Thursday, March 29, 2007

A distant mirror

...not calamitous 14th Century Europe this time, but glimmerings of awareness of complex and textured pasts behind infantile identity politics and brutal fundamentalism as reported in Turkey here and (with less certainty and more turbulently and confusedly) Iran here.

I remember in Esfahan, a few years ago just before the election of Khatami, seeing Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in a book shop window. (One may not endorse Nietzsche's philosophy yet still welcome the capacity for actual thought that his work requires).

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