The title of this blog post is a quote by US political satirist Art Buchwald, who I read for the first time late last year. Renowned for ridiculing the rich and famous, he wrote by pecking words on his beloved typewriter with two fingers, a cigar often clenched between his (no doubt nicotine-stained) teeth. The full quote reads like this, ‘you can’t make anything up any more, the world itself is satire. All you’re doing is recording it ….’ which despite the fact Art Buchwald died almost 20 years ago, sounds about right right now.
This new year on earth has started, with fires – political and actual flames – blazing round the world. Iran is on fire, again, the decrepit regime of 86-year old Ali Hosseini Khamenei teetering as protesters roar onto the streets in ever greater numbers, including younger and elderly women chanting death to the regime.
But the Iranian regime is clenched. Protesters who managed to evade the widespread Internet blackout report mass bloody killings and maimings by the Revolutionary Guard (RG), including RG snipers deliberately shooting civilians in the face from moving cars, and invading hospitals to pounce on protesters already injured from their beatings. As journalist Diana Magnay reports, ‘the people of Iran have been here before with mass protests, and the Iranian authorities have honed their playbook…… mass protest is a long way from revolution’.
I find watching snatches of these protests from my desk disturbing, and surreal. Though I have no personal connection to Iran, I want this regime gone – and it feels like wanting the weather to transform, something over which I have absolutely no control. Our world is haunted by unresolved grievances based on the apparent simplest of questions: how do we best live together?
As autocracies expand, world disorder is increasingly dictated by a handful of men: we have about 195 recognised countries on earth; just 30 have a woman as either President, Prime Minister or Governor General. But – let’s be honest – our world is now rubber-stamped by the constellation of Trump, Xi and Putin; second-in-commands include Narendra Modi, and, increasingly, unelected multi-billionaires running tech empires with turnovers bigger than many sovereign nations, each of them men, all white – and unaccountable to us. No wonder the world feels like satire: this is satire.
I have no easy answers. I wish I did, because then I would run workshops and conferences, fly round the world promoting the good way forward, train trainers to extend my reach, and give interviews where I looked serious yet relatable, while audiences gathered to listen and take notes, as national and international tensions fell away…. listen, sometimes you have to dream ……
In the meantime, I do what I can to hold my own government to account (not easy but somewhat doable, for example via my MP), I raise funds for a Palestinian organisation working inside Gaza, volunteer for a local charity here on the West Coast, and I turn off all notifications on my damned mobile. I even brew my own Kombucha!
The only resolutions I’m interested in this year are about change, and joy and kindness. The world seems increasingly cruel, but we do not have to be. That is a choice we each make. We do not need to conform what what makes us flinch inside. We can try to live in the way we want the world to be. It’s not always easy, but it is a better way to live with yourself, which in the end we each have to.
A final thought on Iran: when people are finally sick of being so frightened, then enraged by having lived with such stinking all-pervasive fear, change becomes inevitable. Regimes, like empires, collapse because eventually they run out of political currency, including the effectiveness of sheer brutality. Then it is a matter of time. And when the dictators and their henchmen are finally kicked out and flee to sunnier climes, like Saudi Arabia, one of the Gulf states, or – as in the case of ex-Bangladeshi dictator Sheikh Hassina – to India, then the work begins.
Putting a country back together is one of the greatest challenges in the world. Trust is shattered, people are angry and exhausted, frequently vengeful, the economy usually in ruins. Look at Syria right now. It takes a long time. But the good news is, it can be done. The revival of Bosnia, not without its problems, sure, is nevertheless an example of what can happen when the fear stops, as well as of how nation-building is a work not of years, but decades.
Maybe the new ruler of Iran will be the son of the old Shah, Reza Pahlavi, though it might also be the opposition leader, a woman named Maryam Rajavi, who has published has a ten-point plan on the future of Iran, based on freedom, equality and abolition of the death penalty. Imagine a woman leading Iran! But it is not for Trump nor the president of anywhere else to decide what the people of Iran need.
Diana Nammi, long-time Iranian campaigner against the regime, cuts to the political chase, saying, ‘Whenever western countries interfere, the country becomes unstable, war continues and it is more oppression for people. I think it’s better for western countries not to interfere at all and let people in Iran decide for themselves what they want.’
Photo credit: Oussama Bergaoui @pexels.com
