A Sentimentalist’s View on Iran at War

My family has always called me sentimental and gullible. To put it politely, I’ve always been the idiot in their eyes. And I’ve learned to accept it. I am an idiot—just like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. The same kind. The kind they mock, argue with, dismiss. But I remain in the back of their minds.

Last September, I wrote a piece about war and literature, just before presenting at the Brockton Writers Series. You can find it here:
https://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/brockton-writers-series-11-09-24-lily-soltani/

I wrote about war, part of me believing it might happen again. Maybe I was warning myself. When I said that to a friend, she replied, “Are you kidding? They would never dare.”
And part of me believed her. My story of surviving eight years of war had started to feel like just that—a story. A backstory, like in Agatha Christie’s mysteries: something horrific happened long ago, and now, in the present, someone is seeking revenge or atonement. The war was my origin story, not my future.

But this sentimental writer has learned a thing or two about catastrophe. War isn’t just bombs killing the innocent—or the guilty. It opens the door to other crimes: theft, blackmail, rape, revenge killings.

Iran is at war again.
The Iranian government has failed to protect its airspace and has failed to keep its people loyal. Have you ever seen a nation cheer for the enemy? Signal them to come and destroy buildings, neighborhoods?
“Well, who cares?” they say. “The neighbour was an IRGC commander.”
Can anyone share a moment in history when this happened? Because my idiotic side is really struggling to understand.

This is a strange era to live through a modern war. I spoke to my cousin in Tehran—she said there are no sirens, no bunkers, no shelters like we had during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s. “These missiles are too advanced,” she said. “Nothing can protect us. Not the metro, not the basements, not even bunkers.”
I don’t know how much of this is true. But I digress. After all, I’m just a gullible cousin living in Canada.

Iran is facing dark times. And it’s going to get worse.

If Israel and the U.S. succeed in overthrowing the Islamic Republic, there will be civil war, executions, and bloodshed.

If the Islamic Republic survive, the outcome will still be executions and bloodshed, especially if the fundamentalists overpower the remaining reformists within the system.

This hopeless sentimentalist has no hope left for the ancient country of Iran.
We ruined it. All of us.
The nationalists. The Islamists. The Communists. Shame on us all.

And to those of you who have raised your voices for Palestine—for their struggle against apartheid and occupation—I want to say: I’ve been with you, since the days of Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir.
But please, think of Iranian lives too. Raise your voice for us.
We might not show it, but we are a lonely nation. We blame the revolution, the U.S., the U.K., and Europe—and there is truth in that. But the deeper truth is this: we have been isolated for centuries.

Since ancient Persia, we have stood apart. To our south, the Arabs; to our north, the Turks; to our west, the Greeks and Europe—we belonged to none of them. We were often treated as a buffer zone between the Russian and British empires. We were invaded, and lost portions of our land bit by bit. And what remains is now under attack by another collapsing empire—the United States of America—using any tool, any puppet, to maintain control.

We are lonelier and more isolated than ever before. They have sanctioned us, starved us, told us openly: "These sanctions will break you. You’ll fall, you’ll beg, and we’ll step in to take control."

Yes, we have made difficult choices—many of them wrong. But now, more than ever, we need international attention. We need the silence around Iranian lives to be broken.

And so, I’ll end this with the epigraph from my novel Zulaikha—a translated poem by Hamid Mosadegh:

Someone with his silence,

Took me to the endless desert of madness.

Someone with his gaze,

Took me to the vast sea of blood.

Return me!

You, who threw me to the end,

Resume me.