"My Catholic philosopher friend Peter Simpson persuasively argues that the American system never really succeeded at checking abuses of power, because it was “set up to fail” by the federalists, who secretly favored tyranny. "
Your friend is completely correct.
Brion McClannahan, a Southern Constitutional Historian and Southern Historian, has detailed how this was done in is highly readable text, "How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America".
As to the "Death to America" sign; I believe it requires a substantial upgrade... "Death to the US Government". This is way more personal and leaves the American population out of it...
Iran and Sudan are two countries where financial system is based on islamic finance, abolishing usury, speculation and dealing in prohibited items such as liquor, pornography, gambling etc etc, and using profit loss, musharka,mudaraba based contracts. Look what the empire of usury doing to them.
>Algeria and Tunisia, which made too many concessions to European-style modernity in their transformations into relatively secular, military-dominated republics.
i agree re tunisia. but what concessions re algeria? algeria has THE heroic liberation struggle from imperialism. morocco has itself become 'imperialist', taking over western sahara as a gift from trump for being cozy with israel.
Beginning in 1992, the Algerian military regime, at the instigation of Western powers, committed a political genocide against the democratic Islamists who were poised to sweep national elections with 80% of the vote, killing many of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the neighborhoods and villages that were hotbeds of Islamist support. The real death count was over half a million.
But the real villains of Algeria's tragedy are the French, who genocidally erased Algeria's traditional culture, creating a void now filled by a "modern secular leftist" state with no deep-rooted historical identity that collapsed into a brutal, corrupt, thuggish military regime that uses leftist buzz-words as hollow propaganda.
yes. 1992 was awful. but i'm not sure if the islamists would have been much different from taliban. they might have given islam a horrible reputation and collapsed from paranoid sharia.
and french occupation for 130 years was even worse. i think algeria is recovering. the military thugs are in their dotage. morocco, algeria, tunisia, egypt syria/lebanon, jordan, iraq were all forced to drink from the poison chalice. the poor arabs! and nationalism just as poisonous. where is the ummah when we most need it?
Post-revolutionary China’s government, for example, has gotten better as it has grown less communist and more Confucian? It would be hard to get more Confucian than Mao. He memorized Kang Youwei's rendering of The Liyun and would quote it frequently: "Now to have states, families, and selves is to allow each individual to maintain a sphere of selfishness. This infracts utterly the Universal Principle, gongli, and impedes progress. ...
Therefore, not only states should be abolished, so that there would be no more struggle between the strong and the weak; families should also be done away with, so that there would no longer be inequality of love and affection [among men]; and, finally, selfishness itself should be banished, so that goods and services would not be used for private ends. ...
The only [true way] is sharing the world in common by all (tienxia weigong) ...
To share in common is to treat each and every one alike. There should be no distinction between high and low, no discrepancy between rich and poor, no segregation of human races, no inequality between sexes. ...
All should be educated and supported with the common property; none should depend on private possession. ... This is the way of the Great Community. [Kang Youwei, Liyun Zhu called Datong Shu].
Iran is not the first Islamic republic in the world. It is Pakistan, which was created by the partition of British India in 1947 and constitutionally transformed itself into a republic with Islam as the state religion in 1956.
That's a good point. But an Iranian might argue that there is a big difference between a "republic with Islam as the state religion" and an "Islamic republic." Pakistan's republic, meaning its governmental institutions, is basically secular, just like the Western nations it copied. The Islamic Republic of Iran, unlike those of Pakistan and Mauritania, was designed to include a class of Platonic "guardians of the republic" with extensive religious knowledge and reputations for piety. That represents a new, specifically Islamic approach to republican governance, and to the larger issue of how to select for virtuous leadership.
Pakistan's official name is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, effective 1956 (https://pakconsulatela.org/about-pakistan/). With 97% of its population Muslims, and with three times the population of Iran, it is as Islamic a republic as it can get for most practical purposes.
However, Pakistan indeed has no religious leader or council of religious experts/scholars providing a moral framework and authority to guide/oversee the civilian government. As an agnostic, and having traveled to Pakistan multiple times, I view this as a fine distinction, although others like you might not see it that way. The influence of religion is quite extensive on government policies and the public code of conduct in the country.
A more prominent difference between the two countries lies in the circumstances of their birth pangs. While both were born out of violent upheavals, the Iranian revolution had the overwhelming support of the people who had suffered enough under the Shah's regime. It took place within the internationally recognized borders of the country, amounting to an internal clash between the popular will and an enforced monarchy installed by Western powers. Crucially, it did not pit one religion against another. Its estimated death toll varies between 15,000 and 60,000, a small price from a historical perspective for the foundational societal changes it brought about.
