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Iran

POETRY

HISTORY RHYMING

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read438 views

The Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years,

was always really only about oil.

Iraq had its Arab allies, the US,

and the USSR supplying cash,

know-how, arms. The war was a reprise

of the Western Front, with trenches and

chemical weapons. Machine guns scythed

line after line after line of young men.

A city was wrecked, a refinery,

many more than a million wounded and dead,

but no reparations were sought or given,

nor any territory exchanged –

a defensive war that accidentally

bigged-up a Cleric, and the hegemony

of zealotry and blood; an aggressive war

meant to big-up the hegemony

of the American Empire, but,

instead, made a Tyrant think he was

an ally not a useful idiot

with a regime of blood and torture.

 

The following two so-called Gulf Wars

were also about oil – as well, of course,

as caprice, rhetoric, spite and racism –

as is the current one. So, perhaps, at last,

Pax Americana will properly

be rendered as Clades Americana –

where ‘clades’, according to Google Translate,

may be translated as: ‘calamity’,

‘damage’, ‘defeat’, ‘discomfiture’, ‘disaster’,

‘loss’, ‘mutilation’, ‘overthrow’, ‘rout’, ‘ruin’,

‘scourge’, according to context, of course  – think

Afghanistan, Vietnam.

 

 

 

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POETRY

SATANS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read5.3K views

Is there some primate imperative, some

genetic human want, need, reverence for

so-called strong leaders, those masters of

othering, destroyers of order,

adepts in venality and stupidity,

casual slaughterers of innocence?

 

Israel attacks Iran on a pretext from the

loan library of Pretexts – more or less

the same pretext Alexander the Great

borrowed when he burned Persepolis,

(city of the Persians). Iran borrows

from the library of Virility

and attacks Israel – the same library the Crusaders used

when they captured Jerusalem and slaughtered

Jews and Muslims, men, women, and children.

 

And the world’s self-appointed Policeman –

in hock to Christian Evangelists

and Fossil Fuel Companies and the concept

of Full Spectrum Dominance – plays his trump card,

a TV series entitled THE END

OF DAYS, with seven full length episodes:

‘Iraq’, ‘Libya’, ‘Somalia’, ‘Sudan’,

‘Lebanon’, ‘Syria’, ‘Iran’; the seven

countries of the apocalypse; repeat.

 

Opportunists and fanatics, rich boys

and malignant narcissists, greedy shits

and unhinged rhetoricians, sadists

and chaps with things to prove are, it seems,

like the poor, always to be with us

to the very end of history.

 

 

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POETRY

THE FOURTH ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2.5K views

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’,

observed Holmes to the astounded Watson,

having noted that the doctor’s face spoke

‘of hardship and sickness’. He had seen action

in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which,

like the First was all about The Great Game

and Russia, and both, like the Third, all

about the British Raj, that Jewel in the Crown,

and Afghan monarchs that might be cajoled

with sufficient treasure or sufficient blood,

while the true rulers, the tribal elders

of the ethnic groups, parleyed with all sides.

 

The Great Game continues, and with new players:

America, China, Iran, Pakistan,

Saudi Arabia. Are Taliban –

who, as some predicted never went away,

but fought a twenty year insurgency –

aka Mujahideen aka

‘freedom fighters’ (to quote Margaret Thatcher),

and the well-funded, so-called Islamic State –

that movable terror, that mobile nihilism –

pawns in the new game,

useful idiots in the exploitation

of the country’s many mineral fields?

 

Those who brought Enduring Freedom chose

not to eradicate polio

but supplied electricity throughout

enabling scenes of havoc and mayhem

to be broadcast on WhatsApp and Instagram.

So, record the lies about Afghanistan –

hypocritical, self-serving untruths,

which ignore the torture at Bagram Air Base,

which prioritise the lives of dogs. Record

that the liars are mostly privileged,

sanctimonious, nostalgic, white

imperialists, some moonlighting as hacks.

 

The Fourth war has masqueraded under

two different euphemisms,

Operation Herrick and then Toral,

and been fought with allies – with Nato,

and the erstwhile Afghan Army and Police –

and achieved no discernible victories,

no battle honours only body bags,

only more of the maimed and the desperate,

only incompetence and abandonment –

against lightly-armed zealots on Chinese-made

Honda motor bikes with a seemingly

endless supply of imported fuel

financed by hectares of exported drugs,

and for whom aspects of criminality,

particularly towards women and girls,

appear a brutal and sacred duty,

in a poor country corrupted with money,

a Ponzi scheme for foreign consultants.

 

Although its capital city, Kabul,

remains the only one in the world

without a railway station, the trade

in opium and hashish has blossomed,

Afghanistan becoming the world leader –

which might have rendered even Holmes speechless.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

MOST WANTED, MOST NEEDED

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.5K views

I

 

We know what happened to ‘the end of history’

and ‘the peace dividend’ but what will we do now

that Osama sleeps with the fishes? Gladly, there

is no shortage of men, for they do tend to be

men, for the role of bogeyman. The myth of the

ruthless, devious, almost supernaturally

efficient enemy endures, for all wars make

money for some and wars of choice – Afghanistan,

Iraq – make even more for the same some, so war

with Iran is probably, definitely not ‘if’ but ‘when’.

 

How many of us dare to publicly expose

our leaders’ new clothes, reveal courageous death and

injury under fire as pointless, immoral,

unnecessary, avoidable, in this still

bellicose and jingoistic nation with its

tinsel patriotism of drums and flags muffling,

obscuring reason – its manipulation

of so much righteous anger and genuine grief!

 

 

II

 

According to legend, Hafiz of Shiraz, Fars,

Persia – the Sufi mystic and lyric poet,

an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer,

and popular still with speakers of Farsi

in Afghanistan and Iran, who learn his work

by heart as proverbs, sayings – was summoned

by Timur Leng aka Tamburlaine, who ruled

an empire that stretched from the Black Sea to China

and south from Kazakhstan to the mud flats of Sindh,

whose conquests, it is estimated, caused the deaths

of seventeen million men, women and children.

 

‘How could you prefer the mole on your lover’s cheek

to Bokhara and Samarkand, cities of gold,

the very jewels in my crown?’ questioned Tamburlaine,

making reference to one of the master’s ghazals.

‘I am profligate,’ replied Hafiz, ‘so am poor.’

The tyrant paid the poet many gold dinars

for his diplomatic wit. So let there always

be war by any other means, by doing what

we do best. The last couplet of the lyric reads:

‘O Hafiz, you have made a poem, so recite it well!

Be rewarded with the pearls of the firmament.’[1]

 

 

 

 


[1] The last two lines have been adapted from ‘TEACHINGS OF HAFIZ’ translated by Gertrude Lowthian Bell, 1897.

 

 

 

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