January 27, 2007
A TERMINAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE MINIONS OF MORON NATION
AS A POLITICALLY CONSCIOUS American, I have for as long as I can remember gleaned considerable pride from my nation’s rejection of ideology in favor of pragmatism: the belief, taken so much for granted it often goes unspoken, that the ultimate test of a policy, a law or even a principle is summed up in the question, “does it work?” Throughout most of our history (and with the very notable exceptions of slavery, the Indian Wars and Prohibition), our national pragmatism has served the greater good (as in the New Deal and its successor the Great Society). But sometimes -- typically when the public is deliberately misled (as in the genocide-by-neglect deliberately built into Clinton/Bush “welfare reform” and the DemoPublican Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit) -- pragmatism is subverted, Enron-fashion, to serve only the board-room fat-cats and their Wall Street factotums.
Thus pragmatismÂ’s great strength and its great weakness: while history generally proves it to be the most reliable (and reliably democratic) path to the best solution possible, it nevertheless depends for its function on a well-informed and thoughtful electorate -- something that corporate mass media and corporate-run public education seems increasingly determined to deny us all.
Pick up a U.S. daily newspaper, and with fewer than a half-dozen exceptions (and every one of those from cities east of the Mississippi River), you will find the publication edited with a frustrating subtext of triviality, in which some local chamber-of-commerce festival -- daffodils, flapjacks, tulips -- invariably takes precedence over the Next World War brewing one continent away, the conflict that -- even as we read how Suzie Suburban is now Primrose Prom Queen -- is being brought ever closer to a boil by politicians and military/industrial profiteers in one or all of the worldÂ’s capitols. Television meanwhile is a deliberate celebration of the vacuous: for every five hours of Britney Spears, missing blonde co-eds and Hollywood sex scandals, we are doled out maybe five minutes -- if even that -- of pseudo-news, its presentation cunningly decorated by the glitter of random violence, the Shakespearean sound and fury that deliberately hides the idiotÂ’s-tale exclusion of anything that might provoke genuine contemplation or serious reflection. As to the Next World War, itÂ’s not mentioned at all.
Our schools are even worse. The individual citizenÂ’s ability to think logically is the core requirement of liberty, but with the high schools turning out graduates who can neither read nor even master the third-grade mathematics required to make change, with college ever more reduced to vocational school (and even that increasingly closed to all but the rich), no wonder Enron has become the ultimate symbol of the U.S. economy. Indeed it seems we are increasingly too dumbed-down to mount even the tiniest resistance to corporate despotism, whether at home or abroad. Thus are we all reduced by moronation into the shrunken confines of Moron Nation, the global Jurassic Park where capitalismÂ’s Inner Tyrannosaur runs amok, deliberately freed to prey on us at will -- downsizing and outsourcing to its infinitely greedy heartÂ’s content.
Another aspect of moronation is that we are seldom if ever allowed the facts that confirm observation and common sense. We see, for example, how even in the early 1990s, the presence of illegal immigrants in the economy of Whatcom County, Washington had lowered the prevailing wage of heavy equipment operators from $20-something per hour to a mere $10, but we are damned as bigots if we dare point this out, and god forbid we should be allowed to know that scabbing and union-busting by illegal immigrants is undeniably forcing U.S. wages downward nationwide -- no wonder the corporate fat cats want to open our borders to all comers. We see terminal climate change in action every minute of every day -- our own senses tell us our planet is getting warmer and wilder -- but the Bush Regime nevertheless continues its Abrahamic war on science by denying us the data that confirms what the relentless northern advance of certain subspecies of crickets has been demonstrating for years. And even those relatively few of us who give a damn about the nationÂ’s elderly have to look long and hard to discover that -- thanks to the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- pharmaceutical profits are up by half even as the denial of life-sustaining drugs is killing people as dead as the corpses still turning up in the ruins of post-Katrina New Orleans.
