The Books He Loved but Others Shouldn't Read

by Amir Taheri • June 4, 2019 at 5:00 am

The new book, a sort of biography, was originally written in Arabic under the title "En Ma'a al-sabr fathan" ("Patience Leads to Victory") but has just come out in Persian translation under a pseudo-poetical title, "The Drop of Blood That Became a Ruby". The "Supreme Guide," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recalls his "passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels" and insists on "the deep impact" that reading novels had on him.
Top of Khamenei's list are 10 of the cloak-and-dagger novels written by Michel Zevaco, the Corsican-French writer who helped popularize what the English call "penny-dreadful" romances in France.... Zevaco's world is a universe of sex, violence, conspiracy and betrayal. In Zevaco's best-selling novel "Borgia," the head of the dreadful Borgia family that dominated Florentine politics in the medieval times, rapes his own sister Lucrece, a seductive blonde. The novel "Nostradamus" is a fictionalized biography of a roaming charlatan who claimed to read the future to gain money, power, sex and fame.
Khamenei says he loved and cherished all those books. Ironically, however, all the novels he devoured with great appetite are on a blacklist of books that "corrupt public morality and violate religious values", established under President Muhammad Khatami in 1999. Iranians who are today the same age as Khamenei was in his youth cannot read the books he loved.

In a new biography, the Islamic Republic of Iran's "Supreme Guide," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recalls his "passion for reading famous Iranian and world novels" and insists on "the deep impact" that reading novels had on him. Ironically, all the novels he devoured with great appetite are on Iran's blacklist of books that "corrupt public morality and violate religious values." Iranians who are today the same age as Khamenei was in his youth cannot read the books he loved. (Image source: khamenei.ir/Wikimedia Commons)

"Tell me which books you read, and I'll tell you who you are!" That was how the late Iranian literary critic Mohit Tabatabai used to tease Tehran's glitterati in the "good old days." To be sure, the claim wasn't based on any scientific study but empirical evidence showed that it wasn't quite off the mark either. Books do offer an insight into the soul of a reader, provided he has a soul.

Thus, those interested in all things Iranian, especially in these exciting times, wouldn't want to miss a new book on the Islamic Republic's "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, if only because it devotes a chapter to books that he loved as a young man.

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June 4: China's Longest Night

by Gordon G. Chang • June 4, 2019 at 4:00 am

The Chinese state has become a dangerous actor. It has, among other things, been dismembering neighbors, closing off the global commons, systematically violating international rules, supporting rogue regimes, proliferating weapons technologies, attacking democracy. Any attempt to stop such conduct is met with Beijing angrily claiming a violation of its sovereignty.
The Chinese Communist Party has resorted to intimidation and coercion to keep people in line. The world's most sophisticated surveillance state is adept at oppression, especially as it adopts and perfects mechanisms of control. For instance, within months it plans to amalgamate local "social credit systems" into a national one, to give every Chinese person a constantly updated score based upon factors such as political obedience. Xi Jinping, the Communist Party's general secretary, is creating what the Economist termed "the world's first digital totalitarian state."
The hope that China can liberalize itself starts with the Chinese people. And the conversation about liberalization begins, as a practical matter, in the only place on Chinese soil where Tiananmen is publicly discussed and mourned, where that coercion is least felt. That place is Hong Kong....
There was a semblance of liberty in the months before Tiananmen... But on June 3 and June 4, [Deng Xiaoping] made it clear the Communist Party would stop at nothing.

During the night of June 3-4, 1989, the People's Liberation Army viciously cleared Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where more than a million people had gathered, talked, sung, and celebrated. During the night thousands died. Blood marked pavements, corpses littered streets and alleys. Pictured: A military parade in Tiananmen Square on September 3, 2015. (Photo by Jason Lee - Pool/Getty Images)

As June 3 passed into June 4 in Beijing in 1989, enraged citizens defended streets and neighborhoods as soldiers and armored vehicles of the murderous 27th Army, along with the 38th, moved from the western approaches of the Chinese capital to the heart of the city. It was China's longest night.

By the morning of the 4th, the self-styled army of the Chinese people, the People's Liberation Army, had viciously cleared Tiananmen Square, where more than a million people had gathered, talked, sung, and celebrated since the middle of April. The papier-mâché Goddess of Democracy, a monument to freedom that dominated the square, was smashed.

During the night thousands died. Blood marked pavements, corpses littered streets and alleys. Protests in the Chinese capital and about 370 other cities were put down. The ensuing political crackdown lasted years, and there was an immediate end to efforts to liberalize the economy.

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