Dennis Hollingsworth

KZKZ

This video is best introduced by the final paragraph of its description in the YouTube summary:

We will DEFEAT this Anti-human and Anti-Iranian regime, but we need the world's freed-thinking people's moral support. Are you free-thinking? does Human Rights matter to you?

The call in this video is for youth, but the repression from the Iranian government against their youth has an ultimate or ulterior object: to limit the freedom of women.

The real revolution will be led by women.

Our "War on Terror", however badly named, is part of a wider resistance from a dying patriarchy (our tribalist legacy) against the autonomy of women. I witnessed my mother struggle against the control of men as I grew up (My father counseled me to find a house-mouse for a wife, bless his soul... the mask of liberal sophistication that my step father wore did not correspond to his actions let us say... and my grandfather was the true tribal chief, period.). Stories of honor killings still haunt the news. The hijab has become a symbol of defiance where it once was simply a scarf.

Still, I find it astonishing that female autonomy is a recent development historically.

Patriarchy will not go down easily.

Here's the summary:

About This Video

Iranian Rap Music against the Islamic Republic and what it stands for. Iranian youth are rebeling against the violence that is imposed on them by the Islamic rule. The world is silent, LOOKING THE OTHER WAY, BECAUSE POLITICIANS IN THE WEST ARE AFRAID OF THESE THUGS, but as Iranians, we will stand up to this EVIL. If you have any respect for Human Rights, Freedom of Thought and want to spread Democratic values, PLEASE Help us.

At the begining of the footage, the idiot Ahmadinejad in his pre-election speeches lies about his credentials as a preson who seeks to promote individual freedom and how he will restore economic prosperity. Just another BIG LIE from these professional Islamic criminals who take advantage of honest people.

On Ahmadinejad's watch, thousands of Iranian youth have been arrested, fined, beaten up, and tortured by the Islamic Moral Police. See for yourself how a young woman cries refusing to go along with their stupid dress codes and the so called officers who are her.

We will DEFEAT this Anti-human and Anti-Iranian regime, but we need the world's freed-thinking people's moral support. Are you free-thinking? does Human Rights matter to you?

And the music is awesome. It doesn't even start until 1:40 into the video. Gravitas unforced. Message and Art, seamless. Righteousness, the good kind.

More here and here. The artist Hichkas seems to be a force behind the music I've linked to here.

Jacques de Beaufort seems to have a few comments regarding patriarchy:

It's important to make categorical distinctions between the patriarchal tribalism of neolithic civilization and the pre-agricultural tribalism of the paleolithic.

It seems this distinction tells the story of how property rights made men bossy, the upshot of the mountain of info linked at a website called Dhushara, the author of which, a Chris King, is invested in a Gaia hypothesis. The information is interesting nonetheless.

Additionally it would be intellectually reckless to lay patriarchal cultural belief systems solely at the feet of Islam.

I didn't. "...wider resistance from a dying patriarchy..." But Islam in the fundamentalist sense is rooted in a tribalist mentality minted in the Arabian peninsula in the same mists of time as when our own civilization emerged. Those doods are super bossy.

But intellectually reckless?

I wouldn't call myself an intellectual.

Remember that all Abrahamic religions have gendered God as male. In this regard Patriarchal belief systems are not a product of spiritual ideologies, but grow out of political institutions that have more to do with the acquisition of land and the maintenance of sovereign borders.

I understand the significance of Abraham as the context of monotheism and not much else. Abraham points toward the Torah wherein the central aspect of the story is about G-d's endowment of freedom upon mankind. This, I believe, is the polestar for what we evolved civilizationally into today: individual freedom, property rights, the marketplace, art (as we know it), science and technology, and restless change.

Although contemporary Western Civilization seems somewhat liberated from the virulent misogyny of Islamic Theocracies, it would be inaccurate to describe Western material civilization as being built upon gender neutral non-dualistic philisophical constructs.

Indeed the story of mankind isn't simple, and it surely isn't about a golden age of benign matriarchy dashed asunder by... capitalistic patriarchs. Applying both sides of Darwin's Law (a proliferation of types in plentitude and then a cultivation of the best types in scarcity) I would guess that the golden ages probably occurred in the times of plentitude and when the game turned zero sum, the bigger bossier guys tried to rule the roost.

Like they always do.

UPDATE II:

I remember this book, it was in my library many moons ago. It took me a while to understand, the kernel was wrapped pretty tight.

UPDATE III:

Evidence abounds.

Posted by Dennis at December 29, 2007 12:46 PM