An insightful and sometime exhaustive look at dissidence in Iran. Many parallels are drawn with the Czech dissident movement and India's own independence movement. The anti-Shah revolution was not hijacked by the clerics, he said, just as the Bolshevik revolution was not stolen by Stalin, as Trotsky had claimed. “We began revolution, in order to create a paradise, but we created hell.” An unjust regime can be changed only by civil disobedience, nonviolently, he holds. Invasion cannot export or impose democracy either. The basic thrust of the article is the claim that the fight in this world is not between civilizations, but between open secular societies and religious worlds. This fight happens, according to the author, in all societies including the western ones.
Excerpts from what promises to be a brilliant book by Ramachandran Guha. The great 19th-century poet Ghalib thought that God was indeed on the side of India. All around him there was conflict and privation, but doomsday had not yet come. "Why does not the Last Trumpet sound?", asked Ghalib of a sage in the holy city of Benares. "Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe?" he continued. This was the answer he got: The hoary old man of lucent ken Pointed towards Kashi and gently smiled. 'The Architect,' he said, 'is fond of this edifice Because of which there is colour in life; He Would not like it to perish and fall.'
Trump's ban on all citizens from seven muslim countries from entering the US may finally do the impossible and unite the Shia and Sunni. The Democratic Party, all said and done, is making plenty of noise and is behaving like a party that won the plurality of the vote. This is a relief. However, they do need to figure out how to fine tune the message. We are clearly seeing a sunset era (maybe temporary) for globalization and trade deals. The Democrats were clearly caught on the wrong side of this and Trump - shrewdly or accidentally - has ridden this wave to the white house. This is a real problem, and the party needs to figure out which side they are on. It is not OK for the Obama wing to be pro-TPP and the liberal wing to be against it and the Clinton wing to be everywhere at once. Republicans can afford to be ride both horses at once on this because they are in power and Trump will dominate their public image for a while. But democrats ne...
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