Many have died these past several nights. Their blood calls out to us from the ground, asking where we stand in the age of Cain. Meanwhile, there are those who engage in ceaseless political discussion from all sides. They debate the intricacies and solutions to this “conflict” as the cities scream. Their very being offends us. Their tongues are contemptible. The smell of their perversion carries over our mass graves. We are busy searching for our dead, reading names off the kill lists with locked teeth while they unfold their next analysis. How many will be unforgiven?
For now, there can only be pure hatred of the political. Hate for all languages of the political. Hate for every movement of the political, every broken regime that it has produced for millennia. They have only ever starved and mutilated imagination. They are the enemy of every single enchantment. Remember, our poets have also hated you forever, calling out traitors who sell false truths in the house. Our dead brothers and sisters will curse all discourse tonight.
Theocrats. Your rituals and idols can go to hell. You are the most godless among us.
Ultra-Nationalists. Your crowns and imperial symbols can go to hell. You are the least majestic among us.
Colonizers. Your invading forces can go to hell—the same pathetic psychology of the serial killer written at geo-sadistic scale. You are the least powerful among us.
Leftists. Once our teachers, now you cling to your theories so desperately for your identity that you make excuses for butchers. Your endless talk of revolution and resistance (where it suits you) has turned an idealized image into a meaningless prison of abstraction, concealing atrocity beneath the logic of resentment. You are the least radical among us. To hell with your materialist dialectics. There is nothing more dialectical than the crossing of a bullet with a teenager’s chest. There is nothing more materialist than a red-soaked floor full of body bags as mothers weep insanely above them.
Do you not see? You are all obscene. And so deeply uninteresting—this disgrace of fake clerics, fake Emperors, fake empires, and fake intellectuals. And nowhere near as different as you pretend—just slightly varying pieces on the same gameboard of Pharaoh (let the pyramid burn around you). You have all murdered children in the name of your fatal programs. You call this History, but our dead youth in the alleyways play for Eternity. They will meet you not in the political arena but in the higher court of the existential where their closed eyes condemn you. These lost names—“Sepehr, my son, where are you?”—are the honor of our universe. And their charges against you are many: shamelessness, negligence, delusions of grandeur, accessory to every homicide. This renders you disqualified; this renders you intolerable.
An entire generation will go mad at your hands. We speak to them for a few stolen minutes only to realize in horror that you have cost them their minds. You live in psychotic fantasies that others pay for. How do you pretend to think clearly when catastrophe walks along the roof? In times like these, those who speak with certainty over vulnerability are not to be trusted. There is no eloquence left; nothing intelligent to be said. This is the incomprehensible.
Tonight, I can think only of my grandfather’s face, gone twenty years ago. These last weeks remind me of how badly I wept for him then. I fear what he would say of us now. I have never prayed except twice in this world: once for my little daughter when she was born not breathing, and once for the ruin of your ideologies. That all the tears of all the parents of our dead somehow become a spell for silence. A wish that you could fall still and quiet, if only for a moment, to remember that there is nothing worse in this existence than having to cry for those who die for nothing.