Totalitarianism Featured And STILL they prattle on about a “women’s revolution” - Part 3 The Iranian regime is not against women per se; it is against everyone who is not the Supreme Leader. Everyone is subject to arbitrary control, and the arbitrary power of all strata ends up borne by women, in Iran instrumentalised in the hijab.
Totalitarianism Featured And STILL they prattle on about a “women’s revolution” - Part 2 I point this out neither to absolve men, nor to tarnish women, but only to make the point that the woman-man divide obscures, rather than illuminates, the events in Iran. It obstructs, rather than facilitates, understanding.
Totalitarianism Featured And STILL they prattle on about a “women’s revolution” - Part 1 If it were up to women like this, there would never be a revolution in Iran. It is unclear why anyone would be interested in what Banafsheh Zand has to say on the events in Iran, other than that she’s a feminist.
Totalitarianism Featured Christopher Hitchens’s “Axis of Evil” speech, Part 2: Iran The Iranian mullahs lost so many young people in the suicide waves that they sent against Iraq, the sending of gangs of school children and teenagers to clear minefields on the Iraqi border. There's not enough room in large parts of Iran to bury the number of people they killed.
Polemics Featured Msreading Iran "Women Life Freedom" is not a feminist slogan and this is not a “women’s revolution.” The events unfolding in major parts of the Muslim world mean that after almost 200 years, the 1848 revolutions finally resume: the autonomous individual is far from dead, with a tip of the hat to George Orwell.
Polemics Featured "Islam is not a religion," Answer to Lloyd de Jongh - Part 5 Religion makes it possible for the "scholars" to pervert the lay Muslims' humanity to such an extent that they are willing to kill their own children, yet are ready to die for God. If that is not a religion, then I do not know what is.
Polemics Featured "Islam is not a religion," Answer to Lloyd de Jongh - Part 4 It might offend Lloyd de Jongh to learn that for Islam, his religion is not important enough to warrant "correcting" its errors.
Polemics Featured "Islam is not a religion," Answer to Lloyd de Jongh - Part 3 "You shouldn’t be in the totalitarianism business if you can't exploit a ready-made reservoir of credulity and servility that’s as big as that." —Christopher Hitchens.
Polemics Featured "Islam is not a religion," Answer to Lloyd de Jongh - Part 1 "Allah Most High prohibited the people to go out altogether in military expeditions and jihad, and ordered a segment of them to engage solely in becoming knowledgeable in the religion of Allah."
Jihad Featured "Will Nupur Sharma ever lead a normal life? Should moderate Muslims speak up?" - A commentary - Part 3 Hindu talk of boycotting Muslim businesses is partly out of helpless despair, and partly out of an urgency to do something when they have no idea what to do. There is nothing either helpless or desperate about jihad murder. It is calculated, meticulously planned, and painstakingly executed.
Jihad Featured "Will Nupur Sharma ever lead a normal life? Should moderate Muslims speak up?" - A commentary - Part 2 That the "innocent" Muslim barber might go out of business is just tough, but Hindus did not create Muslims and certainly did not teach them jihad. Besides, it is not unlawful to save yourself from a Muslim unless, of course, you are a dhimmi.
Totalitarianism Featured Christopher Hitchens’s “Axis of Evil” speech, Part 1 All the years that were spent in trying to contain, coerce, or civilise this man, had been wasted. They had all been exploited by him to advance his program. It seemed that his appetite for power only grew with the eating.
Totalitarianism Featured Eid al-Adha, sacrifice no more While the relationship between Islam and the kufaar expands Islam, the relationship between the scholars and lay Muslims sustains it. The rejection of the relationship between the scholars and lay Muslims is huge, for it is existential.
Dissidents/Ex-Muslims Featured The ex-Muslim activist trap Ultimately, ex-Muslim hatred of non-Muslim scholars of Islam comes down to a combination of envy and fear of being eclipsed. After all, such scholars, mostly academics, are highly educated and highly read, while most ex-Muslims are stunted from their experience under Islam.
Atheism/religion The panic of the sheikhs Atheism spooks the sheikhs. People cannot turn to them for answers, and must seek and find their own answers. Lying flat dissolves the CCP’s power over the Chinese people in exactly the same way as a Muslim woman marrying an atheist does.
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 12 "a boot stamping on a human face, forever." — George Orwell.
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 11 “The matter is summed up for every person alive: either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die… Such, then, is the basis of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity and hatred—directed from the Muslim to the infidel—is the foundation of our religion.” AQR
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 10 “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped.”
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 9 Newspeak, propagandistic language characterised by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. Coined by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-four. Newspeak, “designed to diminish the range of thought,” the language of Big Brother’s enforcers. —Britannica (excerpt).
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 8 Arbitrary control is the conditio sine qua non of totalitarianism. All you need to do is point your finger, utter “Islamophobia”, and it is done. When we agreed to create “hate speech,” we conceded that our thoughts and emotions must be policed. This has always been the business of totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 7 Whether class struggle that must inevitably lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, or “No one comes to the Father except through me,” or “until all worship is for Allah alone," the idea is the same: we act in accord with our purpose, the only way to real human happiness.
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 6 You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behaviour. In these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 5 Were they not in such a parlous state, they would see that Zemmour is their very last hope to stop the slide towards the stark alternatives of either civil war or barbarism
Totalitarianism Totalitarianism: we have become comfortably numb - Part 4 An easy way to assess how Orwell “speak[s] to us in our own time with great urgency and topicality,” is by looking at the way we regard Islam, and to discern whether the decay of thought and the negation of being that Orwell sees in the civilisational breakdown we call fascism, is present in us.
