Reading Lolita in Tehran is even more relevant than before
[NOTE: I originally wrote this post in 2005, nearly twenty years ago. I was reminded of the subject matter last night when commenter “Jeff Z” wrote, on the Holocaust inversion thread, “I don’t know if you’ve ever read ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran,’ but aside from being a terrific book, it covers this very phenomenon. The left-wing intellectuals thought the Islamists were lower-class blockheads, but then…well, you know.” Indeed, I do know, having written about that very thing in 2005. Last night I reread the post, and – unfortunately – it is even more relevant today, when we have our own marriage of leftists and Islamists uniting to destroy. So here’s the post again.]
Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran has scored a surprising amount of popular success. I think part of its popularity (aside from its great title) is that it’s the type of book that especially appeals to women’s book groups—in fact, that’s how I came to read it. Most of the members of my book group talked about the book’s main theme: the shocking and depressing ways in which Iranian women’s lives have been stunted and twisted by the authoritarian and misogynistic theocracy in charge in Iran, and how Nafisi and her students somehow managed to feed their spirits by the clandestine study of some of the classics of Western literature.
Apparently, literature can help keep people who live under a totalitarian system sane—the Soviet dissidents also provided evidence of that. But, although of interest, that was not the theme I kept noticing and marveling at when I read the book; no, a very different aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran kept grabbing my attention: the tendency of literary and intellectual youths in free societies to gravitate towards leftist causes that would end up curtailing that very freedom.
Author Nafisi is currently a literature professor at Johns Hopkins. The biographical blurb on the flyleaf of her book states that she had formerly been an English professor at the University of Tehran but was expelled for refusing to wear the veil, and that she later emigrated to the United States in 1997.
But Nafisi’s story, and her relationship to the revolution that devastated her country, is far more complex and ironic than that. The year 1997 was not her first emigration from Iran; she had left at the age of thirteen and been educated in England, Switzerland, and the US, only returning during the pivotal and fateful year 1979 to her beloved and much-longed-for homeland.
And what a homecoming it was! She writes:
The dream had finally come true. I was home, but the mood in the airport was not welcoming. It was somber and slightly menacing, like the unsmiling portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and his anointed successor, Ayatollah Montazeri, that covered the walls. It seemed as if a bad witch with her broomstick had flown over the building and in one sweep had taken away the restaurants, the children and the women in colorful clothes that I remembered. This feeling was confirmed when I noticed the cagey anxiety in the eyes of my mother and friends, who had come to the airport to welcome us home.
Nafisi learned through bitter experience that you can’t go home again, although you can try.
The terrible irony of her story arises because Nafisi herself was part of the revolution that ended up destroying her country. Her tale resembles that of so many youthful visionaries, dabbling in politics like a bunch of naive Mickey Mouses (Mice?) in Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” not realizing until too late the horrors their machinations will conjure into existence.
Nafisi married early, at eighteen, and attended college at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Her plunge into political activism was as casual (and as literary) as it was leftist:
I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist–though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle.
So, revolution was a mood, an essence, something infectious in the air—rather like bacilli, as it turns out. Nafisi describes the group as markedly Marxist in philosophy and in style, sporting “Che Guevara sports jackets and boots…and Mao jackets and khakis.”
For Nafisi herself, romanticism and literature seem to have been the primary motives, passed somehow through the alchemy of her homesickness and transmuted into political activism:
[I] insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings…I never gave up the habit of reading and loving “counterrevolutionary” writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgrerald—but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers.
Once in Tehran, Nafisi began to realize that the unsettling airport scene had been only the tip of the iceberg. She soon came to bitterly regret the mindless revolutionary zeal of her youth, and to realize that her revolutionary dream had turned into a nightmare, as they so often do:
When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.
