Punkass Mishra & his Iranian goat

Iran is a Muslim country with a long land border with Pakistan. It has supported Pakistan in all of its wars with India. From 1974 onward, it has worked closely with Pakistan to suppress Baloch separatism. 

Israel, by contrast, supported India in '62, '65, 1971 & most crucially during the Kargil War. India's close relations with Socialist Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war  would have soured ties in any case. Relations improved when both countries supported the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. However, Iran's support for separatists in Kashmir remained an irritant. Matters came to a head in 2010 when the Iranian Supreme Leader appealed to Muslims around the world- including those in India- to stand with the Kashmiri separatists. Then, in 2013, Iran detained India's largest ocean liner, the Shipping Corporation (SCI)'s vessel MT Desh Shanti, carrying crude oil from Iraq. After Modi became PM, relations improved and the two countries began to cooperate on specific economic projects. However, neither side considers the other an ally. Iran will always stand with Pakistan while India will continue to deepen ties with Israel. Modi's diplomacy has paid off in that, during the current crisis, Iran is permitting India's ships to pass through the straits of Hormuz. 

Punkass Mishra doesn't seem to understand this. He writes in the NRB of

A Bitter Education

Iran & India exchange students who get a good education & feel no bitterness.  

In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.

India doesn't have a dog in this fight. Will Iran go nuclear? Probably. Turkey & Saudi will follow suit as will Taiwan, Japan, Australia & maybe Indonesia & the Philippines.  

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that “among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.”

But the race which had the biggest influence on India was the British. Nehru wrote in English. His country continues to use English for all official purposes. Persian disappeared from India almost 200 years ago.  

It is the kind of historical fact readily verified by ordinary experience. My grandfather was more fluent in Persian than in any other language;

Mishra is lying. His grandfather was fluent only in Hindi. Iranians would have been baffled by his attempts to speak their language. Moreover, Mishra's grandfather was a Brahmin. He said his prayers in Sanskrit, not Persian. Even if he had converted to Islam, he would have prayed in Arabic, not Persian. Madrasas in India teach Arabic. Persian has vanished.  

I grew up using Persian words in everyday conversations,

because they had entered the local language.  

eating food that originated in Persia,

& China & Italy. The chili peppers his Mother used came from Latin America. So what?  

and listening to music whose most widespread and enduring forms—qawwali and the ghazal—were refined by a medieval poet in Persian.

& Hindvi. So what? That was a long time ago.  

For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia:

but ceased to be so over a century ago. Ataturk 'de-Persianised' his language & forced the adoption of the Roman script. 

the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China.

Ibn Battuta gained judicial appointments in India because he spoke Arabic. He had a couple of assistants who knew Persian precisely because he didn't know the language well. This did not matter. Arabic was superior to Persian.  

Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity

It hasn't. The discontinuity arises because the Arabs imposed Islam. The indigenous Zoroastrian religion was persecuted. Oddly, it was Turkic rulers (e.g. Mahmud of Ghazni who was the patron of Firdausi) who encouraged a separate Persian cultural identity.  

transcending many different political regimes, it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persian civilization, or ecumene.

No. The Safavids, a Turkic dynasty, turned Iran into a Shia country. Persian nationalism is Shia not Achaemenid. The Shah made a mistake by referring to himself as 'the light of the Aryans'. Iranians are Muslims and wish to imitate the Prophet & his companions who were Arabs- not Aryans. Zoroastrians were persecuted in Iran which is why many fled to India. The Ba'bi & Bahai sects are indigenous to Iran. Both are persecuted by the current regime. 

Translated into many vernacular languages, the poetry and philosophy of Firdausi, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Sa‘di, Nizami, Ibn Sina, and Nizam al-Mulk assumed a canonical authority across Asia.

So what? The Arabs translated plenty of Greek & Indic texts into their own language. No Hindu considered any Persian writer 'canonical'.  

Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft

which were shit. Indians adopted British ideologies of statecraft. Why? They weren't shit.  

that, as Richard Eaton

a well known Ayatollah. He was married to a goat & lived in Teheran.  

writes in India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2019), privileged “the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics.”

Which was why India was an utter shithole- especially for non-Muslims.  It must be said, India tended to be ruled by people of Turkish, not Iranian, descent. Turks were good fighters. Iranians were cowards. Their rulers tended to be of Turkic origin. 

The flow of ideas and ideologies came even faster in response to the shocks and traumas of the West’s violent domination of Asia

its domination of India was very peaceful. Why? British rule was vastly preferable to Muslim hegemony.  

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visiting Iran in 1932, Rabindranath Tagore, who grew up listening to his father recite Hafez,

but who didn't bother to learn Persian himself 

enlisted in the country’s attempt to create a national identity based on its pre-Islamic and pan-Asian heritage.

