Horror By Daylight
https://x.com/Vahid/status/2014377909008400688
Over the past several weeks an atrocity has unfolded in Iran at a scale and speed unlike anything since the 1940s, and it has happened in broad daylight, with the whole world…well, perhaps not watching, but nonetheless aware. I am only now catching up on posting about this; perhaps I should have sooner, but the exigencies of life intervened, and I am just some guy and don’t see myself as obligated to write about anything at any specific time; and moreover, I am never timely where writing is concerned. Still, I wish I had said something sooner, as useless as that may be, because what is happening is so horrific that it should shock us all out of our armchairs.
The past month has seen massive popular protest against the regime of the Islamic Republic, on a greater scale than before. At first there was great optimism, because it has been clear for a long time that the regime is deeply unpopular, and there appeared to be real solidarity among an unprecedented number of protesters. But now the regime, rather than compromising or buckling, has responded to the opposition of the great majority of Iranians by simply murdering them en masse. They shut off the internet to buy themselves some artificial darkness, but they could not shut out the sky above, so the outside world watched, first by satellite and through escaping rumor, a mass slaughter evolve to a level not seen since the einsatzgruppen operated on the Eastern Front.
That this has happened by daylight, in the face of the defiance of Iranian society writ large, touches on a terror that has been growing in my heart – the terror of helplessness. I have grown up so internalizing the heroic American myth that if a people as a whole band together, they can overcome any oppression, overthrow any regime – that the main enemy between the oppressed and their freedom is simply their own fear. Of course this has never been quite true, even in America – in fact, the system of chattel slavery in the South imposed such a vicious physical despotism that the terror of the enslaved had very real teeth; still, the many thousands who did overcome that fear and escape, and tell their stories, ultimately led to the destruction of slavery as public opinion turned in the North. But what if a society comes together in protest, and is simply crushed? This has happened – look at Budapest in 1956, for instance.
To me, this idea of a political scenario in which there simply is no possible way to win through to freedom, where overcoming one’s fear with courage does not result in victory, but simply death, no matter the numbers, produces a kind of existential dread that shakes my whole understanding of the world as a place that operates in certain ways, and where one can make some kind of decent life. And it echoes another fear I often struggled with throughout my life, in moments of doubt, or guilt, or outright sin – my terror reading the words of scripture which describe the moment of Judgment when, in the way I understood it as a child, the vast majority of humanity were condemned and destroyed, and all their weeping and gnashing of teeth did nothing at all. Admittedly, I had a bias at times where I wanted to vilify this idea of justice, because I felt threatened by it in my own little rebellions, or simply felt insecure in my doubts; but it also troubled me on a level I can’t properly articulate. The idea of something unspeakably horrible happening, and there being no refuge in others, in even the vast community of others, and no pleading one’s way out of it, appalls me.
Since then, my ideas about Judgment have been complicated, but remain unresolved. But one thing is clear: that this Judgment which again came to mind out of fear, is itself the one relief from the terror I set out to write about today. When something as horrible as the murder of the Iranian people happens, it exposes the world for what it is, and us for what we are; helpless, and doomed to die, in a world where wrong triumphs and there is no hope. But there, beyond the world, and intruding now into is, is the answer – in that Judgment of Christ breaks the final day that will hold to account, and even undo, somehow make right, all these horrors that now go unavenged. The Resurrection is our pledge that this is so – that even death, so absolute and so unfair, will be undone. As it says in the Book of Isaiah the Prophet:
Who is this coming from Edom,
From Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson?
Who is this, robed in splendor,
Striding forward in the greatness of his strength?
“It is I, proclaiming victory,
Mighty to save.”
Why are your garments red,
Like those of one treading the winepress?
“I have trodden the winepress alone;
From the nations no one was with me.
I trampled them in my anger
And trod them down in my wrath;
Their blood spattered my garments,
And I stained all my clothing.
It was for me the day of vengeance;
The year for me to redeem had come.
I looked, but there was no one to help,
I was appalled that no one gave support;
So my own arm achieved salvation for me,
And my own wrath sustained me.
I trampled the nations in my anger;
In my wrath I made them drunk
And poured their blood on the ground.”
This then is hope for the helpless, for the people who overcome their fear and still are gunned down. But we, and by we I mean you and I, here in the West, are not helpless. While we share the same reality before death, in this moment of murder we hold a vast power that could deliver the victims – and yet we do nothing. It is as if the West were a passive bystander on a sidewalk, comfortably licking away at an ice cream cone and scrolling on a phone, while half-watching someone get beaten to death in the street mere steps away.
Of course, now it is too late for tens of thousands of people, and in the same breath that I condemn our inaction, I have to also urge you to read this warning by Omid Memarian, someone who has suffered greatly resisting the Islamic Republic, who warns that an American attack at this moment would likely make the repression even worse. If America intervened tomorrow in our typical tossed-off and noncommittal way, we would simply provoke more repression. We should have helped the protesters when we had the chance. Now we should take responsibility to actually finish off the regime, which must be done at one stroke; otherwise, we should get out of the way of internal Iranian resistance, help in any way that is actually helpful, but not give the regime more ammunition for its propaganda.
But what do I know? It’s very possible that would be catastrophic in other ways. I want to defer to the experts in national security – but at the same time, I don’t trust anyone who is content to accept this kind of unavenged brutality. If we can watch a government no one wants simply gun down civilian protesters, regardless of their numbers, because they have no conscience to prick, and we simply do nothing, then what is all our power even for? What good are we, as a nation? There is no excuse for a country as powerful as the United States (I write as an American, though this applies to several other nations as well) to simply wash its hands and insist that we are not responsible, because Iran certainly isn’t our regime; it’s not as if we haven’t opposed their power for decades. But that’s like booing as someone brutalizes an innocent, but not stepping forward to actually help them. And remember, we are the furthest thing from helpless; when you hold a shield and fail to extend it to cover the broken, that is when you become responsible. If the West, if the United States, with all its power and might, is content to simply watch the cold-blooded murder of a whole people who are doing all they can to stand together and overcome their fears, then we’re worse than useless as a civilization. We don’t deserve to survive.