Although the revolutionaries back in Oklahoma and elsewhere had been decidedly leftist, the revolution they helped birth was a restrictive theocracy. One of the most interesting portions of the book describes how those leftists, at least in the early stages, managed to rationalize and excuse such clear signs that things had gone sharply awry as the imposition of the veil and the subjugation of women.
Nafisi was not one of those excusers, however; she describes her horror at the relentless approach of the suffocating clasp of the mullahs, a chill embrace undreamt of in her leftist days in Oklahoma.
And it got worse, much worse; there are many passages in the book that reminded me uncannily of what it must have been like for French revolutionaries to have watched the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (those who survived, that is), not to mention Stalin’s ex-comrades viewing the purges of their ranks:
In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and ask Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.
“No, I didn’t, but I should have.” What quiet words of chilling despair! And indeed, one wonders how it was that smart people could have been so dumb; by the mid-to late-1970’s, when Nafisi and her friends were supporting a leftist revolution in Iran, surely the jury was no longer out on the fact that this was a road that would lead to the revolution swallowing its own as well as many others. But we see such a phenomenon again and again, as history repeats itself in its winding, twisting path.
In Nafisi’s case, she seems to have been mainly a romantic, interested in literature almost to the exclusion of other topics—such as history, apparently. Unfortunately for her, she had to learn the lessons of history the hard way, from personal experience. And so, too, did her revolutionary Iranian comrades-in-arms, unfortunately for them—and for us, and for the world as well. They could never have guessed at the trajectory their lives would follow from those long-ago days of sartorial playing at being revolutionaries, sporting Che and Mao jackets, to their final moments in the executioner’s chamber.
And, if you can believe this interview, the Iranian students who took the Americans hostage in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s administration were hardly more serious or more focused than Nafisi herself. Read it and weep.
Nafisi’s story underscores the fact that there does seem to be something in the literary mind that is especially susceptible to romantic ideals of revolution, that doesn’t accept that institutions of government will always be flawed, that seeks a sort of misty perfection, and that believes in the power of youth to proclaim those ideals merely by taking to the streets and wishing it very, very hard.
“,,,And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more…”
Kipling knew what he was talking about.
richf:
Yes – did he ever.
Why were the Chinese Red Guards so young and full of zeal? Why did the Hitler Jugend, who were young, fight with so much fanaticism? Because the young see life in primary colors or the duality of either/or, black/white, yes/no. They are the easy marks of history. Like Queers for Palestine, they are capable of suspending reality for extended periods of time moreso likely than any other group.
These situations just keep repeating themselves through history. The world greatest statesman had it. An endlessly useful quote:
When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”
Eight years back I spent a month in Chile visiting my daughter and her family. It was during that time I found “Reading Lolita in Tehran” in the library of an English-language club she belonged to. I was captivated by it, and ended up writing an op-ed for a local paper back home. (I wrote about one a week for several years.)
Her writing is beautiful, and the subject was riveting. And although my op-ed was cautionary of sorts to Americans living in the twenty-first century, even I did not foresee that we would be undergoing our own Marxist revolution in less than a decade.
The feeble-mindedness of this revolution is underlined by its unseriousness, as illustrated by Richard Cook’s note (above) about the suspension of reality that is necessary to write something as improbable as “queers for Palestine.” Not to disagree with Richard, but this is more than suspending reality, it is removal of all honesty from the public discourse. That takes a devotion to dialectical materialism that one expects to see in Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Or UCLA and MIT. Don’t let unseriousness convince you they are not committed to a successful revolution, though.
Nafisi ended up resolving the contradictions of the Iranian revolution by leaving Iran a second time. I have contemplated how Americans who are blindsided by what is happening in our beloved land could find a bolthole. Canada? Worse than what we’re living through. Australia? What they did during the Covid lockdowns does not bode well for their future. Argentina under Milei? Maybe, although it remains to be seen how long-lived that will be.
