NM's blog

“Iran is not a country defined under NATO’s security umbrella, not an economy absorbed into a single bloc, and not a state whose path in a moment of crisis can be determined by the order of one foreign power. But at the same time…Iran does not have the economic power of China or the United States, their global alliance networks, or their institutional power to shape the rules of the world order.” It is “a regional power in an in-between place, trying to preserve a degree of independence without being able to become a global hegemon. “The US-Israeli attack and Iran’s response revealed this in-between position more clearly than anything else.”

[Raphael] Lemkin “ breaks genocide into three types : physical, biological, and cultural. He recognized that the events and processes of genocide, which culminate in the loss of a national, racial, religious, ethnic, or political group in whole or in part, could manifest in multiple ways, for different reasons, and include multiple modes of destruction of the group and its members besides the loss of life. Each type manifests differently, but the end result of each is the same: an irreparable and tragic loss of a culture that carries further implications of their shifted future.  The gruesome and violent physical forms of genocide raise the hairs on our sensibilities, and the biological forms tug on our heartstrings with broken families and mistreatment of women, yet both of these horrible forms of genocide occur as events making them both identifiable with an end. The process of cultural genocide, the grouping left out of the legal definition, is a large scale deletion of a cultur...