This is a translation of a note which someone published yesterday. He claims that he has been in a detention camp in south west of Tehran. Here is his observation:

I am not sure how to begin. Please forgive my typos and grammatical errors because I am in a rush and have to leave soon. It’s 12:08 AM July 28, 2009.

Today morning, a few of my friends and I, narrowly escaped from a death camp. I am 21 years old and I was arrested about a month ago. I cannot believe I am free and alive right now. My friend and I were riding a motor bike and filming the street rallies using a cell phone when we got stopped and beaten by Basij militias. A woman tried to save us but she received her share of beatings as well. They pushed us into a van which was full of young people like ourselves, all beaten and bruised. After a while, the van took us to a police station, but we were kind of semi conscious that we did not realized where we were. They lined up every one next to a wall and a big guy counted and picked the even numbers and made two groups. That’s when I lost contact with my friend and to this moment, I don’t know what has happened to him.

They took my group to a camp called Kahrizak. You won’t believe that there were over 200 people in single room, all beaten, bruised and wounded. Moaning and groaning could be heard from every corner. “What are they going to do with us? They might send us to a court or prison or something. I am pretty sure that could be better than this.” I whispered to myself. There were no room to sit. All the walls were stained with blood.

I was thinking about my friend when I heard some guys crying. Apparently someone died as a result of excessive bleeding. Though, no one could move whereas we were all stuffed into a small room. At that moment, the guards came into the room and broke all the light bulbs and in the absolute darkness started to beat us with batons. They beat anyone who was the closest to them. They beat us for about half an hour and some people went into coma or maybe died.

Later they came back and lighted some flashlights into our faces and said “If you make noises, we will stick these batons up your asses.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Maybe it was a nightmare. A guy called Suddeque, who apparently was their boss, took the body of a dead or unconscious man and leaned him against the wall and lighted his face with the flashlight. “We have been ordered to kill you all. You must be lucky not to die like this son of a bitch. Until the morning, if you die, you die and if you don’t . . .” He said calmly. “You are blasphemists. Do you know what does that mean?” He added. Then he grasped into the hair of a teen-aged boy and asked him “Tell them what does that mean”. “I don’t know” the boy replied. “Oh yeah you damn do. Tell them, tell them what it means.” he said while he was beating the boy. They boy went unconscious after a while. “It means devil, it means wrong doing. That’s what it means.” He shouted.

We lost 4 more guys in the next few hours. “You got no tooth brush, no toilets, no nothing here. Do whatever you want to do right here. Do you freaking understand?” He shouted again. Everyone there was suffering in some way. Broken hand or leg, swollen eyes, bruised body, open wounds but because of absolute darkness, we couldn’t see anything. Later on, they gave us with some dry bread which we gobbled eagerly. After a few days, they released us because of the space problem they had. They had no room for more people, so they released some. I called my family using a stranger’s cell phone and they picked me up on the street.

Here are the names of some people who died in there:

Hassan Shaouri (Student)
Reza Fatahi (Student)
Milad (No family name) The one who took him out first night.
Morteza Salah-shour
Morad Aquasi
Mohsen Entezami.

Mass graves, disappearances, names without a body to go with them…

We remember.  We mourn together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/world/middleeast/29iran.html?_r=2

http://www.indiewire.com/article/2009/07/30/jafar_panahi_arrested_in_israel/

Berlusconi in Tehran
Slavoj Žižek

When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the streetfighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now?

There are many versions of last month’s events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western ‘reform movement’, something along the lines of the colour-coded revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. They support the protests as a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution, as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic Iran freed from Muslim fundamentalism. They are countered by sceptics who think that Ahmadinejad actually won, that he is the voice of the majority, while Mousavi’s support comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. Let’s face facts, they say: in Ahmadinejad, Iran has the president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the clerical establishment whose differences from Ahmadinejad are merely cosmetic. He too wants to continue with the atomic energy programme, is against recognising Israel, and when he was prime minister in the repressive years of the war with Iraq enjoyed the full support of Khomeini.

