Being Ali Khamenei

Even if Jorge Luis Borges' short story is less than 1000 words long, one could spend 14 years analyzing its details - and 14 means infinity, as it is pointed out in House of Asterion.

House of Asterion is one of the few instances in literary history, where less than a 1000 words say far more than even the most graphic imagery ever could.

I guess that's why Borges is a genius.

Through the ramblings of Asterion, aka the Minotaur, living in complete isolation inside the labyrinthic palace on Knossos, Crete, Borges gives us a peak into a mind on the verge of madness.

Tragicomically, the monster with human body and a head like a bull, spends his days imagining things, playing games with himself, running around in the corridors "like a ram about to charge".

Even falling off roofs until he is bloody seems to be a delightful break in routine for this prisoner, who fiercely denies his condition.

Asterion is not a captive - he can exit the endlessly duplicating unfurnished rooms, only he choose not to, so he can avoid the people who looks strange to him, and who are horrified by his appearance.

The minotaur considers himself a "deliverer" of those poor victims he ritually slays as a part of the rituals of the legendary Cretan bull-cult.

It's not like he does not like people, he merely projects his own misery to them and helps them not to live.

The Censor's Complex: All is wickedness

On June 21 it was reported that the 69 year old Ali Khamenei in a Friday prayer sermon spoke the following words:

Like most conservatives he considers himself a man with the sole purpose on Earth to protect people from their own instincts. He is not, like other men, born at random, seeking the meaning of existence.

To most humans this is the experience, as expressed by Jim Morrison in Riders on the Storm:


Not so for the guardian of the revolution. He not only holds the purpose in the palm of his hand; in his mind he is the very purpose; it is written in the palm of his hand.

Another telling sign is one of the latest in a steady stream of accusations against the Mousavi camp for being US agents, one stating the Mousavi headquarter was nothing but a place for "deviants" fighting for "sexual freedom."

These accusations reveal what you may call "The Censor's Complex", a phenomenon also known from the Western hemisphere, namely the moral guardians of Christian USA.

The constant focus on sexually explicit content in music, movies and art exposes some of the most outspoken guardians of traditional values to porn, profanity and obscenities to a point, where they become convinced the outside world is defined by perversion and abhorrent behavior.

In some cases they fall prey to exactly the same instincts they work to make sure only their eyes - the eyes of the censor - can see.

The puritan "revelation" is banal

The secret to the fierce clamp-down on the Iranian opposition and towards anything resembling Western culture - even characteristics universal to all cultures and instincts natural to man - is the constant state of emergency traditionalist thinkers are living in.

They do not consider themselves deviant. They see everyone else as deviants, and in killing some to preserve the repressive order they merely "deliver them from evil", as Asterion puts it.

It is a ritual they have to uphold in order to keep people from embracing a kind of freedom that appears demonic and unnatural to the puritan mind.

And the self-appointed guardians of traditionalist values will transform themselves into monsters to defend the barriers of oppression.

Torturing someone to death, if done for noble purposes, is not nearly as monstrous in this perspective, as for instance indulging in extramarital sex for mere pleasure.

The subtle logic behind their calculations - the slippery slope argument that the institutions of family and the purity of the heart is corrupted by freedom - appears to the isolated paleo-conservative with his back to the wall against the forces of modernity as a mystical revelation.

Since they do not listen to outside sources - which are corrosive influences, nothing but disturbance of the heavenly peace of non-emphatic societal hectoring - they do not realize that to the rest of the world these "divine calculations" are quite banal.

The West respects them enough to consensually and out of their free will establish regulations to preserve moral values, and when there are disagreements about priorities, disputes are settled in a parliamentarian fashion. The West is no more a source of perversion than the East is a breeding ground for terrorism.

These are reductionist profiles created in the minds of isolated individuals observing the world from an ivory tower in the labyrinth they have created in order to protect themselves from realizing the monstrosity of their own arrogance.

The house they have built, the House of Asterion, is a structure of walls put up to set themselves apart from other humans, a social mask by which they can continue to keep up the pretense of being morallay superior, even as they unleash unspeakable horrors on their fellow man.

The truth cannot be repressed

One of Asterion's victims in his last breath prophesies that Asterion will soon meet his own "deliverer". From this point on Asterion can think of nothing else, and when Theseus finally shows up to slay the beast and win the price, "the minotaur hardly put up any resistance", as Theseus confides to Ariadne.

Ariadne, seeing the immense tragedy of the life of her brother, and how the cult of the bull deprives the court of any sense of grace and the people of any sense of hope, betrays Astarion and helps Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth, when he has killed the minotaur.

The labyrinthic structure was, apparently, the greatest threat, not so much the ferocity of the bull-man hybrid.

As in the case of revolutions the big question is always what to do after having slain the tyrant. The post-revolutionary confusion is very much like a labyrinth in which one may get stuck and, in turn, find yourself transformed into a monster.

The legend of Theseus is, according to one popular theory, a synthesis of the rise of Athenian power over the power of Minoan culture, which for milennia was dominant in the Mediterranean.

Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of The Third Reich, famously stated:


Many who use fragments of this quote overlook the fact that Goebbels accurately diagnosed the limitations of the propagandist lie as well as he foresaw how the collapse of the propaganda machine initiated a phase of fierce repression of dissent.

Eventually, outside forces and internal demoralization bring about the threat of complete cultural annihilation for any regime acting against the interests of its citizens.

If only Ali Khamenei from his ivory tower inside the maze of revolutionary Islamic logic could see what other men sees - what is really going on and not just what is going on in the heroic fiction he constructs around his own apparent failings.

No cultural analysis is needed; these are merely for the sceptics and those who are late in grasping the point, which is a simple emotional one, a primitive instinctual one, if you will.

But the point is also a natural one which - like the green seed the Iranian freedom movement has adopted as its symbol - cannot be continuously repressed.

In the words of Marvin Gaye: