JTarrou
4d ago
They weren't belligerent to Iran under a different government for thirty odd years. Makes me think there's another variable.
JTarrou
4d ago
However unkind it was to Carter, it was less than he deserved. The man ruined the middle east for a generation.
JTarrou
4d ago
If Iran had settled down into being an ordinary dictatorship after the revolution, they'd probably have relations with the US no worse than e.g. Vietnam does today.
I agree, which is why it is strange
I don't know why they chose to stick with the whole "Death to America, Death to Israel" thing -- my guess would be their religious fanaticism is absolutely genuine
No doubt mostly true, but so is the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Lebanese etc. And they have more national interest at stake. The Shia are not more religiously extreme than the Sunni, much the opposite. It is Sunnis who invented and funded 99% of what we think of as "muslim terrorism". It is the Sunnis who funded and produced the anti-semitic propaganda taught to schoolchildren all over the middle east. Iran got on this "terrorism" thing late and most of the terrorists they fund are Sunnis.
So why is it easier for them to climb down than it is the Iranians? Weird, right?
JTarrou
4d ago
This is as good a take as I've seen, but it's a more detailed version of (slightly uncharitably) "the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region".
The answer to the questions in your final paragraph, as I see the current state of US policy is that Iran is going to be systematically excluded from middle-eastern affairs. This wouldn't have been my personal policy preference, but I see why they're doing what they're doing. The Sunni are the vast majority, they control most of the countries, they have most of the oil, etc. The combination of Israel, Egypt and Iran as balancing various parts of teh arab world is over for now.
I think what Trump is doing is trying to crush the "Shia Crescent", partly because the two ends of that crescent got themselves into fights they couldn't win. Whatever the outcome of the current air campaign/Hormuz crisis, I doubt Iran is going to be in any shape to be secretly funding and arming other people for a decade or so. In the meantime, what happens to their clients? If Hezbollah and Hamas can both be neutralized as military forces while their sponsor is down, the PA can be strengthened as the leadership of the Palestinians and some sort of deal becomes at least more possible than it currently is. Oct. 7th was Iran's last dice throw to stop this process, and it didn't work.
Meanwhile, various ethnic and religious minorities which have been broadly Shia-aligned/sympathetic (Yazidi, Kurds, Druze, etc.) have been systematically mass murdered, driven out or politically marginalized across the middle east. ISIS did a lot of this, AQ a fair bit etc. The result has been to drastically weaken the various groups that Iran could hypothetically use as agents against Sunni powers. The middle east is being arabized and sunnized.
JTarrou
4d ago
Read both, the second some time ago in an islamic reading list. Not bad as pop history.
JTarrou
4d ago
Then what process lead them to that belief? They didn't have it fifty years ago.
JTarrou
4d ago
It is not useful, however, to chase your scapegoat into the backyard of the biggest dude on the block. What you suggest is that the class war of the Iranian people lead them to hamstring their national position on the world?
JTarrou
4d ago
I'm studying Iranian history this year and am looking for any pointers on texts. Currently still on ancient history, but will work up to modern. If anyone has book suggestions, I'd appreciate it!
That said, I read a few general histories early to get a sort of overview, including the Amanat one. I'd guess at this point my grasp of the general lines of Iranian history exceed pretty much everyone who hasn't studied the place seriously. And I'm mystified as to exactly why the Iranian government became the primary opponent of Israel and the US in the region.
Iran doesn't border Israel. In fact, they don't border any countries that border Israel. Persian people ethnically are not particularly in conflict with jews. Historically, Judaism is rather positive on Persia relative to Rome or Assyria, or any of the other mideast empires that owned the place successively. Neither is there much in the way of religious conflict, because the Iranians are Shia, and the countries that surround Israel are mostly Sunni. Shiism, as a minority faith for most of its history, is less militaristic and more tolerant generally than Sunnism (on the scale of tolerance that is muslim society).
Early in the conflict, it was the Sunnis, both Arab and Egyptian, who funded and manipulated the Palestinian cause. Iran had decent relations with Israel, which grew closer during the time of the Shah.
As best I can make out, this positive international relationship shifted the other way prior to the revolution. In very broad terms, the elites of Iranian society were pretty jew-friendly and largely remain so. The middle class and lower classes are wildly anti-semitic as most middle-eastern nations are, in the Iranian case because they blame much of the abuses of the Shah's regime on Israel and the jews. There was a fair bit of intelligence sharing and cross-training between the Israelis and the Shah's Iran, but of course this was conspiracized into the entire regime being a puppet of Zionists.
When the Iranian revolution succeeded, this view became the dominant one. Immediately as part of their efforts to export their revolution to the world, they began funding the only Shia they could find near Israel, what became Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Over time, the long arc of US/Israeli diplomacy and pressure was slowly bringing the Sunni arab nations around. They didn't like it, but the fact is none of them want the Palestinians and they've been cynically using the issue to keep their people riled up at the joos for a century. The non-arabs, Egypt made a deal with Israel in the seventies. Jordan and Syria made de-facto but not fully de jure deals. Israel and Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina, were in talks to regularize relations when the Oct. 7 attack was launched. Those talks were scotched for a few years, but have since been concluded.
The Americans were able to choke off most of the funding for Palestinian terrorism coming from the oil-rich Sunni states. Iran (and the UN) stepped in to fill the void, and began funding Sunni groups like Hamas. Iran was able to install a friendly government in Iraq after the US did them the favor of clearing out the Sunnis, and controlled the most effective fighting forces in the Iraqi Army. Ten years ago the Iranians had their fingers everywhere, propping up Assad in Syria with Hezbollah, running ISIS out of Iraq (yeah, that wasn't us), keeping Hamas relevant and armed.
The US under Trump and Biden have been willing to legitimize Sunni terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who now run Syria and Afghanistan (again). In my view, we've essentially delegated to the Turks, Saudis and Egyptians, on the condition that everyone play nice with Israel and keep the oil running. There is no more "Iranian Crescent" of influence. Iran just bombed every country in the middle east with a Shia population in their response to the US and Israel playing trampoline on their government and infrastructure. Hezbollah is in rough shape after losing in Syria and the Israelis doing Mossad shit. Hamas is in bad shape after the last war.
So how did it come to this? Why did the Iranian government choose to so directly antagonize the US and Israel, both previous allies (with a lot of dirty politics)? Is it really so simple that the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region? Are they really going to be the last holdouts for Sunni muslim supremacy in the Levant?
I have to be missing something, because this is one of those things that makes me wonder if countries really are controlled by a cabal of their enemies.
JTarrou
4d ago
The law is whatever the dumbest commie at Harvard Law says it is, and that's an end of things.
JTarrou
4d ago
Should western powers have banned all political parties that took money and instructions from Russia when they were communist? Those "Third Way" mugs would have been in prison.
JTarrou
4d ago
Society runs on the energy we harvest from young men during the competition to find who reproduces. We run that cohort at any problem we have, and we can afford to lose most of them in any given generation. If you invert that pyramid, so that there need be no competition for reproduction, you don't have a military. Which means your carefully constructed eugenics program now belongs to anyone who didn't do that shit. None of those men reproduce, and the hypothetical feminists who you think might support it would be the Handmaids of whichever outside power retained a slush fund of young men.
JTarrou
4d ago
This is true of some people. The churn of the Progressive Stack, the daily fashions and directional changes burn a lot of people out, and disenchant many over time. This is part of what makes people more conservative as they age. Lots of gay people my age figuring out that conservatives don't hate them the way they thought and libs don't love them the way they thought.
Of course, many are so brain-rotted or pot-committed that they are psychologically incapable of personal growth, but that's why religious movements like to push irrevocable changes. Once you've castrated your child for The Cause, your identity and sanity is bound up with that party now.
JTarrou
5d ago
The idea that the sort of eugenics nerds who want to calculate the optimal male:female ratio in the blind hopes that will get them into the top 75% of males in terms of reproductive sex are going to win a fertility contest with the people who......don't do those things is what's wrong with it.
JTarrou
5d ago
I agree with the cultural shift required in the black community more or less. But that's not really something anyone outside the community can make happen. I hope it happens, but there ain't much for anyone else to do.
As to greater black participation in college, I think that's a losing game and people need to forget that path as a means of uplifting the poorer parts of the black community. Whatever IQ predicts, it predicts academic achievement. You are not going to get the poorest and dumbest third of black people through any college degree worthy of the name. It is not going to fucking happen, and if that's your plan to help black people, you don't want to help black people.
Better norms about violence, honor, work and family would be great, but as I said, not really much for everyone else to do about that.
It is time to end the discrimination based on college degree, which would do more for the black community than trying to bootstrap 75 IQ hoodrats through a college course.
JTarrou
5d ago
By preaching race-hate, the elites paper over the class switch they're making in those elite positions. It's not poor black american kids getting DEI positions, at least not at the elite level. It's mostly rich, elite african and caribbean kids from extreme privilege who then pretend to be oppressed because they had to go to Brown instead of Yale. The elites are betting that black americans will be happy just to see people who share their skin color in elite positions. And so on with all the other minorities.
The issues that are pushed by the elites are intended to fail. They are not reasonable requests. The minority grievance will be channeled into the stupidest possible lane to ensure that nothing really changes, but everyone can claim it's because they weren't radical enough. Abolish police? Men in women's sports? Chemically castrating gay kids? No borders? Generation after generation of the scions of wealth and power posing in commie gear and talking about tearing down the system.
The whole revolutionary pose is nothing more than a threadbare blanket over the rankest conservatism. So fearful of change they must stymie every advance by making it stupidly radical.
JTarrou
6d ago
The indigenous are just the most recent intellectual cat's paw to be used by the actual native elites to keep the restive natives at bay by humiliating and shaming them for imagined crimes against more historical natives.
Whether it's the poor, the disabled, the gay, the communist, the catholics or the blacks or the jews or the palestinians or the ukrainians, it's just the cudgel of the day. It's how rich mostly-white people who went to the best colleges convince themselves they are chosen by god to lead their countries. The "revolutionary" stance of Ivy league grads and rich kids. It's just a hatred of their own working class, and fear of their electoral power. Only with constant state-funded propaganda, educational brainwashing and public religious ceremonies can the nation be cleansed of its (historical and minor by comparison) sins. And of course, a lot of public money flushed down the toilet of middle-class bureaucrats siphoning off all the cash being spent on the problems they claim to want to alleviate.
JTarrou
6d ago
The list is extensive
Stalin was a Georgian, Napoleon a Corsican, Hitler an Austrian, Churchill half American etc. to demonstrate sometimes these extreme partisans rise to leadership as well. Sometimes the signal is seen as authentic.
JTarrou
6d ago
Where does this end?
It ends with women importing a patriarchy willing to force their fertility in accordance with tradition. Handmaid's Tale is a utopian fantasy, and only one religion fits the bill currently.
JTarrou
6d ago
One of the phenomena I've noticed is that marginal members of groups often position themselves as radical partisans of that group. Colin Kaepernick is a half-black kid raised by a white couple. So of course he has a giant afro and a black-supremacist girlfriend.
Fuentes is a gay little mexican, so of course he's a "white nationalist" or whatever.
Those stuck inbetween groups may feel the need to loudly signal their loyalty through signals that may or may not be seen as authentic by more central members of the group.
In California? Not too bad. In Iran? Less so.
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