Peter comes up to Paul and says, "Can you lend me $5,000? With the credit crunch, all my big customers are paying slow, my suppliers are cutting off credit... "

Paul: "Well, I don't know..."

"You've got the money from your house sale."

"Yeah, but I got to think about it."

"Paul, I lent you the money for the down payment on the damned house you just sold. I made the payments on it while you were laid off. Your son is my godson and every birthday I put a $100. in his university fund."

"Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?"

I remembered the old joke while watching a CNN roundtable discussing Iran. They agreed that Iran/US relations were governed by Iranian students seizing the US Embassy and holding American diplomats hostage in 1979. Embassy staff were held for 444 days.

An Iranian round table might well argue that the US/Iran relationship was determined by the joint CIA/British led coup that overthrew the popular elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mossadeq. Mossadeq had nationalized Iranian oil and expelled officials of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadeq argued that the profits of Iranian oil should benefit Iran, not flow to Britain.

The CIA then installed Mohammed Reza Pahlevi as Shah of Iran. He maintained a fairly brutal regime until he was overthrown in 1979.

In 1963, the CIA put Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in power in Iraq' a bloody business, involving mass killing and torture. The US CIA has been involved in coups in Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela. The one good thing that has come out of the Iraq war is greater freedom for the peoples of Latin America. While the cat's away, the mice can play.

Great Powers serve their own interests. Little Powers get along as best they can. Ideology doesn't  seem to matter. The Romans, the Turks, the Soviet Union, the US, France, Great Britain, China: those who have power use it and, for a time, gain more power.

What's interesting me right now is the way people remember history. Indians, when they think of India as part of the Empire, remember the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and assorted other demonstrations that were ended by British Army rifles. Agha Shahid Ali writes:

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

This is not exactly the history that the British remember. The British remember that a subcontinent of warring small countries was united; the vast rail network that was built; the voluntary march of the British Army from Mumbai in 1947, Gandhi and non-violant protest winning a subcontinent. 

India is complicated. Delhi, like London, remembers the railroads, unification and Gandhi. Delhi has its own independence movements - Bengal, Punjab and Kashmir were never very pleased to be ruled from Delhi. So there are some advantages in specifying 1947 as  a kind of reference point, beginning history.

Ireland has its own specific historical narratives. In Northern Ireland, the Protestants remember 21st September, 1795, the date of the founding of the Orange Order. They remember  the 12th July, 1690 and the Battle of Boyne and Good King Billy. Irish Catholics have their own dates and battles to celebrate.

Israelis remember assorted invasions of Israel and Palestinian  support for these. Palestinians remember being driven from their villages by the Israeli Army, the occupation, the Wall built on Palestinian land, the destruction of much of the West Bank.

It's a cliche to say that the victors write the history. Clio is not so easily raped. History is more like a vast treasure trove; you pick and choose what you want to wear today. British historians do not ignore the discreditable aspects of British Raj and Indian historians give credit where credit is due.

It's politicians who cherry pick. Any historian looking at the twentieth century would have said the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were very bad ideas. National movements in occupied countries win. Sooner or later, the occupying force (whether the Soviet Union in Afghanistan or the US in Iraq) decides the cost of continued occupation is too great. The insurgents, on the other hand, have considerably more at stake.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said that communism would ultimately be a universal basis of political organization, 'the riddle of history solved.' Fukuyama argued in "The End of History" that liberal parliamentary democracies, with an international rule of law and some form of free markets, will ultimately become universal because of their greater efficiency. Both views share an assumption that political organization is evolutionary, aiming towards some ultimate goal involving efficiency, the greatest good for the greatest number, some kind of end product. Not the end of events, but the end of History, of evolution fulfilled. There is part of a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Some terrible magician, hidden behind curtains,
has hypnotized Time
so this evening is a net
in which the twilight is caught.
Now darkness will never come–
and there will never be morning.

I'm currently reading Black Mass, by John Cray. He argues that much of history since the Enlightenment has been based on a secularized apocalyptic vision, with science replacing religion. Some great battle between good and evil will be fought and when good inevitably wins, we will enter a period of harmony, peace and the destruction of poverty. We will have Utopia. He examines current Utopias of the Right as well as Utopias of the Left.  He suggests reading work presenting dystopias, as a warning of what can result from attempts to have the perfect society.  (Or it may just suggest techniques. A friend of mine taught English at Georgia Tech, a good engineering school, and he assigned Brave New World. The engineers thought is sounded like a fine place.)

To paraphrase (a rather loose paraphrase), Cray suggests the nearest we can come to a utopia involves giving up the idea. Accept diversity, tolerance, rather than establishing the One True Way. Hang out with poets and artists, people who live today rather than seeking future perfection or remembering a past Golden age.

So let us turn to poets. Here's the full poem, partially quoted earlier,  by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, translated by Agha Shahid Ali.

Evening

The trees are dark ruins of temples,
seeking excuses to tremble
since who knows when–
their roofs are cracked,
their doors lost to ancient winds.
And the sky is a priest,
saffron marks on his forehead,
ashes smeared on his body.
He sits by the temples, worn to a shadow, not looking up.

Some terrible magician, hidden behind curtains,
has hypnotized Time
so this evening is a net
in which the twilight is caught.
Now darkness will never come–
and there will never be morning.

The sky waits for this spell to be broken,
for history to tear itself from this net,
for Silence to break its chains
so that a symphony of conch shells
may wake up to the statues
and a beautiful, dark goddess,
her anklets echoing, may unveil herself.