The rivers of fire running down the streets. The ripple of gas explosions rushing back along them in the opposite direction. The roiling gobbets of flame flickering at the base of surging columns of black, black smoke. They weren’t made up. They were all real.
I was looking at the Apocalypse. I was looking at Tehran.
It got worse. The flames and the smoke were the result of Israeli missiles striking a major oil depot on the outskirts of the Iranian capital. Like something out of Tolkien’s Mordor, the vapours rising above the city were a sorcerer’s brew of poisonous petro-chemicals.
Within hours they would level out into an ominous purple cloud over Tehran.
Then it rained. Not ordinary rain. A black rain. It was thick, viscous, and glistening with toxicity. It stained the city walls, running down like the Devil’s mascara.
It destroyed the clothing washed and hung out to dry just hours before. It collected on the city’s flat rooftops in disgusting puddles.
It collected in the lungs of the city’s people. They couldn’t stop coughing. And when they refilled their lungs with the city’s acrid air they started coughing again.
Parents closed the windows and the doors, held their children close, spoke what words of comfort they could, while all around them Tehran shook and trembled under the Israelis’ and the Americans’ deadly ordnance.
This is not what I wanted. This is not what I expected.
When I first learned that Israel and the United States were resolved to bring down the theocratic government of the Islamic Republic of Iran by force of arms, I punched the air and whooped like a cowboy.
In my mind I replayed the images of near suicidal heroism recorded over many years on the streets of Iran’s towns and cities. I remembered the impossibly brave schoolgirls setting fire to their headscarves, even as baton-wielding police advanced towards them.
I saw again the wild caravan of Basij militiamen’s motorbikes wheeling in front of defiant crowds of protesters, Kalashnikovs blazing. I thought about the tens of thousands of Iranians beaten, imprisoned, tortured, hanged from cranes, and shot in the back of the head for the crime of demanding freedom.
So, yes, you bet I cheered. What a fool. What on earth led me to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, masquerading as Lady Liberty’s avenging angels, could be believed? How on earth did I miss the meaning between Trump’s lines about staying inside while the bombs fell?
When bombs fall, everything breaks: windows, oil depots, pipelines, human beings.
Christian Nationalists in the United States can cry “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall” but you won’t find many of them living in the ruins of the places upon which the wrath of their blasphemous conception of God has fallen.
What justice can Iranians be expected to fashion out of shattered concrete and twisted rebar? What freedom songs can they sing with lungs full of toxic chemicals?
It is difficult for the citizens of Tehran to get their stories out, but some manage. This is how one of them described the scene to a relative, who passed it on to the young journalists at Novara Media.
“The Rey Depot [the Shahr-e-Rey oil depot located in South Tehran] you won’t believe, was still on fire and it’s insane because in the night it looked like day, and in the day, it was so dark, it looked like a new moon night. So, so dark, just like our futures. While I was leaving [hundreds of thousands of Tehran citizens have fled their homes in search of safety] I noticed there wasn’t a single bird in the sky, and you know what they say? When the birds abandon you, you are truly on your own. We have so many cats in the city. If these attacks continue, whoever rules here next, they will rule over a democracy of cats.”
Iran’s democratic cats are fast running through their nine lives. Not that Netanyahu and Trump will lose any sleep over it. For all their brave promises, regime change in favour of democracy was never Israel’s or the United States’ plan.
Their plan was always to make a smoking ruin of Iran — and call it victory.
- Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
