What I wrote for Politics 101

Di malam sesunyi ini, aku sendiri, sambil mengetik bahan bantuan untuk mata kuliah Dasar-Dasar Ilmu Politik. Not that i’m a kind soul or anything… I’m just finding–yet another–legitimate escape from thesis.

Supaya blog ini ada tulisan baru, bergembiralah karena ini, ada dua bagian saya cuplik.

Pertama, yang ada di bawah entri Alexis de Tocqueville

“Democracy in America” itu bukan buku tentang satu konsep, melainkan buku perjalanan. Dalam buku ini Tocqueville mencatatkan berjebah refleksi tentang Amerika, hasil perjalanan dia keliling Amerika pada 1831.

Saya catatkan ulang beberapa kutipan yang menarik:

“”…I know of no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property.” (http://www.tocqueville.org/chap5.htm)

“If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.” (Ibid)

Dia juga sempat bilang kalau Amerika Serikat mampu… err.. “to exterminate the Indian race… without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the worl.d” (dari buku “Democracy in America” terbitan Everyman’s Library pada 1994. volume 2. halaman 355)

Ha ha

Kedua, beberapa catatan kaki di bawah entri Oliver Cromwell

catatan kaki pertama

a.k.a the guy who, practically, single-handedly threw British monarchy down, created a parliamentary government, defended it, and managed to die of  a naural cause… syphilis.

catatan kaki kedua

Ok, I joked about syphilis. But he did die a natural death (no guillotine, public execution, etc.)

dan catatan kaki terakhir

British monarchy was restored after his death. And they hate Cromwell so much that they dug his grave to execute his corpse, and put his head on top of a pole. Some people then evacuate his head and secretly buried him. The story gets better from here, the location remains hidden until this day with only two people knowing the exact location. They’re two chosen professors from Cambridge University’s Sidney Sussex College. The location kept as secret and handed down from generations to generations to, well, protect Cromwell’s head from the royalist. And I’m not joking here.

Kalau ada anak HI Unpad yang lagi mengambil DDIP dan mampir ke blog ini, saran saya kepada kamu adalah jangan terlalu berharap. Saya belum yakin saya punya niat untuk menyelesaikan artikel ini. Selain itu…

Stop reading my blog and start studying.