On: Each side spins a different story about the US-Iran peace talks - but Tehran may
They speak of “spinning stories” and of who holds the cards, and I must laugh - a dry, rattling laugh that hurts my chest. As if it were a game! As if the last word were a prize to be won in a parlour debate! The whole diplomatic theatre, these “twists and turns,” it is all the Grand Inquisitor’s work. Each side constructs its own airtight justification, its own story, and they are both so terribly, logically correct within their own walls. America speaks of security and order, a world managed by its hand. Iran speaks of sovereignty and righteous defiance. And both stories demand the surrender of the messy, suffering human soul to the clean, cold logic of the state. They offer not peace, but a different flavour of captivity. They promise to relieve mankind of the burden of freedom - the freedom to forgive, to act against one’s own interest, to offer the other cheek.
And we, the spectators, are meant to choose a side? To declare which story is better spun? This is the modern sickness: to believe that truth is a matter of narrative victory. But I tell you, the truth is in the cellar, in the damp and the dark where a man, any man from any side, wakes in the night sweating with the knowledge of what has been done, and what he has agreed to have done in his name. The truth is the single bomb that falls, not on a “target” or a “strategic asset,” but on a house, with a child in it. That child’s terror refutes both stories utterly. All their clever talk, their stacked cards, their last words - they are ashes in that moment.
They will make their peace, perhaps. A peace of mutual contempt and suspended violence. A peace of the ledger and the ledger-keeper. And they will call it wisdom. But it will be the peace of the stone, not of the heart. It will be the peace of those who have finally, gratefully, surrendered the terrible gift. I see it all, and the horror is that I see myself applauding it too, from the comfort of my room, choosing my own story to hide behind. We are all implicated. We have all returned the ticket.