He failed.  

The modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat

educated by French Catholics in Iran before he moved to France for studies. Later he returned & died there 

published The Blind Owl, a masterpiece of Iranian literature, in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1936.

He spent a year in Bombay learning Pahlavi from local Zoroastrian priests. 

The thinker and poet Muhammad Iqbal,

who got his start teaching Arabic in the British College in Lahore. He later qualified as a barrister & got a PhD from Germany.  

an eloquent writer in Persian

Khameni said his Persian was bizarre but his anti-Imperialism was praiseworthy. This is odd. Unlike Tagore, Iqbal clung on to the Knighthood the Brits had given him. He also praised Mussolini though the Italians were slaughtering Muslims in Libya at the time. Incidentally, he also praised the Ba'bi heroine Qurratulayn. 

like many in his Indian generation, was a major influence on Iranian Islamists, including Ali Khamenei, who coauthored a book on him;

Iqbal was the 'poet-prophet of Pakistan'. Iran has close ties with that country- not India.  

the anticolonial struggle of Gandhi inspired Mohammed Mossadegh, the first elected prime minister of Iran.

Mossadegh went on hunger strike. But he kept putting on weight. He confessed that he couldn't resist his wife's cooking.  

These shared, often coordinated, responses to the existential challenge of Western power defined what it meant to be an Indian or Iranian in the modern world;

It literally had zero effect. Iran wanted to emulate France not a fucking shithole populated by 'black crows'. Indians too had zero interest in Iran. Moscow was their Mecca though it was to the US that they emigrated unless, like Mishra, they were content to settle in the UK. 

they clarified what the ideals and interests of a society free from the Western masters of the universe would be.

Utterly shit. Indians & Iranians can agree on one thing- getting a Green Card & working in Silicon Valley is the closest we can come, on this green earth, to paradise. It must be said, Iran has very good STEM subject universities. They don't bother with reservations & affirmative action.  

Yet there were always differing visions for realizing these ideals, ranging from political sovereignty to social justice, and national trajectories could diverge widely.

Muslim countries turned to shit.  

Living in India, I felt no esteem for either the venal Shah of Iran

who supported Pakistan in its wars with India. India was closer to the 'Secular Socialist' Nasserite or Ba'athist regimes in the Arab world.  

or Iran’s revolutionary regime, which, intolerant of political dissent and women’s rights from the start, became more tyrannical during Iran’s ferocious long war with Saddam Hussein, then the West’s proxy.

Hussein saw Iraq as the Prussia of the Arabs. Persia was their ancient enemy. India was allied more closely with Ba'athist Iraq which tilted towards Moscow while the Shah tilted to the US. He bought a shit-ton of advanced US weapons which fundamentally destabilized the region. Sadly, Carter decided to get rid of the Shah. Things could only get worse from then on. 

At the same time, my intimate awareness of the many challenges, setbacks, and disasters of postcolonial nation building during the cold war precluded the reflexive Western attitude toward Iran of fear and loathing underpinned by near-total ignorance.

Mishra's ignorance is total. It is only Hindus he fears and loathes.  

In time, I made my own pilgrimage to the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz. Traveling around Iran, I became a beneficiary of the Persian world’s noblest tradition: warmhearted hospitality.

They should have sodomized him warmly and then collapsed a wall upon him because homosexuality is a great sin.  

Perhaps this explains the desolation and shame I felt

while living happily in England 

when I read about the American torpedoing of the IRIS Dena, an Iranian vessel that thought itself safe in international waters,

Why would it think that? The US was at war with Iran. That's why the ship sought entry into Sri Lankan waters. The Sri Lankans, despite their close ties with China, dragged their feet

as it was returning from an international naval exercise at the East Indian port of Visakhapatnam.

It left Indian waters before hostilities commenced. Another ship stayed on & its sailors were sent back to Iran by chartered plane. Sri Lanka hasn't yet released the Iranian sailors it rescued.  

A few days before the unleashing of Operation Epic Fury, the men on board this ship had been feted on Indian streets.

No. They, like all the other foreign sailors taking part in the exercise, were given appropriate hospitality. Nothing more. 

They had visited the Taj Mahal and taken selfies with curious spectators.

Everyone visits the Taj Mahal. However, only Iranians take selfies. This shows they are super special. Punkass jizzed in his pants when he heard that an Iranian- that too a Muslim!- took a selfie on Indian soil. This proves that India has a moral obligation to declare war on Israel & the UK.  

Yet neither their “silent death,” in Pete Hegseth’s gloating description, death by a 3,700-pound American missile in the Indian Ocean, where the present Indian government claims to provide “net security,”

i.e. it suppresses piracy. But it can't stop a country which is at war with another country from sinking the ships of that country in international waters.  

nor the violation of international law that requires belligerents to help sailors wounded in battle merited an official protest at the US embassy in New Delhi.

In the case of a submarine attack there is only an 'obligation of means'- i.e. inform others that sailors may require rescue. Submarines can't undertake the job themselves. It is believed that the swift rescue by the Sri Lankan navy meant that the US had carried out this obligation.  

The Indian Navy’s statement failed even to mention the attack—

because it was Sri Lanka which was closest & which fulfilled the 'obligation of means'. 

an act of “fun,” as Trump described it to a Republican gathering this Monday, to much laughter—that sank the vessel. Nor did it express regret at the deaths of nearly a hundred unarmed sailors.

It also did not express regret that Mishra masturbates incessantly.  

I read that civilians in Sri Lanka, whose navy recovered some of the bodies of the drowned sailors, had donated money to a refrigerated storage unit that could keep them until their repatriation to Iran.

They didn't want them stinking up the place.  

I kept scanning the Indian and international press in futile search for some thought or emotion that matched this atrocity

Indians should chop off their own heads and shove them up their poopers to express their disapproval of Trump. Obviously this does not apply to Indians who are settled in the UK.  

or, however inadvertently, mourned the silent death of what Tagore hailed as “Indo-Iranian civilization.”

Mishra was farting noisily as he did so. Was he also masturbating? Probably.  

Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places. Too much of mainstream journalism today has been debased and coarsened by its incessant lying or equivocating about Israel’s live-streamed abominations in Palestine.

Israel helped India in its wars with Pakistan. That is why Mishra hates Israel.  

Unsurprisingly, reporters, broadcasters, and columnists display an impeccable sangfroid before not only the chemical incineration of Tehran but also the “double tap” execution of nearly two hundred Iranian schoolgirls.

Worse yet, those broadcasters are jizzing in their pants. Still, it must be said, the country which comes out of the best from all this is Pakistan. It has started a war with Afghanistan to get out out of its obligation to help the Saudis. A Pakistani missile hit a hospital in Kabul killing 400. Trump is totes jelly. 

But it is not enough to recoil from the moral squalor of many “legacy” institutions.

One must also jizz incessantly in one's pants. 

Far more precious legacies are being squandered today.

Like the legacy of the Holocaust. Why aren't more people jizzing in their pants to celebrate it?  

It is our destiny to witness not only “fun” spectacles of “Death, Fire, and Fury” mounted by leaders of the free world

One leader. The American one. Maybe incessantly changing 'Death to America!' is a bad idea.  

working closely together with their genocidal protégé in the Middle East.

Iran is committed to genocide. It isn't a protege of the US.  

We confront, too, the death of a once potent imagination.

Mishra is confronting the asshole of the Ayatollah. Will he be allowed to lick it? No. Netanyahu won't let him. Fuck you Netanyahu! Fuck you very much! 

For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism.

Nonsense! The political and moral imagination of the Persian ecumene concerned itself with either enriching itself at home by corrupt means or running the fuck away to greener pastures in the West.  

For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism

he liked Mussolini. Govind Vallabh Pant, in 1938, called him the Il Duce & Fuhrer of India.  

and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence

Gandhi liked Pax Britannica. He was in no hurry for the Brits to leave. In 1939 he said they should only do so if they first handed over the Army to the Congress party- which was Hindu. Otherwise the Muslims & the Punjabis & maybe also the Gurkhas would take over everything.  

It must be said, Gandhi's unilateral surrender in February 1922, meant that the Brits would be able to defeat the Iraqi rebellion. They remained the hegemon there for 35 years. 

—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad,

who should have become a cleric rather than a Commie. Communism is a Western disease. It was the Ayatollahs who rescued Iran from 'West-toxification'.  

the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.

Actually, Iran was developing rapidly. The Americans wanted land reform & the Shah delivered on this. That's why Khomeini took against him.  

During this bitter education in the making of the modern world, both Gandhi and Al-e-Ahmad became alert to how the pursuit of wealth and power could plunge people of non-Western origins into intellectual and spiritual as well as geopolitical subservience to the West.

Gandhi liked rich Indian people because they gave him money for his crackpot schemes. Al-e-Ahmad may have been a stupid drunkard but even he didn't want Iran to become like one of the Soviet Central Asian republics.  

Faced with its full, grotesque embodiment at home—the Shah of Iran with his Pharaonic fantasy of top-down modernization and secret police trained to torture by the CIA

Mossad & the French took over after the Americans fucked off 

—Al-e-Ahmad defined, more precisely than other Asian thinkers, this pathology: gharbzadegi (“Westoxification,” or more literally “West-struckness,” which connotes both bewitchment and sickness).

Mishra doesn't live in the West. He is married to a goat & lives in a cave in North Yemen.  

