roachboy

caveat lector:

this post refers to no. 40, above (it took quite a while to write and much has occurred in the meantime it seems)

i have been sitting in front of what follow, reading through it, for a quite a while trying to decide if i should post it or not.
this is not written as a personal attack on you, lebel.
but i find that it can be read as one.
for that i apologize up front.
but i couldnt say what i felt i needed to say about this without going here to some extent.

==========

so let me see if i follow you:

first you assume that you can answer a direct question about the interests of the state of iran--that is its government--by not talking in any detail about the state of iran.

you seem to assume it is logical to treat iran as the expression of "radical isalm" in general--you even treat this equation as a given--which i suppose it is if you do not look at the facts of the matter at all---who the known fundamentalist organizations are, where they come from socially, their relation to the existing power structures within the communities they come out of, whether they oppose the existing power structure before anything else--whether the regime in iran is part of the existing power structure or not---whether these groups are sunni or shi'a--how that division plays out across the sociological situations that shape these groups. none of this is taken into account in your post, lebel--and not a bit of this is obvious without quite a bit of research. so your most basic claim does not hold water.

but let's pass over this preliminary issue:

you really think that iran--the government of which (like any other) has an interest in staying in power--would pass nuclear weapons to a --well what---you dont actually say anything specific, you seem to have no idea who iran might be passing these weapons to, these weapons they do not yet have but might soon have maybe...
to hezbollah?
we already discussed them in this thread---they are not really a "terrorist" outfit in the special senses given the term these days.
hamas?
that would not seem imaginable within any scenario given what is unfolding on the ground between israel and palestine at the moment.

so obviously the problem must be Someone Else, someone we dont know about, who does not now exist, but could exist one day and it is that Potential Enemy who is the Real Threat--well, no wonder there is nothing specific about who iran might pass these weapons they do not yet have to.

but it seems necessary to be able to say SOMETHING about the Potential Enemy, the one that does not yet exist, that we do not know about, but could at any moment, any place, Pop into Being--so what do we know about them? that they are evil muslims who want to destroy israel. voila. there you have it. presto, a kind of sea-monkey enemy: just add water and watch it twitch about in the tumbler of your choice--Instant Enemy: they make fine pets and they help justify massive, out of control defense spending. they keep people glued to their tv sets and help structure paranoia. Instant Enemies are available everywhere, all the time. you dont need to know anything about them--you just need to know that they are evil muslims who want to destroy x....here you can say israel--there you can say the american way of life or our freedoms--it really does not matter what you fill in, it is always something Terribly Important: your own Instant Enemy is always really jealous or really angry or really something and as a result they just want to blow shit up. bad bad muslims.


you dont provide a real indication of how this passing of nuclear weapons could possibly be understood as rational by a government that presides over a nation-state and therefore has an interest in remaining in power and do to that needs to also have an interest in keeping a nation-state around and not getting it blown to smithereens by either the israelis--who are a real nuclear power--or the united states--or both.

[[aside: well, you *do* have the glorious history of american and soviet nuclear weapons thinking during the cold war from around the period around the cuban missle crisis, the mutual assured destruction thing. and because this was an american "strategy" and this is american dammit, it must have been rational.]]

but outside MAD--which was both rational contextually and completely insane contextually at once---even from the most low-level type of self-interest, it would seem to me nuts, your scenario. seeing as your understanding is rooted on no specific information about iran, no specific information about these "terrorists" or "fundamentalists" or other boogeypersons that keep you awake at night and by extension conservatives in power---no specific information about islam for that matter, just a sequence of rickety assertions tied together by the kind of startling fact that you seem to believe what you say.

what is really startling is that you let yourself drop into a very old, very unpleasant set of tropes: They are fanatics--They are not reasonable--They do not act from self-interest--They are inferior--They are deluded: all quite unlike you or Us--all requiring no information--only good old fashioned racism.....but i understand (i think) how this game works these days lebel, and do not blame you personally for it at all--you just follow the logic your particular position leans on--it is perfectly acceptable these days for conservative types to be racist without limits when it comes to arabs, to muslims--because it is wrapped tight in nationalist fervor, in projection, in fear, this particular racism goes unnoticed, unnamed. it is part of the nationalist game. and that nationalist game is an unquestioned good.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite