Back in 93 I spent 3 months in hospital. It was… beyond bad.
But it had one great advantage. I lost my fear of death.
I don’t know what happens after death (though as someone whose done ludicrous amounts of spiritual work I have strong suspicions) but even if it’s “that’s it, it’s over” I don’t fear it because I know that bad shit, beyond most people’s imaginations, can happen while you’re alive. Death can becomes one’s best friend.
Westerners fear death greatly. They say stupid things like it being your job to make the other person die for their country.
Sure. Obviously killing them and not dying is preferable in most cases.
But being willing to die for your beliefs, whatever they are, is also incredibly powerful. You’d think so-called Christian countries would understand the power of martyrdom.
Shi’a society is remarkably based around this. Iman Hussein refused to acknowledge the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, whom they considered corrupt. He went into battle knowing he would lose and indeed he did. He did the right thing even though it cost him his life.
And what that has lead to, in the modern era, is organizations like the Iranian government and Hezbollah. Sure, they’d rather not die, but they know there are worse things than death, like living on your knees or crawling on your belly. Martyrdom is celebrated. It helps, of course, that they believe there’s a heaven waiting, but so do many religions whose followers are far less willing to die for their beliefs. (Most Christians aren’t any more.)
You see Iranian leaders say things like death is preferable to living in an unjust world. Almost every single senior leader of Iran from before the war was killed in the first part of the war. I believe only two survived.
And it didn’t make a difference, except that it strengthened hard-liners who wanted to fight.
Western leaders are, as a group, cowards. This wasn’t always the case: in WWII elites fought or sent their children to war. Many of the died. In WWI the cream of Britain’s elite youngsters died in the trenches, often leading suicidal charges.
But our modern leaders like Trump are cowards. They never fought in war and they don’t send their kids to war. They aren’t willing to die.
Further they lead societies where they are hurting the majority of the population. Western leaders think they are special because the people who work for them fundamentally don’t want to. There is no sense of mission, despite all the MBA bullshit trying to create purpose and meaning in corporations.
Everyone knows that the only thing Western leaders believe in is making the rich (themselves, usually) richer. So to get a western organization to work requires extreme incentives: greed for the rulership class, the whip of hunger and homelessness for the peons.
Western leaders thus consider themselves special, because they need to force people to do what they want and without their constant threats and incentives their organizations would fall apart. No one works for a bank or private equity because they believe in anything other than getting rich, or at the lower level, they believe in not winding up homeless.
So Western leaders are, in fact, important: they’re leading their societies in directions that are bad for most people, and that takes an immense amount of cunning and work.
Further there isn’t a deep bench. Because no one believes in the mission who isn’t near the top. Why would they? It doesn’t benefit them, and there’s nothing uplifting about “mint more billionaires”.
This is not to say that all Iranians are true believers or support the government. But the people in the military and government, do believe in the “mission”. They are the metaphorical children of Iman Hussein. They do not fear death.
Hezbollah is the same, but more so: if you’re a Hezbollah member, odds are you believe strongly and you know that Israel only left Lebanon last time because you forced them to.
And if you get killed, someone else replaces you who believes. There’s a deep bench, right from the top to the soldiers and bureaucrats (and remember, Hezbollah runs clinics, picks up garbage and even provides pensions. It’s a government within Lebanon.)
Western leaders can’t wrap their heads around this. They’d do anything to save their own lives and they don’t understand people who would rather die than give up their beliefs. They don’t understand the people who then replace the dead and continue the fight.
If Iranian leaders feared death, the war would be over. They would have cut the sort of deal Delcy Rodriguez did in Venezeula “yes master, I’ll do whatever you say if you leave me at the top of a society I no longer run. Just don’t kill or kidnap me, please.”
Greedy coward.
That won’t happen in Iran. There’s no one in the leadership with enough support to pull it off, if there’s anyone at all who would consider it.
Sometimes to serve your cause, to remain true to your beliefs, you have to be willing to die. Americans knew that once. The West knew it once. Christians knew it once.
Today? The leadership of the West are substantially all cowards.
The truth is that if you will do anything to avoid dying, you’re a slave to anyone who can credibly threaten you with death.
Iranians and Hezbollah members refuse to be slaves.
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