Are We Colleagues?

Or About Being a Doctor that Cannot Save a Fly

As I am spending already two weeks stuck in a hospital - or two - coming to terms to a serious medical condition, I am confronted every other day with the gentle question on behalf of the qualified doctors: are we colleagues?

In the German-speaking realm, holding a title of doctor is considered a social achievement and adding the title to your full name is customary. Austria goes so far that overachieved academics - that may hold two doctor titles, at least - freely add all of them, the result being long combinations of Dr.Dr., sometimes dr. h.c etc too. It may look unusual for some eyes, but in my opinion it is the right recognition of long years of hard work and personal sacrifice. All those times spent stuck in the libraries from early in the morning until late in the night, perusing hundreds of pages per day, out of which you may produce maximum one sentence. All those days, and especially nights, spent writing, re-writing and deleting hundreds of words in order to create something new, insightful and completely original. Also, the days and nights spent unable to advance any single word, putting yourself and your intellectual capacity into question and even questioning your role as a public intellectual.

The priviledges of PhD

If you went at least through a five year PhD program you know very well what I am talking about. 

True is also that given the available financial and intellectual resources, having a PhD nowadays is much easier than it used to be one or two decades ago. Some of our societies are interested to invest in intellectual achievement and appreciate the undergraduate work, therefore various financial incentives - such as grants - are available for those keen to pursue an advanced career. However, as the job market is becoming highly specialized and the academic job searching dramatically competitive, it is another question that I will not address right now how easily it is to find a job in your line of research, for a long-term contract, especially if you are specialized in some obscure Middle Ages poet. As in any other domain, being flexible, open to learning new skills and using the general knowledge accumulated through years of specialized research may help survive on the market. Otherwise, you can end up like this academic, who is keeping herself updated with the latest published information in her domain of study - history - trying to publish articles and books once in a while, but getting the main sources of income from various projects by using research and linguistic skills acquired during the research. For me, as for many other people that embarked on the intellectual pathway, PhD is not the beginning or the end, it´s a natural stage of a life of constant dedication to the works of the intellect.

Not the first in my family to earn a PhD, I never took my academic achievements for granted and rather considered them with humility. The time spent in the academic world was the result of a relatively priviledged family background, that allowed me to spent time in prestigious high-education institutions, to have direct access to relevant people in my area of study as well as to noteworthy sources of information. I´m feeling guilty sometimes for not being humble enough for recognizing my priviledge and maybe also for taking way too easily my academic journey that did not require any sacrifices - financial - on my side. 

An insider job

Before and long time after moving to Germany though, I kept my PhD only for the job applications and avoided to mention in my personal or professional emails, for instance, my academic title - a detail that, as I mentioned before, is more than customary. Unknown to me is the fact that suddenly, in my health insurance, before my name, the Dr. title was added, probably the result of some hasty hour of truth while filling the famous tons of papers required efficiently by any stage of German bureaucracy. Adding the title of doctor for a document used for the interaction with mostly medical personnel is not necessarily the best remedy against the imposter syndrome.

My family dreamed on me being a doctor. Due to some early childhood medical issues and some serious time spent in hospitals, I was considering this profession as well, fascinated either by the technical details of the tools used for different stages of the process or by the thought of being able to make people healthy - at least in most of the cases; or both. But those were the childhood dreams that once entering the rebelious teenage years were shortly forgotten. At that moment in time I decided that although science, and particularly medicine, will always be of interest to me, I want to spend the rest of my life writing the chronicle of the current times, using all my might, knowledge and energy as a journalist or in the field of writing in general. This is how I´ve intensively spent the last two decades of my life - which doesn´t mean that I am that old because, in fact, I was barely 15 when my serious personal and professional decision of being a writer was taken. Among other achievements, I also earn a PhD in history, dealing with intercultural and minority relations among elites in Central and Eastern Europe. At the time of my PhD research, Central and Eastern Europe was a relevant topic of study and of political planning, but not too much nowadays. That´s all I have in terms of doctor knowledge.

The real doctors

I´ve never faced my old professional choices as in the last two weeks. Being forced to spend some time in the hospital and while keeping updated about the situation regarding the Coronavirus spread around the world, I´m in awe for the valuable work the representatives of the medical system are doing every single second. Each and everyone all over the world active in various capacity in the medical system is a hero. Many of them are working under tremendous stress, underpaid, underevaluated and exposing themselves to life-threatening risks. They work against the clock and against all institutional and human odds to save human lives.

