Iran has always had a confusing identity to the rest of the world: Middle Eastern but not Arabic, Shia not Sunni, too big and oil-rich to never not be treated with a sense of suspicion by its neighbours. But a way I like to explain its modern contrariness is to view it through the prism of my Fox News-addicted, Donald Trump-supporting Iranian mum.
My mum grew up in the Iran of the 60s and 70s – when it was governed by a West-oriented monarchy that was so focused on he country being groovy that photographs of her in that era look like stills from Austin Powers. That sense of glamorous vanity never went away – by the way, Iran still has one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world.
She came to Britain shortly before the Islamic Revolution, which vowed to replace the sins of elitism with religious rigour, before becoming a vicious, insular, murderous and theocratic elite of its own.
In Britain my mum ended up translating Farsi for asylum seekers. I would help type up her transcripts – the graphic testimonies of persecution, abuse and torture meted out by the regime washed over us after a while. If an applicant was successful, she was the only Iranian they knew in London. I was her actual son, but she had a phalanx of grateful pseudo-sons desperate to display Iranian generosity at the drop of a hat.
In the crude discourse of our age, helping asylum seekers might make her seem like “a massive leftie”. But in the last 10 years, steered largely by online influences, she’s swung the other way – into the world of Maga. It’s not obscure. Among the influential Iranian diaspora in Britain and America (who campaign strongly on behalf of the country, but don’t know the country super well anymore), this swing to Trump has been common. It might seem baffling – yet it is heartbreakingly simple if you take the time to unpick Iran.
Since the desperate plight of the Iranian people has been ignored by so many Western leaders (from Merkel to Macron, Corbyn to Cameron), as soon as Trump started lambasting the regime (in 2017, he said they had “forced a proud people to submit to its extremist rule”) Iranians started to feel seen.
Such is my mum’s disdain for the tyrannical regime that oppresses her people, she rationalises her support for Trump as “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. It’s hard to fault that logic. And as someone mortified to have a Maga-ish mum, boy have I tried, but her mind is made up.
But here’s the sad thing: I worry deeply that she’s been cheated by a man who could set her country back even further.
Trump had the cheek to say that Keir Starmer is no Churchill this week – yet on current evidence Trump isn’t even George W Bush. The Iraq War at least had clear aims.
Despite the bombs, it’s become obvious that the US has no apparent plan on what happens next, and replaces the current regime.
Members of Trump’s administration have been making contradictory statements every day about war aims since the offensive started. Iranians had been teased with regime change – then told simultaneously as the first bombs started falling to “stay sheltered” and also “seize control of your destiny”. Trump told the “great proud people of Iran” that they could take over their own government.
So for all of Trump’s grandstanding, it’s all down to beleaguered, confused Iranians – the bravest of whom are still reeling from the massacres two months ago. “This will probably be your only chance for generations,” Trump told them, blithely unaware of his terrible timing. “Lets see how you respond.” It’s hard not to think of Iran as an expectant child waking on their birthday, being given some flour and eggs and told cheerily to make their own cake.
To underscore their helplessness, if Iranians now find themselves brutally let down by the Trumpian right wing, they’re also entitled to feel let down by the left’s inaction too.
It all adds up to a soul-destroying silence for people who care about Iran. Meanwhile my extended family in Tehran navigate the internet blackouts and send us texts telling us how glad they are that the bombs are falling.
Everyone I tell this to is shocked, just like the story of why my Iranian mum went Maga. They can’t see the decades of trauma that leads to these quirks of logic, how the knotty twisted Iranian narrative is a product of generations of pain. It makes no sense in a politically entrenched world where palatable truths must be bite-sized enough to be consumed.
I called my mum the morning the war started. I wondered if her support for Trump might be wavering given the vagueness of his speech. She still has hope.
Yet I can’t bear to imagine how she’ll feel in a year if this all fails. Conned, cheated, contemplating a homeland made worse by her enemy’s enemy.
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