But nowhere is the Moron Nation syndrome more evident than in our declining knowledge of history. In a land where two out of three college students could not correctly identify George Washington as the general in charge of the nation-founding battle of Yorktown, itÂ’s not really surprising to read -- as I read on a certain leftist website a few months ago -- the embarrassingly ignorant claim that Islamic hostility to the West is retaliation for the Crusades. As I pointed out in response, though the Crusades (1091-1295) were instead the counterattack of Westernesse against 400 years of Islamic aggression, they ended with the destruction of the crusader-kingdom of Jerusalem and the ouster of the crusaders from all their other middle-eastern conquests. This was not just a huge victory for the forces of Islam, but a pivotal event leading to the final collapse of the Classical world -- Islamic overthrow of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire via the sack of Constantinople in 1458 -- which in turn led directly to the Balkan conflicts that precipitated World War I.
Never mind these are facts most historians accept without question, including the associated sequence of cause and effect -- that the related academic argument is almost entirely an ideological clash over the assignment of blame -- I was immediately branded a “ bigot” merely for having pointed out the correct chronology of events. From then on, everything I posted there was subjected by the site’s moderators to the strictest doctrinal scrutiny, even as my personal history was deeply probed for any evidence that might be twisted into ideological damnation. Predictably, I was eventually denounced and then of course ousted: proof that not even facts are allowed to stand in the way of political “correctness.”
All of which provides a perfect example of how, once dumbing down has plunged beneath a certain depth, the process of moronation becomes self-sustaining.
Not that the Right is any more enlightened. I have been similarly denounced, on Lucianne GoldbergÂ’s News Forum, for supporting homosexual marriage; for refusing to accept the notion of Presidential Infallibility; for supporting universal health care and restoration of the New Deal; for repeatedly posting links that expose the huge threat of theocracy implicit in Christian fundamentalist political action; and for even daring to point out that Christianity in general eternally jeopardizes our freedom: that it is no accident the entire post-Roman history of Westernesse -- even after the Peace of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War -- is mostly the history of theocracy. But in deference to Ms. Goldberg and her moderators, let me also point out that neither she nor anyone else there ousted me for my ever-more-frequent unorthodoxies. Indeed she and her staff provided me with the space and opportunity that brought about my self-restoration as a writer; I left her site merely because (A), I grew tired of being attacked by other posters every time I opened my virtual mouth, and because (B), the encounter with the tyrannosauric reality of capitalism imposed by my involuntary return to urban living had shocked me into a quest for more robust alternatives to the Libertarianism I then espoused.
Alas -- perhaps incontrovertible proof I suffer from a severe learning disability of my own -- I have spent the past 18 months seeking an ideologically comfortable electronic roosting-place. But now, after yet another encounter with self-proclaimed “leftist” malice on yet another website, I have given up my quest as nothing more than a fool’s errand: a search for community that is even more impossible than finding the Fountain of Youth or the Seven Cities of Cibola. Here is what happened:
A poster flatly proclaimed, in a discussion about the site’s form and content, that America is “not in any danger” from the forces of radical Islam.
I responded in haste -- it was a working day for me -- noting that the threat was not only proven by 9/11 (never mind how the Bush Regime had manipulated it into a new Reichstag Fire), but was demonstrated also by the entire post-Roman history of Europe. Which, I added, illustrates the seemingly impossible dilemma of what we as a nation are facing today: we are assaulted, within and without, by the forces of tyranny: terrorism and Islamic theocracy on one hand; the ever-more-overtly fascist (and potentially theocratic) rule of corporate authoritarianism on the other.
Sidestepping for a moment the debate over whether there remains any genuine Left (or leftists) anywhere in the United States, both Left and Right have failed abysmally to identify the totality of the onslaught. Generally, Left emphatically denies the threat from abroad and focuses only on the despotism of the Bush Regime -- thus the underlying absolve-Islam significance of 9/11 conspiracy theory -- while Right fervently denies the domestic threat and focuses only on the depredations of the Jihadists. But in truth we are faced with a combined threat the like of which we have never before encountered: precisely why (if we are to respond with any effectiveness), we must first acknowledge its totality.