It was the affliction of a people, he wrote, who have “no supporting traditions, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.”

Iran was developing rapidly. But it was guys who had studied STEM subjects- not Literature- who were most successful.  

Today this lightness of historical being stultifies the American and European citizens of Iranian origin who

are rich and secure. Sadly, they want their relatives back home to enjoy similar opulence & security. They don't think 90 million Iranians should be bombed to buggery simply so Ayatollahs can dream of destroying Israel & the USA.  

hope to be delivered regime change on a plate by an authentic axis of evil: a stalwart member of the Epstein class,

Noam Chomsky? 

an internationally wanted exponent of genocide,

Hamas? 

and the buffoonish son of Iran’s disgraced former potentate.

Mojtaba Khameni?

More terrifyingly,

Mishra just wet himself 

India displays, at the highest levels of policymaking, a lack of supporting traditions and historical memory.

No. Modi remembers what Muslim invaders did to India.  

The personal choices of a Hindu supremacist prime minister

why is he not forcing Hindus to convert to Islam?  

—Narendra Modi visited Israel just two days before its assault on Iran to express his bonhomie with Bibi,

Bibi said India was an 'ally', not just a 'partner'. In other words, Israel can rely on India because the 2017/2018 agreements between the two countries have borne fruit. Modi says India has the 'aspiration'. Israel has the 'innovation'. In other words, the defence partnership will thrive thus counter-balancing the Pak-Turkey tie-up.  

and to receive a medal as illustrious as the FIFA Peace Prize

the Knesset Prize shows that all Israeli parties support the Indian alliance. They may hate each other but they all love India.  

—are only partly to blame. The principled opposition to racism and imperialism that once made India

a laughing stock. People said 'you just invaded Goa, mate! You are a fucking Imperialist! What about Kashmir, Nagaland, etc?' In 1962, Nkrumah demanded that the UK stop helping India. In 1965, Sukarno sided with Pakistan. In 1971, the Palestinians & other Arabs supported Pakistan. One could go on and on.  

the moral leader of Asia

Pancheel was a fucking disaster. Nehru built up Zhou Enlai & then Zhou took down his pants and made fun of his puny genitals.  

went missing well before Modi and his toadies emerged with their WhatsApp forwards to deride the ideals of Gandhi and Nehru.

Indira Gandhi initiated the alliance with Israel in 1968 through Kao. In 1971, Haksar was in charge of getting Israeli mortars. My point is, Indira could only make her move once she had her own Kashmiri clique to support her. Still, she and Rajiv had had a soft spot for the lugubrious Arafat. 

This rupture in historical memory

never existed. Nehru & Krishna Menon made a mistake by talking bollocks in the mid-Fifties. They lived to regret it.  

is more startling, and seems more devastating, when you consider how much the “century of humiliation” motivates the Chinese leaders working on the gradient of national transformation at the farthest end of the Persian ecumene.

There is a Chinese oikumene. There isn't a Persian one. A pidgin can be a lingua franca without any particular people speaking it as their mother tongue.  

“Rising” Indians and well-heeled Iranians of an Americanizing global class assumed that American ideals of economic, intellectual, and political freedom would triumph; they convinced themselves that their personal flourishing depended on diligent concord with the global hegemon.

No. They thought they should either rise through STEM subject education or get rich through commerce or the practice of a learned profession. Also, they should run away from Socialist or Islamist shitholes.  

Such delusions mattered less when the political actors and intellectual publicists of Western supremacism still wore the mask of liberalism, and claimed to preside over a benign globalization that would lift all boats.

There speaks the voice of paranoia. Did you know that Trump kills & eats niggers? Yet darkies queue up to get H1B visas! It is because they have been brainwashed by Noam Chomsky.  

Marco Rubio’s encomiums to white Western civilization, and Hegseth’s pornographic fantasies of “death and destruction from the sky all day long,”

which are causing Punkass to jizz in his pants 

proclaim today a sadistic urge to re-impose the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century.

So that Trump can turn niggers into cheeseburgers.  

It is in this old-new world that the once undisputed leader of the non-Western world

India? It never led shit. It was too poor. 

is reduced to a bit player; exposed now to routine bullying by Trump, it is unable to mourn, let alone protest, the murder of its Iranian guests.

They stopped being guests once they got into international waters.  

The violent historical drama of Western supremacism in its frenzied final acts

Final? The US will remain top dog for the next decade. Maybe, by then, China will have caught up. Maybe not.  

will have many more casualties, but few will be as destitute, or provoke as much horror and pity, as the victims of West-struckness, of gharbzadegi.

Says a guy who left India, married a British woman, & settled down in the West. This made the Iranian goat to whom he was betrothed very sad. It wrote a very beautiful ghazal on this theme but the kasai it recited it to chopped off its head and turned it into kebabs. Sad.