There is an ethno-religious component to what's going on in Syria. The very top of the state apparatus, the senior security people, the elite army units, and the irregular state militias are all dominated by a small tight knit religious minority which traditionally was severely persecuted by the majority population. Of the other two significant minorities, one seems to be mostly passively supporting the government while the other is sympathetic to the protesters but also fairly passive (Christians and Kurds). The Christians look at what happened in Iraq, and the relative lack of Sunni outrage compared to the horrible but not as thorough and more understandable (tit for tat) violence against Sunnis by the Shiites and are nervous. And nobody in the region, be it Sunni Arab, Sunni non-Arab, Shiite Arab, or Shiite non-Arab, secularist or religious, has seemed to ever care much about persecution of the Kurds.
1) Maoist purges
2) Stalinist purges
3) Jewish shoah
4) Armenian genocide
5) neb's murder of ogged and subsequent seizure of the throne/sceptre
I suppose the Begian Congo should have a spot in there, but I can't figure out what to bump.
Don't be absurd, Von Wafer; I had my hands on the sceptre long before ogged died.
Ogged gave it to him to hold in his awkward fist.
Take your hands off the sceptre when you're thinking about ogged, you pervert!
3: please call me nov refaw, if only to bug LB.
No more sceptre-handling to ogged's blogging.
I played indoor for the first time in a couple of months. Man, I have neither the cardio nor the recovery fitness necessary. Boo.
Should do more sceptre-handling to build up fitness.
I'm sceptical about what will happen with these revolts in the whole region, but who knows. Not that the idea seems bad, but just that thinks could get worse for a very long time before they get better. Sorry for your friends' family.
2: Is there a special category for "chinless perpetrator?"
And Moby brings the serious. Dude should write for Slate.
9: I play every week, and I still feel like that. Except that I also realize I don't have the skill.
I just played tonight! I feel pretty good, unlike you two.
I played indoor tonight, if by "played indoor" you mean "sat indoors, at a bar, and ate chicken wings". Which I assume you do, because totalitarianism.
None of that is what I meant. You're terrible at understandsion.
Related to the original topic, I picked up Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone after Glen David Gold recommended it at Crooked Timber. It's ostensibly a thriller, but set within a gripping portrait of civilian life in totalitarian WWII Germany. in a way that I hadn't thought about since reading Hannah Arendt in college, since most works I see are more directly Holocaust-related. There are Jews in the novel, but the main characters are Germans in various relationships to the SS and state apparatus. The stressfulness of everyday minute surveillance was so vivid, I actually had to put it down for a while because it was horribly compounding my garden-variety work and time-management stress.
If I still had a heart to break for such things, for me the most heart-breaking detail would be that people are being killed against their wishes.
In this broken world we live in, it is interesting what people find heart-breaking. (Not that I'm judging! It's hard to know when to let your heart be broken, without just giving up in despair.)
Heebie, perhaps your colleague's sorrow can be expressed with reference to Haidt's moral module of in-group loyalty.
35 is roughly how I feel, but I felt like 67 until my nap this afternoon.
This post probably says more about ogged than about Satrapi, but it seems relevant.
Holy shit. I can't believe she did that. I was planning on reading the sequel.
Comment on Totalitarian States
Holy shit. I can't believe she did that. I was planning on reading the sequel.
There but for the grace of god...
I've got relatives who did worse, much worse.
Are you related to people who make CSI: Miami?
I was planning on reading the sequel.
I found the sequel really interesting, actually, because she's much less confident in her actions/decisions. The second volume seems to reflect the ways in which stress and uncertainty accumulate, and how she ends up making a variety of bad (or at least questionable) decisions because she had so little structure to offer support.
25: Wait'll your read Persepolis 3, it's awful -- she gets her book club to pick Reading Lolita in Tehran because she got a review copy free from the publisher, but everyone else has to pay full price!
I'm currently reading a book I got as a free review copy. I won't make the rest of you buy it, though.
I got a free print-edition New York Times today. My understanding is that if I link to it from the front page of the blog, each of you also gets a free copy.