Yet again - no war in the land of Esther

In the light of recent news, I find I have very little to add to the following two posts I wrote from 2013 and 2017, so I am quoting them below verbatim. The one exception I will make is to say that John Bolton is clearly an actor with far worse and more insidious motivations than Michael Flynn ever was; not just in Iran but in Venezuela also. Trump failed his test of being a peace president in Yemen; may God help him not fail this one. So here is the post from 2013:

In the first Gospel, the first people to recognise Christ as King and worship him were magi; that is, the Persian (read: Iranian) followers of the prophet Zoroaster. That they would recognise Christ as King and worship him is fully understandable; they were merely doing so in accordance with Zoroaster’s teachings.

Zoroaster was one of the first prophets to proclaim a single God, transcendent, without form and not contingent upon history or culture. He was the first prophet to proclaim truth, beauty and goodness as transcendent ideals, outside of historical or cultural constraints.

He was also among the first prophets (along with Zhou Gong Dan and Abraham) to preach what was then, and apparently is again now, the radical social doctrine that it is not the absolute and untrammeled private right of the wealthy and the powerful to dominate the poor and the weak. He preached, indeed, that the treatment of the poor and weak, whether good or ill, would have eternal consequences, correspondingly good or ill. He preached a divine right of kings (again, along with Zhou Gong Dan) that is dependent on the righteous behaviour of the king, as measured by how he treats the least of these in his kingdom, and held well before Mencius that it is not wrong to overthrow a tyrant, a ruler without farr. Indeed, he was among the first people to hold that each person is responsible for her own actions (and only her own actions) in her own lifetime. He was also among the first people to proclaim a Saviour of the world, born of a virgin, who would come to judge the living and the dead.

As Pliny tells us, Zoroaster’s followers and priests, the magi, were the tutors of Pythagoras, and through Pythagoras of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the entire Western virtue-ethical tradition. That all too many of our classicists persist in the error of Herodotus in identifying the Persian Empire under the Achaemenids as barbaric, or even more laughably tyrannical, merely because two of their emperors (Darius the Great and Xerxes the Great) opposed the government of Athens in its wrongheaded foreign policy is nothing more or less than a reflection of their dependence on that government’s own propaganda. Socrates also opposed the government of Athens in its wrongheaded religious policy, to his death; would these same classicists render him also a barbarian?

That same Xerxes, by the way, is the same Persian Emperor who married Esther, and who saved the Jewish nation from perishing from the face of the Earth. That Esther, along with her kinsman Mordechai, the prophet Daniel and Ezra the Scribe, are still buried in Iran. To this day, there remain Jews in Iran; these Jews for the most part choose to stay in Iran in spite of repeated attempts by the Israeli government to resettle them, and have permanent representation in the Majlis, where they sit alongside the Christian Armenians and Assyrians who have also historically sought shelter in Iran from persecution, and who also have guaranteed seats there. (Armenia, the oldest Christian country on the planet, also happens to be one of a number of countries which recognises Iran’s right to pursue peaceful applications of nuclear power.) These Jews, and these Christians, emphatically want no war to ‘liberate’ them, as any such war would have disastrous consequences for them in particular.

Is it truly so surprising that from a nation in which lies the fountainhead of Greco-Roman philosophy, and the first inklings and the preservation of Judaic morality, come several priests who come to kneel and worship before the incarnate recapitulation of both? It would not have been so to St Matthew, a Jew who spoke Greek and who was obviously very knowledgeable about both Jewish and Greek history.

Iran is home to the second-oldest continuous civilisation existing in the world today, after China. That civilisation, which stands on the Silk Road and thus not only was invaluable to the intercourse between East and West but in some measure belonged to both, assimilated their Macedonian Greek conquerors, evaded conquest by the Romans and the Huns, resisted conquest by the Arabs, the Turks and the Mongols, and carried the torch of their unique civilisation through the gauntlet of the murderous rapine of each. So deep runs the Zoroastrian-rooted tradition of a transcendental, scholastic principle of justice in Iranian civilisation that it managed to transfigure even the doctrines of Islam into the social-justice and martyr-oriented tradition of the Shi’at Ali – inspiring the ‘Red Shi’ism’ of Dr Ali Shariati.