Finally, and saddest of all, are the leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad. What is at stake for them is Iranian freedom from imperialism. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed corruption among the elite and used Iran’s oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority. This, we are told, is the true Ahmadinejad: the Holocaust-denying fanatic is a creation of the Western media. In this view, what’s been happening in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a coup, financed by the West, against the legitimate premier. This not only ignores the facts (the high electoral turnout, up from the usual 55 to 85 per cent, can be explained only as a protest vote), it also assumes, patronisingly, that Ahmadinejad is good enough for the backward Iranians: they aren’t yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular left.

Opposed to one another though they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests as a conflict between Islamic hardliners and pro-Western liberal reformists. That is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants to increase people’s freedom and introduce a market economy, or a member of the clerical establishment whose victory wouldn’t significantly change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed.

The green colours adopted by the Mousavi supporters and the cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’ that resonated from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness suggested that the protesters saw themselves as returning to the roots of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and cancelling out the corruption that followed it. This was evident in the way the crowds behaved: the emphatic unity of the people, their creative self-organisation and improvised forms of protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline. Picture the march: thousands of men and women demonstrating in complete silence. This was a genuine popular uprising on the part of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution. We should contrast the events in Iran with the US intervention in Iraq: an assertion of popular will on the one hand, a foreign imposition of democracy on the other. The events in Iran can also be read as a comment on the platitudes of Obama’s Cairo speech, which focused on the dialogue between religions: no, we don’t need a dialogue between religions (or civilisations), we need a bond of political solidarity between those who struggle for justice in Muslim countries and those who participate in the same struggle elsewhere.

Two crucial observations follow. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the ayatollahs. His demagogic distribution of crumbs to the poor shouldn’t deceive us: he has the backing not only of the organs of police repression and a very Westernised PR apparatus. He is also supported by a powerful new class of Iranians who have become rich thanks to the regime’s corruption – the Revolutionary Guard is not a working-class militia, but a mega-corporation, the most powerful centre of wealth in the country.

Second, we have to draw a clear distinction between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi is, effectively, a reformist, a proponent of an Iranian version of identity politics, promising favours to particular groups of every kind. Mousavi is something entirely different: he stands for the resuscitation of the popular dream that sustained the Khomeini revolution. It was a utopian dream, but one can’t deny the genuinely utopian aspect of what was so much more than a hardline Islamist takeover. Now is the time to remember the effervescence that followed the revolution, the explosion of political and social creativity, organisational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. That this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the revolution was an authentic political event, an opening that unleashed altogether new forces of social transformation: a moment in which ‘everything seemed possible.’ What followed was a gradual closing-down of possibilities as the Islamic establishment took political control. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the ‘return of the repressed’ of the Khomeini revolution.

What all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy. The American journalist Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘manufacturing consent’, later made famous by Chomsky, but Lippmann intended it in a positive way. Like Plato, he saw the public as a great beast or a bewildered herd, floundering in the ‘chaos of local opinions’. The herd, he wrote in Public Opinion (1922), must be governed by ‘a specialised class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality’: an elite class acting to circumvent the primary defect of democracy, which is its inability to bring about the ideal of the ‘omni-competent citizen’. There is no mystery in what Lippmann was saying, it is manifestly true; the mystery is that, knowing it, we continue to play the game. We act as though we were free, not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction tell us what to do and think.

In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

Alain Badiou has proposed a distinction between two types (or rather levels) of corruption in democracy: the first, empirical corruption, is what we usually understand by the term, but the second pertains to the form of democracy per se, and the way it reduces politics to the negotiation of private interests. This distinction becomes visible in the (rare) case of an honest ‘democratic’ politician who, while fighting empirical corruption, nonetheless sustains the formal space of the other sort. (There is, of course, also the opposite case of the empirically corrupted politician who acts on behalf of the dictatorship of Virtue.)

