Reflections on having so many new friends in Iran.
I first heard from some of the Iranian students who publish Zaytoon magazine during a period of a few days when I was receiving thousands of beautiful messages in one form or another from people from all over Iran. At the risk of self-indulgence I'll share a bit more about the experience of having so much correspondence with so many Iranians over the course of the past two weeks or so -- especially because there's a much bigger story to be told from this smaller one.
I'm a musician, singing in English, putting up videos of me singing songs on Instagram and other platforms. It's not too hard to figure out that I'm not only singing in English, but I'm from the United States.
My fellow Americans might be surprised to learn that despite being from the country that has been bombing Iran and killing thousands of Iranians over the past seven months, the country which has been trying in so many different ways to overthrow the Iranian government since 1979, when people in Iran heard me singing a song about the aerial massacre of the children of Minab, they all responded with such deep appreciation.
I put up a lot of videos of me singing songs I write, and songs I write with what I call my AI band, Ai Tsuno. Especially the songs opposing the war on Iran and the war on Palestine are more likely to get into the algorithms, for whatever reasons. A giveaway that algorithms are involved, it seems, is usually when a song is performing well on Instagram, it will also be performing well on Facebook.
My rendition of "Minab," however, went almost nowhere on Facebook, but to date it has gotten over 300,000 views on Instagram. The many thousands of comments make clear in various ways that the overwhelming majority of the viewers have been Iranian. This song didn't spread because of algorithms. It spread organically, because of Iranians sharing and forwarding the song, mostly to each other.
Once again at the risk of excessive self-indulgence I want to share some of the things people said, which in so many ways flies in the face of many popular themes with regards to Iranians in certain influential circles in the US and elsewhere in the west.
Thank you very much for being the voice of our innocent killed baby girls.🙏 Thank God still humanity is alive.
That brought tears to my eyes, deeply touched and felt so grateful that someone too far away could feel our pain and loss.
Great work, sir! As an Iranian and as a human being, thank you so much.
There is still hope left in the world when souls like yours exist. Thank you, good sir.
God bless you free man. 🙏
Thank you for this beautiful song and for the touching lyrics, which beautifully convey the pain of losing these children and the deep sorrow their families and the whole city have experienced after Minab School was bombed. 🤍
As an Iranian, I appreciate you.
Thank you, this means a lot, this means humanity still exists regardless of nationality, race, or colour of skin.
Again, there were thousands of comments just like these, from accounts that appeared to be authentically Iranians, mostly living in Iran.
There is a widespread notion in certain circles in the west that oppressed peoples should be encouraged to speak out against their own oppression, rather than having other people do that on their behalf. The idea is that the oppressed then feel like they have more agency, and the non-oppressed people deigning to speak for the oppressed people can feel more humble by shutting up.
If that last paragraph made any sense to you, you're probably an American progressive. For most of the rest of the world, it all seems bizarre, from what I've noticed as a touring performer who travels internationally a lot. The basic idea of solidarity, and of empathy as well, is broadly popular throughout the world, except among certain confused circles in the US. Most people in most of the world deeply appreciate solidarity and empathy, as the comments on the song illustrate.
I've been in touch with various fellow musicians from Iran as well as journalists, tour guides, students, professors, and festival organizers, among so many others.
It was particularly eye-opening to hear from the festival organizers, because through them I discovered the website of the festival they're organizing.
In places like the US and the UK sometimes protest organizers will call their protest a "festival of resistance," to try to make it seem more interesting and attract more participants. This is a fine thing to do, but the Khesht-e Sevom Festival's intentions are to be a festival of resistance far beyond anything I've ever experienced. A bit like the World Social Forum, but more militant.
The festival's aim is to be "inspiring resistance movements worldwide through culture and art." Submissions of every conceivable form of traditional and very modern media may focus on one of many themes, including the Persian Gulf, the Minab School, Assassination and Steadfastness, and Martyrs and Defenders of the Homeland, to name a few.