The historical record indicates that the Iranian people do not suffer tyrants lightly, be they Huns, Arabs, Turks, Mongols or British. Rest assured that we shall see the green banners again, but though we may and should wish them well, we must never presume that they are our own cause. We must never support the Mojahedin-e Khalq or the Salafist Jundullah, both of whom (though for very different reasons) hold in contempt the civilisation they seek to ‘liberate’, as the standard-bearers of that cause. And most of all, we must never seek to invade that nation, thus damaging perhaps for centuries to come the beautiful tapestry that has taken them five millennia to weave.

And here is the post from 2017:

You know the old saw ‘in like Flynn’? Somehow I don’t think old Errol would agree.

Or, rather, here we go ‘understanding the right of all nations to put their own interests first’ (who ghostwrote that, I wonder?). As David Lindsay rightly says, ‘Bernie would have won’.

General Mikey is now putting Iran ‘on notice’ because Yemeni Shi’ites have the temerity to defend themselves against indiscriminate Saudi attacks. Let that sink in, please.

Iran is our ally in Iraq, against the extremist ‘Islamic’ State, which in our magician’s-apprentice-like naïveté we summoned up to battle against Assad in Syria. (We actually do have an interest in fighting the ‘Islamic’ State. We have no such true interest in the Houthis either way.) Even prior to then, the ‘Islamic’ State represents a judgement upon America’s foreign-political sins. The arming of Saddam against the Iranians and both of the Gulf Wars have shown, to what ought to be a mortifying degree, our inability to learn from our political follies in meddling in the region’s affairs.

Iran, a country which never has been and never will be as anti-American as either American or Iranian hawks would like it to be, has since the dawn of its ancient civilisation been a beacon for creativity and organic spiritual unity, and one which valued the freedom of the spoken word. In its cultural infancy, in contrast to every single civilisation around it (except China, far to the East) it promulgated an ideal of just kingship – khvarenah – which blessed the right of the monarch to rule only when that monarch behaved in a virtuous and morally exemplary fashion, particularly toward his poorest and most vulnerable subjects.

When Iran forged an empire, it banned slavery and guaranteed the religious and cultural integrity of each linguistic and ethnic community it governed. When its empires fell, as under the Tatar and Mongol yokes, Iran put up an indomitable resistance. Even the form of Islam which it adopted, when Islamic Arabs overran its borders, was a radical form of Islam – best expressed in Dr. Ali Shariati’s ‘red Shi’ism’ – which placed its priorities not on attaining and keeping political power, but with speaking up for the downtrodden even at the cost of personal and national martyrdom. Iran has long integrated and infused its artistic life with its moral and spiritual life, and as its artistic traditions show, it has never had much use for or interest in modern utilitarianism. But Iran is the home of the tombs of Daniel, Esther and Mordechai (which are still in existence and under the protection of the government), was the home of the three Magi who first visited Jesus and remains one of the region’s few safe havens for ethnic Armenians and Jews.

Iran has long – and indeed, always! – been characterised by its unswerving, even martyric passion for independence. Not independence in the narrow, materialistic, bourgeois sense of the word as we take it in the United States (though economic independence from Britain and the elimination of BP’s corporate stranglehold over Iran was of great importance to Mosaddegh and to the Iranian democrats of the time). But more important in the Iranian lifeworld is spiritual independence from all false idols and ideologies. (It is no accident that Iran of Late Antiquity bore forth some of our Church’s greatest saints.) Even in the throes of its revolution, Iran never succumbed to the shadowplay of the two great falsities of communism and capitalism. And now, as we see, even in its ‘black Shi’ite’ theocratic state, it shows itself a ready ally against the extremes of political, Wahhabi Islam! Though Iran holds near and dear to its heart the principles of creativity, of spiritual unity and independence, these principles are not and cannot be held on terms amenable to bourgeois, individualistic Western-style liberalism – any more than the similar Russian principles can be.

It should indeed be clear that they have their own interests which may not coincide in every particular with our own. But it took Obama far too long to learn that; Trump cannot be afforded the same degree of leniency. We must also learn that we should not make our friendship with Iran conditional upon ideological conformity; otherwise, they will spurn us and rightly so.