‘If democracy means representation,’ Badiou writes in De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, ‘it is first of all the representation of the general system that bears its forms. In other words: electoral democracy is only representative in so far as it is first of all the consensual representation of capitalism, or of what today has been renamed the “market economy”. This is its underlying corruption.’[*] At the empirical level multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – mirrors, registers, measures – the quantitative dispersal of people’s opinions, what they think about the parties’ proposed programmes and about their candidates etc. However, in a more radical, ‘transcendental’ sense, multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ – instantiates – a certain vision of society, politics and the role of the individuals in it. Multi-party liberal democracy ‘represents’ a precise vision of social life in which politics is organised so that parties compete in elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus. This transcendental frame is never neutral – it privileges certain values and practices – and this becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people want or think. In the UK elections of 2005, for example, despite Tony Blair’s growing unpopularity, there was no way for this disaffection to find political expression. Something was obviously very wrong here: it wasn’t that people didn’t know what they wanted, but rather that cynicism, or resignation, prevented them from acting.

This is not to say that democratic elections should be despised; the point is only to insist that they are not in themselves an indication of the true state of affairs; as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa. Take an unproblematic example: France in 1940. Even Jacques Duclos, the number two in the French Communist Party, admitted that if, at that point in time, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Pétain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When De Gaulle refused to acknowledge France’s capitulation and continued to resist, he claimed that only he, and not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not, note, on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’). He was claiming to be speaking the truth even if it had no democratic legitimacy and was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. There can be democratic elections which enact a moment of truth: elections in which, against its sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic opinion; however, that such elections are so exceptional shows that they are not as such a medium of truth.

It is democracy’s authentic potential that is losing ground with the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are coming closer and closer to the West. The change always takes place in accordance with a country’s values: Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing). Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell, and, in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation, they both enjoy popular support (more than two-thirds of the electorate). No wonder they are personal friends: each of them has a habit of ‘spontaneous’ outbursts (which, in Putin’s case, are prepared in advance in conformity with the Russian ‘national character’). From time to time, Putin likes to use a dirty word or utter an obscene threat. When, a couple of years ago, a Western journalist asked him an awkward question about Chechnya, Putin snapped back that, if the man wasn’t yet circumcised, he was cordially invited to Moscow, where they have excellent surgeons who would cut a little more radically than usual.

Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism, Berlusconi’s great achievement has been to reconcile the two, to embody both at the same time. It is arguably this combination which makes him unbeatable, at least in the near future: the remains of the Italian ‘left’ are now resigned to him as their fate. This is perhaps the saddest aspect of his reign: his democracy is a democracy of those who win by default, who rule through cynical demoralisation.

Berlusconi acts more and more shamelessly: not only ignoring or neutralising legal investigations into his private business interests, but behaving in such a way as to undermine his dignity as head of state. The dignity of classical politics stems from its elevation above the play of particular interests in civil society: politics is ‘alienated’ from civil society, it presents itself as the ideal sphere of the citoyen in contrast to the conflict of selfish interests that characterise the bourgeois. Berlusconi has effectively abolished this alienation: in today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the bourgeois, who openly exploits it as a means to protect his own economic interest, and who parades his personal life as if he were taking part in a reality TV show.

The last tragic US president was Richard Nixon: he was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how Reagan’s popularity went up after every public appearance, as journalists enumerated his mistakes). This new presidential type mixes ‘spontaneous’ outbursts with ruthless manipulation.

The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’

To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state of emergency in the whole of Italy as a response to the illegal entry of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. At the beginning of August, it made a show of deploying 4000 armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities (train stations, commercial centres and so on.) A state of emergency was introduced without any great fuss: life was to go on as normal. Is this not the state we are approaching in developed countries all around the world, where this or that form of emergency (against the terrorist threat, against immigrants) is simply accepted as a measure necessary to guarantee the normal run of things?

What is the reality of this state of emergency? On 7 August 2007, a crew of seven Tunisian fishermen dropped anchor 30 miles south of the island of Lampedusa off Sicily. Awakened by screams, they saw a rubber boat crammed with starving people – 44 African migrants, as it turned out – on the point of sinking. The captain decided to bring them to the nearest port, at Lampedusa, where his entire crew was arrested. On 20 September, the fishermen went on trial in Sicily for the crime of ‘aiding and abetting illegal immigration’. If convicted, they would get between one and 15 years in jail. Everyone agreed that the real point of this absurd trial was to dissuade other boats from doing the same: no action was taken against other fishermen who, when they found themselves in similar situations, apparently beat the migrants away with sticks, leaving them to drown. What the incident demonstrates is that Agamben’s notion of homo sacer – the figure excluded from the civil order, who can be killed with impunity – is being realised not only in the US war on terror, but also in Europe, the supposed bastion of human rights and humanitarianism.

