While for many Khamenei was the “embodiment of a repressive regime”, one expert explains the religious reasons some are mourning.
I mean, you don’t become a head of state without a certain degree of approval. Seems a bit oppressive to try prevent people, especially since it’s probably combined with mourning the destruction of a country in an illegal war.
Yeah well that’s quite a tricky one to navigate.
There’s a really lovely lady at work that was quite happy with Khamenei when we spoke a few weeks ago. I was surprised but also I’ve never lived over there and I really don’t know much. Yes I read certain things but my knowledge of the picture as a whole is limited.
I’d like to say the world’s gone mad, but has much really changed ?
I think its one of those periods where history changes slowly, then all at once.
Many elements leading up to this period have been bending and breaking for a couple decades. In the case of the West, (i refer to that since that has been the leading force in the world and I’m part of that construct for better or worse),
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The West led by the US has now failed militarily (Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine only the most notable for their reasons)
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It has failed economically with rolling crashes followed by narrowly dispersed recoveries and increasingly failing to deliver on historical cultural promises of standards of living.
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Finally through wikileaks, panama papers, support of a genocide of Palestinians, and now Epstein we find our legal and ethical standards are rotten to the very core of our power structures.
Organisations like the UN will survive in some form, there is a practical need for the convening and discursive power of international bodies. But the US led order cannot be the same now.
I don’t know where the US ends up, but the path for Australia is clear, reduce our productive reliance on other Nations (costly, but neoliberals were just flat out wrong on targetting their narrow definition of ‘efficiency’), make Oceania as a regional network of Nations a meaningful entity, increase commitment to organisations and summits such as UN and APEC, augment our relationships with our traditional allies to make them less US centric, and increase collaboration worlwide with mid-sized powers (Carney’s assessment is correct).
This is all medium to long term projects. The sad thing is most of this will have to be done after the current US administration have left Office. It will make this change harder if saner heads in the US prevail once again, in fact that would be a significant threat to building a country like Australia’s sovereign capability.
The only way a country like Australia can stay so closely tied to the US is if there is a just reckoning for those in power, and those who have influenced the powerful for their own gain. Such a reckoning would span such a wide range of coutries and internal groupings that it is near impossible to foresee.
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