The partition of British India to form Pakistan was far more bloody. Total deaths were in excess of one million across both sides of the divide. The British, true to their devious nature, kept the actual borders they had drawn between India and Pakistan a secret until the very last minute. The lines sprung upon the people overnight split formerly united provinces like Punjab and Bengal down the middle by administrative fiat. This naturally triggered an appalling chaos (planned, I suspect) brought about by fear and deliberately stoked interfaith hatred due to the abruptness of such an immense decision affecting properties, livelihoods and daily lives. The extent of blood spilt is the seed of the continuing tense hostility between Pakistan and India until today.
My father was among those who fled Karachi on one of the infamous 'ghost trains' which were often waylaid at stations by both sides and their passengers brutally massacred on the sheer basis of their faiths. The trains often continued onwards, arriving at their destinations with thousands of corpses. Hence the name. Born two years after the partition, I often struggled to understand my father's visceral suspicion and animus towards my Muslim friends in India. Just as he never came to terms with my chummy hobnobbing with them and my fascination with Urdu poetry and ghazals (romantic semi-classical music) by Pakistani artists.
All of us are ultimately prisoners of our respective experiences which shape our outlooks towards life at large. However objective or dispassionate we may see ourselves as.
Not entirely. Morocco has been a crossroads of people from Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean world (linked to trade routes stretching all the way to China) for millennia, so there's a fair amount of genetic/racial diversity built in to indigenous Moroccans. My Moroccan wife has siblings ranging from blond and blue-eyed to darker "typically North African," which is not all that uncommon. Iran, too, is genetically quite diverse. You're right, though, that Revolutionary era Americans hadn't yet had time to interbreed much, and were less inclined to do so (due to Protestant/Puritan heritage) than average humans are.
"My Catholic philosopher friend Peter Simpson persuasively argues that the American system never really succeeded at checking abuses of power, because it was “set up to fail” by the federalists, who secretly favored tyranny. "
Your friend is completely correct.
Brion McClannahan, a Southern Constitutional Historian and Southern Historian, has detailed how this was done in is highly readable text, "How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America".
As to the "Death to America" sign; I believe it requires a substantial upgrade... "Death to the US Government". This is way more personal and leaves the American population out of it...
How about "death to the Zionist oligarchy?"
Yes. That gets around the national angle, and the attack against the decent peoples of either of the two secular states.
Iran and Sudan are two countries where financial system is based on islamic finance, abolishing usury, speculation and dealing in prohibited items such as liquor, pornography, gambling etc etc, and using profit loss, musharka,mudaraba based contracts. Look what the empire of usury doing to them.
Allah be their helper
Indonesia is doing really well, with no Jews.
>Algeria and Tunisia, which made too many concessions to European-style modernity in their transformations into relatively secular, military-dominated republics.
i agree re tunisia. but what concessions re algeria? algeria has THE heroic liberation struggle from imperialism. morocco has itself become 'imperialist', taking over western sahara as a gift from trump for being cozy with israel.
Beginning in 1992, the Algerian military regime, at the instigation of Western powers, committed a political genocide against the democratic Islamists who were poised to sweep national elections with 80% of the vote, killing many of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in the neighborhoods and villages that were hotbeds of Islamist support. The real death count was over half a million.
But the real villains of Algeria's tragedy are the French, who genocidally erased Algeria's traditional culture, creating a void now filled by a "modern secular leftist" state with no deep-rooted historical identity that collapsed into a brutal, corrupt, thuggish military regime that uses leftist buzz-words as hollow propaganda.
yes. 1992 was awful. but i'm not sure if the islamists would have been much different from taliban. they might have given islam a horrible reputation and collapsed from paranoid sharia.
and french occupation for 130 years was even worse. i think algeria is recovering. the military thugs are in their dotage. morocco, algeria, tunisia, egypt syria/lebanon, jordan, iraq were all forced to drink from the poison chalice. the poor arabs! and nationalism just as poisonous. where is the ummah when we most need it?
Post-revolutionary China’s government, for example, has gotten better as it has grown less communist and more Confucian? It would be hard to get more Confucian than Mao. He memorized Kang Youwei's rendering of The Liyun and would quote it frequently: "Now to have states, families, and selves is to allow each individual to maintain a sphere of selfishness. This infracts utterly the Universal Principle, gongli, and impedes progress. ...
Therefore, not only states should be abolished, so that there would be no more struggle between the strong and the weak; families should also be done away with, so that there would no longer be inequality of love and affection [among men]; and, finally, selfishness itself should be banished, so that goods and services would not be used for private ends. ...
The only [true way] is sharing the world in common by all (tienxia weigong) ...
To share in common is to treat each and every one alike. There should be no distinction between high and low, no discrepancy between rich and poor, no segregation of human races, no inequality between sexes. ...
All should be educated and supported with the common property; none should depend on private possession. ... This is the way of the Great Community. [Kang Youwei, Liyun Zhu called Datong Shu].
At the Getty Museum in San Francisco, I saw a piece of pottery from Iran, dated to 5000 B.C. Not just an earthen clay pot, it had a finish on it.
Now I'm worried about the towers from 1000 or 1200 years ago. Ten-sided architecture in northern Iran.
Iran is not the first Islamic republic in the world. It is Pakistan, which was created by the partition of British India in 1947 and constitutionally transformed itself into a republic with Islam as the state religion in 1956.
That's a good point. But an Iranian might argue that there is a big difference between a "republic with Islam as the state religion" and an "Islamic republic." Pakistan's republic, meaning its governmental institutions, is basically secular, just like the Western nations it copied. The Islamic Republic of Iran, unlike those of Pakistan and Mauritania, was designed to include a class of Platonic "guardians of the republic" with extensive religious knowledge and reputations for piety. That represents a new, specifically Islamic approach to republican governance, and to the larger issue of how to select for virtuous leadership.
Pakistan's official name is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, effective 1956 (https://pakconsulatela.org/about-pakistan/). With 97% of its population Muslims, and with three times the population of Iran, it is as Islamic a republic as it can get for most practical purposes.
However, Pakistan indeed has no religious leader or council of religious experts/scholars providing a moral framework and authority to guide/oversee the civilian government. As an agnostic, and having traveled to Pakistan multiple times, I view this as a fine distinction, although others like you might not see it that way. The influence of religion is quite extensive on government policies and the public code of conduct in the country.
A more prominent difference between the two countries lies in the circumstances of their birth pangs. While both were born out of violent upheavals, the Iranian revolution had the overwhelming support of the people who had suffered enough under the Shah's regime. It took place within the internationally recognized borders of the country, amounting to an internal clash between the popular will and an enforced monarchy installed by Western powers. Crucially, it did not pit one religion against another. Its estimated death toll varies between 15,000 and 60,000, a small price from a historical perspective for the foundational societal changes it brought about.
The partition of British India to form Pakistan was far more bloody. Total deaths were in excess of one million across both sides of the divide. The British, true to their devious nature, kept the actual borders they had drawn between India and Pakistan a secret until the very last minute. The lines sprung upon the people overnight split formerly united provinces like Punjab and Bengal down the middle by administrative fiat. This naturally triggered an appalling chaos (planned, I suspect) brought about by fear and deliberately stoked interfaith hatred due to the abruptness of such an immense decision affecting properties, livelihoods and daily lives. The extent of blood spilt is the seed of the continuing tense hostility between Pakistan and India until today.
My father was among those who fled Karachi on one of the infamous 'ghost trains' which were often waylaid at stations by both sides and their passengers brutally massacred on the sheer basis of their faiths. The trains often continued onwards, arriving at their destinations with thousands of corpses. Hence the name. Born two years after the partition, I often struggled to understand my father's visceral suspicion and animus towards my Muslim friends in India. Just as he never came to terms with my chummy hobnobbing with them and my fascination with Urdu poetry and ghazals (romantic semi-classical music) by Pakistani artists.
All of us are ultimately prisoners of our respective experiences which shape our outlooks towards life at large. However objective or dispassionate we may see ourselves as.
I would like to live in Morocco
Marhaba!
Moroccan citizens, Iranian citizens, Revolutionary Era Americans = racially homogenous cultures.
Not entirely. Morocco has been a crossroads of people from Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean world (linked to trade routes stretching all the way to China) for millennia, so there's a fair amount of genetic/racial diversity built in to indigenous Moroccans. My Moroccan wife has siblings ranging from blond and blue-eyed to darker "typically North African," which is not all that uncommon. Iran, too, is genetically quite diverse. You're right, though, that Revolutionary era Americans hadn't yet had time to interbreed much, and were less inclined to do so (due to Protestant/Puritan heritage) than average humans are.
You ask: “Am I being incoherent?”
No. “All truth can be found in the careful wedding of paradox”
So said a wise woman I used to know and follow.