion. Left with nothing to talk about of any consequence, as a result, we tend to resort to discussing the weather – it saves on being thrown bodily out of the window when offence is taken.

Of course, on-line all bets are off. We are all more or less anonymous. We can act-out whatever deep, dark and possibly deranged aspects of our seething ids we so feel fit. If the moths of psychoses are most readily drawn to the candles of politics and God-bothering – and if the light burns so much brighter in the non-real, laisse-faire realms of the interweb – we can hardly be surprised that some nutters of gigantic proportions do tread the cyber boards when discussion turns to matters of any interface between the political and religious. In short, if the cyber-world’s men in white coats, armed with butterfly nets and tranquilliser guns, want a good bag to cart off, frothing and gurgling, tied down to the gurneys to the Big House On The Hill, then internet discussions of religious politics or the politics of religion are a good place to stalk their gibbering quarry.

Given the momentous events taking place in Iran, one can hardly be surprised at all that the usual suspects on one’s favourite “over excitable” boards and fora have gathered like some enormous cluster-fuck of rationality and good-sense to parade their every nasty thought, deranged connections of unconnected items, and assorted deeply-held bigotries, prejudices and narrow-minded incoherencies in some dreadful demonstration of the continued need for psychiatric care in the community. Merrily and entirely unwittingly shooting themselves in both feet - and repeatedly between both eyes - they again and again prove to be neither use nor ornament to the discussions at hand – serving no benefit, other than to prove to their often bewildered interlocutors that they were right to think that all politically possessed religious people were… well.. Possessed. In all, it is a bit sad and sometimes a little amusing; but mostly the former

And so it goes on – the general carnival caravan of internet loopyness, at its most exotic and extreme in that intersection of religion of politics – And usually, one can sit by the side of the road and watch it pass, jangling away to itself, the Wild Ones and the Freaks capering alongside the carriages – And home one goes, as this dissonance of a thousand sadnesses and hilarities falls over the horizon, to tell the tales of today’s encounters with the mad and the bad, the good and the wise, the saints and the sinners…

But not always is this so. Three days ago I got into a tussle with another Muslim convert about Iran. In the past he had struck me as highly-strung, but not off-the-wall. But then it started. He put up a YouTube video of such singular ugliness and deeply offensive content that I felt compelled to respond. The video concerned that infamous and entirely false claim that 9/11 was the work of the fictional worldwide conspiracy of Jews. I am not going to discuss it at length – it was the usual mishmash of medievalist conspiracy theory, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitic iconography and twisted theological pretexts for blatant race-hate. The thesis of the poster was – and I quote: “the Jews started this War on Terror and now they are trying to overthrow the ‘Line of the Imam’ [Khomeini] in Islamic Iran!”

There are two things that make the red mist descend as far as I am concerned – one is utterly crass, delusional stupidity as a convenience in the minds of people I know to be otherwise quite bright, the other is racism – I am surely not alone in finding that there is often a close connection between these equally unpleasant phenomena. Nonetheless, I have learned not to go off half-cock in such situations, to keep my powder dry – if only so that I can be sure to nail the racist scumbag with the first shot. Perhaps I should ignore such tossers when they prove to be so; but I cannot help being disappointed that my judgment has so woefully failed me – that once again I find myself in the presence of yet another co-religionist whose conduct and voice is that of the gutter and not the stars. Such is, I suppose, my lot.

So, in I ploughed, informing him that his video and his commentary were neither welcome, nor constructive, nor factual. Further, I disputed the entire legitimacy theologically and wisdom politically of the system of state in Iran; and that, in any case, I could not for the life of me work out exactly how a tiny minority of Iranian Jews could engineer the overthrow of the thirty-year-old edifice of the Islamic Republic. Furthermore, I opined, it was exactly this sort of inane, evil discourse with which many people, from all walks of life, were completely sick and tired of inside Iran – that change for them was not simply about getting shot of a mindless political dwarf like Ahmadinejad and his gang of unshaven, corrupt thugs; not simply a matter of reform of the absurdities and wrongs of a system that defined wide swathes of society as unworthy and unequal as a result of gender or gender-preference. In fact, I dared to suggest, these factors were all intimately connected.

I expected a strong response. What I did not expect was a string of death-threats from supporters of the Ahmadinejad regime who had been sitting in the wings all the while monitoring the on-going interactions. I was PM-ed and emailed informing me to expect the knock on the door in the night, that should I ever visit Tehran to expect to be swinging from the end of a crane in a public square shortly after arrival. I was informed that those who did not follow the Supreme Leader or his poisonous President were not members of the Faith, they were apostate. That I was (in Persian) the “father of a dog” and that this “dog” (my infant son) would be best off dead. That my wife was a whore and a slave.

Given what I wrote above about the carnival of the mad that is often the experience of the internet, perhaps I should be neither worried, nor surprised by such abuse. However, I neither live in Britain, nor yet Europe, nor North America – I live in a rather vicious state in Africa which has had its own experiences of people swinging from lamp-posts on various pseudo-religious pretexts, decapitations by the religiously deranged and assorted abominations against God and Humanity. So I do worry –if just a bit. What I do not find is any of it even vaguely amusing; but it saddens me, rather than angers; it frustrates, rather than infuriates. It deeply depresses me that a Faith – that at least for me – offered a road to some contentment should be for others a vehicle for their vices and disturbed lives without offering in return for these people some salve for their own evident inner hurt. Again, perhaps, my naivety has gotten the better of me. Such also may be my lot.

However remote the prospect of anything untoward actually happening, I have become somewhat circumspect since these events. To a degree, I have been beaten into a sort of silence – and it leaves me wondering what it must be like to live one’s entire life under such a threatening cloud of violent retributions for thinking for one, for standing up for one and others. So I have nothing but admiration and wonder at the people of Iran, who for the second time in just over a generation have stood up against the bullies of this world, to redress, to amend, to remake anew their country and life – and in so doing to reform a Faith twisted out of all recognition by its present politicisation at the opportunistically grasping hands of the ultimately ominous Men in Black.

On reading some recent Iranian Samizdat, the anonymous author referenced Brecht’s play about Galileo; and in particular the scene where Galileo is greeted on his recantation by his disciples who demand of him that he be their hero. The suffering scientist replies: “Pity the nation that needs heroes”.

Pity beloved Iran - for now she needs heroes more than ever. And she has them silent on her roads and boulevards - whilst those who God has made mad spit their hate from guns, or the keyboards of their desktops, sunk in their depraved Hell of loathing and despair.