Winds of Change.NET: The Bard's Breath: The Present Crisis

April 22, 2003

The Bard's Breath: The Present Crisis

by Joe Katzman at April 22, 2003 4:45 PM

"The Bard's Breath" is a Winds of Change.NET feature bringing you art, quotes and verse related to our times every Tuesday and Thursday. We all need a bit more than just news to make it through these times: Spirit. Perspective. Faith. Humour. Reminders of humanity, and horror, and the shape of true victory.

In the 1800s, a poet named James Russell Lowell penned "The Present Crisis". It was mostly about slavery, but Porphyrogenitus notes that it has current relevance too:

"When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast.
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of the century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time."....

There's a lot more, and since I found it via Porphyrogenitus it's only fair to send you there for the link to the rest.

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Comments

#1 from iggy at 7:32 pm on Apr 22, 2003

Yeah? Well I don't see the "enslaved" Shi'ite cleric in Karbala feeling "the soul within him climb /
To the awful verge of manhood." I hear him saying "Our resistance to the foreign occupation will definitely take a nonviolent form ... at first." To rolling cameras from al-Jazeera. Are you the blogger from another planet, by any chance?

This is not the French Revolution we're talking about here, a spontaneous upsurge of popular revolt. This is a military invasion and occupation, with the democracy to be granted to the subject people, 60 percent of them Shi'ite, to be subject to limits dictated by American interests. I attribute the current crackdown on reformist voices in Iran, like Sina Motallebi, to this colossal foreign-policy blunder by Bush and cabal. They've simply set in motion once more the same conditions that gave rise to the Taliban in the first place.

#2 from Joe Katzman at 8:18 pm on Apr 22, 2003

The Present Crisis extends beyond just Iraq, of course. I find it amazing that an Islamofascist government arrests a journalist, and you blame... George Bush. Then go on to chide ME for my grasp of reality? Hoookay....

Here's reality. The crackdown in Iran is happening because this is the time when the USA is most distracted, and so this is the best time to try and remove or intimidate anyone who might lead a drive for real freedom in Iran.

Iran is currently very active in Iraq, in Karbala and especially in Kut. Their policy since before the war has been confrontation and subversion, and they know this will bring them into conflict with the USA (currently setting up its administration and securing the Syrian rear). Welcome to Phase 2 of the Iraq Military Campaign... which is still ongoing.

Saddam's regime is over (yay!), but the war in Iraq is not. This will be nerve-wracking, but for people who study the way actual states have behaved throughout history rather than living in U.N. fantasy land, hardly abnormal or unusual.

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