I am not encouraged. Even electing Trump would only be a delaying tactic. The Marxists in the Democratic Party are far more committed to Marxism than most of the rest of us are to the free market. And they are in it for the long haul. If they have not succeeded by the time Kamala Harris is as old as Joe Biden, there will be a new generation of Marxists eager to overthrow what our founding fathers gave us.
That’s downright scary.
f-
Yep. I have saying this for years. I think events are going to play out. They are, in a sense, beyond our control. I have been saying this for many years but people don’t want to hear it.
f:
You know what else is scary, or at least depressing? I looked up what Nafisi is doing these days, and she seems to have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Neo
I am reminded of some Venezuelans living in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, in exile from the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. They returned to Venezuela after MPJ was deposed. Surviving family members exiled themselves to Costa Rica during the Chavez-Maduro administration. They could go home again, but not forever.
Family friends knew these exiled Venezuelans in Puerto Rico, were their hosts during visits to the US, and kept in touch with the surviving exiled Venezuelans when they moved to Costa Rica.
You can’t always go home again.
I read Reading Lolita in Tehran in a book club over a decade ago. Time to reread it.
I hitchhiked to Houston in 1978 to seek my fortune. One of the rides I got while hitching around Houston was from an Iranian student who invited me to an anti-Shah demonstration. I didn’t go, though now I wish I had. Hard to believe it now, but it was easy to get around hitching back then.
In 1979, I was working on a drilling rig in Argentina when a very important component of our computer failed (think of all the dust that a drilling site generates- hell for computer parts). An Iranian employee of or company flew down from Houston with the part, and installed it. When an Argentine asked him about the theocratic government in Iran, his reply was that if that was what the Iranian people wanted, that was fine. (I believe he remained in the US. He did not impress me as being a religious fanatic.). Several days after he left Argentina, the Iranian “students” occupied the US embassy in Tehran.
Interesting coincidence.
Neo
She has not changed or matured. A revolutionary in search of the perfect revolution.
I remember reading sometimes in the mid-1980s about an naturalized Iranian intellectual who had been at the forefront of anti-Shah protests at his university – in California, IIRC. When the revolution came and the Shah was overthrown and exiled, this Iranian intellectual with great fanfare, invalidated his American citizenship and flew home to the new, revolutionary Iran – I think to take up a minor position in whatever passed for the culture ministry …
But a few years later, he ran afoul of the mullocracy, and fled Iran (again), returned to the US (presumably a bit humbled) and tried to reinstate his American citizenship.
He was told quite firmly that no – one could not put off and then reclaim American citizenship, as if it were a garment of convenience. He could stay in the US, go back to his university … but it would be as a resident alien forever and ever, amen.
Sorry to be a bit vague about all this – but this was thirty years and more ago, and I was out of the country in the military at the time, and my sources of current news were limited to the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and AFRTS.
Neo
She is not the only person fleeing tyranny to have TDS. Francisco “Quico” Toro, co-founder and former editor of the Caracas Chronicles, is a self-admitted “progressive” who also has a strong case of TDS. One more intersection of Venezuela and Iran, both countries where the revo made things worse. At least to Quico’s credit, although a leftist, he never was a Chavista.
If we restrict this particular type to “literary”, is it possible that the ability of the writer to make anything happen he wants to happen becomes the view of how the real world can be influenced as “I want it to”, and “I don’t foresee and therefore there are not and cannot be” any negative results.
In discussions, pointing out the absolutely given next step, which is bad, is vigorously denied simply by being told, “it can’t happen”. Because the literary type doesn’t want it to and therefore it won’t.
Neo: I am both scared and depressed by that bit of information. Revolutionaries don’t learn, even when they’re lined up against the wall. I have a vague recollection of people in Cuba saying they couldn’t believe Che was a killer. Even when he put the blindfold on them. That might not be totally accurate, but it’s close.
I haven’t read Reading Lolita in Tehran, but from your description it strikes me as being similar, in certain key respects, to Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard.
