Jafar Panahi - In Defense of Tolerance & Free Speech

Jafar Panahi, the internationally acclaimed Iranian film director was arrested earlier this year by the authorities on charges of making an "anti-state" film. He was held in detention without trial for 3 months and released on $200,000 bail only after his compatriot filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami circulated an open letter petition to the Iranian government that was signed by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Robert Mackey in the New York Times today has the details of the story including the English translation of the full text of the passionate statement that Panahi made to the court last week in defense of artistic freedom and tolerance. It is a plea that must be heard by repressive governments and authoritarian groups all over the world. This is an eloquent defense of the most basic of human rights: the freedom to think and speak one's conscience without private or public coercion. It is convenient to talk only of Iran in this context but these are values periodically under threat in many parts of the world. Sadly, it is the so-called Islamic world where most restrictions exist on this fundamental human freedom with many western allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt being the worst offenders.

Here's the second half of Panahi's courageous statement which is patriotic in the best sense of that much abused word:

History testifies that an artist’s mind is the analytical mind of his society. By learning about the culture and history of his country, by observing the events that occur in his surroundings, he sees, analyzes and presents issues of the day through his art form to the society.

How can anyone be accused of any crime because of his mind and what passes through the mind?

The assassination of ideas and sterilizing artists of a society has only one result: killing the roots of art and creativity. Arresting my colleagues and I while shooting an unfinished film is nothing but an attack by those in power on all the artists of this land. It drives this crystal clear however sad message home: “You will repent if you don’t think like us.”

I would like to remind the court of yet an other ironic fact about my imprisonment: the space given to Jafar Panahi’s festival awards in Tehran’s Museum of Cinema is much larger than his cell in prison.

All said, despite all the injustice done to me, I, Jafar Panahi, declare once again that I am an Iranian, I am staying in my country and I like to work in my own country. I love my country, I have paid a price for this love too, and I am willing to pay again if necessary. I have yet another declaration to add to the first one. As shown in my films, I declare that I believe in the right of “the other” to be different, I believe in mutual understanding and respect, as well as in tolerance; the tolerance that forbid me from judgment and hatred. I don’t hate anybody, not even my interrogators.

I recognize my responsibilities toward the future generations that will inherit this country from us.

History is patient. Insignificant stories happen without even acknowledging their insignificance. I, myself, am worried about the future generations.

Our country is quite vulnerable; it is only through the [guarantee] of the state of law for all, regardless of any ethnic, religious or political consideration, that we can avoid the very real danger of a chaotic and fatal future. I truly believe that tolerance represents the only realistic and honorable solution to this imminent danger.

Respectfully,
Jafar Panahi
An Iranian filmmaker 

UPDATE: December 20th, 2010

Jafar Panahi was jailed by the Iranian authorities for 6 years for working on a film which was judged "anti-regime". He has also been restricted from traveling abroad or speaking to foreigners for 20 years. Here's the story in The Times.

Iran is a particularly noxious regime but defenders of individual liberty and freedom of speech need to be vigilant everywhere. From religious zealots who advocate murder against offensive expression to the Western governments bearing down on Julian Assange to dissuade people from exposing their wretched power games, individual freedoms need consistent defense everywhere on the globe.   

Arundhati Roy & Tony Judt on Genocide

On January 18th, Arundhati Roy spoke in Istanbul at the first death anniversary of Hrant Dink, the courageous Turkish-Armenian editor of the newspaper Agos, who was assasinated by a 17 year old Turkish nationalist. With more than 100,000 people marching silently through the streets of Istanbul at Dink's funeral last year, the assasination brought into focus, yet again, the deplorable official Turkish position of continued denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915. In this speech titled "Listening to Grasshoppers", (reprinted in abridged version by Outlook India) Roy does not have much to say about the Armenian tragedy specifically but reflects more generally on the nature of genocides ("Its an old human habit, genocide is").

To her, "Union" and "Progress" are code words that are the "twin coordinates of genocide". Notions of "Union" pitch their populist but exclusionary appeal on platforms of shared race, religion, ethnicity and nationality and "Progress" on the ideals of individual and national attainment of wealth. Both these ideas inevitably lead to the dehumanization of those who are a threat to the "union" project or are obstacles to "progress". In Roy's Indian examples these "twin coordinates" inevitably lead to the genocidal mindset of Narendra Modi's Gujarat ("Union") or to the brutalities of Nandigram in West Bengal ("Progress"). Into this argument she weaves the idea of the expansionist need for "Lebensraum" ("living space"); a notion that necessitates the displacement or even 'extermination' of those who occupy land and resources thwarting the "noble" goals of union and progress. This is a powerfully engaging piece and reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's work ("Eichmann in Jerusalem", "The Origins of Totalitarianism") to make sense of man's murderous instincts.

In the past, Roy's non-fiction has sometimes struck me as emotionally overwrought. Her relentless attacks on India's (unequal) growth, even when fair, have never even cursorily acknowledged that growth (even with all its terrible inequalities) has been effective in bringing millions out of poverty in places like East Asia where the process has gone on longer. In 1997, the American economist and now the famously liberal New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman wrote a classic piece called "In praise of cheap labor" that articulates a different point of view that, at the very least, requires honest intellectual acknowledgment. However, despite these reservations about Arundhati Roy, I have come to admire her fierce and passionate intellect. There is no shortage of people who will always be willing to promote the economic miracles of China or fuel the hype of a "Shining India" with pride. But it takes a peculiar combination of intellectual acumen, relentless courage and a deep commitment to the plight of the powerless to keep an uncompromising focus on "Narmada Bachao", farmer suicides, Nandigram and Gujarat in the shadow of a frequently unreflective triumphalism of the "New India". Even if one quarrels with some of her intellectual foibles the world needs more Arundhati Roys.

Co-incidentally, Tony Judt , the British historian, also has an interesting piece on the issue of genocide in the February 14th, 2008 issue of the New York Review of Books. The essay is titled "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe". This piece too starts with a reference to Hannah Arendt's influential work. It goes on to state that Europe may be in danger of trivializing the lessons of its own genocidal past. The repetitive invocations of the Holocaust and its sometime political use as a defensive shield for Israel is desensitizing modern Europeans to the scale of these crimes.

"Meanwhile, we should all of us perhaps take care when we speak of the problem of evil. For there is more than one sort of banality. There is the notorious banality of which Arendt spoke —the unsettling, normal, neighborly, everyday evil in humans. But there is another banality: the banality of overuse—the flattening, desensitizing effect of seeing or saying or thinking the same thing too many times until we have numbed our audience and rendered them immune to the evil we are describing. And that is the banality— or "banalization"—that we face today."