The formula of ‘reasonable anti-semitism’ was best formulated in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, who saw himself as a ‘moderate’ anti-semite:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz . . . We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti-semitism is to organise a reasonable anti-semitism.

Our governments righteously reject populist racism as ‘unreasonable’ by our democratic standards, and instead endorse ‘reasonably’ racist protective measures. ‘We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and Eastern European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers,’ today’s Brasillachs, some of them social democrats, are telling us. ‘We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organise any pogroms. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable, violent actions of the instinctual anti-immigrant is to organise reasonable anti-immigrant protection.’ A clear passage from direct barbarism to Berlusconian barbarism with a human face.

seeked by American imperialism, some new alliances may be born out of the Iranian political movement(s) that is taking shape.

This will be a frightening reality for the U.S…

http://www.newiraqnews.com/fa/pages/?cid=2407

http://www.sidewalklyrics.com

Here is Pedestrian’s profile/bio/thing…

Whenever I start reading a new book, blog, article, I read a few lines, and then I try to find some sort of biography of the person I am reading. I’m not sure what it is, but a little bit of information gives me a better … feel … for the piece on which I am about to embark. In front of me, I have the entirety of their being summed up in a paragraph, page or volume. And it means a lot to me to know a bit about this person.

But now, as I try to write a piece about myself, it feels really, quite odd. I mean, what part of “me” do I define? I can begin by stating my name, age, occupation. But are those really who “I” am? … I am a mix of everything, and nothing significant at all. So where do you I begin?

I’ll begin with my age. I’d like to think I’m 15. But the sad truth is that I am actually 16. I was recently engaged to an extremely cute 25 year old who is the love of my life. I know that could be considered pedophilia in some countries, but we’re finding a way to get around that dilemma. I love watching sunsets, and sunrises. The only problem is that I love to sleep in. Certainly a problem for watching a sunrise – it doesn’t wait around for anybody.

I love reading, or at least I used to love reading before school drove me six feet under. I love to paint … but I don’t know how. I love to play on my guitar … but don’t know how to do that either. I love to buy shoes … I know how to do that very well.

I have been an engineering student in Tehran for the past few years. For those of you who failed ninth grade Geography, Tehran is the capital of Iran. A country of roughly 70 million inhabitants situated in the Middle East. If you don’t know where that is either, then, well, close this page now and go lie down, because you could inflict great harm to yourself and those around you.

I am praying to god that this will be my last and final semester in engineering, because to tell the truth, it’s been god awful. I can’t tell the difference between a MOSFET and a light bulb, or distinguish the Fourier series from a hash table. ENOUGH. The world would be a much safer place if people all did what they were made to do … Of course, if that were to happen, some of our most renown world leaders would have to resign and start barbeques.

But hey, since they don’t look like they’ll be doing that any time soon (have you in recent years heard more atrocious news than Tony Blair become head Middle East peace envoy??!!!!!!) I thought I’d start with me. I really don’t think I was cut out to be an engineer, and so won’t attempt at being one much longer. Of course, then the next question is: what were you cut out to do? … Take over the world? Join a burping contest? chew gum? … None sound like very promising careers. I really don’t know what I was cut out to do. And if I say the same in a years time … I am definitely screwed.

I know one thing though: I don’t think the world I live in is very livable. I live in one of the most promising, and yet perished regions of the world. I have lived through a war, and been born within five years of a revolution. To a lot of people, those are just words belonging to “The Count of Monte Cristo” or “The Three Musketeers”. But in other parts of the world, that is everyday life … even now.

And I can’t change any of that. I’d certainly like to think I can. When you are young, you have this feel in your gut that tells you anything is possible … Young people have an almost biological tendency to be hopeful. So I’d like to think I have the “power” (no, not the kind Snap! croons) … But the sad truth is, well, I don’t.

That’s another thing about me: I’m very realistic. Amir, my mom, my friends, my relatives, my teachers, … all like to say that I am pessimistic, but they’re all just bullshitting. I’m simply realistic. And I certainly know that the world, I can not change.