So many college graduation speeches conclude with “go out and change the world”. So much better would be, “You are, as a group, naïve, fanatic, self-righteous and self-deceptive. The idea that you have an idea of a better society is farcical. The mass slaughter during the 20th century of helpless human beings are the direct result of the disproportionate power of the young. Get a job, get married, have a family; then you might know something.”
jvermeer: You are so right! Between children, grandchildren, and my students, I’ve listened to so many graduation speeches, almost all clueless and naive in the ways you describe. Honestly, one of the best things about retirement is attending fewer commencements.
I have loved literature for most of my life, studied literature in college and graduate school, and taught literature for many years, but I have never experienced the romance of revolution or of the so-called “youth movements.” Perhaps I was saved by faith in real religion, not the ersatz religion of Marxism.
jvermeer, good advice. David McCullough Jr., son of the accomplished historian, gave a commencement speech for Wellesley High School in Massachusetts, where he taught, and probably still does. ‘You Are Not Special; You Are Not Exceptional’: Why David McCullough Jr.’s dose of reality to young people is important.
One might be surprised by Mark “Son of Kurt” Vonnegut’s imagined commencement address he would have given at his Alma Mater, Swarthmore in 1969:
________________________________
One of the things I’m taken by when I look out on a group like this one is how hard people have tried to do nice things for you. The financial cost of your education alone is staggering, but it doesn’t begin to tell the story. In a process that goes back generation upon generation countless sacrifices have been made in your name. The list is endless. It ranges from World War II to making do with margarine instead of butter. You’ve been given the best of everything from prenatal care to college professors. Your grandparents, parents, teachers, and others have burned a lot of midnight oil trying to figure out how to make life more pleasant for you. One of the things they came up with is a liberal arts education, which is what today is all about.
By and large, you’re not a thankful lot. A lot of you feel terribly cheated and that a liberal arts education is a pile of shit. You feel you’ve been conned into wasting four years of precious time. I don’t find your bitterness entirely misplaced. After all, here you are at the ridiculous age of twenty-one, with virtually no real skills except as conversationalists. Let me remark, in passing, what fantastic conversationalists you are. Most of you have mastered enough superficial information and tricks of the trade to be able to hold conversations with virtually anyone about anything. This is one of the reasons you’re such big hits at your parents’ parties. Being a good conversationalist is really what a liberal arts education is all about.
–Mark Vonnegut, “The Eden Express” (1975)
________________________________
Interesting fellow. He went from college grad to hippie to certified insanity to Harvard Medical School to a career as a pediatrician.
I don’t get it. How does someone who spent four years in college think they know everything? Maybe I was lucky to major in Geology. When I graduated, I felt like an imposter because there was so much geology that I knew I didn’t know. My ambition was not to change the world as much as it was to learn as much as I could, and maybe one day I would be a competent geologist.
When I reported to my first job with an oil company, I was worried that they would find out how little I knew.
My plan: Work hard, absorb as much as I could, keep learning, and hope I would measure up.
Fortunately, the geologists I worked with were mostly like me. We knew enough to do our work competently but learned new things most days on the job as we took on new prospects.
Uncle Sam and the draft put an end to my geology career, and even though I spent 37 years as a pilot, I never thought I knew all it was possible to know about aviation. I was still learning when I retired.
How do people get the idea that they have all the answers? I understand the myth of the utopian egalitarian society. At first glance it looks pretty good. What I don’t understand is the people who refuse to look at the evidence that history has shown – Marxism/Communism/Socialism doesn’t work.
There is a personality type that seems attracted to theoretical social science ideas. They tend to be literary, artsy fartsy sorts that are driven more by emotion than by reason. And, unfortunately, it’s a fairly large segment of the population. Large enough to overthrow governments by revolution.
Things don’t look good. To that I’ll agree. But things didn’t look so good many times (Civil War, Depression, WWII) in the past. Somehow, we’ve muddled through.
Keep the faith, vote, and pray if you’re so inclined.
