#death to the dictator

[nando161mando]

Death to the dictator, death to the army.

Western Tehran, Wednesday.

[mermistaforprimeminister]

Rest in peace Hannah Arendt you would have hated funko pops

[time4-mindpower]

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian-born Soviet revolutionary and political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953.

[loneranger0369]

People are being kiled horribly. Gunned.

By the Revolutionary Guard of Iran.

I am not sure who this man is... Please share if you find it important

[jeremiasdorap]

[rainestorm2556]

Masha Amini was only 22. The Iranian government claims she went into cardiac arrest but the doctors say otherwise. She was clearly beaten and bruised. She was traveling to the capital with her family when they took her away. She was pronounced brain dead and they refused to let her father see her body. He caught a glimpse of her legs and they were bruised. Iranian women are fed up. They’re burning their hijabs (headscarves) and protesting against the dictatorship. At least eight deaths have been confirmed since Masha’s. The government is cutting off their water and internet. People are cutting their hair and shaving their heads to show support to the Iranian women. Please, be their voice. Send this to anyone who’s willing to listen or do something. The reason for her death was immoral and simply because she had some of her hair exposed.

[carlsensei]

How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures.

Instinctively, when dictators are toppled, we invade their castles and expose their vanities and luxuries—Imelda’s shoes, the Shah’s jewels. We loot and desecrate, in order to cut them finally, futilely, down to size. After the fall of Baghdad, I visited the gaudiest of Saddam’s palaces, examined his tasteless art, his Cuban cigars, his private lakes with their specially bred giant fish, his self-worshipping bronze effigies. I saw thirty years’ worth of bodies in secret graves, along with those of Iraqis bound and shot just hours before liberation. In Afghanistan, Mullah Omar, a despot of simpler tastes, left behind little but plastic flowers, a few Land Cruisers with CDs of Islamic music, and an unkempt garden where he had spent hours petting his favorite cow.

Cf. Useless Tree on Mencius in Libya:

Mencius is generally against killing as a means of government. But in this instance the violent downfall of a tyrant was acceptable. The bad guy brought it on himself for being so bad for so long. The people could no longer tolerate the injustice and they struck out against him.

This does not necessarily imply a generalized "right to rebellion" in Menicus. Nor does it necessarily mean that the "people" are the legitimate agents of this kind of political change. In 5B.9 he tells us that it is ministers from royal families who have the moral standing to remove bad rulers.

But 1B.8 reflects a kind of resignation. If tyrants face the people's wrath and die violent deaths, we should not mourn them as fallen kings. Rather, we should look forward and ask: who will bring humane government to a traumatized land?

Mencius would not feel sorry for Qaddafi.

And here's a quote from my favorite thing ever,

A young man without power or money is completely free. He has nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to preserve an existing system or plot a revolution. He can reinvent himself daily, according to the discoveries he makes about the world and himself. But if he prospers through the choices he makes, if he acquires a wife, children, wealth, land, and power, his options gradually and inevitably diminish. Responsibility and commitment limit his moves. One might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move. The tyrant's choices are the narrowest of all. His life—the nation!—hangs in the balance. He can no longer drift or explore, join or flee. He cannot reinvent himself, because so many others depend on him—and he, in turn, must depend on so many others. He stops learning, because he is walled in by fortresses and palaces, by generals and ministers who rarely dare to tell him what he doesn't wish to hear. Power gradually shuts the tyrant off from the world. Everything comes to him second or third hand. He is deceived daily. He becomes ignorant of his land, his people, even his own family. He exists, finally, only to preserve his wealth and power, to build his legacy. Survival becomes his one overriding passion. So he regulates his diet, tests his food for poison, exercises behind well-patrolled walls, trusts no one, and tries to control everything.

From Mark Bowden's May 2002 Atlantic piece on Saddam Hussein.

To cap off the evening, I recommend Book IX of the Republic.