Nilgiri
INT'L MOD
The point unsaid between Joe and me (he will wince and go I) was that you never truly lose till your own blood turns on you.
Parsis and Iranians are in a state of generational PTSD denial that was engineered carefully over centuries to hold the Arabs responsible for the fall of the Persian empire.
That is what is taught to our children. And how we grow up.
The ugly truth is too ugly and self defeating.
Cheers, Doc
Yeah. But history is replete with blood turning on blood....Abel and Cain stuff (which itself IMO was proto-theology analogy/allegory w.r.t fear, jealousy on divine favour...given the immediacy of which this story took place right after loss of innocence of man after the fruit and eviction from Eden)
China had its (still vastly understudied) Taiping war in the 19th century (i.e fairly recently w.r.t history) which had strong theological core basis (the new "brother of Christ" religion that had taken shape and spread quickly) that then spread into other sub-identity basis w.r.t the Han as well.
Issue with entities the size of China, India though are their vast size and spread, the intrinsic inertias at play and energies needed over time to achieve full majoritarian primacy on what the default theological-cultural essence/basis of the civilisation is.....w.r.t both power centres and laypeople.
So the Taiping war was relative flash in pan (as horrible as the final death estimates are) given the start/spread duration of time and the raw total population of China to begin with.
Compared to Persia which always had far lower total population than India and China (the number of rivers carrying capacity etc along with the sheer geographic spread and hedging of these rivers w.r.t underlying ethnicities and languages too)
Thus Persia saw a prolonged %-wise impactfcul intense stasis+whittling away situation relatively speaking w.r.t its blood brother situation.....compared to the rates that India and China ever saw.....it was just that much more compact in the end.
You are right though when its "own brother, own blood" and you live in the downstream of all of it in the reality today, it cannot really be described in words what you feel. With the Jews it was always cognitively easier for them that way (given their much smaller size of kingdom) in that it was foreigners (Babylon, Rome) that led to their great depopulations and eviction (with one return in between helped by the Zoroastrian Persians as you very well know with great theological consequence upon the Jews).
The generational PTSD denial, in that Iran state even today harnesses from Achaemenid et al selectively for specific purposes.....but has been hypocritically miserly in its approach to the Zoroastrian people that carry that torch.










