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At this point in time, there may or may not be a ceasefire, an odd word to use given that the war on Iran is a lopsided one and “ceasefire” assumes that both parties entered into a potentially cataclysmic event.
As the fog of war lifts then settles again and the bombings and deaths leave Iranians everywhere shattered and unsure of what might come next, supporters of Iran are rallying around the country and its inhabitants. Many point out that Iran, with a long and complicated history, should not be bombed because, as they like to point out, it’s more advanced and civilised than the bomb-droppers, Israel and the U.S, would have us believe. On social media, people have been posting tweets, Instagram reels, and TikToks that show women walking in the streets of Tehran, heads uncovered, and people going about their daily lives in what look like immaculately maintained subways. Several posters have said that the city is more “civilised” than London. To refute the claim that Iranian women are kept behind closed doors, posters have been pointing to the statistics: the literacy rate among women is 98% and 70% of graduates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are female. 1I cannot find the links and don’t have the time to search for them, because trying to do that is like fishing in jello.
All of this is an attempt to “humanise” Iranians, to show that there are real people who will suffer the consequences of war. But do we really need to engage in this rhetoric? If the argument is that Iranians should not suffer because they are educated, cultured, and civilised, are we not implicitly making the case that other populations who cannot be proven to be the same deserve to be bombed to hell?
This kind of discourse emerges whenever a Western power invades or attacks a Muslim-majority country, because so much of both the implicit and explicit rationale behind the destruction of the latter rests on the idea that it must be a brutal regime that oppresses women and possibly LGBTQ people as well. Infamously, Laura Bush went on the airwaves to claim that the U.S invasion of Afghanistan would free Afghani women from the Taliban, as if the bombs would be dropped with such precision that only the latter would die. Twenty-five years later, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and many of its women are now worse off.
Behind all the bluster and the deeply racist and Islamaphobic drive to annihilate the country, the war on Iran, like every other war, is an attempt to control its natural resources: convincing the U.S and Israel that Iranians know how to use oyster forks and that they are highly educated and cultured isn’t going to stop the blatant aggression.
To humanise victims of war is an attempt to make allies and onlookers care about them. Do we have to like other humans to be persuaded to not kill them?
Humanising is a strategy used in court trials as well: dress a defendant in a nice suit, give them a haircut, get them to talk about their childhood abuse—and the jury might go kindly in its verdict.
Why should Iranians, who are not on trial, have to play this game?
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For more, See Stephen Prager’s “The War Hawks Aren’t Even Trying To Persuade Us Anymore” for more on the current Iran situation.
And this Democracy Now episode for more on multiple perspectives on Iran.
See also my “Sharbat Gula Is Not Lost.”
And my “Rights Make Might: The Dystopian Undertow of Hillary Clinton’s Feminism.”
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