Another interesting contradiction is that the former Shah, and one or two of his priors (not blood related, necessarily) were some of the major movers for secularization and westernization, despite being complete despots. Thats why the clerical backlash includes a lot of anti-democratic tendencies (and interestingly, in some other middle eastern contries, the religious zealots are actually pro-democratic religious zealots).
I get the impression that at least some of the Secularists would be okay with a sort of totalitarian secularism, or would have at some point, but its awful hard to derive whats going on in Iran, especially since our media has been leveled down to Fox and CNN.
So I suppose we should be careful for who we wish for in the internal power struggle.
Iran has a very long and established history, and in fact they used to own parts of what would become the soviet union, but in that history I don't see that much religious extremism (of course, it always depends on what you read and how much), so I really don't fully understand how the clerics ended up with such a death-grip on the country.
Current Events » in reply to Same post, attempted HTML fix
more on Iran
The whole thread (31 posts)
- The Coming Wars
- re: The Coming Wars
- re: The Coming Wars
- Before the Iraq war
- Interesting. And, you'll notice it's about Iran, not North Korea or Pakistan.
- Alternatives
- just to point some of your rhetorical garbage out to you:
- So, you think the covert operations are good idea? Must have misread you.
- just to point some of your rhetorical garbage out to you: