[lit-ideas] Re: Ahmadi-Nejad's Letter to Bush

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 12 May 2006 00:25:47 -0500

PE:

Except for the Revolution which forced a very particular understanding
of Sharia on the whole of Iran.  And their brutal persecution of the
Bahai.

All inside Iran, yes. And I too hate fascism. But they have not invaded any other country nor invaded by proxy any other country to enforce their "vision" on others.



And their support for Hekmatyar and other warlords in
Afghanistan.  And Hezbollah in Lebanon.  And now Hamas.  And in Iraq.

Oh, Christ, please, Paul, let's not get into a tit-for-tat on criminals that the U. S. has supported compared to criminals Iran has suported, you would slink away in shame. I like you, I don't want to have to do that to you.



Yeah, I think Ahmadi-Nejad is a threat and I think the
Bush administration also represents a threat.  The two are different and
I don't feel that the one requires that I can't say anything about the
other.


Agreed. But from my perspective, my call to duty is to defuse the rush to attack Iran. Iran is not a threat to the U. S. or any nation as I see it even with nuclear weapons -- no more so than Israel or Pakistan or India or France or Great Britain or Russia or China or North Korea. LH writes of Islamists as if we're dealing with Stone Age peoples -- God, in heaven, they invented mathematics and astronomy and science, they made monotheism rational, they preserved Egyptian and Greek intellectual life for us Westerners through our Dark Ages, they basically fucking reinvented us. But because they're not now a wealthy society, we wealthy societies (mostly Western at the moment) denigrate their ability to understand and deal rationally with the world. If you don't have money, the reasoning goes, you must be stupid or at least inconsequential. Well, yes, within our capitalist value system, I guess that's true. But there are other value systems at work in the work, and many of them see us as vicious, greed-driven, imperialistic warmongers. I don't see us that way, on reflection, but I know why they do. I know why most of the world despises us. I would too, were I not one of us, did I not know so many loving people. I know we're not our military-corporate presence in the world. That we're decent people caught up in a culture that demands economic things of us that can't be met without screwing our fellow man. We're forced to relate to people as sources of income. A pernicious existence, yes, but that's capitalism, we deal with it as best we can, trying to survive both economically and humanistically. Iran is forced to live in a world with us -- we who basically spit on all their values. They seem to have managed to go on with their lives with amazing equanimity over the past 1300 years compared to our dealings with those with whom we've disagreed just over the last 230 years. Islam has a vision of God and of how humans should relate to God and consequently how society should be organized in the furtherance of that relationship to God -- so do we in the Christian West. We have our ways which we revere, which we see as ways of identification. In that I think we're not very different from anyone else. My advice: accommodate. Honor be damned, accommodation, I am.

Mike Geary
Memphis








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