Real wars, imagined communities

Reading Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” amid war with Iran.

Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.”

It’s not as if the increasingly irritable American public was clamoring for another war, this time with Iran. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll on the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes this weekend — which appear to have killed Ayatollah Khamenei — showed just 27% U.S. respondents approving. This is another governing-class project, as wars of choice tend to be, albeit one without authorization from Congress.

But I live amid one of those strong pockets of genuine and enthusiastic grassroots support, Los Angeles, where the large Iranian exile community was celebrating after news spread yesterday of the Ayatollah’s death and the prospect of regime change. From my old colleague Corinne Purtill for the Los Angeles Times:

Car horns blared and Persian music pumped through open windows. A Tesla Cybertruck festooned with two giant flags of the Imperial State of Iran, the monarchy overthrown in 1979, sped up Veteran Avenue; a Mercedes with the same flag billowing from an open sunroof turned in the other direction. Phones pinged with constant texts from friends and relatives watching the news around the world.

“You have to understand that we have been raised in preparation for this day,” said Ryan Abrams, 34, as he and his wife, Ashley Abrams, 32, walked the neighborhood with their dog.

He wore the lion-and-sun flag of the shah’s Iran tied like a cape around his shoulders; she wore a similarly sized Israeli flag around hers. Both of their Jewish Iranian families immigrated in 1979 to Los Angeles.

“Our whole lives we’ve had to navigate our different identities, coming from both Persian and Jewish backgrounds,” he said. “Today we see one step forward.”

Even as a neighbor, I wouldn’t pretend to deeply understand the experience of Iranian exiles or their descendants. So I listen to what’s said, through reading or by hearing from Persian friends. “On one hand, you hate all of them [the regime] so bad you want them all to die,” a 37-year-old Tehran native turned Los Angeles waiter named Amir told Corinne. “On the other hand — war. Things can go wrong in war. But me and a lot of people think war is better than what’s going on.”

Amid the bombs, what is conveyed through quotes like “Hopefully the regime will change, the shah will return back home and we will have a glorious future for Iran” is the power of nationalism, the feeling of belonging even to a faraway land, a sense of community potent enough to carry over oceans and forward through time, across generations, even beyond the fear of war. There are few feelings of community like it. “In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love,” Benedict Anderson wrote in his classic “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism” (1983), which I finished as the war with Iran began.

If I asked, what communities would you say you belong to? I self-identify, with various levels of intensity or importance, as an Angeleno, Californian, a journalist, writer, unionist, professional, a guest character in somebody’s morning coffee klatch, a Big Tech antagonist, etc. What’s significant about these community identities is that I can not only identify but identify with other people who belong to those groups: You’re somebody with whom I have something in common. Even as strangers we could proceed on shared assumptions of shared experiences. We can imagine we already know each other.

But when I look at my list, I see identities that are far thinner than they look: I could, in theory, move away, change my politics, stop showing up at the coffee shop, stop writing, change professional identities, so on. Suddenly my idea of “community” seems something quite voluntary, if not fully disposable. I could leave it all behind, in the past, to a place of mere trivia.

Nationality is a community identity you can’t get rid of so easily. You can always sell your car and unfollow the Honda Fit owners’ subreddit, but it’s a little harder to stop being French. You could legally renounce a citizenship, try to purge from your mind every thought and memory of the homeland (note the pervasively filial terminology of nationalism). But someone will still notice your accent or, if you’re famous, edit in a nationality on your Wikipedia page. Nationalism can be powerfully felt, but also powerfully imposed. I don’t think often about what it means to be an American, but I also know I lack imagination for a future where I wasn’t, or wasn’t allowed to be.

Yet life — real, actual life — is often so much vaguer, shoddily constructed, at times so much more disposable and mutable than any one community identity can ever suggest. Especially nationalities, which are usually modern smoothings-over of muddy pasts: by monarchists, imperialists, revolutionaries and bureaucrats alike, who shared little except goals of fixed languages, fixed borders, fixed histories and a fixed and comprehendible people. “The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one — and only one — extremely clear place,” Anderson writes. “No fractions.” The sincerity of Persian Angelenos celebrating the Ayatollah’s death is real and unambiguous, but I have more curiosity about the multiform imaginations of transitions of power, of endgames, of the restoration of a long-lost Shah to a vacated throne on the opposite side of the planet. What does almost fifty years of exile, under constant bombardment by Golden State cultural radiation, do to everyone’s sense of future? Was five decades in Los Angeles an interruption, or was it a whole new branch of life? Could it be both? Under the Hollywood palms, my longtime neighbors dream of the far-away.