(It is an aside -- though an especially relevant one -- that the Democrats have come much closer to such acknowledgement than the Republicans: no doubt the underlying reason for their sweeping victory in the 2006 Congressional elections. But even the most allegedly “Left” Democrats still stubbornly refuse to admit the extent to which capitalism has unleashed its Inner Tyrannosaur -- not only the source of the domestic threat, but also, though often indirectly, the origin of the Islamic threat as well.)
In any case, my acknowledge-the-totality-of-the-threat argument was ignored -- in fact I might as well never have posted it -- even as the entire Islamic-threat history was furiously rejected as manifest ignorance and/or “Zionist“ propaganda. Thus, later the same day -- still (stupidly) believing some degree of rapprochement was possible (if I could but make myself heard) -- I posted a more elaborate response, “Ten points re: the chronic aggressiveness of Islam and how its recognition is an essential step in the process of building a functional political alternative (and thus relates to the totality of this discussion).” The following is revised only slightly:
{1}-The notion of Islamic aggression is not "my thesis" -- it is history and the consensus of historians as taught in the entire Western World before the suicidal dogma of moral equivalence imposed its infinitely dangerous brand of revisionism from the 1980s onward. Though my BA (1976; for which thanks to President Lyndon Johnson for the Vietnam Era GI Bill enacted in 1966) is technically in "interdisciplinary studies," about a third of the associated work was in European history, and my most influential instructors were not "Zionists" but Marxists -- with the selfsame Marxist contempt for religion that originally fueled exposure of the innate savagery in ALL the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
{2}-Despite politically "correct" revisionism, Christianity cannot be blamed for the Islamic invasion of post-Roman Europe in the 600s: this was Islamic aggression (urged on by Muhammed himself) pure and simple. Christians thus tasted Islamic savagery long before, via the Crusades, Muslims tasted its Christian counterpart.
{3}-Save in instances of direct reprisal (as in how the Red Army repaid the Germans for their genocidal savagery in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) -- the savagery of one group can hardly be used to justify or even explain the savagery of another.
{4}-It is in fact historically accurate to acknowledge that the ability for savagery and sadism is part of human nature, and that the ultimate test of a given system of ideals is how well it restrains the human penchant for savagery.
{5}-By the test of savagery restrained, all the Abrahamic religions fail abysmally. The historical portions of the Old Testament prove the genocidal murderousness of the Hebrews; the histories of the Inquisition and genocidal warfare against the peoples of the Americas does likewise for Christianity; and the blood-drenched history of Muslim conquest -- including the extermination of 80 million Hindus -- does likewise for Islam. Moreover -- though Judaism and Christianity have each largely leashed their Inner Savage, the practice of suicide bombing proves that Islam has not been able to do so -- and all three religions remain implacably hostile to woman and Nature.
{6}-To argue that Torquemada doesnÂ’t represent Christianity or that the Ottomans (or Abdalla the Cruel) donÂ’t represent Islam is like arguing that Hitler doesnÂ’t represent Nazism. As I learned history, the Inquisition is the quintessence of Christianity, just as AbdallaÂ’s beheading of all Spanish Christians who refused to become Muslims is the quintessence of Islam.
{7}-I am well aware that the United States financed Islamic extremism as a means to counter the wildly growing popularity of Marxism in the Middle East during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Thus the U.S. continued a policy developed by Hitler and von Ribbentrop during the mid-1930s.
{8}-Those who acknowledge that we created the threat and then in the same breath deny that the threat is real are illustrating (by the fact they are hopelessly trapped within a contradiction), the ultimate unsustainability of the dogmas of moral equivalence.
