This is the sixth day of the war.
The sixth day of unprovoked aggression by the Israeli genocidal regime against Iran, my country.
The killing spree and the murder machine began last Friday, following twenty months of ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the bombardment of Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, built on many decades of apartheid, aggression, impunity, and occupation.
My intention was not to talk about any of this at the 2025 Finnish Anthropological Society Conference.
My intention was to talk about judgement, and the role of judgement in anthropology. About how we, as anthropologists, should treat judgement as something to reflect on, turning it into a matter of discussion. A project that Hannah Arendt wanted to pursue in her final work, The Life of the Mind. She wrote about thinking, willing—and never got the chance to finish her thoughts on judging.
I wanted to connect her ideas to Joel Robbins’ notion of the ‘comparative study of the good’, his idea that anthropologists have become so accustomed to their own judgements that there’s barely any space left to acknowledge difference asanthropologists did before.
Difference as something that might make anthropology relevant to the world.
How distant all that feels now, in light of Israel’s aggression against Iran.
The latest act of atrocity in its brutalist repository of violence.
I am broken inside.
This was never supposed to happen. I grew up with the nightmare of an Israel–Iran war. And now—here it is. Decades of imagining it, fearing it, trembling at the thought. Yet somehow, never really believing it could happen.
Only a month ago, I was in Iran.
My brother asked me if he should start a business or wait for the threat of war to pass.
We both stayed silent.
Then we shrugged: “Nah, it’s not gonna happen.”
We had to move on with our lives. Why?
Because Israeli aggression isn’t just another option: it’s the end of all possible options.
“Nothing good ever comes out of it,” we told each other.
The good.
Maybe this is where I can return to what I had hoped to talk about at the conference.
The good that all the parties involved in this bloody war are searching for.
The good that some of my fellow Iranians align themselves with, in supporting the Israeli attack—hoping to see themselves freed from decades of oppression in Iran.
Some live in exile.
Some now live under bombardment in Iranian cities.
Still, they believe, deeply, that Israel might bring them freedom.
But their good is not my good.
Just as the good that the Islamic Republic of Iran claims to uphold is not my good.
Just as the good pursued by Israel’s apartheid, genocidal regime is not my good.
Just as the good that the German political class hide behind—when they silence us, in public and in universities—is not my good.
The kind of good that justifies genocide, torture, oppression, or the illusion of peace and freedom in the wake of war.
I’ve struggled a lot with whether anthropology is even relevant in my life right now—let alone the idea of giving a presentation at a conference, which demands scholarly rigour and composure.
I don’t have either.
I am broken inside.
Nothing holds together anymore.
No system of value feels relevant.
Western values are the ones now underwriting genocide; the very same values and the good that do not even help to summon the strength to oppose mass killings in the West. What Didier Fassin has recently called “moral abdication”.
What am I supposed to explain to my son when he soon asks me what is happening in Iran?
Who attacked it?
How do I explain that the same German system that gives us a livelihood—whose passport is supposedly the highest achievement we can aim for—is sending arms to Israel to kill his family back in Iran?
How do I explain to him that many of us have escaped the persecution of the Iranian regime, only to find ourselves now facing the monstrosities of other political systems?
In his four-year-old mind, my son lives with monsters. He loves them.
His latest creation is a monster that devours everyone and everything. It has red hair and red eyes.
“Who is this monster?” I ask him.
He translates it using his child’s mind, structured by the German language’s capacity to combine words into a single compound word.
A monster who sleeps in the sky at night and wakes up in the morning on the ground.
He adores this monster. It is a creature of his own imagination.
And I, deep inside my mind, can’t help but repeat to myself how similar it is to Israel.
A monster that wants to devour everything.
At night, it rains bombs, with red-flickering drones and stealth F-35 jets. And in the mornings, it gives us suicide bombings hidden in cars.
Everything is breaking down for me.
Nothing is left of those systems of value.
And yet, I don’t want to position myself as someone neutral.
I cannot.
As Arendt says, we have to get rid of “the deep-seated fear of passing judgment, of naming names, and of fixing blame”.
The question and answer Arendt proposes regarding judgement deserves a long quote here:
“What happens to the human faculty of judgment when it is faced with occurrences that spell the breakdown of all customary standards, and hence are unprecedented in the sense that they are not foreseen in the general rules—not even as exceptions to such rules? A valid answer to these questions would have to start with an analysis of the still very mysterious nature of human judgment—of what it can and cannot achieve. For only if we assume that there exists a human faculty which enables us to judge rationally, without being carried away by either emotion or self-interest, and which at the same time, functions spontaneously, that is to say, is not bound by standards and rules under which particular cases are simply subsumed, but on the contrary, produces its own principles by virtue of the judging activity itself; only under this assumption can we risk ourselves on this very slippery moral ground with some hope of finding a firm footing”
I go back to the initial argument I had hoped to develop.
Joel Robbins asks anthropologists to take difference seriously, and to resist the “judgemental turn” in anthropology, where we already know who is to blame. In his case, it’s neoliberalism: the idea that, wherever we look in the world, we find its evils. He poses this to hold a position against ‘ethnographic homogenization’, and he warns against the kind of anthropology that too quickly draws conclusions.
I agree with him.
This stance gives us a chance to reflect on and revisit many of the long-established values of the West and ourselves.
But I can’t help but feel that we need judgement, especially when the old systems of values, standards, and norms are crumbling.
We need it, so that we assume a firm moral ground; one that is responsive, and spontaneous.
Do I even dare to think about all of this right now?
I’m not sure, at least not these days.
The days when, as Paul Celan, the Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, with his painful and uncomfortable relationship to the German language, wrote in Todesfuge:
Black milk of mornings we drink you at night
we drink you at midday death is a Master from Deutschland
we drink you at dusk in mornings we drink and drink
death is a Master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he whistles his hounds he grants us graves in the sky
he plays with his snakes and he dreams death is a Master from Deutschland
On June 17th, Friedrich Merz, the new German Chancellor, commented on the war with Iran, stating with maximum clarity that Israel is “doing the dirty work for all of us”.
‘Death is a Master from Germany’.
And from wherever else is included in the ‘us’ Friedrich Merz refers to.
in Helsinki, 18th June 2025
This text was originally presented in panel 16: “Coexistence as in-betweenness: everyday practices of comparison” at the biennial conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society in Helsinki, Finland.
Works Cited:
Arendt, H. 1964. Personal responsibility under dictatorship. New York Review of Books.
Fassin, D., 2025. Moral abdication: how the world failed to stop the destruction of Gaza. Verso Books.
Robbins, J., 2023. “Anthropology bright and dark: Relativism, value pluralism, and the comparative study of the good.” Social Analysis, 67(4), pp.43-100.
