We Were "This Close" Says Iran

Perhaps, but as far American cultural exports are concerned, there is a reason why it’s seen as “the devil.” Junk food with no nutritional value whatsoever; movies and entertainment that are completely devoid of any real meaning (not to mention the lampooning of everything sacred); financial institutions that are rooted in rampant usury....

Americans in general are generous and kind folks, but there’s something real rotten beneath the surface....

 

I'm Israeli and I have no "missions"...I also don't think its divine to seek Nukes, it's a very reasonable they would if they want to be a power, it's also very reasonable their enemies will try to stop them, I don't see any of that as divine.

 

Reagan did not Murder folks in his own country ? You jumped into a conversation without knowing what it is about.

Hitler was not using chemical weapons when folks in the US were supporting him - so this is not a good comparison to Rotten Ronnie.

 

Times have changed and continue to change. This change is most certainly not fast enough for Iran but, the global hegemony is declining.

We used to just have to whisper our desires into the ear of a nation and that nation would come running to comply. We were the only game in town and everyone wanted to play. This is no longer the case.

Now - it takes threats, sanctions and so on - and sometimes even that does not work - and in fact these actions have backfired. Every time you turn around some nation is giving the US the middle finger. This was almost unheard of in past decades .. sans a few rogue nations.

Now - even our allies refuse to comply. Huawei 5G is going ahead in Europe - despite US protest. Nordstream is going ahead - despite protest. Italy has signed on to the "belt and road" initiative. India, Turkey have gone ahead with the S-400.

While Trump goes around using trying to club nations into submission - China and Russia are going around doing deals.

 

You are conflating Lebanon with Iraq. Iran has been relatively benign in its support for Hezbollah - and that Soleimani acted as an adviser to Hezbollah is of no moment. We also act as advisor's to various groups ..

Hezbollah is not a threat to the US - Hezbollah extremists are not doing terrorist actions in other nations. The home made rockets that are fired into Israel are little more than beefed up fireworks. If Iran was to supply Hezbollah with modern military technology - (like the US supply of arms to Al Qaeda in Syria) that would be a different story.

Iran could easily kill US Diplomats and high level leaders - and they have said as much - but they don't.

It doesn't matter how these wars are being fought - This does not change the covenant against assassinating high level officials in other nations.

What we did in Syria is far worse than anything Soleimani did ... this too was a non conventional war - Should Russia then start assassinating some of our leaders ?

 

Why are you attributing something to me that I never said ? You must have made a mistake.

 

More self righteous anti American judgement. How very original.

You can’t import culture unless it’s accepted and even desired by those receiving it. Nobody is forcing American culture on any part of the world.
What a load of utter crap to try to blame personal choice on others.

 

But you’re just an ordinary citizen, the same way you have ordinary Iranian citizens. You need to zoom out and look at it from a conceptual perspective...

 

It doesn’t matter if it’s being forced or not. The point is that the source of it all is America. It’s nothing personal, just the reality of things.

 

You said “something rotten under the surface”

Sounds like you take it personal. That’s a purely personal viewpoint.

You’ve bashed America repeatedly on this thread. That post is fully inline with that mindset.

 

I had a German friend in the 1980's. He told me he hated America because
everything was "drive through", even for your junk food.
The problem is - Germany became the same. Not because they imitated
America but because their standard of living enabled them to do so. Same
with China today.
This "junk food" and car-based society etc isn't so much America, it's
modernity. Any other country could have got there first.

 

Nonsense, it’s just that you are taking things too literally, and fail to consider the point from a metaphysical perspective.

 

Sure, but it’s just the case that America is the leader in all this, having taken the ball after Great Britain threw it to them when the latter ceased being a world power. You need great spiritual discipline in order to guard against the taste of modernity, which is something most people in the world lack. They just don't care enough, and it is what it is.

 

Blowhard


That’s the term that comes to mind.

 

I have many terms for you, but I’m already in the heat with the mods...

 

I would imagine you do.

I’m sure they would all be as informative and insightful as your post have been.

 

Really? So if Germany had won WWII it would no doubt have been the great metro nation
of Europe. People already had cars and Hitler built the first autobahns. Germans would have
had color TV, junk food and the universal adoption of cars.
Now imagine America was poor. You could ask Americans, "What do you hate about Germans"?
and you would have got the same response, "Everything is drive through, they eat junk and they
are fat, indulgent and have no spirituality."