Me, the colleague they are asking about, can barely save a fly. 

Of course it is a very simplistic perspective and I am fully aware that, at a certain point, all of us, doctors in various fields, we can do great works. Both the remedies created by the medical doctors and the poetry analysed by the doctors in literature are good for the humanity. But in time of such tremendous crisis, saving lives and putting humans in flesh and blood first is what it matters first and foremost. 

I´ve seen a couple of days ago on social media a question about the possible outcome of the current crisis, about the extent to which the crisis will change the ways in which we will interact with each other and consider each other as human beings. My bet is on more humanity and more solidarity, more understanding towards each other needs and feelings. 

After all, intellectuals - a category to whom medical and other doctors belong to - are supposed to play a role in offering role models and human inspiration. Isn´t it the right time to do so right now and make this dramatic shift?

In this mission, we are all colleagues...

Should One Answer Hate Comments?

Once newspapers entered the online world, humans of all kind, enjoying the priviledge of anonymity invaded the space. Some of them believers in the dirt there were spreading, others just unable to separate their minds from their education and family background. In the age of print, they were there too, but reaching their destination was harder: they had to write an actual letter and send it by post. The power of the Internet is the momentum.

The German journalist and writer Hasnain Kazim had it all, from a very early age. And he decided to collect all the hate letters in a book, where he also shows his answers.

The main question is: Should One Answer Hate Comments? Isn't it that by answering them one is offering credibility to such approaches?

Kazim's hilarious yet smart answer to his trolls are worth reading it. Maybe at the end of the exchange some changed their mind, but some minds may be so damaged that there's nothing to do. His 'penpals' are contesting his belonging to the 'German people', hate foreigners, accuse him of Islamisation or on the other end, being an enemy of Islam. It's hard to make everyone happy nowadays.

Kazim's contagious humour let you forget what realities many are living in Germany nowadays. Their Germany is obsessed with origins, against foreigners of all kinds, unaware of the tragedies of its past mistakes. A scary landscape, you don't want to do anything with. But if you live there as a foreigner you will be forced to think at least twice.

It's worth sometimes answering hate mails, but there is so much to do against those worrisome trends. 

Academic Book Review: Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic

The very recent events taking place in Iran demonstrated how rare are the adequate interpretations of this complex society and political regime. How can someone from outside understand in the same narrative the massive street manifestations mourning Qasem Soleimani and the student protests against the regime following the unintentional shooting of an Ukrainian passager plane killing 176 people on board, most of them brilliant young people?

At a certain extent, democracy makes us lazy. In dictatorships, people learn the hard way of fencing with the restrictions and building their oasis of relatively free thinking. Dictatorships, regardless their breed are not made of homogenous chunks but of individuals that despite the high political pressure, they have their own interests and ideas, including sometimes contrary to the accepted school of thought.

Narges Bajoghli's Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic studies the ways in which authorities are trying to reach the younger generation though media - particularly film - productions. The main question those productions should answer is 'How to transmit the commitment to the revolutionary project from one generation to another?' 

It mainly explores the 'media world' of the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij, an important paramilitary force active in schools, universities and other institutions. The messages are spread through a plethora of foundations, schools and institutions, as well as formats (tv series, documentaries, films). 

However, it does not mean that the success is overwhelming. Sometimes, people involved in producing the narrative do have unique perspectives, some of them - especially veterans of the Iran/Iraq war - may have their own disappointments. Sometimes, the distribution channels of such messages doesn't go smoothly. Often, the target of those messages does not react as expected. 

There are also specific differences between defending the regime (nezam) and criticism of the government (dowlat), between the insider (khodi) and the outsider (gheyr-e khodi). Identifying and understanding those differences are very important in having a better view of different angles and ideological movements within the Islamic Republic.

The author, Iranian-American, based the book on interviews with representatives of the ideological production, plus an extensive knowledge of those productions. Besides offering a different way for interpretation of the Iranian realities, it shares interesting information about the Iranian movie industry, whose development is at least partially due to the massive state interest in ideological production.

My biggest regret though is that the book is too short, as for me it ended in the middle of a very interesting discussion that I was expected to continue at least for more than 200 pages. 

