These days, truth is much like a B2 stealth bomber. It is hard to detect it, though it hovers right over our heads. The US bombing of the nuclear reactors in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan was allegedly on behalf of Israel. How did a war between Israel and Iran spin around to consolidate the narrative that the US has returned as the global supercop and that Donald Trump is the only world leader worth talking about?
Satellite imagery showed six gaping wounds at Fordo, a blackened sprawl at Isfahan, and an 18-foot hole at Natanz. Trump repeatedly asserted that Iran’s nuclear programme was “completely obliterated”, a claim the Israel Atomic Energy Commission backed. Yet, making defiant noises from his bunker, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei proclaimed a “severe slap” to America and a “victory” over the “Zionist regime”. There were photographs of Iranians dancing on the streets in celebration, having chosen to believe in their victory. As a great author said, patriotism is the opium of the people.
Closer home, one thought of Operation Sindoor. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said it was an unqualified success. Pakistan’s General Asim Munir, in return, claimed his army had shot down Indian planes. We chose officially not to believe him. Yet, the latest on this front is an admission of downed planes by an Indian defence attaché, a naval officer, at a seminar in Jakarta on June 10. But we still don’t know how many planes India might have lost, or how many died or were wounded during the operation.
We don’t even seem to know for certain if the families of the Pahalgam victims have been compensated for their plight. In short, we are swallowed by the official bubble.
In the absence of clear evidence, then, you are free to live in the truth bubble of your choice. Or so one thought until Trump bombed Iran, marking the return of the unipolar world, where the American version of the truth increasingly seems to be the only one, gaining ascendance over other national narratives.
The indeterminacy of reality is a haze enveloping the world. Never mind if we are living in one of the most surveilled times in history: almost nothing goes unrecorded. Even what we search for on the internet comes back to haunt us as advertisements. We walk naked in the crowd, as it were.
Great events happen right in front of us, but we do not know for what reason. And because we do not know the reason, what transpires before our very eyes appears distant and unreal, a game whose rules and meaning are unknowable to us.
An instance of such mass illusion happened last fortnight when, after ‘obliteration’, Iran fired 19 missiles at the US military base at Al Udeid in Qatar. Clearly, this was retaliatory and a gesture of assurance to the Iranian people. But how meaningless it was. According to reports, Iran informed Qatar and the US of its intent in advance, so they could evacuate the base. It was all like a game. It happened and did not happen. More on this later.
Why is truth so elusive even when facts are available? No independent body—the United Nations, Nato or the International Atomic Energy Agency—can pierce the fog. The UN, a toothless pensionary, issues platitudes that vanish into the void, its Security Council paralysed by vetoes. Nato, a military white elephant, watches from the sidelines, irrelevant as Trump’s America bypasses allies for unilateral glory. The IAEA, meant to guard nuclear safety, is barred from Iran’s shattered sites; its director, Rafael Grossi, is reduced to parsing satellite images and guessing the damage. We don’t even know if there was a radiation leak post bombing.
Prime Minister Modi has always been quick to claim India’s ‘growing’ role in international affairs. Yet, when it came to collecting credit for calling off Operation Sindoor and making peace with our one constant enemy, Modi’s version, so appealing to the patriot, was shot down by Trump, who said he was the one who brokered peace.
Last week at the White House, Trump said in the course of a speech: “I said, cancel all deals with India and Pakistan… Look, you want to have trade with the United States. It’s great, but you want to go and start using nuclear weapons on each other. We are not going to allow that. And they both agreed.”
To revisit an earlier point, Khamenei’s claim of victory is a case study of the world becoming a mirage of itself. He had hailed Iran’s missile strikes on Israel as a crushing blow. Yet, the facts sneer in his face: Israel swatted most missiles and officially incurred only 28 civilian deaths. Iran’s Qatar strike grazed the base, killing no one. Why would you warn your enemy? The missiles were not meant to kill but to strike a posture, to feed a narrative of defiance against the “Great Satan” and the “Zionist enemy”.
In a post-truth world, the posturing is the point. But even this is in dire straits as a pumped-up US blows out into being the one bubble that swallows the rest of the world. As the wise said, history is the writ of the victor. And the world increasingly seems to have only one.
C P Surendran | Poet, novelist and screenplay writer whose latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)