Iran is in Central Asia, and for centuries before our beautiful little democratic experiment ever was dreamed of, Mongols, Tatars, Chinese, Persians, Medes, Assyrians, and all those other Central Asian folk had been overrunning whatever and whenever the slightest spirit moved them. Genocide there was not a fun word for intermissions at rock festivals -- this is where it really happened, as whole peoples disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving skeletal cities as mute reminders of whole civilizations that once were. This has been the single most brutal and convulsive part of the world throughout history, and it seemed clear to me that they weren't going to change just because some Rousseauian Americans thought people were basically good.
By reading Persian history you could know that because of all the invasions, the Persians were paranoically afraid of strangers -- and hostile toward them. You would see that taking hostages was their idea of a release of national tensions: their Oktoberfest , only they did it in November, without alcohol. You would have been able easily to predict that bringing eighty thousand Persian students to the United States, where they felt miserably inferior and alone and out of place, would only bring about, at the right time, a disastrous counter-effect. And you would have known that all throughout modern Persian history, the Shi'ite clergy took the lead again and again against all and any outside invaders.
But on top of all that there was something even more curious that was generally missed. R. K. Ramazani, the fine Iranian-born scholar at the University of Virginia, pointed it out to me after the hostages were taken, when I was interviewing him on Meet the Press . "What they have done is so very odd," he told me. "They are pretending to be against us because we have not supported their democracy. But there is absolutely no tradition of democracy in Persia. They got this precisely from the United States. They are rebelling against us for not supporting there what we believe in." And even beyond this bizarre reasoning, you had to see what I had seen that December-cold, snowy morning in Neauphle le Château: the eerie juxtaposition of these ancient beliefs and modern technology. Yes, indeed, the ancient imam, Khomeini, learned one might say overnight -- as fast as the overnights of the Parisian playboys -- to use "Satan's Sonys," not to speak of the French telephone system, to try to carry his people back fourteen hundred years.
But it also seemed to me that what we were seeing in Iran was also something we were seeing in one form or another all over. I tried to analyze in a column as early as 1977 the roots of these seemingly incongruous new forces:
WE STILL CAN ' T GO HOME AGAIN
LONDON -- With very few people noticing it, key groups of people in important countries are psychologically and culturally trying to "go home."
It now seems devilishly clear that one of the political problems of today (and of the next 10 years) is how to deal with these masses of people who are determined to return to old cultural, political and religious forms.
In Israel, for instance, I was confused for a long time about the Gush Emunim, the ultra-orthodox who are determinedly settling on Arab lands they consider theirs because of ancient boundaries.
It seemed incredible that the government would allow a small and unrepresentative group to poison peace possibilities. A well-off businessman with very liberal views who had been raised on a kibbutz explained it to me.
"They remind us of what we were, so even we liberals rather yearn for them," he said. "Clean, wholesome, sure."
Much the same thing has been going on in Egypt, where, in frustration over the failures of both socialism and capitalism, young people in masses have been returning to traditional Islam. The key to the movement, which was one element behind the recent anti-Sadat riots, is a return to unity -- in this case, the ancient unity of Islam.
In Africa, it is a renascent tribalism, and the retreat to tribalism is not, interestingly enough, occurring only among African blacks.
Leroy Phillips, a young Jamaican-born black social worker in the London ghetto, told me recently that black power and "soul" had been superseded on a large scale by a "back to the roots" movement that has young black people meeting in basement study groups to reconstitute their tribal heritage.
The numbers of similar, emotionally irredentist situations are endless, ethnicity in the United States, the American Indian movement, Slavicism in the Soviet Union, the Palestinians' passion for "The Return."
But what does all of this really mean? Does it have any great importance?
Importance it certainly does have. The Palestinians could start a world war: the Gush Emunim could stop Israel from making peace: tribalism could cause untold suffering: ethnicity in the United States or in Russia could enormously weaken the countries' unity.
But, does it make any sense? Clearly, it does not. The transcendental experience, the "kick," is basically the same in all of them -- frustrated or psychically wounded by the demands of the modern world, all would like to "go home again," to go back to a time when life was sure and simple and encompassable.
Science and technology and ideologies are without soul. None of them turns out to be ultimately satisfying for everybody. If, in addition, as in Egypt and Africa, they don't even bring material well-being, then why bear them? ...
[But] the world has not stood still, even if ... imaginations and memories have. What [these people] are suffering and struggling for is something that no longer exists -- they can only come back to the future.
This is typical of the situation everywhere. What is needed is not impossible attempts to "go home," but attempts to develop post-"Era of Certainty" goals and reasons for living. What is needed is a combination of inner moral certainty and an outer sense of the relativism of an interdependent world.
What I am saying is that these new situations -- these Irans and the Jonestowns and the Cambodias and the brainwashing and the national psychoses -- pose levels of deep questioning for everyone, but particularly for the journalist. How do we journalists deal with these questions that are basically questions of national psychology, of pathology, of neurotic leadership? How can we interpret them in normal language, when they do not respond to normal language? How in the most practical terms can we apply a knowledge of cultural differences and relativeness within our work, incorporating that into our writings? First of all, we prepare our internal selves to understand.
