"Mejor los Mullahs"
Iranian diaspora have a Cormac McCarthy moment
“Charcoal scrawls appeared on the limewashed walls. Mejor los indios. The evening streets stood empty and there were no paseos and the young girls of the city were boarded up and seen no more.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
A passage from the middle of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian comes to my mind as I follow the daily scenes from Tehran. Glanton’s bloodthirsty gang arrive in the city of Chihuahua, Mexico where they are greeted not as violent criminals but as saviours. The city had been beset regularly by Apache hordes, who would reek utter havoc before riding out of town.
With the arrival of the murderous Glanton Gang, the shopkeepers and local dignitaries of the town believed they had been given a protector, sent by God. They held a vast feast in their honour and did their best to encourage the Glantons to stick around, knowing the native Americans would now think twice before returning. They soon found out that the saviours were actually worse thugs than the Apaches. The treatment was worse than the affliction. As the text recounts, pretty soon the townsfolk of Chihuahua were graffitiing “Mejor los Indios” on the city’s walls. Better the Indians.
In like manner, for decades more secular-oriented Iranians have been fleeing Iran to settle in the West. There they have embarked on a huge pressure campaign against the mullahs - the Ayatollah and Shia clerics who have run the theocratic government of Iran since its inception in 1979. They have fed information to Western and Israeli secret services and done everything they could to undermine the regime.
Now, nearly fifty years down the line, the long hoped for military intervention is happening. But it isn’t going the way they hoped it would. Tehran is being bombed and the lives of many diaspora relatives are under constant threat. Trump has openly stated his intention to take Iran back to the Stone Age.
The Zionist American-backed regime has pursued a remarkably simple strategy right across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). You have essentially two choices as a country in this region. Either you become completely subservient to USA / Israel, as are Jordan and the Gulf states. Or you will be sent back to the Stone Age, as has happened to Syria, Iraq, Libya and, slightly further afield, Afghanistan. There are, as the Iranian diaspora are beginning to realise, no other options.
I don’t see an easy solution here. But for those of us with Iranian blood, I think there are learnings about who you take sides with.