What force as political philosophy and tactic is really about...

Francis Fukuyama posts on his brilliant little blog I just found, today (for liberals convinced of their ideological monopoly on brilliance, Fukuyama's website should be a humbling experience) about what force as a political philosophy looks like when taken seriously.

Fukuyama references a story about Iranian independent intellectual, Ramin Jahanbegloo.

Jahanbegloo was released from an Iranian prison and confessed his crimes against the Iranian state. As Rasool Nafisi of opendemocracy.net reports of Jahanbegloo's confession:

"The immediate cause of Ramin's arrest was a proposal he drafted for the German Marshall Fund, in which Ramin had compared Iranian and eastern European intellectuals, and purportedly discussed the balance between the strength of a country's civil society and the overthrow of its political regime. That was his mistake, he said: he had been duped into believing that this was intellectual work, while in reality the document represented opposition to Iranian national interests – an outcome he never intended. He said that now, he planned to go to India to continue his studies about that country, and stay away from politics."

That's what force as a political philosophy really looks like. Americans are pussies; they just don't know what force really looks like. The Iranians are masters of it (though the Soviets and the Nazis really perfected it long before the Ahmadinejad).

There's a reason why liberal democracies developed norms of free thought, expression, engagment, and capacity to challenge government policies and rules. This situation in Iran is the reason. It's just a history of dissent that has already been paved for Americans and Western democracies so thoroughly that their citizens can take that history for granted.

Ironically, Ramin writes this really brilliant case for independent thought along Ghandian principles.

Force is not a philosophy. It is the opposite of philosophy, as a general rule. Except when it is accountable to the highest standards of conscience and thought, force is the antithesis of thought.

And in Iran, it is clearly the most serious enemy of thought.

Love,
Ben