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Neda Agha Soltan.
The May 2009 portrait ... by Caspian Makan, 37-year-old photojournalist in Tehran who identified himself as Neda Agha Soltan's boyfriend.
The Party line is that its America's fault for overthrowing Communist dictator in the 1950s.
http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/
CBC puts it straight:
On Monday, the BBC gained a clearer picture of Neda from a man who claimed to be her fiancé: he said Neda Agha-Soltan was driving with her music teacher, but had exited the car during a traffic jam when she was allegedly shot by pro-government militia.
Selected comments from CBC readers:
firsthings wrote:Posted 2009/06/22 "If she wasn't a good looking young woman would this be a news item?"
carlbailey wrote: Posted 2009/06/22 "Straight to heaven."
really? i thought only christians got to go to heaven.
are you saying this muslim "martyr" gets to go too?
are you like, some kind of uncrowned, undeclared prophet, or saint?
you've got pull with the big, angry, bearded, invisible peeping tom in the sky, do you?
or did you just post without thinking about what you were going to say before you said it?
Ground Zero wrote: Posted 2009/06/22 "God Bless, straight to Heaven, blah, blah ..."
More religious drivel from the political right, eh.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/
Of the dozen comments at CBC, over half were in this vein.
It's not particularly funny to read comments by teenagers about Mossedec, overthrown when I was too young to know about it. I do know something about Iran in the 70s, though. None of it matters much. It's about a girl and a nation today. It's about an oligarchy of professional tyrants today in Iran. But here it's mostly about angry and self-important loser Canadian kids with nothing to say and no reason for living, mindless conformists with the Party line to make themselves feel that there's a reason after all. Empty and stupid conformists who live on sentimentality and phony moralism. They have little else to think about. They don't know anything real. They live phony lives. People are conformists by nature, and this generation of conformists think themselves daring and smart. These stupd little sissie are going to get the shit kicked out of them. And they'll like it. At last they will meet men who aren't cowardly and snivelling and grovelling. Men here, as well as women, are starved for maleness. When these creepy-crawly kids encounter real men, and when these kids get brutalized and bullied, then we'll see them cry like little girls and love the beatings. That's the way life is. People respond to power, and power is male.
Some idiot, no doubt a sociologist, wrote a report claiming that Moroccan males attack gay men in the Netherlands because Moroccans have to lash out against the next lowest group in the pecking order, and lash out because they are oppressed by the white heterosexual power structure. It takes a conformist fool to come to a bogus conclusion like that. We all know it's a stupid conclusion, but in this day and time it's the accepted version of why. It's a girl's way of dealing with things. Fine. Live in a land run by girls. Then, when foreign men come, there's a price to pay in blood and death. Neda paid it. Shot to death by an effeminate puke who hates women and likes licking boys instead.
Canada is filled with effeminate creeps. America elected one as president. Iran is filled with old men who screw boys. A dozen men could wipe out a whole nation of sissies in a month. Hurt a few of them and the rest will roll over and cry. Then they'll love the attention and beg to belong. Then hurt a few more and they'll think you're god.
Meanwhile, incompetent Iranian kids are dying. A handful of strong men could destroy the nation in a month. They're missing. But that won't always be the case. They'll come. Where they come from is the serious question.
Perhaps you know already of the White Feather campaign in Britain in WWI: as a sign accusing men of cowardice women would give un-uniformed men a white feather. It was a public shame campaign. It worked. Men joined the military to escape the feather. Most did. Not all.
Archibald Fenner Brockway, The Baron Brockway (1 November 1888–28 April 1988), was a British anti-war activist and politician. Received from outraged fellow citizens so many white feathers, (signs of cowardice,) during WWI that he became famous for his response: "I have so many feathers I could make a fan."Today such men as Fenner Brockway are lauded as the greatest of guys. I'd have knocked him to the ground and then stomped his nuts to mush. That's the way it is. It doesn't change no matter how sensitive and sharing and caring men are supposed to be. Only the weakest minded don't get this. Those and those who win at this game by playing along, careerist men and women who will change in a flash into killers true and cold-blooded. It takes regime change, and then the conformists will all turn over and be whatever the new regime demands of them. It's nature, buddy. Don't fight that.
