A Political Culture Shock

On our last evening we walked past the “US Den of Espionage”, the former US Embassy in the middle of one of the busiest commercial areas in Tehran – now a training centre for various military units. Its a large brick compound with 3 meter high barricades on the outside, with guards patrolling every few meters. The US emblem that was suppose to be sealed out on the side walls had been torn off the bricks, but its pretty obvious what had been there before.. This was where 52 American Embassy staff was captured and held for 444 days between 1979 and 1981 at the hight of the Iranian Revolution. The outside walls were painted with some extremely interesting, fascinating, quite good quality but blatantly disturbing propaganda murals with anti-US and patriotic propaganda (I didn't dare take pictures, but here are some), such as a paintings of the Goddess of Liberty as an evil skeleton, several ripped USA flags and various picture of Khomeini in heroic poses, with a clear and concise ‘Down With USA’ in English painted on the very front door. This is just like the public mutilation of a dead enemy’s carcass after a victorious battle, looted and then hung on display, all hatred of a nation dispensed upon it, compulsorily. Gratification? Revenge? Indifference? Debt? Inheritance?

We were booked on the overnight train to Esfahan, and we spent an hour or so in the station waiting lounge waiting for our train to get there. The wide-screened television was broadcasting an image I am not completely unfamiliar with, but became suddenly weary and intense about: A Palestinian city in chaos, grey clouds of smoke rushing into the sky, debris across the street, ambulances shriek about. The people I saw in there suddenly looked like everyone else that’s sitting around me, and everyone that I’d rubbed shoulders with in the last few days in Tehran: handsome lean young men in sweat-shirts, jeans and sneakers, middle-aged women covered in hijab and long coat, small children wide-eyed and vulnerable, skinny old men with silver moustaches… suddenly displaced on the dusty street, some lying in pools of blood, screaming, some hurrying the injured onto ambulances, others crying over a dead loved-one on a stretcher. Then came the tightly wrapped body bags in an angry public funeral procession, little bundles, big bundles, white bundles, green and black and red bundles. These images are one sided, as one would expect, but refreshingly so. Graphic, unforgiving, the closest camera screens to tragedy I have ever seen... children's severed limbs, a dead man's eyes piercing the screen, the haunting sound of wailing. Then familiar nouns flash across the bottom of the screen in English, – bombs, death, condemnation, Israel, guns, soldiers, Hammas, rockets, food, aid, blood... Gaza. and then the slogans appeared across the bottom of the screen - US DOES NOT STOP ISRAEL. ABBAS HAS NO HOPE OF LEADERSHIP. OUTRAGE FOR GAZA BROTHERS. JUSTICE TO MURDERERS OF GAZA'S CHILDREN. DESTRUCTION TO ISRAEL!

Sitting here in this crowded waiting lounge, it just felt far too close to home. It can happen right here, right now, and I wouldn't be surprised. I looked around here into hundreds of pairs of enraged eyes. The station roof may as well have come down now.