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Akbar Lightning said:

they cry out for me!!! Allah O Akbar.
Globatron is putting our energies toward world peace, and in this way we honor you Iran.
That video was very moving, especially the level of emotion you could feel in the reader’s voice.
Allah O Akbar
- 27 June 2009 at 3:30 pm
globatron (author) said:

That would be Lightning O Akbar. Lightning is Great I suppose. But I thought of Akbar Lightning when I first saw this.
I just hope we don’t lose focus on the struggles all over the world
going on right now because our collective consciousness could get swallowed up by the death of Michael Jackson.
Not sure how I can help the Iranians, other than just being conscious and aware of their struggles and not forgetting.
And to remember the calls of Allah O Akbar the night before their revolution began. A revolution that I’m sure will see more blood shed before peace is seen.
Allah O Akbar.
- 27 June 2009 at 8:27 pm
Logocentric said:

These are my first impressions after watching the above video. Just for clarity’s sake, this response predates Akbar’s and Globatron’s comments but was delayed by an untimely interruption of internet service. I say this because I do not want this to be taken as a response to or rebuke of their comments. This clip moved me, perhaps more than anything else I’ve seen on this site. But it is hard to say what that says, except that I want to believe certain things, and that the evidence I see is only the evidence I want to see. Hence, I am responding to what amounts to a work of art, put forth by a person or persons with a viewpoint I assume I relate to. But even then, I’m only thinking; I’m not quite sure. We can’t trust the media of messages without knowing something about the messenger. I’m not sophisticated as an art commentator; I am trained to think like an historian; yet I tend increasingly to think that the historian is not very far-removed from the artist. There is no surety in one’s interpretation of the message in either field, particularly when I consider that the message 1) has political ramifications (i.e., has the propensity to mobilize people toward a specified end), and 2) may in fact not come from a source whose position I support. Anyway, here is my initial response:
Are we animals? Is this our destiny? Encaged as if in a zoo, relating to the desperate cries at night of other animals, encaged? Unable to say anything that would make sense of the zoo. Where is this place? What are we?
Is there no comfort except in the illusion that I belong in my separate place? So impressed with misfortune that I am no longer alive to the other? Have I taken the past for granted? Have I forgotten to ask for the substance of history, seeking instead my fortune? My daily feeding. My identification with this cage. Am I alive while others die? Am I a free person while others are taken from their homes and taken to dark places?
But what is the end of this? How should I relate to this feeling of desperation? What is the end of relating to the other? More dying? More desperation? An invasion of hope from one cage to the next?
I am caught in a mindset that tells me that in order to participate in the world, I must behave as a national—as a member of this territory called America. That I am to recognize this house in which I sit tonight, this computer at which I write, the money that I spend for internet service, which allows me to see an image of Iran, as the sum of my reality, the elements of an identity that mediates my relationship to suffering. And I admit that for all my discomfort, there is an illusion of security in that identity. I admit that the illusion is often enough to keep me from losing consciousness, some form of it. I have access to memories of security in this cage, from which I can scream into the night.
But what is there but an illusion of security? Is this outpost of Iran, the newest version of an old civilization, not a precursor for perhaps the West? Instead of seeing people going out of their minds in despair, perhaps I ought to see them as responding rather healthily to an absurd and unjust situation. It is perhaps the way Americans should have behaved in 1974, 1984, and especially 2004. Instead, we groomed ourselves behind our bars; caged into the plethora of media snippets that told us what to feel as much as it told us what to wear and where to buy it, each snippet drowned by the onslaught of the next, so that we had nothing to anchor our opinions or to give voice to our rapidly-changing emotions; tied to perpetual renewal, such that to go retro with anything but fashion was naïve (oh, rebelling against your government is so 1960s; oh, isn’t it a shame about those poor Iranians)—that is to say that in America, history is a fashion statement and little more.
Now, there is no turning back. I am tied to an image of freedom and justice, but my own image. And the problem is that I am unable to express it clearly, so I don’t know how it relates to another’s sense of freedom and justice. And I am unsure of how my means to such ends conform to others’ means. But I sense somehow that they would not involve destroying more homes, killing more civilians. At least that is not my vision of freedom. Still, it seems there is no turning back. To what extent must liberation from suffering and injustice be said to necessarily involve more war? That seems to be the ultimate direction of this video. “Save us by invading us.” Or “save them by supporting the next right step toward a world made in America’s image.” There is no turning back. No turning back from the uncertainty of the artist’s motives, and yet the very convincing spectacle that tells you that your image of justice is good and, further, that you have some power to mobilize the machinery of such justice.
I would much rather that Allah came down from the night sky and smote the unjust with his lightning bolts and falling stars. But one cannot demand that kind of justice. One can either wait and hope for it or else begin to act according to the limited knowledge that is part of the human condition. A third option, the easiest one—and perhaps even the most rational—is to watch and do nothing except perhaps wonder where the lines of propaganda, entertainment, art, and genuine cries for help converge. Have we reached a point where genuine positions of morality and politics are impossible to claim?
- 30 June 2009 at 2:49 am
globatron (author) said:

Quickly to answer your last question. Yes. We have reached that point. None of us knows the whole story. It’s all clouded behind smoke and mirrors defending one side or the other. Depends on what side you are on.
America has acted out unjustly to its people and even recently at the 2004 RNC protests in NY. More people were arrested then there were arrests protesting the war in Vietnam in the sixties. I believe it was 1800 in one day at the RNC protests vs. 800 in several years. I can’t get the exact numbers but it’s close as I the statistics last night on a HBO documentary “Shouting Fire” about the First Amendment and our countries troubled history with the freedom of speech.
A good point of the documentary is that the freedom to speak no matter what your viewpoint is a freedom that fights terrorism. If we take that away at all we have the potential of bottling up animosities that boil over into physical acts of violence.
So I’m now a firm believer in protecting that right no matter what they are saying. As much as I have utter disdain for Rush and others if we infringe on anyone’s right to speak up we are bottling up dissension. Dissent is healthy and should be desired in a true democracy.
- 30 June 2009 at 1:27 pm

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