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Happy Anniversary, says Iran: it’s Islamic Revolution Victory Day — 15 Comments

1. the Muslim brotherhood in Baradei (sp?) has presented Egypt with their equivalent, and he’s what they need in Egypt, a guy who can sweettalk crowds into believing that they will get a radical fundamentalist Islamic government without the oppression and inevitable slide into the stone age.

   Far more dangerous than Khomeini ever was.

2. Fancy that…
   they think dates are important and like to do that..

   After all, what was Sept 11 mean in the 1600s?

   Emma Goldman was arrested today as well

   they finished selling out the Baltic and other countries to extermination and totalitarianism as Yalta ends

   Sacajawea gives birth to Pompey

   Russia’s General Alexei Maximovitch Kaledin commits suicide [Upon the vote, Kaledin resigned his position, walked into the next room, and ended his life with a single gunshot to the chest.]

   anyone remember the FEBRUARY REVOLUTION?
   it really happened in the beginning of march, but given that they use a different calendar (or used to), it was called the February revolution. 🙂

   and its important, as most dont know the history at all

   By 1917, most Russians had lost faith in the leadership ability of the czarist regime. Government corruption was rampant, the Russian economy remained backward and Czar Nicholas II had repeatedly dissolved the Dumas, the Russian parliamentary groups established to placate the masses after the Revolution of 1905, each time they opposed his will. But the immediate cause of the February Revolution–the first phase of the more sweeping Russian Revolution of 1917–was Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War I. Militarily, imperial Russia was no match for industrialized Germany. Russian troops were shockingly ill-equipped for fighting, and Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war. Meanwhile, the Russian economy was hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort, and moderates joined Russian radical elements in calling for the overthrow of the czar.

   On March 8, 1917, demonstrators clamoring for bread took to the streets of the Russian capital of Petrograd. Supported by 90,000 men and women on strike, the protesters clashed with police, refusing to leave the streets.

   On March 10, the strike spread among Petrograd’s workers, and irate mobs of workers destroyed police stations. Several factories elected deputies to the Petrograd Soviet (“council) of workers, following the model devised during the Revolution of 1905.

   On March 11, the troops of the Petrograd army garrison were called out to quell the uprising.

   In some encounters, regiments opened fire, killing demonstrators, but the protesters kept to the streets, and the troops began to waver.

   That day, Nicholas again dissolved the Dumas.

   When the frustrated Russian army at Petrograd unexpectedly switched their support to the demonstrators, the imperial government was forced to resign and a provisional government was established.

   Three days later, Nicholas formally abdicated his throne, effectively ending nearly four centuries of czarist rule in Russia.

   anyone care to compare some key details with Egypt? that even musicians keep following the same themes that identify them…

   now of course THEY know this history the way we know (or used to know) Washington…

   why did not mubarak leave before?

   well, not one person gave any cogent answer!!!

   he could NOT leave before no matter WHAT any one said, because he had not been invited to another country to live!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   of course most will just think that he would step down, and go to some farm home and live out his days with his wife, kids, kalashinkov, body guards and a rich social life among world leaders.

   HA!

   he has to LEAVE or else the new regime with KILL him to prevent the people wanting him back if things are not to their liking (which they wont be).

   so, without obama saying, come here to the states, bring your money, your wife, kids, dog, and you can live here till the end of your days…

   he basically said, its time that you left this boat.
   and we never wanted to notice that the boat was in the middle of the ocean and there was no place to go since you cant go off planet!

   so he HAD to stay… and he HAD to play his part
   He is Nicholas, and his family are the ruling family
   the crowd refuse to leave
   the military switches sides
   etc.

   of course if we keep making stuff up to fill in the blanks, we will live in a self created reality that has little but resemblance to the real thing.

   and when did the French Revolution of 1848 start?

   The February revolution established the principle of the “right to work” (droit au travail), and its newly-established government created “National Workshops” for the unemployed. At the same time a sort of industrial parliament was established at the Luxembourg Palace, under the presidency of Louis Blanc, with the object of preparing a scheme for the organization of labour. These tensions between liberal Orleanist and Radical Republicans and Socialists led to the June Days Uprising.

   basically the ruler said no to mass meetings (hidden in banquets due to a prior ruling). when he saw thorough the sham, he took away the banquets.

   As a result, the people revolted, helping to unite the efforts of the popular Republicans and the liberal Orleanists, who turned their back on Louis-Philippe.

   Barricades were erected, and fighting broke out between the citizens and the municipal guards. from wiki

   ah… so again.. a most similar thing… food, and people and masses, and so on…

   On February 23, Prime Minister Guizot resigned. Upon hearing the news of Guizot’s resignation, a large crowd gathered outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An officer ordered the crowd not to pass, but people in the front of the crowd were being pushed by the rear. The officer ordered his men to fix bayonets, probably wishing to avoid shooting. However, in what is widely regarded as an accident, a soldier discharged his musket, which resulted in the rest of the soldiers firing into the crowd. Fifty two people were killed

   kind of like Kent state.. (but now we know that someone DID fire a gun at the troops to start it off, and it WAS a leftist!)