I'm fairly confident that there is no festival remotely like this one anywhere in North America, anyway. When I leave North America and go anywhere in Latin America, however, everybody knows as readily as they know the sun rises in the east that art, music and culture is the beating heart of the resistance. For most people involved with social movements in most of the world, this is a statement of the obvious, as I discover again and again.
In the US, however, and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries particularly impacted by trends in the US, like Canada, the UK, and Australia, this statement of the obvious is not obvious at all. In the US in particular, any elements of society connected with resistance movements, from those opposed to imperialism and genocide to those fighting for the rights of workers or tenants, has been successfully alienated from culture -- their own or anybody else's.
In the US, for the past fifteen years especially, you will find almost no art, theater, music, or other basic expressions of culture at the vast majority of protests, particularly with regards to whatever is happening on the stage with the sound system. Whereas protests, social movements, and resistance movements in the past in the US have had more in common with movements around the world that understand culture to be central to maintaining and building anything involving humans, in modern times in the US this understanding appears to have been almost completely lost.
Millions around the world have become big fans of the brilliantly anti-imperialist Lego animation videos being produced by artists in Iran. Whether or not those people around the world know it, these videos are only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of resistance culture coming out of Iran.
Many of those who appreciate the Lego videos may or may not also be aware that these kinds of powerful, artistic forms of communication can be both encouraged and suppressed. What a festival/cultural institution like Khesht-e Sevom is very intentionally doing is encouraging the further development and flourishing of resistance culture.
If we survey the history of the past century in the world we can find many other examples of resistance movements, as well as governments with the same kind of orientation, that very consciously use their resources to serve the cause of building a culture of resistance. Examples include the Cuban government's support for the Nueva Trova/Nueva Cancion movement that gave rise to artists like Silvio Rodriguez becoming tremendously popular from the 1960's to the present, or the great work of the PLO Film Unit in the 1970's, or the Political Song festival that used to be a major event in East Germany, or the work Pete Seeger and friends were doing with the People's Songs project in the 1940's in the US.
On the other hand, culture can be systematically suppressed through all kinds of different means.
The main purpose of the US secret police force, the FBI, since it was formed over a century ago, has been to suppress popular social movements in the US. The popular movements they focused on eliminating were always profoundly artistic, from the labor movement of the very early twentieth century to the communist movement of the 1930's to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's, the Global Justice movement of the 1990's, and beyond.
The efforts on the part of the powers-that-be to suppress social movements in the US have, for decades on end, included a backdrop of constant vilification and mockery of any connection between resistance and culture. The corporate media in the US came up with the term "protest singer" in the 1960's in order to degrade the powerful efforts of the antiwar movement to use music to win the hearts and minds of the American people to oppose the war on Vietnam. They focused on the most hedonistic aspects of any social movement, doing their best to make it all seem ridiculous.
Later, the successes of the secret police to infiltrate academia resulted in an atmosphere where anyone in the US oriented towards the liberation of humanity needs to stay in their lane, write only about personal experiences, and leave it entirely to the oppressed to communicate about their oppression, lest some of us engage in politically incorrect behavior like "cultural appropriation."
With the rise of (anti-) "social media" platforms in the past two decades, and their powerful algorithmic tools that allow for an even more systematic and much more insidious form of suppression of resistance culture and promotion of vapid escapism, we have arrived at the present day, where the waning social movements that still exist in the US have become completely divorced from culture.
Now, in the present day, where social movements around the world involve a seamless merging of political organizing and cultural expression, as they always have, in the US, by contrast, there is virtually nothing of the sort happening.
Instead of being events that educate, lift up, and inspire people to action, protests in the US do the opposite -- people leave them before they're over, feeling dejected and despondent, after being shouted at by "activists" who have no idea how to communicate effectively, who seem to have no capacity to understand what they're doing wrong, over and over again, causing movements to shrink and die before they have a chance to grow.
I dream of the day when international solidarity, and festivals of resistance like Khesht-e Sevom, succeed in becoming as popular as the organizers of that one intend them to be. I dream of the day when resistance culture is not only popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but in "the western world" as well.
In the meantime, it's great to be in touch with so many Iranians who understand where I'm coming from, especially at a time when far too few of my fellow Americans do.
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