I was born in Kermanshah. I feel I should state that plainly, before proceeding, the way one states the name of the dead at the start of an obituary – which is, perhaps, what this is. The city in western Iran where my father, damaged by one world war and fleeing to what he imagined would be a simpler life, brought my mother, and where I arrived in 1919 into a world that was already, though we could not see it then, preparing for its next catastrophe. I left as a small child. I never went back. But a birthplace is not something you choose, and it is not something you shed, and today I find that the coordinates of my first breath are coordinates of war.
The reports say that Tehran is caught between American and Israeli bombs falling from above and the regime's internal security apparatus tightening from within. This is the geometry of modern suffering – struck from two directions simultaneously, crushed in the middle. I recognise it. I have seen it in Rhodesia, in South Africa, in every place where ordinary people discover that they are merely the medium through which great powers conduct their electricity. The Iranians on the streets of Tehran, described in the dispatches as living in "unrelenting dread," are not political abstractions. They are people who queue for bread and worry about their children's schooling and argue with their spouses about money, and who now must also calculate, each morning, whether the building they work in will still be standing by evening.
Ali Larijani is dead. One of Khamenei's closest confidants, killed in a strike. Funerals are being held in a country where the act of public mourning has become, itself, a form of political theatre. Netanyahu, we are told, hopes that the strikes against Iran's internal security forces will lead to an uprising, a revolution, regime change. I have lived long enough to have heard this logic before. It is the logic of every empire that bombs a country and then waits, with inexplicable optimism, for the bombed to be grateful. The Americans tried it in Iraq. The British tried it everywhere. The assumption is always the same: that if you destroy the apparatus of repression, the people beneath it will blossom into democrats. What actually happens, what always happens, is more complicated and more terrible.
In Washington, a man named Joe Kent, the country's top counterterrorism official, has resigned. He says he cannot support the war. He says Iran was not an imminent threat. He says the war was started due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. These are remarkable statements from a man inside the machine, and I note them with the detachment of someone who has watched, over decades, the occasional individual conscience flare up against institutional momentum and then, almost always, be absorbed into the narrative as a footnote. Kent will be called brave by some and a traitor by others, and the war will continue regardless, because wars are not stopped by resignations. They are stopped by exhaustion.
Meanwhile, the global machinery adjusts. NATO is deploying Patriot missile defence systems to southern Türkiye. Japan's leader travels to Washington, where she will be pressed for military help in the Strait of Hormuz – that narrow throat of water through which so much of the world's oil passes, and which Iran has effectively sealed. The fertiliser shortage threatens global food supplies. The price of petrol in Japan has reached record highs. A confectionery factory has shut down because it cannot source the heavy oil it needs. This is how wars work now – not merely in the craters and the casualty lists but in the price of a chocolate bar in Osaka, in the darkness of a Cuban kitchen where the power has been out for weeks.
Cuba. I must speak of Cuba. The island has been without reliable electricity for three months, plunged into blackout by an American blockade that has cut off fuel shipments entirely. European aid convoys are setting out from Italy. And Donald Trump – the same man conducting the war against Iran, the same man who has already intervened in Venezuela – is now signalling that Cuba may be next. His Secretary of State says Cuba needs "new leadership." The pattern is unmistakable and very old. I wrote about it fifty years ago, though the names and geographies were different. The powerful decide that a small country's government is unacceptable, and then they arrange – through sanctions, through blockades, through the slow starvation of a population – for that government to fall, and they call it liberation.
The word "liberation" has followed me all my life. In Southern Rhodesia, where I grew up, the white settlers used it to describe what they had done to the land. The liberation movements used it to describe what they intended to do to the settlers. Both were sincere. Both were, in their different ways, wrong: or at least incomplete. Liberation is not a single act. It is not a bomb falling on a command centre in Tehran. It is not a regime change engineered from ten thousand miles away. It is the long, grinding, unglamorous work of people learning to govern themselves, and it cannot be delivered from the outside. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something – usually weapons.
In Kabul, a Pakistani airstrike has hit a drug rehabilitation centre while patients were eating dinner. The exact number killed is still being counted, but it is feared to be in the hundreds. Hundreds. Men who had gone to that place to try to stop destroying themselves, destroyed instead by a missile fired from a neighbouring country in a dispute that has nothing to do with their addiction or their recovery or their small, desperate hope of getting better. I find I cannot write about this with the analytical distance I have been maintaining. There is a point where the irony of history gives way to something simpler and more raw, and this is it. A rehabilitation centre. Dinner time. Hundreds dead.
A Belgian court, in what feels like news from another century, has cleared the way for the trial of a 93-year-old former diplomat for complicity in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo. Sixty-five years. That is how long it has taken for a court to say: yes, this should be examined. Lumumba was killed because he was inconvenient to the Belgians and the Americans and everyone else who had plans for the Congo's resources. His family calls the trial "the beginning of a reckoning." I admire their patience. I admire their refusal to forget. But I wonder what reckoning means when the man in the dock is ninety-three, and the structures that produced him are still fully operational, still producing new interventions, new convenient deaths, new small countries whose leadership is deemed unacceptable.
There is one piece of news that has nothing to do with war. Scientists have discovered an entire ecosystem hidden beneath the ice of Antarctica – living things, thriving in conditions we assumed were incompatible with life. I mention this because it seems to me precisely the kind of discovery that reveals the poverty of our assumptions. We look at a frozen continent and see nothing. And beneath it, in the dark, in the cold, life goes on. It adapts. It persists. It does not require our permission or our awareness.
I think of the people of Kermanshah, my city, though I have no memory of it, and I think of all the people in all the cities that are today being struck or blockaded or starved or simply ignored, and I think: they are the ecosystem beneath the ice. They are there. They persist. The reports from the surface tell one story of missiles and resignations and geopolitical chess, but beneath it there is another story, older and more stubborn, of people who continue to live, to love, to queue for bread, to argue, to hope. This story does not make the news. It never has. But it is the only story that matters.
I was born in Kermanshah. The weather there today is unknown to me. I imagine – but I do not know – that spring is beginning, that the almond trees along the river are thinking about blossoming. Or perhaps they have been blown apart. I do not know. I am old, and I am dead, and I cannot help. But I can say this: what is happening is not new, and it is not inevitable, and the first step toward changing it is to refuse – absolutely, stubbornly, in the face of all the sophisticated arguments – to accept that it is normal.