 

You're only seeing one side of us, Goomba, and I'm not surprised to find it's mainly the superficial and negative aspects of our people, culture and institutions you're seeing.

We have wonderful cuisine in this country, some of which you'll find nowhere else in the world. If I wasn't worried about eating myself to death I'd move to New Orleans in a heartbeat. We also have art and entertainment that isn't mindless, soulless pap, and our financial institutions have helped many of us live better lives - without them I wouldn't have my university education, my home and the vehicle I drive to work every day. We're also one of the most religious and spiritual nations in the West (if not the most), and many of us revere and respect the sacred in our own ways and according to the kaleidoscope of our many different creeds and beliefs, and we enjoy the freedom to think and speak and worship thanks to the men and women who were willing to give up their own lives for us and our freedom. It's for those things and people and a land that has been blessed with great natural beauty and boundless resources that I wouldn't trade this country for any other country in the world. I'm not saying America is better, I'm just saying I love it.

It's a shame that other people aren't shown or can't see that side of us, our country and culture. Unfortunately, we're not alone in that respect - a lot of the things we are shown and many of us are only willing to see are the negative and superficial aspects of other people and their countries and cultures. Sadly, this is what we can expect from the media, entertainment industries and audiences around the world and it blinds us to the good in other people. Television and especially the Internet had the wonderful potential of overcoming that but in many respects mass communications have only made things worse.

 

Oh, don’t get me wrong Talon. I’m sure and well aware that America has a lot to offer in terms of sophisticated cuisine; profound art and literature; and general all-around civilizational goodness. Yes, God has blessed the US- this is readily apparent.

However, this “superficiality” that you raise is exactly what I’m talking about. You can call it the American government; call it the Jews; call it the devil- call it whatever you will. The US just so happens to be the main face and exporter of this superficiality. I don’t blame Americans for this. No, someone has to play that card, and the USA just so happens to.

Should America be hated for this? Absolutely not. They play one side of the coin, while the other side (the resistance) plays theirs. It’s good vs evil; Ying vs Yang...it’s the balance of the universe. It is what it is, my Western-oriented friend, it is what it is.

 

Indeed, God has blessed our land and its people and I am humbled and grateful for that and the sacrifices of my ancestors who struggled to ensure that I would live as God and Nature intended me and my children to live - free and prosperous.

That being said, I understand and accept that your depth of awareness is limited and colored by a variety of your own personal, ideological and environmental factors. I no more expect you to have a fully informed knowledge of my people, country and culture than I expect to have a fully informed knowledge of your own.

By all means feel free to disagree with me, but I think this "superficiality" that we've both been talking about is called materialism.

The problem with calling it by other names, and blaming Americans and claiming that "the US just so happens to be the main face and exporter of this" and that "someone has to play that card, and the USA just so happens to" ignores the fact that materialism is an ancient and universal human condition. What the U.S. brought was mass communications and a scapegoat - the face and the card were there centuries before the mid-20th Century.

Well, that was mighty charitable of you.

Very Manichaean...

I'm Western to the bone my Middle Eastern friend, and I find your fatalism somewhat unconvincing. Perhaps, it's you who is a little "Western-oriented".

 

I think it’s much more sinister than that. We’re talking about the same ‘something’ that made Adam and Eve fall from the Garden. There’s nothing wrong with materialism, just as long as you balance it out with spirit.

No, what I think we’re discussing is really heedlessness. We are discussing a conscious state where an individual or society is not in constant or general remembrance of their celestial origins. The West and America think mainly in terms of economic efficiency, which reflects how their societies are structured, and their actions with the outside world.

It explains things like the Atlantic slave trade, and the butchering of indigenous Indian tribes. It explains phrases like “the white man keeping the black brother down.” The West sees these groups from their own Post-Enlightenment perspective, and thus fails to perceive (and ergo experience) the universe on any other level but its own. Naturally, they don’t understand that their actions have consequences on a cosmic level, which is very dangerous. Please refer to Pocahontas for more details.