   Paris was soon a barricaded city. Omnibuses were turned into barricades, and thousands of trees were felled. Fires were set, and angry citizens began converging on the royal palace.

   King Louis Philippe abdicated and fled to England.

   Mubarak abdicated and fled to where?

3. Artfldgr: by the way, the Shah abdicated and initially fled to Egypt.

4. there is more…

   1936 The Reich arrests 150 Catholic youth leaders in Berlin

   Silvia Plath commits suicide…
   The Ideological Apprenticeship of Sylvia Plath
   http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831805

   I may have barren spells, times of despair, as when I consider the possibilities of another war (I am an ardent pacifist). For even as I am a product of the twentieth century, so am I a victim of the popular fallacies; I have unconsciously assimilated the ideas and catchwords that are “in the air” everywhere. 🙂

   An ideological and political awareness, though deliberately disguised or concealed in most of Plath’s imaginative work, had been part of her consciousness since childhood. This awareness was disguised primarily because it was initially overshadowed by another ideology with which it competed, a modernist aesthetic that separated art from politics and celebrated the individual vision of the artist.

   1. Individualism and the ‘peanut crunching crowd’ Plath’s strong faith in individualism and the independence of art from society was cultivated by her upbringing, and reinforced by her reading. Three significant influences on Plath’s version of individualism are Nietzsche, Ortega, and…

   The corollary of this celebration ofthe individual, whether that individual is seen as artist, intel? lectual, or part of an aristocratic elite, is that American notions of democracy were undercut by a suspicious disdain for the majority and this is sometimes exposed strikingly in Plath’s later writing. The mass of people become the mob, the “stinking people” she sees in the Yankee Stadium,13 the potato people that Plath refers to in her later correspondence from Devon, or the “peanut-crunching crowd” who come to watch a striptease of the performer in “Lady Lazarus.”14 Her student read? ing of Ortega’s The Revolt ofthe Masses encouraged such an attitude. Jose Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher whose book was published in its English translation in 1930. His primary concern was population explosion, which, he observed, had several important consequences. These included overcrowding and intrusion but there is a third consequence ofthe crowd’s occupation of places reserved previously for the privileged few that particularly alarmed Ortega, and this was the growing influence of the populace. John Carey describes Ortega’s sequence of thought as follows, starting with the growth of the masses:

   [Onel consequence is the dictatorship ofthe mass. The one factor of utmost importance in the current political life of Europe is the accession ofthe masses to complete social power. The triumph of “hyperdemocracy” has created a modern state, which Ortega sees as the gravest danger threatening civilization. The masses believe in the state as a machine for obtaining the material pleasures they desire, but it will crush the individual

   have we really forgotten so much in so little time?

5. The only thing preventing me from waking up and running out into the dead of night gibbering and gesturing is a busy work schedule. Well did our Puritan father’s counsel about the saving nature of work.

   But . . .

6. Meanwhile back n Earth the Syfy channel has a Primeval festival. It’s a relief to watch something more realistic than mobs of demonstrators thinking they have just improved their lives.

7. I can not watch these jubilant crowds without terror, anticipating all the horrors the future has in stock for them.

8. Looks like it’s Sarah Palin’s birthday, too. I wonder which event will ultimately occupy the historical high ground?

9. Art,

   I also read somewhere that in the last few days the Saudis and a few other Arab leaders (Jordan, Yemen, UAE ? I can’t remember exactly) were putting a lot of pressure on Mubarak not to step down.

10. I bet the Iranian thugs are really angry at having their anniversary upstaged by a bunch of twitterers.

11. Syria’s official television station calls for the end of the Camp David Accords, anti-government demonstrations in Jordan, Hamas controls Gaza, Hezbollah may soon control Lebanon, and now Egypt may be an the verge of becoming hostile once more; the Israelis must be getting extremely nervous and particularly so with Obama in charge of American foreign policy.

    A new occupant in the oval office come 1/21/13 can’t come soon enough.

12. expat,
    they probably were…
    the more of them there are the more they can argue that they are what things should be. one is an anomaly, many is normal. (well thats how some see it)

13. All those crowds just look like target rich environments for a massive nuclear barrage to me.

14. One very large difference between Egypt and Iran is that Iran had a ready-made charismatic figure in Khomeini, who was ruthless in his drive to power. Egypt seems to lack a similar figure–so far.

    I worry about this guy coming back:

    http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/58461/jewel-of-the-nile/

    He has a bigger following than Khomeini ever had, and as much religious authority as well.

15. Patvann: thanks for the link. I had never heard of him, but he sounds like a very troubling possibility.

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