I don’t get it. How does someone who spent four years in college think they know everything?
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This is explored in Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed.
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To contrast this story, a friend of mine and medical school classmate had left Iran after getting into some trouble with the Shah. He finished medical school in California, then did an orthopedic surgery residency. By this time he had a wife and a couple of kids. His parents were still in Tehran and the Shah was still in power. He wanted his family in Iran to meet his American family (His wife’s name was Dixie). They flew to Tehran and, in the airport, he was stopped by the Savak, the Shah’s secret police. They told him that they would offer him a deal. He could take his family to see his parents but, in return, he would have to do his one year military service. He took the offer and sent his American family back to the US. He spent the next year as a military doc at an oil field where he learned to play golf.
He still plays golf and Dixie is fine. I saw them a year ago. Of course he has not been back to Iran since the Shah was removed.
hmmm….a little side note.
I was never a hippy–I am of the silent generation and was raised in the Episcopal Church. Taught to be kind always–to help. I passed that training on to my DD. Several of her high school years were spent at an Episcopal school with a strong international student body. The day after she turned eighteen she married a young Iranian student who was also eighteen. Her explanation startled me . . .”mom this way his whole family can come to America!” The year was 1983.
Perhaps, I should have taught kindness with more detailed restraint and innuendo? She is a beautiful soul who still does kindness and integrity first!
Of course, they were divorced less than a year later as the family was already here and waiting for an answer on their acceptability . . .
I still wonder what, if any, influence the very liberal school teachers had on the decision these young people made at that time.
This post reminds me to the Egyptian portion of the Arab Spring. In addition to the facts that many people know, there was the lesser known fact that Google/Alphabet corporation was very active in ensuring that all the radicals in Egypt had unfettered access to social media and messaging through smart phones. A few head people at Google made hundreds to trips to the White House while this was going on.
So my thought is that while there is the usual “nuttiness” of young radicals, socialist or not, modern technology and communications can add fuel to that fire. Especially if those enablers wish to foment revolution.
yes the Mossadegh cadres and Mujahhedin Al Quaq, appealed to the intelligentsia including the idiots who though Khomeini was a respected Islamic dissident, even into his last days, Imam Quradawi fooled many, in his exile in Erdogan’s Turkey
JJ…”even though I spent 37 years as a pilot, I never thought I knew all it was possible to know about aviation. I was still learning when I retired.”
May be why you are still in the world of the living.
“There is a personality type that seems attracted to theoretical social science ideas”…in the novel That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis described his protagonist, a sociologist:
“..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laboureres were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”
David Foster:
That reminds me of Milan Kundera’s imagology. See this.
Neo…the Imagology post is interesting. It’s true that the person who lives in a modern society cannot have personal experience of everything that’s going on in the way that the person who lives in a village can. I often think of something that a wise executive once said to me:
“When you’re running a large organization, you’re not seeing reality. It’s like you’re watching a movie where you only get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what’s going on.”
If this is true of running large organizations, it is even more true of the situation facing the citizen in a large democracy. Few people can have direct personal information as to what happened with a situation such as the Gaza hospital. They have to rely on sources–they watch a movie, using the above metaphor, and all they can see is selected frames. So the people who choose what frames are seen, and in what sequence, have enormous power.
In addition to particular phrases and images, there are complete ideological systems. The writer Andre Maurois observed that people who are *intelligent*, but not at all *creative*, tend to latch on to intellectual systems created by others and to hold to those systems even more fiercely than the creator of those systems would have done.
“Intelligent but not creative” describes a high % of our academic and media classes.
do they understand economics or history or even basic science, then they really aren’t intelligence, the way many bought the nostrums about covid so readily, suggests the latter,
in the 60s, in the spy who came in from the cold, there was a character of that type played by claire bloom, who is rather inordinately attached to Marxism what people in East Berlin were trying to escape, she dies in the climax so does Leamas
some 50 years later Cornwell revisited that episode in Legacy of Spies, giving more of a Backstory to Leamas, because those events figure in lawsuit by her daughter and his son against the Service,
in pre Castro Cuba, many intellectuals of a center left beat did go on the ritual denunciations of Batista, because reasons, frankly in restrospect, he was probably too soft too clubbable for the task at hand, why
regimes in South America, were decidedly more aggressive
Jacques Barzun valued conversation highly: “Culture in whatever form — art, thought, history, religion — is for meditation and conversation.” That is to say, argument or factual information or specialized research alone is not culture. But Barzun’s standard for conversation was much higher than anyone’s is today.
I looked up what Nafisi is doing these days, and she seems to have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yes. Apart from news about Iran and promotion of her books, her X account is pretty typical anti-Trump fodder. Aparently Nafisi is good friends with Anne Applebaum. She’s also not above retweeting Bill Kristol, Biden-Harris campaign ads, and commercials from the sockpuppet Republicans Against Trump. Politics makes people stupid – or at least some people, sometimes.
miguel cervantes
Fidel Castro exposed the incompetence of Batista’s army, which showed itself to be the veritable “paper tiger.” I have read that about 2,000 lives were lost in Castro’s gaining of power. Not many.
That led to an overconfidence on Castro’s part regarding what he could accomplish with his governance. “Yes, it is difficult to increase milk production, but after all we accomplished the very difficult task of overthrowing Batista.” Actually, it was relatively easy to overthrow Batista.
Castro’s overconfidence resulted in many failed projects- the 10 million ton sugar harvest, etc. Milk production in Cuba is about 10-20% greater than it was 6 decades ago, while milk production in Latin America has more than quadrupled during that time. Castro was very skilled at acquiring, maintaining and increasing his power, but not so skilled at using that power to benefit the Cuban people.
David Foster: ““Intelligent but not creative” describes a high % of our academic and media classes.”
That would fit with my definitions of intelligence as the ability to recognize patterns, and of creativity as the ability to recognize new patterns.
Who said that the Times Herbert Matthews (of whom buckley made that mock advertisement for fidel) as with halberstam a decade later he was talking out of his rear quarters
Batista was a nice guy compared to the wandering coma as luque escalona one of the last great dissidents described him, this is why urban paramilitaries arose in brazil and other places
If it wasnt for mexico shipping him to us like one of those stink bombs the world would have been a better place they served a similar function to the German General Staff and Lenin
Blame “humanitarian” motives. Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez all led a failed coup/putsch/insurrection. Instead of the “humanitarian” penalty of some time in prison followed by release from prison, the world would have been better off if all three had been executed. So much for “humanitarian” motives.
So danny strong the punk that gave us empire and game change is trying to paint castro as a victim in a propaganda piece for show time about the mob
Jj:
Pilots…
When my father retired, after a career as a NASA pilot and a USMCR squadron CO, the first thing he did was get rated to fly seaplanes. Oddly, NASA did not see a seaplane rating as work-related…
Thinking back to the true believers of those days, the ones that still hold fast to their hopes and dreams, and thinking of the eager, earnest young sadistic Jew haters of today, the phrase that comes to mind is
“Meh”
good men make for soft men how did yeats put ‘the worst filled with passionate intensity’ there was a troll at another blog, which i’ll not name, like invoking beetlejuice, because he called me a bastistiano, as if that was some kind of curse, whereas Maoists and Stalinists, see Anita Dunn and Jeremy Corbyn, technically he was a Trotskyite are non deemed unredeemable, they as Burnham a former Trotskyite, described the drive to power, which angered Orwell, even though he borrowed liberally from Burnham
Lunatics tend to hijack the majority of revolutions in the third world.
Iran – Khomeini
Iraq – Saddam
Egypt – From Abdul Nasser to Alsisi in the present day.
Syria – Alasad
A sisi was the best of the available options that doesnt mean hes really trustworthy