recovering economist
Well, learn something new every day, the word Saddam means: The crasher.
So even ridiculous things, like fortune cookies and your name revealing part of who you are, end up being true some of the time.
Of course in retrospect, world history would have probably preferred Saddam Hussein’s first name to have been Darius.
For “Darius” best translates as “to possess good.”
Less crashing. More goodness.
Ok?
The name Saddam is best translated “the crasher.”
-Stephen Mansfield, The Miracle of The Kurds
The problem with
It was drawn by politicians out of political means. See, before all that, national and ethnic lines were understood to be at natural barriers.
Mountains and rivers and oceans make the best natural boundaries. And people naturally divide themselves around them.
So when you tell a people group that has lived in the mountains of a region for thousands of years that they are now to be governed by outsiders, in a capital 700 km away across the plains, it is not bound to go well.
The Kurds know—and never for a moment forget—what most people in the world have never understood. The nation of Iraq is not a centuries-old country with natural boundaries and an organically blended population. Instead, Iraq is a structure of artificial boundaries and unnaturally combined tribes and religions conceived by Europeans just after World War I.
-Stephen Mansfield, The Miracle of The Kurds