{9}-The tyranny implicit in Islam is embodied in its very name, which means "submission." (The claim that Islam means "peace" ironically originated as a Hard Right talking point, born of the Grover Norquist scheme to build a pan-Abrahamic coalition of fundamentalists -- Christians and Muslims -- both to bolster the Republican ranks at home and, in the broader sense, to rule the planet: Christian theocracy in the West, Islamic theocracy in the Middle East and Far East. I have repeatedly posted links on this vital matter, and if anyone is interested, I will post them again here.
{10}-For a general introduction to the subject of Islamic aggression, Google "Islamic invasions of Europe" and "Islamic invasions of India." Better yet, read Paul Fregosi's violently suppressed book Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries. This was finally published by Prometheus Books in 1998 after Little Brown, which had paid Fregosi a generous advance, backed out of the deal in terror of bomb threats.
My point -- which I hope is now clear -- has nothing whatsoever to do with whether Islam is better or worse than Christianity: a pagan/agnostic, I am equally hostile to all Abrahamic religion (and to patriarchal religion in general). Indeed I regard the Abrahamic credo to be the most willfully tyrannical, infinitely murderous belief system ever spawned by human consciousness -- its murderousness especially evident in capitalism and ever more undeniable as capitalism inevitably matures into fascism. Thus I am merely re-acknowledging a related truth suppressed by the political “correctness” of the past two decades: the equally undeniable fact of radical Islam's oft-demonstrated and historically proven hatred of Western Civilization, a hatred in which 9/11 -- the U.S. government’s curious obliviousness to the threat aside -- is merely another exclamation point.
But beyond that is a much broader and far more pivotal point: as I said before, our situation is historically unique -- and uniquely difficult -- in that we are equally threatened from within and without: from without by the forces of radical Islam, from within by the forces of tyranny mustered by the Republicans and their Democratic collaborators in service to corporate fascism. Moreover, each of the two threats originates ultimately from the core ethos of Abrahamic religion: the notion of a master race or ruling class of “god’s chosen people” that animates not only Islam but also capitalism and in fact fuels the capitalist transition to overt fascism as well. And until we acknowledge these facts -- which I believe the vast majority of Americans already sense at least dimly -- any solutions we might propose will be invalidated by contradictions.
Just as U.S. foreign policy deliberately inflamed Islamic extremism (ultimately to defend capitalist depredation), so does Madison Avenue deliberately inflame the frenzies of acquisition that motivate so much domestic crime. But in neither case does the cause of the assault relieve us of the necessity for self-defense: not unless we are suicidal.
However, once we have come to that realization -- and once we stop the foolish adoration of the alien implicit in the denial of Islamic history and dogma -- we are finally and at long last in a position to begin thinking about how the redistribution of wealth (both at home and abroad) might actually bring humanity not only to the threshold of world peace but to a realistic possibility of surviving the impending double apocalypse of petroleum exhaustion and terminal climate change.
Obviously I believe socioeconomic change is the key -- in fact the only key -- to all of this. I also believe the American public is ready to embrace such a change -- that what we must do is set aside the self-defeating fantasy we somehow magically have the power to “enlighten” the public but rather and instead learn how to express the public’s yearnings in a manner sufficiently dynamic to convert expression to action.
Which is, of course, the great advantage still inherent in our Constitutional system -- never mind its present-day captivity in the Avignon of corporate tyranny.
The response to these points was a rampage of denunciation, ongoing even now (five days later), in which my arguments were labeled “bullshit” and my writing attacked as “smoke puffs and loud clanging noises and other Wizard of Oz shit”; in which I was damned as “openly reactionary,” my opinion characterized as both a “Big Lie” and a “big crap you are trying to take on us about how it’s our moral duty to go kill some A-rabs”; in which everything I had written was finally dismissed once-and-for-all as the ravings of a lunatic: “hey this guy is nuts.” All this on a site presumably dedicated to the open discussion essential to arrive at some sort of meaningful socioeconomic and political statement that addresses the present crisis that afflicts the United States -- Islamic aggression from without, capitalist aggression from within -- potentially our nation’s destruction whether by way of additional suicide-bombings or the slower but equally deadly ruination of downsizing and outsourcing that is subjugating all of us into sweatshops and wage slavery.