I don’t blame America or Americans. As you said, “the face and the card were there centuries before.” Indeed, the devil has been finding ways to make humanity be unmindful of Truth ever since we were created. But all the elements (and general history) that make America what it is today has allowed the country to be the perfect breeding ground for the devil’s mission. You have the money; you have the talent; and you have the balls. What more could he want?

This can never be understood from a Post-Enlightenment perspective. Think metaphysics!

Perhaps, but both the East and West belong to Allah.

 

As you can see, @Talon, this is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s always about “if it weren’t for our post-enlightenment technology...”

 

Ole Goomba, he is just not very good at hiding his contempt for American.

 

I have been to New Orleans a few times and like its cuisine as well. I lived in America and seen much of it first hand. The good, the bad and the ugly. Even others in Iran, who haven't seen America, and are indoctrinated only to see its warts, don't want America "utterly destroyed". But there are many Americans, including voices you read here, who want that for Iran. There is a reason for this difference, it is related to both culture and politics, and I will explain and expand on it if I find you interested to at least listen.

The continental, European, secular attitude towards religion, born from the French revolution, is not the prevailing sentiment in America. And it doesn't represent American culture and attitude towards religion. At its best, the American attitude is how you describe it, reflecting its legal institutions which guarantee the free exercise of religion while also trying to keep religion at bay by trying to impose a wall of separation between religion and state. But at its worse, what you describe is a far cry from the realities which infect and affect American politics. And that worse is running rampant because it feeds into the powers of a superpower with a lot of means to do evil,

Again, this is itself a subject that requires a whole lot of discussion, but I will say this to you. I am against the perverse and arrogant notion that the 'material world' is the 'be all and end all' of everything. While westernization has brought the same rampant materialism in the West to many parts of Iran, and even though materialism didn't even start with the West and won't end with it either, every truly educated Persian, learned in the country's rich poetic and philosophical traditions, regardless of attitudes towards theistic religion, would be aware of the temporal nature of the material world. Of the folly of becoming too attached to it. Of the recognition that true human liberty includes liberating one self sufficiently from the addiction of materialism and the danger of becoming pets who do tricks for treats. At the same time, I am no 'Sufi': the material world, while not all the world (even scientifically, constituting no more than 5% of the universe -- the rest, composed mainly of unknowable forces, some of which work in opposite of the material forces, constituting 70% of the universe, dubbed Dark Energy), is most certainly the visible and knowable part of the world. It is the part that, aided by the faculty of reasoning (good for striking down falsehoods and dogma and not for reaching truth), knowledge gained from experience and experiments (the sciences which teach us about the material laws of the universe, even if those aren't the predominant laws to learn), and the same instincts found in all other animals (particularly those who have learned to pack) allows us to gain sufficient control of the material world, and sufficient insights into it, to help future generations develop further and come closer to understanding things which fall outside of this material world.

In the meantime, for me, this Quest for the Truth, guided by the instinct that makes love of knowledge for its own sake and not only its material benefits, and by the the light that draws us to what is both truthful and beautiful, ultimately represents what is "Good". While evil is represented by falsehood and lies.

Love America. But don't preach hatred of others who don't hate America, but want to keep it at bay. Not because they don't like what is good in America (there is good in America as there is evil), but because they don't want to be subjected to any one else's whims and dictates. Go back home and make America that 'shinning city on the hill'. Imperialism isn't what America was supposed to be about. And while racism is embedded unfortunately within aspects of American culture, recognize that the best in America comes from truly majestic words found in its Declaration of Independence and many of the things written and spoken to by the framers of its constitution, which speak to the human spirit and not to any of its races and divisions.

Unlike America, which has a preponderant influence in how many around the world, even outside its own borders see it and see others, most Americans and most people in the world are badly misled and lied to constantly about many other cultures and countries. None as much as mine. I know Iran and I know the United States. The good and ugly in both. Iran, ultimately, is NOT anything like you have been told. Besides missing out on one of the most beautiful and vibrant cultures in the world, even Iranian politics (with all of its warts, which are often not about what is advertised as its warts but are even more damning in some ways) and political realities in Iran are the subject of constant false propaganda.

 

So what you are saying is that you don't chant "Death to America", you don't observe November 4th as 'Death to America Day'...a national holiday, and you don't have U.S. and Israeli flags painted on the ground so people will walk on them.



My only question is when did ya'll stop all that stupid ****?