74 lashes

 Trump's bombing of Iran was a flagrantly illegal act of aggression that was bound to blow up in his face, and lo, that's exactly what happened. Trump deserved to have his ass handed to him in this war, in short. And so, there are moments when one can almost feel a sneaking appreciation for the Islamic Republic of Iran—if only for teaching him such an obvious yet apparently much-needed lesson. 

As a correction to this tendency, it's healthy to remind ourselves every few days that the Islamic Republic is still a brutal theocracy that regularly hangs, tortures, and flogs its own citizens. They are not the good guys here, even if hauling off and attacking them in violation of the UN Charter was not a moral, lawful, helpful, or prudent way to respond to their misdeeds. 

One of these much-needed reminders about the character of this regime came to me yesterday, when the New York Times reported that the Iranian republic recently sentenced a singer to receive 74 lashes for performing with her hair and arms uncovered. "Jenkins, all too clearly it is time / For some ritual physical humiliation," as the Scottish poet Tom Leonard wrote of corporal punishment in schools. 

What is most revolting about this form of patriarchal terrorism and ritualized humiliation is the obvious element not only of cruelty, but of barely-disguised psychosexual perversity and sadism. As the great Quentin Crisp observed of a public caning he once witnessed in his English boarding school: "What was most insufferable was that a [...] form of self-gratification should be put forward as a moral duty." 

Tom Leonard picked up on this too. He has the speaker of his poem—a self-deluding and pompous inflicter of corporal penalties—intone: "You may hear that physical humiliation and ritual are concerned with strange adult matters, like rape and masochistic fantasies. / You will not accept such stories. / Rather, you will recall with pride [...] The day that I, Mr. Johnson, summoned you before me [...] and gave you four of the belt." 

Seventy-four of the belt, or the knout, in this case. Is that a punishment the human body is able to withstand?

But lest we recoil so much in horror from this that we start to think that maybe Trump had the right idea—let us recall as well the one final and eternal law of Trump: he will always find a way to combine the worst of all worlds. Because yes, Trump did haul off and bomb the Iranian theocratic regime. But he has also proved himself just fine with its many human rights atrocities, including its patriarchal abuses against women.

Indeed, most recently—as discussed yesterday—Trump deported an Iranian woman to the Central African Republic—a Putin-aligned impoverished war zone from which she faces a serious threat of "chain refoulement" back to her home country: Iran. A place, that is, which she fled, and where she faces exactly the kind of barbaric persecution we are discussing here. 

Trump, far from being militant avenger of the wronged Iranian civilians, is apparently perfectly willing to deport them straight back into the clutches of the hangman and the whip-hand. 

So, let not we Americans become smug and complacent at our own civilization, before the spectacle of the Iranian clerico-fascist regime that whips women for baring their arms. Not only is our government apparently perfectly willing to send refugees back to such a fate. We are also a country that recently reintroduced the firing squad as a preferred method of execution, and in which people are still regularly asphyxiated and killed in state death chambers. 

"Fascism," as Arthur Koestler once wrote, "is merely a matter of degrees." ""[T]he exhibition of some half-dozen funipendulous forgers might have shocked the tender bowels of [the Druid's] humanity, as much as one of his wicker baskets of captives in the flames shocked those of Caesar," as Thomas Love Peacock once wrote. So too, one should perhaps not shoot off firing squads in glass houses. 

We have horrors and "ritual humiliations" of our own to set up against the Iranian regime's atrocities that could shock the latter's conscience down to their "tender bowels"; whatever remains of it. Not least of them being our own war against Iran, in which in just the first few hours—lest we forget—an American missile took the lives of more than a hundred schoolchildren. Perhaps we should not be the first to cast a stone (not even against a country that still permits stoning).