Memories Of Isfahan And Security Shocks In A Wilder World

Monday, 30 June 2025, 12:02 pm
Opinion: Frances Palmer

In 1975, though Indochina was left in ruins, New Zealanders’ OE options still included places now wiped off tourist routes, including a 5 week ‘Scandy /Russia’ bus trip with 40 ‘down under’ youth, and 3 months from ‘London to Katmandu’, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, in tents right across Europe, Russia and the Middle East. Frequent moves across the region in tents then represented eager adventures of lucky young westerners broadening their life experience of other peoples, places and cultures. Regular relocation in tents now is instead part of terrible trauma of famished families whose homes have been made the rubble graves of relatives.

By my bed is a beautiful woven rug from Isfahan’s gorgeous market, and on a shelf, hand painted tiles gifted by a mosque guide. Photos of Isfahan from its small ‘mountain’ overlook the graceful city. Postcards display its majestic blue mosque. All is now at risk, its people and awesome heritage due to Israel’s war fever and America’s endless supply of lethal weaponry.

Is the world nearing 21st century meltdown? Russia and Ukraine, both part of my adopted daughters’ heritage, are now war zones. Israel, not satisfied with ongoing genocide in Gaza, West Bank or bombing Lebanon and Syria, has drawn US into war on Iran, ostensibly to destroy nuclear facilities (verified by regular IAEA checks for peaceful energy use only), including one in Isfahan.

On our last night there in 1975, two young locals took a friend and I to a lovely restaurant, soon filled with a jubilant wedding party, the bride still in her white gown. My polite host told his story. Under the Shah, two years military service by all young men was compulsory. Disgusted with its ‘barbarism’, he left to join nomads in the desert, spending his two years’ national service teaching their children before returning to his family, who by then presumed him dead. He could not get a driver’s license, bank account or anything else revealing his identity, risking prison and torture for ‘desertion’.

Israel also has ‘refusers’. But it takes a strong sense of personal agency to resist patriotic propaganda and pride in military sacrifice from childhood onwards, despite deep structural injustices perpetuated by military power; millions killed and maimed worldwide in living memory, and centuries of precious infrastructure and cultural heritage razed.

How long will humanity allow foreign policies underpinned by nihilism and factories profiting from death, while the world burns, glaciers melt and seas rise due to inaction on climate change? Who really believes that we, or the world in general, gain more security with nine nations now armed with nuclear weapons and six additional nations ‘sharing’ them?

US pressures within America and abroad to transfer more government spending from civilian needs to military research and development and industry, resembles a massive international marketing campaign. The power of that industry, burgeoning since World War Two, is comparable to a tumour becoming cancerous as it metastasizes (grows and spreads through the body), swamping vital organs, snuffing life out of the human host, while its lethal products kill ‘Others’, users seduced by promises of power, dominance or ‘security’.

In America, democracy has become oligarchy in all but name – government dominated by highly visible and less visible hands of wealthy corporations. ‘Tied’ sponsorship is required to run for national leadership, enabling sponsors to largely determine national priorities and what will be scrapped. Military spending increases unabated, while federal spending on civilian programs shrinks, shortening life expectancies and hopes of many. New Zealand would be wise to resist such butter to bombs pressures and instead pursue policies which genuinely enhance security. These include stronger support for multilateral institutions to protect human rights and climate, and tweaking skill sets at home from 'enhancing our lethality' to strengthening civil defense responses to intensifying climate change crises, as well as mitigating emissions creating the problem.

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