The above juxtaposition may be found the BackChannels reading page — the page on which the editor shares part of his daily news feed — at https://www.facebook.com/BackChannels/ .
BackChannels believes history unified: when all has been truthfully reported, the parts may be found to fit all the way through. The greater public will with time dismiss lies and liars alike, and clarity and peace may emerge and prevail.
Well, for the sake of realpolitik, perhaps it is better to have walked on to the bridge than to have continued throwing mud balls from opposite banks.
More than likely, and in light of basic necessary Israeli-Palestinian cooperation (as with COGAT), interaction (growing, voluntary, social), and trade, peace will well up from beneath the headlines to essentially drown the conflict in modern Palestinian doubt, fair-mindedness, humanity, and indecision — and appreciation and love. New ideas and information may do that. The once-Soviet Era poison as installed will slowly evaporate as light works its way into and through the community.
“Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.”
The statement appears with many others down the left sidebar:
The greater contest associated with anti-Semitism may be that between feudal power supported by the medieval worldview — power descends directly from God to some benighted human — and the modern image of our glorious and variegated humanity. Those that recognize that God, nature, and the universe have produced and sustained for us at this time about 7,000 living language cultures, each of them addressing their environmental and social challenges differently, should not be able to remain with or return to an inflexible absolutism.
The supremacist values — out of any people anywhere at any time — defy nature and human nature, and where they’re forced to work — because it takes force to get them to work — people suffer . . . and it could be said that everyone suffers.
Indulgence in anti-Semitic cant may be a good signal of having chosen to march one’s people backward in time.
I relay some conservative thought, as in the above video, with hesitation as it doesn’t represent my thoughts, but my thoughts . . . egads! smile emoticon
I think issues associated with any aspect of the “Islamic Small Wars” (my term) are by nature intergenerational and likely to be longer-lived than any single American presidential term. Therefore, the prism through which these events and processes are viewed must be wider than the instance in which they occur.
While it’s true that the Obama Administration appears to have done as much as possible to accommodate a tyrannical regime that has refused all compromise on its barbaric, lethal, and piratical agendas — outside Iran and within — it’s also true that there will be another American Administration in about a year, that other and alternative games (political and military), ideas, and plans developed and out of sight are going to be “forwarded” into that administration. While the future has yet to be written, Iran will have a new generation of professional, about 50 percent or more of it female, graduating from its colleges in the same period; it will have within whatever influence has been brought to its elites and “masses” (I hate the term, but it suits) by Internet, relationships, and by new trade; if the regime gets its money back (from sanctions), it may have issues with avarice and greed at the highest levels.
I believe Time is with the west, not the medievalists, but it takes some tolerance of threat and related patience to get through time, and, granted, the Obama Administration has embarked on a long-term but still perilous course.
The question for the medievalists — Putin, Assad, Khamenei: how well have you done, really? Extended in Yemen, stalled in Ukraine, one-third of Syria beyond state control — and each situation appears stalemated at best?
This is a long video, but it may help some readers align with the observations and thoughts of more specialized intelligentsia.
The Iranian regime is known for its aggressiveness, anti-Semitism, duplicity, egoism, and piratical character.
It is also known to be ageing.
Persians know too their greater history — and none among the educated have forgotten Cyrus.
A little offstage: the effects of the history of state police forces, from the czars to the Soviet and KGB to today’s FSB in Russia and VEVAK in Iran. At about 25:15 in the above video, Professor Milani invokes the modern update term on feudalism: “state capitalism”. Oligarchy. (The URL trope to insert here: Reuters “Assets of the Ayatollah” — and so done).
Whatever one might wish to call such dictatorships operated by state mafia or theocracy, I believe the form still feudal and formed around the concentration of political power and access to wealth in one human demagogue.
In any case, the demagogue in Tehran has at hand a latent nuclear weapons making capability, in state or beyond (who knows?), and the worth of any agreement with the same has no basis in experience or earlier history (save that scandal with the illicit arms trade and even perhaps rougher politics).
Still, time is time, and the more time floats around and past the dictator, the more cultural evolution may temper the excesses of the malignant personality. Where The Great Leader will not, or cannot, change, the Greater Society may.
If there were a “true religion” God, perhaps, would have created fewer of them for waging wars that seem to pit all against all. However, despite mankind’s many religions and near 7,000 living languages, there may be a sufficient progressive tendency to bond toward the mild, moderate, and virtuous middle however we may conceive — of have conceived — of the meaning of our existence. Developing that bond, tending toward good, minimizing the power and impact of dogmatic absolutists may be our common struggle.
While mentioning the Soviet, now post-Soviet, vision accompanied by the familiar oligarchies of kleptocrats mad for power and wealth (and their display), one should not overlook elements of the Christian mythos in Hitlerism and its propagation in the Muslim world during and after World War II. This old fighting is not only or always about belief and religion: it is about the language-shaped character of humanity and the idea of human virtue and dimensions, ideals, and values associated with the same, e.g., “dignity, equality, fraternity”; human rights, equal justice; the balance between communitarianism and individualism; idealism itself.
As some doors may open on a new world, others may close, and we hope — I hope together we hope — that the door closes firmly over time on absolutism, dictatorship, terrorism, and totalitarianism.
Pretty words.
Across social divides, the human heart suffers from a sympathetic astigmatism: “the good” are in about the same place emotionally — please stop the fighting! — but also a different place for each language-informed and poetry-embracing mind and spirit. Nonetheless, the horror meted out in such as the Syrian Civil War, where the razory madness of a brutal dictatorship matched to an implacably evil fascist religious movement — just set all those millions in the middle aside for a moment — have been out on full display, tells that an end is wanted and the vision need not be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or atheist or Arab or anything other than the largest possible human response to the twin obscenities of the unrestrained greed and sadism of the unconscionable and ruthless.
Now return to those millions traumatized at least, displaced most likely, maimed at worst — although the worst, the dead, number beneath the first million on the grim statistician’s abacus — and their inability to date to grapple with the twinned evils noted. They can do it, they can stand up on their own land, but only if — IF — they can arrange themselves with others, including those they may have believed competitors, enemies, rivals, and threats.
As with Syria, so the world: the want is for a bonded middle force that today does not exist.
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