Braindroppings

you know i ended up totally changing my mind on this issue. at first i was annoyed that it was just another case of directionless iranian nationalism. i've since changed my mind, and partially because of some things your colleague and friend touraj wrote.

there really are systematic attempts to degrade and vilify all things Iranian, and we need to be more vocal about objecting to it.

A while back, i was at a conference where a guy traced through film history the appearance of the irish and how they always appeared paired with whatever group was the villians in that historical moment (e.g. when the bad guys were italian mobsters in the 40s the irish appeared as irish, in the nineties the irish showed up in films training in dessert with arabs, etc.). it was really well done and well researched and the clips were right in front of your eyes where you could see the evolution.

Of course, since the Irish peace process has gone better, there has been no need to vilify them, but one can now see similar processes at play in the case of iranians and other ethnic groups.

Moral of the story after reading Niki's response: get your own affairs in order and they will not make fun of you...

And one more thing... since when you Hez- and reform-ollahis care about Iranian monarchy and how it is portrayed? I remember having a conversation with a Neo-Hezi once who argued that Reza Shah was horrible because he was "uneducated"... so was Khashayarshah... Leave Iranian monarchy alone and get upset only when they attack your mullahcracy... Don't worry about old Iranians and those with kinship with them... they all can take care of themselves and Khashayarshah don't need Ahmadinejad and his ilk to protect him... Didn't you people want to dump the Iranian monarchy into the trash bin of history? Voila, you've done your deed... next comes flooding the Parsagad and blaming it on the Danish... Amazing how your head score penalties against your behind...

I haven't seen the movie 300, and I am in no hurry to do so (mainly, I simply rarely go to movie theaters any more). However, I had no idea that there might be a political agena to the movie. I have seen a documentary about the events before, during, and after the battle of Thermopolae, so I have some basic knowledge of the historical events that the movie deals with. From what I learned, it was the Greeks who struck the first blow by burning a Persian city. It seems to me that this would make the Greeks the bad guys, not the Persians. Still, I know that the Persians must have struck a lot of "first blows" to acquire such a huge empire.

I read the interview with Frank Miller. This fool thinks that Iraq declared war on the U.S., just like Japan did in WWII, and so we had to invade them? He seems to be a very confused man, equating al-Qaeda with the entire Muslim world! He seems to think that America is falling apart as a great nation because its people lack the moral fortitude to be great anymore. Well, I have a very different perspective on things. I see America in trouble because it is being excessively parasitized by a tiny minority of aristocrats who have extended their sociopathic corruption into nearly ever facet of governance in this country. Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their corporate gang are more deeply embedded with this systemic corruption that any administration in U.S. history, as far as I am concerned! Not since the robber barons of the late 1800's has the U.S. government been so much in the grip of so few with so much money and power. It is my own personal theory that the Roman Empire fell not for any reasons of moral turpitude, but rather because there were simply too many aristocratic parasites feeding at the trough. Excessive greed and lust for power led to dozens of civil wars over the succession to the imperial throne. Civil wars didn't bring looted bounty into the empire, as the previous wars of expansion did. Instead, they consumed the human and material resources within the empire itself. America is still looting the world of its resources, so the potential decline and fall of the American Empire is not immediately at hand. However, I think that important lessons from history are being ignored. Aristocrats do not thrive when civilizations fall. They are actually some of the most vulnerable of people, because they are very nearly incapable of doing anything for themselves.

Ok Khodadad, you can correct the flaws in my historical reasoning now. :)

It's understandable why you would be perturbed by VDH given
your early Islamic and occidental indocrination in Iran.

You just can't believe that there are people who
see right through you and your ilk thinly veiled agenda
of Proselytizing imperialist Islam in the name of scholarship.

You people are nothing but Islamist Jacobins who
somehow gained economic power through Robespierrian Allahrocacy
in Iran and can't detach yourself from the trough that
made you into the parasitic pseudo-intellectuals. Your only
aim in life to reconcile your dissoance and justify your
conflicted vile totalitarian upbriniging and what you
know better since you were allowed to live in the west
and spew your bile without impunity here in America.