[MD] Hippies (and Humour) in the Middle East

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt previously]
Bohemians and hippies in the Middle East. Do you mean Hamas?.

[Arlo replied]
No one but you buys this idiotic pairing. Bohemians and hippies advocated a
rejection of social and intellectual patterns, in pursuit of DQ. Hamas
advocates allegience to social patterns. That you would attempt to equate the
two only further evidences your deceptive tactics.

[Platt]
Geez. I ask a simple question and get a lecture in return. You get more like
Rigel with every post.

[Arlo]
More distortion. You didn't "ask a simple question". You can easily tell my
Pirsig's own description of bohemians and hippies as "contrarians" (which I've
emphasized in every post) has nothing whatsoever to do with a militant group
like Hamas. What you tried to do, as always, is make a rhetorical pairing
between all that oppose you and militant tyranny. Imagine your outrage if YOU
had said "America needs more conservatives", and I had replied with "You mean
like the SS?" And then said, "Gee, Platt, I didn't mean anything by it, it was
a simple question.".... The only one "getting more like Rigel", Platt, is you,
so consumed with blind obedience to static social patterns. 

[Platt]
The man on the street in Iran should be working to overthrow the government so
intellectual values could flourish. Instead we see riots against free speech.

[Arlo]
We see riots against a perceived threat, something very easy for the leaders of
the country to build up with fear, propaganda and reliance on historical
knowledge.

But if the Middle East had more hippies, if we would have supported secular
liberal groups throughout the Middle East, instead of the oil autocracies and
mujahideens, maybe we'd be seeing "riots for free speech". But again, you reap
what you sow...

Speaking of which, Ant mentioned the republicans' role in getting Iran nuclear.
>From wikipedia...

"The foundations for Iran's nuclear program were laid in the 1960s under
auspices of the U.S. within the framework of bilateral agreements between the
US and Iran. In 1967 the Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) was built and
run by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). The TNRC was equipped
with a US supplied 5-megawatt nuclear research reactor. Iran signed the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968 and ratified it in 1970. With the
establishment of Iran's atomic agency and the NPT in place plans were drawn by
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (Iran's monarch) to construct up to 23 nuclear power
stations across the country together with USA by the year 2000.

By 1975, The U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had signed National
Security Decision Memorandum 292, titled "U.S.-Iran Nuclear Cooperation," which
laid out the details of the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran projected
to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue. At the time, Iran
was pumping as much as 6 million barrels (950,000 m³) of oil a day, compared
with about 4 million barrels (640,000 m³) daily today.

President Gerald R. Ford even signed a directive in 1976 offering Tehran the
chance to buy and operate a U.S.-built reprocessing facility for extracting
plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel. The deal was for a complete "nuclear fuel
cycle". The Ford strategy paper said the "introduction of nuclear power will
both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil
reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."

Notice two key sentances... "the sale of nuclear energy equipment to Iran
projected to bring U.S. corporations more than $6 billion in revenue" and "both
provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves
for export or conversion to petrochemicals".

You reap what you sow...

[Arlo previously]
Blind faith in that belief will always lead to conflict.

[Platt]
Right. And Germans believed Jews should be exterminated as a matter of justice.
I suppose you sympathize with them, too? 

[Arlo]
Just more deceptive rhetoric... really, Platt, c'mon. The point I'd make is it
was exactly "blind faith and obedience to the Nation State" that led to the
success Third Reich. They felt, as you feel, that their Nation could do no
wrong, that to criticize the Reich made one an "enemy of freedom", that the
Jews represented a "biological threat" to their Glorious Social Patterns. Of
course, to perpetrate such an attitude, the Nazi leaders first had to discredit
the Academy as full of evil liberals and other dispicably biased creatures.
Then it had to "redefine" patriotism as "obedience to the Reich". It had to
create an real enemy that would keep the Germans living in fear, and finally it
had to stage a national tragedy, the burning of the Reichstag, that it could
blame on its enemy so as to build popular support for a "patriot act" and the
creation of the German Homeland Security Act, giving Hitler power to act above
constitutional law and jurisprudence. Nonetheless, it was "blind obedience in
the absolute morality of the nation state", the same thing you advocate, that
led to WWII. If only Germany had more hippies... 


[Platt]
And what "viable solution" do you suggest?

[Arlo]
I don't know. Like I said, I think there may be too much hatred on both sides to
prevent some sort of armed conflict. And we will believe "they hate us for our
freedom" and kill 'em like germs, and they will believe that we are the evil
empire and kill us like germs. And so many lives will be lost because neither
side is able to admit any culpability in the situation.

I do like Ant's suggestion, provide economic rewards for Iran to allow liberal
secularism to go unpunished and begin building a valid, organized and popular
base within Iran. But, we should have been doing this decades ago, instead of
providing our unquestioning support of the Shah and his autocratic regime that
decimated free press, free speech, and other liberal policiies. Just like we
should be doing now in Saudi Arabia, rather than supporting a repressive
autocracy. Funny, we love our dictators so long as they do business with us.
But as soon as they stop...

[Platt]
Faith in a nation that guarantees individual liberty and freedom of expression
is not likely to bring about the end of liberty. Nations that oppose such ideas
can indeed snuff out the light of the world.

[Arlo]
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. - Thomas Jefferson. One cannot be
blind and unquestioningly obedient and be vigilant. Threats to freedom are not
always in the form of enemy armies marching over the hill, sometimes they come
in insideous ways, like when a nation hands over its privacy to the President
in the name of "security". And being able to know, and say, when your country
has acted immorally is the foundation of liberty, not its antithesis.

[Platt]
At last, a definitive statement -- "I don't want Iran to build atomic weapons."
Now the question is, "What are you prepared to do about it?"

[Arlo]
Initially, I thought, "Hey, why should my children have to pay the price for
republicans who began the nuclear program in Iran to 'make a buck' and secure
more oil for American oil companies? Since it was republicans who are to blame
for Iran's level of nuclear development, let them pay the price of stopping
it." Just think, had the republican party NOT provided so much nuclear
development support, Iran might still "want" nuclear power, but it would be
decades behind where it is now.

Then I thought, "It was because my government tossed its full support behind
autocracies and mujahideens, right-wing dictators whom we loved when they did
business with us, and either watched passively or encouraged the suppression
and extinguishing of all "secular liberal groups" in the region, not caring at
all about the oppression of these regimes until they turned on us, that is part
of the reason there is no viable resistence to hard right-wing fundamentalism
in the region. If my government hates hippies so bad that it bed dictators to
suppress them, then as a hippie-kindred spirt, I am justified in saying 'you
reap what you sow'."

But, realistically, I don't think there is "anything I can do about it". The
wars and the hatred will not end until Islam now undergoes a Reformation, which
will only be possible if secular-liberalism is able to gain a foothold again in
the region. Until then, the hatred on both sides of the Atlantic is so deep,
the will to war is so great, and the historical understandings of the
complexity of the situation so vapid, that there is only one conceivable
outcome. War and death. And there will be nothing but war and death until
somehow the Middle East can grow some hippies. The question is, is our own
loveable right-wing able to support that? I doubt it. I am only deeply saddened
by the people, so consumed with blind patriotic fervor, that will die in a
pissing contest rather than for one moment admit that My Noble Country has ANY
responsibility for the current state of affairs.

Arlo