The Illusions of Royalties: The Shah by Abbas Milani

I grew up in a communist dictatorship in a country that once used to have a king - although a German, non-local dynasty brought to the country by the Big European Powers when they figured out that the local politicians were out of sight and they needed stability in this part of Europe. After the communist took power with the help of the Soviets, the King was exiled in Switzerland and never spoke correctly in the local language of 'his country'. There were also gossips that his family left with a train full of works of art and jewellery, some of them fabricated by the local secret police. 

In the dark days of the dictatorship, when people were starving in cold concrete boxes of matches, and illiterate aparatchiks were in power, the thought that there is a King, somewhere in the beautiful Switzerland who was sending messages to his 'people' via Radio Free Europe was the soul medicine. It means that the country had a chance of normality.

Once the democratic change took place, the King, now of an advanced age, returned to his country. Many people - especially among intellectuals - trusted him and created a little monarchist 'party' dreaming about a right Kingdom in the corrupt country. In other former communist countries - Albania, Bulgaria - inheritors of their fathers' thrones were coming back, welcomed by enthusiastic masses hoping for the same beautiful future as the naive people in my country of birth. Some tried their hand into politics, like Simeon, the Bulgarian tsar, who in a very circumstantial move accepted to be prime-minister.

But the reality showed that those crowned people were out of touch with politics, living in cloud 9th having no idea about what does it mean to manage a country. Their role in mobilizing the imaginary of oppressed people behind microphones of the free media was done. Everyone knew this.

Many are comparing nowadays the situation in Iran with the situation in the communist dictatorships, but they are wrong for reasons that I will not mention right now. But I will focus only on one aspect that given my familiarity with the topic gives me a bit of insight to talk about: the return of the Pahlavi dynasty.

Most of the serious academic accounts and personal accounts from people with a certain unbiased knowledge pledged against it. Besides the grandomanie and the outrageous waste of resources used for personal aims, there is, as in the case of my country of origin royal family, the story of the goods that were stolen from the country. Every time there are protests in Iran, the figure of the Shah and of the monarchy is waved optimistically by international media outlets with a certain bias as Radio Farda and VOA Farsi. The inheritor of the throne appears in the media, launches press releases and his supporters are gathering on the street with the old flag of Iran, screaming in support of the monarchy. In the country, the bloody cynical bureaucrats sending young poor people to death or to prison have a reason to pretend that the protests are, in fact, the puppets of the Pahlavis.    

I was looking for a long time of a reliable monography to figure out by myself about what it really meant the reign of the Pahlavis for Iran and The Shah by Abbas Milani, based on extensive interviews - except the family of the Shah - and archive research was a good start. 

First and foremost, it is written beautifully, which makes easier to navigate the impressive amount of information. I've spent long evenings with this book immersed in the intrigues and small stories accounted for. It reveals a lot about the myth building and nationalism, but also about the history, diplomatic alliances and last but not least, the problematic psychology of this dynasty.

I am very much familiar with European royalties and the entire ritual and philosophy that was built around it starting with the Middle Ages, centered on the Christian traditions and writings. In the case of Iran - and other royal houses in the Muslim world I am partially aware of - there is a completely different approach as it reflects another religious background. The irony was that the Shah was anti-religion, or has a different view on religion than the one of the religious establishment, but maintained a standard of personality cult worthy of the old chronicles of Ferdowsi. Add to it the love for vintage cars, womenazing, and an investor touch that turned all the important businesses in Iran into a provider of income for the extravagant hobbies - like the Zoo on Kish Island (that's my add-on, not in the book). 

What is less known is how the Shah maintained his reign in times when Iran was faced with difficult external decisions, under pressure from both Soviet Russia and the Allied Powers. The book outlines clearly the old connections Soviet Russia started to build into the country from the very beginning of the 20th century, through the Tudeh mostly but later on through its extended network which involves, naturally, KGB spies. 

The Pahlavi times achieved modernisation and started to acknowledge the need of an equal status for women, including by a significant presence of women in public positions and access to universities. It started to change the faces of big cities into architectural works of art, also thanks to the inspiration of the Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, Shah's third wife which studied - without graduating - architecture in Paris.

But unfortunately for the fate of the country, the Shah was unable to understand the changes taking places among the population, surrounded by sycophants - just like his father - that kept him away from the realities. His alliances, both internal and external were circumstantial and mostly aimed at offering short-term solution to serious grievances. In the words of the author: '(...) the Shah lost his throne because he failed to make concessions at the right time, and because he failed to see the domestic roots of the movement against him'.

