Not fandom related at all but the news about Marjane Satrapi made me really angry and I really need to vent about it
I fucking hate Marjane Satrapi and I fucking hate Persepolis. Imagine writing a graphic novel "to combat Western stereotypes" about your homeland and then putting nothing but Western stereotypes in there. That thing about giving plastic "keys to heaven" to young soldiers to encourage martyrdom is insane level of bullshit. What else? Did they also fly to Iraq on a fucking carpet? Literally never happened, you will never find anything about it written in Farsi, it's all Israeli and diaspora bullshit. The concept of keys to heaven itself isn't even Islamic, for fuck's sake, it's Christian, how stupid do you need to be to fall for this? The fact that allegedly Satrapi learned it from her parents' SERVANT should already make you side eye her. Do you have a servant? I do not. The keys bullshit was disproved even by a guy who worked for BBC, and BBC isn't known for its great nuanced perspectives on the Middle East.
The claim of her being a native informant and therefore reliable is so laughable. She was an upper middle class Tehrani from a leftist secular family with access to Western culture and the funds to send her to Vienna. She went to an elite French school. Is this supposed to be a universal Iranian everygirl? Before the revolution, only, like, 3% of the population had college degrees. She's representative of less than 3% of the population bc not even other rich kids of that era universally love her. Would you consider a woman with Mar-a-lago face a universal American everywoman? Why not?
She called Shi'a rituals fake and insincere but never criticized US/Israel as an existential threat to her homeland, how US sanctions devastate ordinary Iranians, US military interventions and what Israel is doing both in Gaza and Lebanon. But do you know WHAT she criticized? French visa policy, because poor, poor children of Tehrani rich shits can't immigrate to Western Europe so easily.
Her book is such a typical post 9/11 jerkoff material for people with white savior fantasy, I just can't. Off course, everybody religious in Iran is grim and depressing and rude, the veil is oppressive and the Western culture and attire are so, so liberating. Everything about Islamic government is terror, misery and stagnation. She's like "Please, US, bomb my country, but do so in a cool, progressive and feminist way". Btw did you know that Iran now has more women with STEM degrees than US or any European country?
Satrapi's political position is pure delulu. She said she rejects East-West binary and thinks that the only conflict is the conflict between fanatics and everyone else. Did fanatics steal Iranian oil? Did fanatics hang signs "Entry of dogs and Iranians prohibited"? Did fanatics bring both Pahlavis to power with a coup?
Persepolis is nothing but flimsy ideological justification for US military intervention and agressive foreign policies in the Middle East. Even other Iranians living abroad think that it's bullshit, please consult Hamid Dabashi and Roksana Bahramitash. The ones not living abroad will be even less kind with their criticism.
I'm genuinely scared for people from Tumblr who think that Persepolis is in any way enlightening... The social justice anti-racism website falls for the stupidest neo-orientalist propaganda, haha classic. Western feminists don't give a shit about second and third world women and just want to play saviors, because most of them believe that it's brown men who are evil and at fault for everything wrong with their countries, and totally not the West that has been fucking with the said countries for more than a century and continues to do that even now. I am disgusted, genuinely disgusted.
turnnoffyourmind
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
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