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Satire from 1909 Iran

Context: The revolution of 1905-1911, the Anglo-Russian active opposition to the revolution, the abdication of a shah and ascendance of another, reactionaries and conservatives continued to promote royalism and the execution of one of them–Fazlullah Nuri*.  “My countrymen I loathe and execrate,   My country is the object of my hate!   I represent the Monarch wise and great,   Who to my hands commits the nation’s fate!   ‘Tis time for breakfast. Put this business through!   Who bids? Who bids? Come Sir, a bid from you!” Quoted in E. G. Browne’s The Press and Poetry of Modern Iran , 1914, Cambridge University Press  * Nuri “was hanged in his turban and cloak, an eloquent tableau of clerical authority subordinated to  profane law. It is a telling commentary on the spread of constitutional ideas that the sentence was endorsed by many of the senior ulema of Iraq, as well as Nuri’s own son, Mahdi, who ‘stood at the foot of the gallows, reviling his father, and urging the [executioners] to br
Justice If you earn £25000/year before tax, it takes the Brazilian player Neymar 6 minutes to earn your weekly salary ! May be it is worth it. A footballer entertains us and makes us happy; he might even help us release some orgasmic energy!  In doing that, he is more useful to society than a nurse or a cleaner.

Patriotism

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities , pp. 25-6, Verso 2006 ed. No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ‘ashamed’ if her s
“Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life … This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.” " If remain had won, we would already have returned to pretending that everything was carrying on just fine. Those people who have been forgotten would have stayed forgotten; those communities that have been abandoned would have stayed invisible to all but those who live in them. To insist that they will now suffer most ignores the fact that unless something had changed, they were going to suffer anyway. Those on the remain side who felt they didn’t recognise their own country when they woke up on Friday morning must spare a thought for the pensioner in Redcar o