One particular story I did prepared me, in a very basic and very different way, for reporting and understanding the depths and breadths of the new pathologies of the world that we were being asked to report.
All through the sixties, when I was in and out of Latin America regularly, the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador beckoned to me with a strange siren spell. These were the islands -- barren, volcanic, with trees with limbs like gray specters against the stark, blue, equatorial sky -- that a Spanish buccaneer spoke of three centuries ago. "We will never arrive there," he said, as the ship twisted in the strange sea. "They are enchanted islands, mere shadows and not real islands." Later Charles Darwin himself, when he arrived there aboard the H.M.S. Beagle in 1853, said (ingrate!) of the isles that were to ensure his place in history that they were "what we might imagine the cultivated parts of the infernal regions to be."
Why, when I finally was able to go to the Galapagos in 1970, when they first opened up to two small ships, was I so enchanted with these islands? Well, it was simple, I suppose -- they represented to me the very inner mystery of the species, the most basic saga of how human life develops.
The animals were still unspoiled. Since most had never known "man," they did not fear him. They lived in a general harmony together because there were so few predators and because they had over the centuries implicitly divided up the feeding grounds. It was a strange, lost world, but one of a unique balance among creatures.
Fear: there was virtually no fear on the part of the animals. I felt a sense of awe ... and bewitchment. Baby sea lions, totally unafraid of the "man" they have never known, swam playfully with you in the shining sea, while their grandmothers rode the waves in lik
e surfers. Prehistoric black and red iguanas curled langourously up in the sun on the lava rock while the ancient turtles, which disappeared elsewhere in the world seventy thousand years ago, lumbered so slowly they seemed aching with historic exhaustion. Isolated for more than a million years from the great continents, the Galapagos became a safe harbor for the reptilian animals of prehistoric times. In this glorious isolation--and here alone--they were preserved from the evolved mammals that would have destroyed them on the great land masses.
Then one day on the lava rocks of James Island I was taught a most dramatic lesson. Everywhere the animals were friendly. But here when we approached a group of furred sea lions on the rocks, they suddenly fled in terror. I was bereft. What was wrong?
Later I asked the scientist why this had happened. He paused, as if he did not want to answer. "You may not believe this," he said slowly, "but this is the only island where the animals were hunted."
I stared at him. "You don't mean ..." I started. Then, "When?"
"Two hundred years ago."
Now I truly gaped. "You are not trying to tell me that they have passed that knowledge down within them through the centuries .... "
He nodded. "Yes," he said, "I am."
***
So it was that seeing this world developing around me from Guatemala to Iran -- a world of guerrilla warfare, and pathological warfare, and leaders like Khomeini who lived in a world much like the eerie but very real world of the Galapagos -- I immediately began to seek out the small but fascinating coterie of people around the country, mostly psychiatrists with a political sense, who could interpret these things for me on the deeper level the times called for.
There was Dr. Steve Pieczenik, the leading terrorist negotiator at the State Department, who looked at countries and societies in much the same way as one might look at human beings. When Congressman Leo Ryan was going to Jonestown, for instance, Pieczenik advised him not to go. Why? Because Jonestown was a paranoid society. Just as individuals can be paranoid, so can societies or cults be paranoid.
When you start thinking in this way, you could see that the Carter administration had piled mistake upon mistake in dealing with Iran: giving up its long-formed terrorist policy of not negotiating or paying blackmail, trying to woo the American hostages' captors, negotiation from a point of apparent weakness. Certain psychoanalysts saw just what was happening. One of my columns, on a top-level psychohistory conference sponsored by my late friend and mentor, the analyst Heinz Kohut, showed the direction of this thinking:
PSYCHOANALYSTS PROBE THE " MESSIANIC " POWER OF LEADERS LIKE KHOMEINI AND QADDAFI
CHICAGO -- "How do you deal with an Ayatollah Khomeini in the future?" is beginning to be asked -- with deadly seriousness -- in many quarters. And at a watershed conference, on "Psychohistory -- the Meaning of Leadership," here, the answers amazingly all turned out the same ....
At the meeting at Michael Reese Hospital here, the first conference where so many analysts and historians met in such seriousness and felicity, the Khomeini question kept rising.
Dr. Heinz Kohut, the psychiatrist of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, who many feel is the preeminent man in his field today, said of the Iranian situation, "Through the hostages, Khomeini is trying to prove to his people that he can win against the Great Powers ... but without bloodshed."
Then he spoke of the Iranian people "making an enormous change from their old selves to their reshuffled selves." The West imposed "a new self that they did not feel was really their self instead of letting them gradually absorb the changes." And still another thought which came up regarding the extremist leaders so seemingly prevalent in the world (not only Khomeini but Libya's Qaddafi, for instance): "Each group lets the extremists within it take over when in crisis situations because it feels that they best express the past and sense of the group. During the crisis, the doves, who rule much better in non-crisis situations, represent only a weak commitment to the group self."