4 comments:
A guy who thinks power is only male is, I've got to say, not being completely honest with himself; at least he forgets what is needed to build strong and successful families. Women, in any society, are not ever solely powerless victims; they always have power over other women, over sons and daughters, and to some degree over their men. To the extent that societies like Iran try greatly to control women, to deny the power inherent in their sexuality and mothering, they become relatively weak societies, as you suggest. And, their obsession with women's honour is in fact a sign of their worship of the feminine, albeit in a rather perverted and self-destructive way.
Power is about how many people "you" (i.e. no one in particular) can network in order to make a greater whole. The most powerful societies are not those which rely on a few great men but on millions of mediocre ones, in which no man is irreplaceable, essential.
To lord it over the kind of people who are willing to be submissive is only power in a narrow sense. At the peak of their power (mid-20thC.), free Western societies had more liberated and powerful women than we have today, but we don't see this because of liberationist ideologies that miss the forest for the trees. Now we turn girls and office women into actors in porn fantasies and call them "powerful and liberated". And so many understandably look depressed, lost, cheated, and angry, which is why so many men get caught up in a "cat-fight" culture.
The most "manly" of men, in your apparent definition, are not the most powerful, if we take a long historical perspective. An honest analysis of the question has to come to terms with BOTH to what degree the de-cavemanization of men is conducive to the empowerment of all members of a more productive society and, on the other hand, when does the effeminization of boys and men become a sign of a weakening, less rational social order. It is not at all a straightforward question.
For example, man for man, Nazi Germany was, in a traditional sense, more manly than the British and Canadians who stood up to them and stopped them in 1939-40. In fact, the Nazis were fighting to avoid the kind of "effeminization" they saw in the more anonymous "clericalized" manhood of the more advanced (Jew-Masonic-Anglo-Saxon) market economies. In contrast, the Russians were perhaps more manly than the Nazis, at least much more willing to sacrifice themselves for the fatherland. YOu can call the Russians serfs, peasants, but by the same token so were most of the Nazis and for both parties peasants were more manly than office workers. In the Russian case, the overwhelming numbers of "manly" Russians overcame the fewer, more disciplined, more controlled, Nazis. But in relation to the Brits, where numbers were more comparable, the more "manly" Nazis could only come to a stalemate.
Truly strong men are not simply "masculine" or "effeminate" but are somehow more integrated than the alternative: they come to the father without having to declare war on the mother; they transcend the mother's control but without becoming obsessed with the need to do that. Their love for the mother is further realized in their love for the father.
Power is ultimately a collective phenomenon, related to advancements in representations of what is sacred, beautiful. If one only interprets power in the narrow, animalistic, vision that imagines the world in terms of one-on-one relationships and resentments of dominance and submission, one misses something essential: all the paradoxes by which the collective sacred is constructed and operated. The greatest manhood is not about simple domination but that which allows - sustains over time with hard work and responsibility - the freest societies with the fewest people telling you what you must do. The problem with effeminate men is when they no longer know how (or are able) to do their part in sustaining freedom, not when they forget how to discipline weaklings. Bully societies are not strong, once some competing societies find the path to a freer, more collective, discipline; and the bully strong men often come to their end with their impotence revealed for all to see. (In a free society, the smart "Jew" advances at the expense of the traditional aristocratic big man; and that is what the Nazis resented, with (a lmited) "reason".) Oprah or porn-worshiping men aren't particularly strong either. The story is not linear.
Better to say: Power is about how many people "you" (i.e. no one in particular) can network in order to make a greater whole. The most powerful societies are not those which rely on a few great men but on millions of mediocre ones, in which no man is irreplaceable, essential, but in which these replaceable men are willing and able to stand up and do what must be done when they are in a situation where it is up to them to do what must be done. A society in which ordinary Joes are willing and able to wait patiently, and still be ready, to be heroes for the day, when and if they are needed, is the mark of power. In other words a power is a question of men knowing and living covenants and that is not a straightforward question of dominance/submission.
Sorry one more correction: "
To lord it over the kind of people who are willing to be submissive is only power in a narrow sense. At the peak of their power (mid-20thC.), free Western societies had more liberated and powerful women than we have today, but we don't see this because of liberationist ideologies that miss the forest for the trees. Now we turn girls and office women into actors in porn fantasies and call them "powerful and liberated". And so many understandably look depressed, lost, cheated, and angry, which is why so many men get caught up in a "cat-fight" culture."
-this is a much too simplistic and not completely true formulation. WOmen are in some ways more liberated and empowered today, and in other ways less; I was trying to point out the paradoxes in our narratives of "feminization", but this is not an easy thing to do in a few sentences.
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