What happened after we can still see - although not always properly understand as outsiders: 'The revolution that overthrow him in 1979 was democratic in its nature and its demands. Sadly it begot a regime more despotic than the Shah's own modernizing authoritarianism'. 'The continous tumult in Iranian politics over the last three decades is rooted in the fact that the democratic dreams and aspirations of that revolution were aborted and remain unrealized'.

Will the inheritor of the Pahlavi throne achieve them? My questions are: How? With whom? Why? when you can rather look forward into the future and find the solution which suits the situation and mindset of a generation that has enough of being sold illusions.

In Cascais or Montreux, royalties ghosts are waiting for the right momentum for an interview until the next royal wedding is taking place and they can socialize with their more successful royal peers. In the streets of America or Europe, people with a sour heart of the exile wave pro-monarchists banners and praise the Shah.

Everyone has a dream, but no dreams are equal. Some might easily turn into nightmares.

Introduction to the 'Hacked World Order'

Cyber security and its appending concepts - among others cyber weapons and cyber space - is no more a new idea, but the ways in which to approach the conundrum it creates is still work in process.

The Hacked World Order by Adam Segal initiates a discussion about the various aspects involving the cyber security nowadays, which browses both the technical aspects and the diplomatic implications of the new realities. And, as usual in the case with the researches with a generalistic outreach, it doesn't offer enough insights into the specificities of any of the topics but at least outlines the main topics that can be eventually researched throughout later.

The cyber world of tomorrow may be guarded by a large coalition which involves both private and state actors, from the companies in Silicon Valley to the newly created state institutions in charge with such issues. The collaboration mechanisms and technical ways of control aren't settled yet and not necessarily in favor of the free trade of information (see the case of state-filtered Internet in China and most recently the complete blackout for a couple of days during the mass protests in Iran). But both state and private actors are both perpetrators and victims of cyber attacks and a smooth mechanism aimed at protecting the state and its individual citizens in terms of privacy and freedoms is unrealistic.

A cyber world based on trust is possible only in a global political system based on trust. Edward Snowden revelations regarding how the USA through the NSA is practically have the capacity of keeping under tight control everyone, regardless of the importance from the security point of view (although the real time capacity of processing those humongous amount data is highly problematic if not impossible) broke the fragile trust between old time allies. Coalitions of likeminded countries are possible, but trust doesn't operate as long there is the temptation of cheap and relatively risk-free information gathering. The new army of electronic spies has other rules and moves faster than, for instance protection system aimed to guarantee the human rights.

The Hacked World Order offers a couple of directions and concepts to follow further - for example how the cyber issues are integrated into the everyday flow of foreign relations and international treaties. Not all chapters are equal and some are just reproducing well-known cases such as the Stuxnet virus. The information used is solid although there are rarely clear conclusion regarding an issue or another. Maybe this is how the cyber world operates at the intellectual level.

Note: I've listened to the audio version of this book.

Rating: 4 stars

'The Elite Charade of Changing the World'

The modern elites seem to be broken. The fundament of those elites and their reproduction principles seem to be widely rejected. But this rejection means also directing votes towards anti-elites, populist candidates, such Donald Trump of America, who in fact altough a counter-elite is nevertheless also part of the upper - money-fuelled - class. 

Anand Giridharadas' Winners Take All. The Elite Charade of Chaging the World is focused on the American case - with its high concentration of wealth and prestige among the elites - but it can easily serve as a guide for any other developed country. 

The situation, according to Giridharadas: the gap between the upper and lower layers of the society only gets bigger; winners know the problem but want to preserve their status quo; instead of trying to change the system, the member of the elites are trying to rather redistribute their wealth through charities instead of putting more efforts into redesigning the system completely. 

Is it a sign of a failure of participatory democracy? Or rather there is a need to reinvigorate citizenship? Or to improve the level of trust into public intellectuals whose ideas seem to be often subsidized by the same members of the establishment they are supposed to criticize?

The book is very interesting for the detailed landscape offered and the overview of various aspects related to the lack of balance of the system of distribution of wealth and power nowadays. It questions this system by simply displaying its failures. But when thoughts are changed into commodities - part of the ways in which the system reproduces itself at the intellectual elites level - it is hard to hope in a due change.

