zenpundit.com

REVIEWING LEARNING TO EAT SOUP WITH A KNIFE

“Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife -Book Review” is now up at Chicago Boyz.

IRANIANS WITH NO ENDGAME

That Iran’s illegal propaganda circus with captured British military personnel continues is an indication of the factional state of Iran’s leadership. Returning to the same provocative well once again is a sign that Ahmadinejad’s hardline Pasdaran faction behind the well-planned seizure have not garned the expected payoff that they most likely predicted would occur. So they are playing for time, hoping for a deus ex machina to whip the Iranian people into a nationalistic frenzy.

A second sign is the rather pathetic effort by the regime to employ a rent-a-riot “popular demonstration” against the British embassy. Aside from the laughably small number of “protestors”( probably Ansar Hezbollah or Basij goons), which indicates that the top clerics are keeping a very tight leash, as they could deploy thousands of paramilitary thugs in mufti, if they chose, there is a strong whiff of nostalgia here for the symbols of the 1979 Revolution. What appeal this political gesture will have to the vast number of Iranians too young to recall the seizure of the American embassy, I cannot say but to me it seems like something that would excite only the most partisan elements of Ahmadinejad’s base.

Ahmadinejad is painting Teheran into an increasingly isolated corner. Hopefully, the Bush administration will tailor their moves to maximize and profit from Iran’s diplomatic self-immolation rather than distract from it.

RELATED LINK:

Dan of tdaxp responds to Tom’s criticism

THE LOST WORLD OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS

Lexington Green has an interesting post “Do we really owe it all to the geography of the Norwegian fjords?” at Chicago Boyz that traces the culture of Anglo-American notions of political liberty to the nuclear families of the Norwegian fjords:

“Here is a whole corpus of writing about which I knew nothing. I have in the meantime obtained a copy of the translation of the Demolins book, Anglo-Saxon Superiority, To What is it Due? (1907). The beginning of it is a summary of the writing of M. de Tourville, which discusses how the Saxons came to dominate all the other invaders, Angles, Danes, Normans, because of their cultural practices, particularly nuclear families, which Tourville calls “particularist” social structure. The Saxons generated a unique type of state apparatus as a result, operating large states on a federal-type basis. For example, note this passage:

We know how, under Egbert, the Heptarchy fell under the domination of the Saxons. But the latter did not give the Angles a Saxon government, nor did they foist Saxon officials on them, for the good reason that their political development was most limited, their strength lying more in private than in public life. They never dreamt of administering conquered peoples in the fashion adopted by the Romans, and later by the Spaniards and the French. Their idea was rather — and has remained — a Federation. Thus were started by the Saxons that former United States of England. So little did they aim at constituting the model of a large empire, that their king continued to call himself simply ‘King of the Saxons of the West’. Yet he was sovereign over the whole island.

Remarkable if true. We see the Saxons at the earliest possible date showing the genius for distributed power and federal arrangements that we in the Anglosphere still have today. Unfortunately, the Demolins book, which I am halfway through, is more focused on reform in France a century ago, with the English case only as a background.”

Very intriguing. At the time the Demolins book was published, the troubled Third Republic was deeply split politically, socially and culturally. There was, to an extent, in France, a sense of anxiety over the might of the “Anglo-Saxon powers”, rising America and reigning Great Britain and paranoia about the aforementioned power’s distant Teutonic cousins in Wilhelmine Germany. On the other hand, admiration for British political institutions was not unusual among French intellectuals prior to the 20th century – Montesquieu and Voltaire being the most famous examples of that tradition.