Friday, May 19, 2006

The Prisoner

Decades after the British television series “The Prisoner” has aired its last episode, Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian political philosopher, now Iranian political prisoner, is in the same surreal predicament as the BBC protagonist. As Jahanbegloo sits in Tehran’s Tehin prison, he is probably asking himself, who are they? why are they keeping me here? And what do they want from me? The difference is that in the BBC series the hero, "Number Six," really was a secret agent, whereas Jahanbegloo is simply accused of spying for Western powers.

Our man Jahanbegloo is not in Her Majesty’s Secret Service or in the CIA or a member of the Mission Impossible Team. He is a member of a private cultural research department in Tehran. For the suspicious Iranian reader, this job has no similarities to the embassy cultural attaché post which we usually suspect of being a cover for spies. The Cultural Research Bureau, where Jahanbegloo works, figures out how to encourage volunteerism in urban areas, or how to increase the number of cinemas in Iran. The agency contracts to provide statistics and demography, does youth studies, explores drug related social issues, and such. It is also a think tank for foreign relations. For instance this group translated into Persian Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilization and the New World Order (where it is argued that the future global conflicts will occur along the fault lines separating civilizations such as Islam and the West).

Of course you can’t do all this without possessing formidable scholarship, intelligence and insight. Number Six was never a post-doc at Harvard like Jahanbegloo, but it was still a thrill to watch his intelligence and insight pitted against the nightmarish mind-control technology of his mysterious captors. He always outmaneuvered his nemesis, "Number Two," in witty dialogue and brisk action. Yet episode after episode he would wake up in the same prison village, and try to figure out all over again, who or perhaps what was "Number One," which ideology governed the villagers, and where on the map was this place anyway? Puzzles that intellectuals have been trying to figure out about post-revolutionary Iran for more than two decades.

Jahanbegloo was perhaps too intellectual as a youth to have watched spy movies on TV. His metaphor for his present predicament comes from his reflections on a Bertolucci film:

This retreat of intellectuals in the Middle East reminds me of Bertolucci’s film, The Conformist. I could not get this picture out of my mind for a long time. I did not immediately understand it. [I] was constantly reflecting on what in fact was happening. What was it that hypnotically bound me to that film? What was the tragedy? What was the hero’s drama? For me The Conformist is an example of the theme of “the intellectual and power”. The intellectual opts to compromise with power because of the force of circumstances and becomes a conformist figure. This state of affairs is wrapped in tragedy for the intellectual; he/she is sacrificed, whereas the conquering side is power. On one hand, the intellectual cannot avoid power in one form or another, but on the other hand, he/she cannot subjugate himself/herself to it, as those who hold power would desire. It seems to me that the problem here is that of the conflict between the spirit and power.

To riddle the mystery of his captivity Jahanbegloo has gone where Number Six never thought to look. The conflict between spirit and power.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

United 93

Directed by Paul Greengrass

Along with the strong documentary feel--the hand held camera, the annoying passersby that block the view--there is an eerie absence of editorializing in this movie. The film plays like a security video of a 7-11 murder, with the effect that the viewer doesn’t have the comfort of knowing this is someone else’s point of view. Director Paul Greengrass knows that messages and morals would only dilute the brutal realism of his work. Through the innovative use of detachment, Greengrass has solved the problem of keeping the events of 9-11 perpetually fresh in the American psyche. Grandstanders and warmongers can now continue with their work, their zeal undiminished, their material replenished.

The information in the plane’s flight data recorder has not been made available to the public, so we don’t know why this passenger plane, hijacked by terrorists on 9-11, crashed before it reached its target. The film’s storyline follows the popular theory that the passengers mutinied against their captors and brought the plane down. But in keeping with its policy of objective reporting, the film makes no attempt to create heroes out of the passengers. Even the famous line, “Let’s roll,” which I had imagined as a heroic battle cry just before the passengers stormed the cockpit, was delivered in a huddled hush by one of the mutineers. The line was whispered so softly, I wondered how Greengrass expects us to believe that a telephone was able to accidentally pick it up.

There is also no attempt to make villains out of the terrorists beyond the obvious destructiveness of their act. They are guerrillas on a mission, improvising as the field conditions dictate. Not making villains out of the terrorists has the effect of closing the door to rebuttal. An apologist can’t argue that the terrorists are just doing what we would do under similar circumstances. The movie doesn't allow the debate to go there. “Of course they are like us,” the film seems to declare,” but things have gone beyond negotiation, understanding, or figuring out who is right and who is wrong. What we must do to protect ourselves has nothing to do with who’s the bad guy here.” This frightneningly pragmatic point of view should alarm even our friends. Once the world finds out we have disengaged from the moral debate, once it knows we would fumigate or vaporize other people out of existence while fully recognizing their humanity, it will look upon us as a global Macbeth in need of curtailment.

