"There is something about coming back to peace that makes a man rot from the inside," Abdoh writes of his return from the front to the cafes, art galleries and literary readings he attends in Teheran. "Not every man, I am certain, feels this way, and not everyone wants to rain rockets on people who do not know, or feel, that there is a war next door. But I felt it. Because I was rotting from inside."
The torturers, the killers, the pilots who obliterate wedding parties and hospitals and gun down unarmed civilians, if found out, are treated as freakish aberrations. War, to perpetuate itself, requires us to believe in a Manichean world of good and evil. The diseases of nationalism and religious chauvinism, which grip whole populations like a fever in wartime, are not only about this self-adulation, but the rendering of those who oppose us into beasts. This simplified division of the world into absolutes, part of war's attraction, absolves everyone from moral choice. If evil is embodied in those we fight, then their eradication is a form of purification, a chance to rid the world of evil itself. To perish in this crusade is to be transformed into a martyr, celebrated, at least for a moment, in the state-orchestrated rituals of war.
Iran was infected with this cult of death during the war with Iraq. The war began in 1980 when Saddam Hussein, with the support of the West, invaded post-revolutionary Iran in 1980. It ended eight years later -- I was in Baghdad on August 20, 1988 when the ceasefire was announced -- with no clear victor. The war, physically and psychologically, was to Iran what World War I was to Russia, France, Germany and Great Britain. It replicated the tactics of World War I with its labyrinth of trenches, its numbing, its landscape of shell holes, bloated corpses being eaten by rats, acres of mine fields, ruined towns, coils of barbed wire, constant chatter of machine guns and relentless boom of artillery, as well as its suicidal human wave assaults and senseless bayonet charges. At the end, it even culminated in poison gas attacks. Over half a million died. Hundreds of thousands returned from the war damaged beyond repair.
The Iranian state, to justify the collective self-slaughter, incessantly celebrates these heroic martyrs. And young men, trapped in the squalid slums of Iranian cities, sign up for this new war against the Sunni jihadists to become in death what they can never become in life, to equal the feats of the martyrs whose names and stories are told and retold to justify war's folly. As did Proust, Abdoh understands the fevered yearning to become heroes in movies that play incessantly in our heads. This yearning has been enhanced by digital media, allowing suicide bombers to dream the night before their self-immolation about the millions of views their obliteration will attract on the internet. These fantasies divert us from all that is sacred and precious.
"Martyrdom was our shibboleth; we distinguished each other's sincerity by the way someone talked too little or too much about it," Saleh says in the novel. "We knew who was lying and who was telling the truth when they prayed for martyrdom. We were adept at intuiting when a guy was ready to leave this world. A certain light, a halo even, would surround him. He became extra kind. His prayers turned heroic. He cried a lot. This was not always the case and maybe not all of these things happened at the same time. But they happened enough times that my martyr radar was strong; I knew when a man was finally tired and felt like he'd done his share of protecting the holy places and was ready to leave this world."
No matter how many people war devours, there are always new recruits, eager to obtain the imprimatur of combat and the status that comes with it.
"I looked to the side of the road that lead to the Zaynab, not nearly as crowded as that first time, and saw a group of young men, Iranians, sharing some bread and cheese next to one of the shrine's many trinket stands," Saleh says. "I knew their kind. They were me. And Nasif. They'd sold the shirts off their backs and somehow made it way out here to be Defenders of the Faith and Protectors of the Holy Places. But nobody let them into the inner sanctum of bloodletting. They didn't have the right connections with the Guards, or lacked the skills, or were just plain unlucky. They'd come here because they had nothing else going on. They came because there was something to be said about defending the faith even if, like me, you haven't much faith to begin with. I wanted to go over and kiss them. Martyrs by default, martyrs because of the poverty of their options, they were here to be immortalized as heroes. They wanted to enter the chronicles of sacrifice."
The wars that Abdoh writes about have not ended. They still send out the siren call. They still pile up corpse upon corpse. They still leave families in grief. They still return to us men and women deformed by war. It is the triumph of death over life. These wars will not end until we look at what we are doing and what we have done. Abdoh's novel lifts the veil on the murderous insanity.
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