But the conference -- and more, the times -- dictate deeper questions. The psychoanalysts may come to an agreement on how to deal with such "messianic" leaders (or, leaders who in effect think they are Cod), but how could you sell the injured country, in this case, the U.S., on doing "nothing"? How do you translate their perceptions into politics? How do you begin to imbue our political leaders and diplomats with the tools to carry this out -- and the original knowledge to explain it? How do you explain it to a Ramsey Clark who has more than a few "messianic" feelings about himself?
All of these questions are difficult to apply to everyday life, and all too often the people who espouse them have couched them in such arcane terminology that they are barely understandable. They are changing, as shown here, but the other side is not.
And, finally, we must ask ourselves, what is "everyday life," these troubled days? Well, it is Khomeini and his raging mobs and Jonestown and its zombies and Cambodia and its piles of bones -- events so earthshaking that we simply must come to an understanding of the real explanations for them.
There is a new breed in the psychohistory area -- not the old half-baked charlatans who used to use the name -- and they are developing their disciplines side by side. We need them: in training our diplomatic corps, inserting their knowledge into policy, in alerting our politicians in this new-old world.
The problem is that, when the dust does settle over Iran, our thought will doubtless be directed, again, to the fruitless question of, "Who was guilty?" Rather, we might save ourselves the next time by asking, not in its political sense, but in its deepest sense, "Why?"
If our policy had been thinking along these lines earlier -- and I mean thinking about the intrinsic problems of countries instead of thinking in terms of our ideological preference of the moment--we would have come out far, far better in virtually every part of the world. Take, since it has so come to bedevil us, Central America, where for me it really all started.
Almost two generations after my trip to the mountains with the Guatemalan guerrillas, the entire isthmus was in flames. In Guatemala my guerrilla "friends" had come back in force and were even doing something quite extraordinary: organizing and inspiring the historically passive Indians to take part. El Salvador was in one of the most bitter civil wars of all times, with thirty thousand dead in only two years of fighting. Nicaragua had been all but taken over by the hard-line Marxist wing of the Sandinistas who fought against the dictator Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza. And all of this could have been and should have been avoided had the United States only analyzed these societies, right on our borders, the way we journalists analyzed them at best: with respect for their intrinsic political and psychological needs.
As it happened, I returned to Nicaragua the week after the Sandinista triunfo or triumph in August of 1979, and it was one of those most fascinating of times: when the curtain opens and you see the change actually taking place before your eyes.
I had known Somoza and had interviewed him last only a year and a half before his disgraceful exit from the country he had plundered for decades and then bombed to dust in the last desperate months. He was a recycled dictator then, sixty pounds lighter, hair and mustache mysteriously darker, talking tough. He also did not go out of his famous "bunker," which was just that, a bunker in the National Guard camp downtown. When he spoke, it was from behind a bulletproof glass enclosure. "It's gone, the control," I wrote, "it's gone, the mystique that the Somozas cannot afford to lose. He is a leader imprisoned by his own people."
There was one amusing moment during the interview, in which he excoriated the United States for allowing communism to come to the country he had raped for years. We had just begun talking when he looked at me with an odd focus and then said, "Wait a minute, didn't you write a book on Latin America?"
I said I had, and I almost prepared to back toward the door, for I had certainly not been kind to him in The New Latins .
"You got me into a lot of trouble," said this man who was half American cowboy and half bru
tish banana republic dictator. He shook his head, then went on, "You said I had a mistress and my wife read it there. She had quite a fit."
"Well, Señor Presidente ," I said, with deliberate irony, "she must have been the only person in Managua who didn't know it."
He looked up brightly. "She was," he replied.
When I went back just after the Sandinista takeover, I was willing to give the new forces the benefit of the doubt, despite the prevalence of hard-core Marxists in the top command. Part of the reason for this was that I had been so harsh on Marxist Cuba over the years that I wanted to be especially fair, trying to believe there could indeed be a "new" kind of revolution here. In retrospect, I was too fair, but that is the question of another of those balances that we journalists have constantly to arrive at within ourselves -- and the only thing finally to draw on is our own ethics and our own skeptical intellect.
Anyway, one evening I was returning from the pool about 10:00 P. M. and walking, very wet indeed, through the lobby, when I saw the hardest of the hard line, Tomas Borge, in a clutch with Latin American diplomats. Borge was the powerful minister of the interior, a small gnomelike man who had suffered unspeakably under Somoza and become a total Marxist, so I was fascinated by the chance to listen.
As I stood there dripping, unnoticed by the group, Borge actually outlined their entire plans for Latin America. "The fewer problems we have, the more Latin America will be attracted to us," he was saying in a low, conspiratorial voice. "The more problems we have, the less." He went on to say that the Nicaraguan revolution would be less sanguinary in its aftermath than the Cuban, when Castro executed eight thousand men in one day, but he made it clear that this was only tactical. "Me," he said, "I would shoot the Somozistas. But we won't because we do not want to turn the rest of the Latin American revolution against us."
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