The movie's suspense begins when the terrorists make a mistake by failing to monitor passengers on telephones. Once everyone learns over the air-phones that the plane is on a suicide mission, the four terrorists lose control of the crowd. The passengers conspire against their captors and even begin to improvise weapons out of heavy luggage and boiling water.

Here, the greatest irony of United 93 comes out. The airplane itself is an improvised weapon. Despite all Greengrass' efforts towards gut-level rawness, the astute viewer will pause for introspection and wonder what desperate thoughts prompted the terrorists to improvise this weapon. Did they believe they were passengers in a world that was being piloted on a suicide mission by Western excess? Was the World Trade Center a metaphorical cockpit being stormed by desperate global passengers?

I would guess that this irony was unintentional, but intention is not the substance of art. Like an embarrassing child, art speaks her own mind, heedless of what her red-faced parents told her not to say. On a less artistic level there is an allegory which probably is intended. Since in this version of the story the passengers of flight 93 crashed the plane before it could destroy the Capitol building, their action may be considered pre-emptive. The invasion of Iraq was said to be pre-emptive, and now the possible invasion of Iran is also being touted as pre-emptive. United 93 suggests that in the long run such an attack would be worth the sacrifice of a few American lives.

Besides unintended irony, this work of art also has unintended lessons. The most important lesson questions why Islamic and Western civilizations have to clash in the first place. For example, the movie opens with the most moving recitation of the Koran I have ever heard. This is because the calming and yet deeply emotional quality of the words were enhanced by a soothing sustenato of strings in the background. Musical instruments are forbidden in Koran recitations, and if someone wanted to make a fuss about it, this fusion of violins and Koran could fuel street demonstrations. There was no protest because the innovation was not intended to offend, but to convey to a Western audience the sense of calm that a Koran recitation can bring. Yet even to a Muslim this fusion of cultures was astonishingly artful.

United 93 deviates from the Hollywood airport-movie genre in that the audience knows the story will end in tragedy. But there are those of us who still believe in a happy ending to the Islam vs. West conflict. To help this ship land safely we will create and support art and literature that intermingles the sublime aspects of these two cultures, rather than catalogue and memorialize the atrocities we have each committed. We happy-ending fans recommend the audience walk out on United 93 after enjoying the first scene with the amazing aria 'sung' in Koranic lilt.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

How will the Iran nuclear showdown end?

Last month on this website I recommended Iran augment its current hurry-up-and-catch-up research on the obsolete nuclear technologies of the mid twentieth century, and focus on newer reactor designs. These newer reactor designs are being considered by nations who are serious about the use of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels. The reactors of the future will be far more efficient and safer in the sense that their waste falls to tolerable levels of radioactivity in a few centuries rather than the tens of thousands of years for current reactors.

For a few days last week it seemed the Europeans were offering Iran “the most advanced nuclear technologies available” in return for Iran’s abandoning its uranium enrichment program. Though equivocations began to later appear in the news, if there is the smallest chance that this hint of an offer can be made real, the enterprise would be worth the efforts of any foresighted Iranian administration. Iran has vast hydrocarbon resources, but it is to her economic advantage to export this resource than to burn it for domestic use.

However, abandoning her uranium enrichment program is not an option for Iran. Technological self sufficiency is written into the Iranian constitution. The constitution has as one of its pillars, “The attainment of self-sufficiency in scientific, technological, industrial, agricultural, and military domains, and other similar spheres.” For the Iranians who are still paying the humiliating price of technological backwardness, this article of the constitution is more important than any of the declarations of loyalty to the Islamic way of life. This is why more people in Iran are united behind her nuclear program than support the Islamic regime. Any European offer of technology must respect Iran’s constitution on this point or the deal is off. Any regime interested in staying in power in Iran must respect Iran’s constitution on this point, or its time is up.

The Europeans know this and the Islamic regime knows this. The solution will be to satisfy the self sufficiency clause of Iran’s constitution by simply limiting her uranium enrichment efforts to pure research. This way Iran will not have nuclear strike capability but if by some chance Western security guarantees fail, Iran has the option of producing a weapon as a deterrence.

There is no other logical way this deadlock can be resolved, and if there were no hidden agendas, events would be proceeding in this direction. The fact that the world is still arguing about what to do with Iran has to do with the agenda of the United States to maintain superpower control over the economies of developing countries. However, the military failure of the United States in Iraq, the waning of manufacturing in this country, and the slow erosion of faith in the legitimacy of America as a global financial authority are likely to make the US agenda less and less important to the rest of the world. Once the global perception of US power is on a par with reality, the Iran nuclear issue will be resolved peacefully and logically.