Remember, keep the nerve
Dear Comrade,
I met an artist yesterday who makes dolls of people’s shadow selves. Ugly, frightening, two faced dolls for them to hold. She gave one to her father’s new wife for Christmas haha.
It made me think of the splitting you describe. The inability to look honestly at ourselves and the world. The lack of critical abilities and awareness that at its worst is the generator of Trumps and Modis and Mileis. Humanity is trying to avoid taking responsibility for what we have done. What images of our shadow selves should we make. How do we illuminate this evil within so that people can stop projecting it on the ‘other.’ Is it part of our job to try and reveal the darkness that is driving us to destruction.
You and I exchanged whatsapp messages on Saturday as Israel and the USA began their war against Iran. I had been at a kids party, and then dinner with friends. You had been in the pub with colleagues. No one had mentioned the war to either of us. You’d been talking about Dostoevsky over drinks, I’d been making small talk while kids played tig. No one mentioned Iran. We asked what this could possibly mean. How could something so frightening be ignored.
While the people I was with were silent about the war, my phone lit up with messages from Bayan in Hebron, talking about the city being closed again, the petrol already rationed, the sound of explosions overhead. Ayman in Haifa sent me a rolling eye emoji and another of a face blowing a party streamer: “here we go again to the shelters.”
Why was no one here talking about the bombs falling in Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Qatar, Bahrain.
Is it because the war is both new and old. It is the endless war of imperialism. The background noise of death and destruction that we are so used to now? Are we ultra pacified? Completely disengaged? Have we heard it and said it all before?
Is it because these are brown people? A war happening where we expect a war to happen. Ukranians could be understood as like us, that had to be talked about at dinner parties. But Iranians? They are an unimaginable other. A people that should have seen it coming. They probably contain the dark seed of their own undoing. Maybe the war is good actually? Isn’t the Ayatollah a tyrant? Ach it’s complicated.
Or is it because we do understand but we now contain our rage and mourning in small scrolling bursts. Everyone taking themselves away for five minute bursts of violence and grief. Lighting up their faces in bathrooms and stairways with images of rubble and dust and blood. Then back into the pub, back into the party.
Is it because the horror has become too great. The American bombing of a primary school in Minab, Iran. 175 young girls dead. The American torpedoing of a ship of Sri Lanka. 87 young iranian men left to drown in the Indian Ocean (weren’t even Nazi sailors rescued after their ships were sunk? What is this new barbarism?). Are we all not speaking about it because we cannot say anything about the violence? Is it all too large, too awful, too endless? Do we simply not know what to say?
You suggested that this state of stunned speechlessness was precisely where poetry is needed.
***
If the world is a body, then yes, as you write, it is torturing itself. I do not know anything much about pain. It’s almost entirely outwith my experience. I’m grateful to you for telling me about it. I wonder in what ways it increases how you feel the violence that we are yet again watching.
All the people dislocated, displaced, destroyed.
***
Your last letter made me think about Gil Scott Heron’s letter to the new rappers in the early 90s Message to the Messengers:
if they look at you
Like they think you insane
Or they call you scarecrow
Thinkin’ you ain’t got no brain
Or start tellin’ folks that
You suddenly gone lame
Or that white folks have
Finally co-opted your game
Or you really don’t know
They said that about me a long time ago
If they finally start to tell people
That you lost your nerve
That’s what they said about Johannesburg
You ain’t insane you have got a brain
You haven’t gone lame
You have got your game
Remember, keep the nerve
Keep the nerve Keep the nerve
We’re talkin’ ‘bout peace
***
Peace feels like a very hard thing to fight for right now. America is trying to bring the Kurds into the war against Iran (how many times will the Kurds allow the USA to use them then throw them away? Who knows.) Israel is desperate to bring the UK, Australia, and Europe into the war. Those Countries that are sometimes called The West (Israel?)! Or the Global North (australia?)! But surely can only really be understood as the White Imperialist powers.
Do I sound like I have a tin foil hat on when I say I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Israeli assets, not Hezbollah who bombed the RAF base on Cyprus. It probably doesn’t matter anyway, the chaos that Israel continues to unleash creates a thousand different conflicts that have every chance of dragging everyone in. They want to shatter Iran and make it another failed state. Tariq Ali reports that the Israelis are not just assassinating the leaders of the regime, they are also killing the left opposition. They want a civil war, but one they can control. Let’s see how possible that is.
Elsewhere the USA becomes ever more unhinged. Commanders informing US soldiers of the new war told troops “The president has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.” And it is Iran that is the dangerous theocracy.
Yet again we see the fact that Iran -- Like Iraq, like Libya -- actually did need Nuclear weapons to protect itself from destruction. The nuclear apartheid led by the USA, UK and France is another front for imperialism. Of course all nuclear weapons should be decommissioned but until they are, who can blame North Korea for its decisions.
But Iran has said again and again since the 1990s that it has no ambition to build nuclear weapons. A few days ago their president said ‘In what language must we tell you we do not want to build nuclear bombs.’ But we insist that they do because ‘weapons of mass destruction’ remains our best excuse for imperialist war. A deranged accusation in the mirror. A failure to look at our own shadow self.
The USA and Israel are destroying Iran because they created this Iran. First, they, along with the British, deposed the left wing government in 1953 -- horrified by welfare, land reforms and the nationalisation of oil. They created the conditions for right-wing dictatorship. Then lost control in the revolution. Iran grew in strength as a bulwark against the USA. Then in 2001 and 2003 the USA destroyed Iran’s enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq. No longer hemmed in by border wars and hostile neighbours Iran began to spread its anti-imperialist power across the region, to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine. In many ways the Axis of Resistance was an unforeseen externality of America’s last great illegal war in the middle east.
What unforeseen anti-imperialisms will emerge from this war?
***
I hope some of them will emerge here. The war may well reach these shores for sure. Who knows how long it will take Starmer to get dragged in to the new crusade. But regardless the effects will be felt. Another great price shock. No natural gas, no oil, no fertiliser. The UK is uniquely badly placed, wholly dependent on food imports, completely lacking in a manufacturing base. As the war continues to cause logistical chaos, to waste fuel, money and lives, it will also drive more and more Scottish people into poverty. Next winter there will be even more flats in Glasgow with no food, no heat and no electric. We need to make sure they know why.
Khameini and Nasrallah may be dead but Israel and the USA are still busy creating more enemies for themselves around the world.
***
I tried to find out how many countries the USA has bombed since I was born and how many people it has killed but I couldn’t. The answer is tens of countries. Countless people. I wrote a poem:
Death to America
glossy as a dentist’s smile.
Death to Israel
glittering on the coast.
Empire loves distance,
it keeps the blood off the carpet.
A man asks who won the war.
What?
A man asks who won the football.
Celtic.
No one asks who buried the children.
The war is very far away.
We fly ten thousand miles
to crack open a school kid’s head.
Death to the America of bombs,
Death to the Israel of walls,
Death to America,
Death to Israel.
The mouth is very far away
it says freedom
and has teeth made of missiles,
to crack open a school kid’s head.
Death to America.
Yours hoping that the war ends soon,
Henry