There is no shortage of bitter humour in the darkness of these days. This is a message from the former president of Mongolia saying: “Mongolia stands beside Iran—the people of Iran—in the twenty-first century, just as it did in the thirteenth!” 🙄

The past does not determine the relationship between peoples today, and we are grateful for his support. But the thirteenth century? The devastating Mongol invasion of Iran, which killed millions of Iranians and after which, according to the source, Iran’s population did not return to its pre-invasion level for 650 years?!

Well, at least it appears that those who have held our fate in their hands have much in common in their concern for our health and safety, and in their conviction that history has failed to understand them properly.

But that such a catastrophe has descended upon these people that a Mongol can feel that what they did to Iranians in the thirteenth century amounted to solidarity and empathy—that is a new riddle for whose invention they deserve congratulations.

Sometimes I think we entered a parallel universe long ago, one in which the boundary between tragedy and comedy has been erased from every dimension of life.

At least we can congratulate the Mongol for showing more understanding, humanity, and moral courage than the global left.