This book is a warning of how far things are in terms of resistance to genuine change. The fact that the priviledged few are throwing up some crumbles of money to the many unpriviledged is sometimes a simple PR spin that doesn't bring social justice, it rather confirms an inequality status. In the American case, donations for charity involve tax exemptions therefore paying for generous causes is done for a very specific non-charitable reason. 

It is a good start if you want to understand the map of intentions and interests among elites nowadays. How the change may actually occur is a topic for another book, maybe.

Who are 'The Arabists'?

I went familiar with the writings of Robert D. Kaplan through his Balkan travelogue Balkan Ghosts - part of it I translated for a feuilleton published by a newspaper I was working on, in a time when the Balkans were on interest, although deeply misunderstood - which I've largely found relativistic, sensationalist and written in a very simplistic way. It rather has the style of blog posts, at a time when there were no blogs around, written fast, to cater an audience hunger for colourful descriptions and easy explanations of century-long conflicts. Those were the times...

Kaplan is a favorite of many South-Eastern European leaders who happily invited for an insightful chat, especially when they hope to have their name mentioned in his next travelogue, wrote also about South-Eastern Asia and went embedded with US troops in Iraq. He has the knowledge and the right connections for obtaining direct reliable information but don't expect his writings to be academically insightful. You might get the shape of things, but the content must be filled with something different if looking for a solid picture.

About The Arabists, which traces the roots of the Foreign Services elites in the Middle East, I had no idea it exists, until browsing a collection of books about this part of the world. The book was written at the end of the 1980s and republished. What is fantastic about this book is the big number of references and interviews regarding various diplomatic appointees in various positions in the Middle East. Not few of them were children of methodist protestant missionaries sent by their churches to converts Arab populations to Christianism in the 18th-19th century. In some places, like in what used to be called the 'big Syria', which included Lebanon of today, those missionaries clashed with the French representatives represented by the Catholic Church. Children of those missionaries were eventually born in the Middle East, spoke Arabic, returned in the State and were included in the white Protestant elites. They entered the Foreign Service but eventually their interest decreased and went to explore other 'exotic' part of the world, like Africa.

The Protestant religious activism shaped at a great extent the political activism and Arab nationalism, including through the university network created, such as the American Universities - in Lebanon and Cairo, that still remain important institutions of high education in this part of the world. Americans themselves prefer to study there for a full immersion into the elitist version of the local societies and for improving the language. The intellectual life was developed under the Protestant spell. For instance, the first Arabic printing press in Syria was brought by American missionaries to Beirut from Malta in 1834. 

But who really are those 'Arabists'. According to Robert D. Kaplan since the early 1950s onwards, there were two definitions that will exist side by side. One, for the use of the Foreign Service and the Protestant missionaries, referred to 'someone who spoke Arabic well and had substantial living experience in the Arab world'. The other one, public and according to the author embraced by the 'Jewish public' was: 'Someone who loved Arabs, often because he hated Jews'. The latter acception prevailed sometimes in the US diplomatic approaches to the Middle East peace process, including through the policies of the American embassy in Tel Aviv - very knowledgeable in Arab affairs, speaking the language, but not Hebrew (which is spoken in only one country, anyway). I might add that the current pathos of the US administration towards Israel is often based also on a religious basis, the neo-evangelical missionarism which is equally toxic and anti-Semitic in its origin.

However, that 'love' for the Arabic speaking realm has some limits, many of them. It did not have the state-building outreach of the Brits - who, like Lawrence of Arabia or Gertrude Bell were genuinely believing that they can change the course of events and the geopolitical configuration of the region. Many were just too desillusioned with their Western bubble and were looking for an exotic connection to the outside world. They pretended not only to 'understand the Arabs' but they assumed that their disgust toward the unreliable political elites and corruption would in fact help the local societies to change. More often those diplomats chose to change their location when apparently things were not following their designs.

Following the end of the Cold War, when the local - especially Republican - American elites lost their grasp of the realities as the binary US/Russia (which generously got involved in the elite building in many places in the Middle East, Syria being one of them) conflict ceased to exist. The life of the Arabists fell the victim of the 'rampant shallowness and careerism and the sterilization of embassy life. The Foreign Service, after all, mirrors the society from which it draws it recruits, and these recruits are consumed with status and advancement and less concerned with the subject of their expertise that their predecessors were'. 

Robert D. Kaplan avoids making any conclusion. But it is enough to read only for one day the flows of news regarding America's adventures in the Middle East to see how low the standards sunk. It can't get any lower.