But I have something to say. It makes me want the whole world to hear it.

So if I were to sit down here, at my computer and depict myself, in a melodramatic, serious tone and use a few paragraphs to do it, it would sound something like the following. If I tried really hard to tell you of “me”, and my inner most thoughts, feelings, … it would sound something like this:

———————————————–

I am not convinced that the choices we make and the decisions we come to are solely based on desires and wishes that randomly perturb our mind. Rather, they are a direct consequence of the circumstances with which we are faced. Those very events go on to define the way we perceive ourselves as individuals. They not only shape who we are – but who we strive to become … The very fibers of our humanity.

I was born amidst Kalashnikov bullets and F-14 bombs, sheltered by my grandfather’s garden of citrus blossoms. The war for me as a child only meant families coming together in my grandfather’s beautiful villa. In contrast, it was really one huge family fleeing from bombs to gather in a shelter distant from the city bombings. Red alerts from radio stations predicting – and never actually protecting – more deaths were signs of getting my hands on more candy – candy saved by elders for exactly those occasions to calm our fears.

Through childhood naivety and parental shelter, I never understood what was really going on around me until years after it was over. Some children were like me … But most weren’t that lucky.

In some ways, the war that was fought over 16 years ago is still as alive and vivid as it has ever been. Children paralyzed and scarred are now grown adults being nurtured by their elderly parents. Boys who quit school after the death of a father are grappling to make a living without an education. Husbands and fathers damaged by the weapons of war fight – and lose – their battle with disease even today.

I am a 23 year old born after a revolution, and within miles of a bloody war in one of the most tumultuous regions of the world. A region plagued for centuries by the ignorance of its own people and the brutality of outsiders. And I am convinced the only way – the only tool – for not only blockading, but destroying the naivety, the ignorance and the greed that boils killing and tumult is to breed understanding. An understanding of why those atrocities have happened. To decipher the pain that they have brought. And to fathom why their occurrence must be prevented by any means necessary. Not just on a regional level, but a global one. More than ever, as we come to realize this “global village” that has come to define our world, we need to escort it with a sense of global understanding.

————————————

…… And that’s where I come in. Well, so does everybody.

“We” the ordinary masses, don’t have anything. We’re nameless, faceless, penniless (in comparison to the billions of dollars being emptied into certain pockets as we speak), and completely, and utterly powerless. We have nothing, and no thing at all. No means of doing anything significant except possibly getting a job with a good law firm or engineering company. And hoping that through being “good” and “righteous” in our own lives, “we can make a difference” … Sure, if that helps you go to sleep at night, ok.

But that’s just an illusion. And in the grand scheme of things, really won’t make a difference at all. And if you’re planning a life in politics because you think that will: it’s a dog eat dog world, so you better start learning how to bark.

But that is the sad awful truth … that we really possess nothing significant at all … But our voices. And despite all the downsides of technology, you gotta give it credit for one, extraordinary accomplishment: it has given ordinary people a face, a voice, a meaning. I can sit here behind my desk and read about the dreams and aspirations of just about anybody out there willing to throw me a piece of their mind. And perhaps this is just the naive, adolescent in me, but I think that has got to mean something.

It has to. Not in that we are going to start another Bolshevik revolution; or rally against all the we see wrong with the world. But in that by knowing just a bit more about the people that surround you, there’s more of a chance that you will not inflict them harm when you go out into the world tomorrow.

You might read about what I had for dinner last night, or where Dave took his date, or where Joseph wrote his final exam. Sure, all may be extremely insignificant and mundane details. But it gives each of these people personality, face, … life.
And that, is most certainly powerful: to believe in the life that surrounds you. To believe in those very “faceless”, “nameless” individuals out there. To truly believe that despite all our difference in race, color, culture, and beliefs, underneath, we are all just human. Aspiring to do things, hoping to achieve things, dreaming of better things ahead. And if we believe in that, if we truly “feel” it, we will cringe the next time anybody tries to convince us otherwise.

… So if you are still with me, and reading this hasn’t been like taking horse tranquilizers, … that pretty much sums it up.

Oh, and another really good thing about having access to a lot of people: if any of you out there ever want to do my homework, you are, by all means, most certainly welcome.