EARLIER this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in
separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia
Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will
return some time to conquer evil on earth. A website based in Qom,
Iran’s holiest city, deemed the men “deviants”, “fortune-tellers” and
“petty criminals”, who were exploiting credulous Iranians for alms
during the Persian new-year holiday, which fell in mid-March. Many of
the fake messiahs were picked up by security men in the courtyard to the
mosque in Jamkaran, a village near Qom, whose reputation as the place
of the awaited Mahdi’s advent has been popularised nationwide by
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When he took office in 2005 he gave the
mosque $10m.
Last year a seminary expert, Mehdi Ghafari, said that more than 3,000
fake Mahdis were in prison. Mahdi-complexes are common, says a Tehran
psychiatrist. “Every month we get someone coming in, convinced he is the
Mahdi,” she says. “Once a man was saying such outrageous things and
talking about himself in the third person that I couldn’t help laughing.
He got angry and told me I had ‘bad hijab’ and was disrespecting the
‘Imam of Time’,” as the Mahdi is known.
Mr Ahmadinejad has called his administration “the government of the
hidden imam”. Last month he told a batch of new Iranian ambassadors to
consider themselves “envoys of the Mahdi”. After his first speech at the
UN in 2005, a video circulated showing Mr Ahmadinejad telling a leading
Iranian cleric that world leaders had been enchanted, during his
oration, by a halo around his head that had been put there by the Mahdi
himself.
That’s seriously one of my best arguments for Batman as the modern incarnation of God - street crazies claim to be him the same way they once claimed Jesus or King David or Napoleon or, apparently, the Mahdi.
Proper attention has not always been given to the great changes which have taken place since 1870 in the way people judge the revolution; yet these changes must be considered if we wish to understand contemporary ideas relative to violence.
For a very long time the Revolution appeared to be essentially a succession of glorious wars, which a people famished for liberty and carried away by the noblest passions had maintained against a coalition of all the powers of oppression and error. Riots and coups d'état, the struggles between parties often destitute of any scruple and the banishment of the vanquished, the Parliamentary debates and the adventures of illustrious men, in a word, all the events of its political history were in the eyes of our fathers only very secondary accessories to the wars of liberty.
For about twenty-five years the form of government in France had been at issue; after campaigns before which the memories of Caesar and Alexander paled the charter of 1814 had definitely incorporated in the national tradition, the Parliamentary system, Napoleonic legislation, and the Church established by the Concordat; war had given an irrevocable judgment whose preambles, as Proudhon said, had been dated from Valmy, from Jemmapes, and from fifty other battlefields, and whose conclusions had been received at Saint-Ouen by Louis XVIII. Protected by the prestige of the wars of liberty, the new institutions had become inviolable, and the ideology which was built up to explain them became a faith which seemed for a long time to have for the French the value which the revelation of Jesus has for the Catholics.
From time to time eloquent writers have thought that they could set up a current of reaction against these doctrines, and the Church had hopes that it might get the better of what it called the error of liberalism. A long period of admiration for medieval art and of contempt for the period of Voltaire seemed to threaten the new ideology with ruin; but all these attempts to return to the past left no trace except in literary history. There were times when those in power governed in the least liberal manner, but the principles of the modem régime were never seriously threatened. This fact could not be explained by the power of reason and by some law of progress; its cause lies simply in the epic of the wars which had filled the French soul with an enthusiasm analogous to that provoked by religions.
This miltary epic gave an epical colour to all the events of internal politics; party struggles were thus raised to the level of an Iliad; politicians became giants, and the revolution, which Joseph de Maistre had denounced as satanical, was made divine. The bloody scenes of the Terror were episodes without great significance by the side of the enormous hecatombs of war, and means were found to envelop them in a dramatic mythology; riots were elevated to the same rank as illustrious battles; and calmer historians vainly endeavoured to bring the Revolution and the Empire down to the plane of common history. The prodigious triumphs of the revolutionary and imperial arms rendered all criticism impossible.
The war of 1870 changed all that. At the moment of the fall of the Second Empire the immense majority in France still firmly believed the legends which had been spread about regarding the armies of volunteers, the miraculous rôle of the representatives of the people, and the improvised generals; experience produced a cruel disillusion. Tocqueville had written: “The Convention created the policy of the impossible, the theory of furious madness, the cult of blind audacity.” The disasters of 1870 brought the country back to practical, prudent, and prosaic conditions; the first result of these disasters was the development of the conception most opposed to that spoken of by Tocqueville; this was the idea of opportunism, which has now been introduced even into Socialism.
Another consequence was the change that took place in all revolutionary values, and notably the modification in the opinions which were held on the subject of violence.
After 1871 everybody in France thought only of the search for the most suitable means of setting the country on its feet again. Taine endeavoured to apply the methods of the most scientific psychology to this question, and he looked upon the history of the Revolution as a social experiment. He hoped to be able to make quite clear the danger presented in his opinion by the Jacobin spirit, and thus to induce his contemporaries to change the course of French politics by abandoning ideas which had seemed incorporated in the national tradition, and which were all the more solidly rooted in people’s minds because nobody had ever discussed their origin. Taine failed in his enterprise, as Le Play and Renan failed, as all those will fail who try to found an intellectual and moral reform on investigations, on scientific syntheses, and on demonstrations.
The idea of the Fifties that America still holds — the happy, “greasy” Fifties — was an “invented History.” Up until 1969, quite an opposite cultural memory held sway. When Americans remembered “the Fifties,” they thought of Joe McCarthy witch hunts, of an “age of anxiety,” of the “shook-up generation” diving under their desks during A-Bomb drills, of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit selling out and Holden Caulfield cracking up, or Allen Ginsberg ’48 and Jack Kerouac ’44 too “beat” to fight back. Nothing to get nostalgic about there. In a section titled “Re-inventing the Day Before Yesterday,” Guffey describes older critics, who remembered the decade only too clearly, “shocked at the happy-go-lucky imagery” of what Horizon Magazine protested as the “newly-minted” Fifties.
Used to roll with Eddie Bauer - good cut, good fabric, good elastic, good fly with no button - but the line’s discontinued. Was hoping by the time this day came the “boxer brief” fad would be dead, alas. They do seem to have evolved from worst-of-both-worlds hybrid to serviceable boxers with ugly codpieces, so there’s that.
Two things here I’ve never seen in a mall before: a distillery tasting room and a pet… leasing? dealership. I dunno man.
Torrid’s developed a distinct enough brand style I bet people wouldn’t even guess it started as a ‘90s spinoff of Hot Topic’s “mallgoth corsets for fat girls” aisle.
This is a startlingly historical and philosophical backgrounder to the Malheur occupation and I approve.
That’s surprisingly good for the LATimes – I’m surprised anyone in their offices has ever heard of the Homestead Act.
It’s kinda interesting to see where they make small mistakes despite that, though. The modern descendents of the Sagebrush jackasses, Finicum’s branch included, along with even the 1980s variants, are at least self-aware enough to realize that they’ll lose out from privatization, and thus primarily advocate for state possession where they’ll have more ‘pull’ (and established philosophy). There’s no such thing as “Oregon Public Radio”, and the original quote from “Oregon Public Broadcasting” said only that fostering was his ‘primary’ source of income and explicitly said he’d make ends meet without, rather than the only way to keep the ranch afloat. Ending the timeline in the 1970s with the FLPMA rather than the Endangered Species Act is… at best misleading.
Which is kinda disappointing. It’s not exactly hard to tear down these folk at the legal, philosophical, or historical levels. But apparently it’s too tempting to make them Cartoonishly Evil, rather than just wrong.
Good points, also he could have stood to mention how often lands were opened under pressure from protests or unauthorized settlement, against the wishes of wise planners in Washington - the Preemption Act, the Boomers of Oklahoma, the settler militias that started Indian Removal on their own. (Or in London, with the American Revolution inland of the coasts experienced as a reaction to the Proclamation of 1763.)
Also Bady’s not on staff, he’s a hotshot socialist editor of The New Inquiry. That such a traditionally provincial and rightist paper would run someone like him is pretty striking in its own right.