Thus -- even on a website that vowed its dedication to transcending ideology and searching directly for pragmatic solutions to the crisis (and never mind the fact my hostility to all Abrahamic religion is well known) -- the membership required me to regard Islam as not just beyond criticism but so utterly sacrosanct, even its true history is to be suppressed. And when the site-moderator strenuously objected to the fact I was being not debated but trashed, he too was attacked, the validity of his protestations first denied, then dismissed as “over-dramatic bull shit.”
Though I had been drawn to the site by my great respect for its moderator (an admiration now further reinforced by his bold refusal to be shouted down by my detractors), and though I was genuinely smitten by the site’s unique promise of pragmatism, the astonishing venomousness of the ensuing controversy quickly convinced me my participation there was pointless, and I posted my withdrawal accordingly. Subsequent admissions of premeditated malice -- “hey this guy is nuts” (as if to say, “and therefore good riddance“) -- merely confirmed my adversaries had imported their hatefulness from elsewhere and had carefully nurtured it in anticipation of an opportunity for ambush.
It was admittedly an uncomfortable experience but it was also undeniably worthwhile.
In the first place -- slow learner that I am -- I can no longer avoid the fact the label “Left” in the United States has degenerated mostly into another fad-name (perhaps synonymous with “liberal” and “progressive”) for a vindictively conformist cult of romantic delusion. The cult is based on the reflexive deification of everything that is alien: the paradoxical notion anything foreign (or any one foreign-born) is intrinsically superior to anything (or any one) indigenous to the United States -- even if the alien ethos is defined by the practice of torturing women and children to death for the alleged crimes of adultry, fornication and homosexuality. Hence the cult’s gatekeeper-doctrine -- the test that determines whether one is admitted to the ideological inner sanctum -- is mandatory denial of the Jihadist threat. Fail this test (as I did by asserting the historical reality of Islamic aggression), and you’ll be forever excluded from the entire American leftist community, no matter your views on class struggle or terminal climate change or the ultimate slave-world that lurks within the New Order of the Global Economy. There are a few other such arbitrary tests too: support for illegal immigration, forcible disarmament, politically “correct” subversion of First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Fail any of these tests -- this is by far the most memorable lesson of my 18-month odyssey through the leftist sector of the blogosphere -- and you’ll be relentlessly hunted across electronic space by a coterie of self-appointed Robespierres, all frothing at their virtual mouths to expose your slightest deviation from political “correctness” and thus ensure you are denied any significant audience.
In the second place, now I am finally beginning to understand why it is at least arguable the current anti-war movement is merely another expression of the Left-cultÂ’s adoration of everything and anything non-American: note that its definition of peace activism never extends to demands for a moratorium on capitalÂ’s endless war against U.S. labor, or on the bourgeoisieÂ’s campaigns of contempt and belittlement perpetually waged against blue-collar and rural citizens of North America. It is not so much anti-American as it is indifferent to Americans: why else, for example, do the cultsÂ’ members -- even as they rail against battlefield deaths 12,000 miles distant -- so often ignore the domestic atrocities of deaths in the workplace and fatalities inflicted by denial of medical care?
In the third place, I realize that what my online writing has become is an expression of my political independence -- and it is in fact a huge compliment that neither it nor I have been granted any sort of ideological home. Why then should I not consciously make it also a celebration of my independence? Especially since it was out of this very independence I crafted the name Wolfgang von Skeptik.
For now I see more clearly than ever before how AmericaÂ’s one ultimately defining trait -- the hugely creative, vastly productive, intuitively democratic pragmatism I cited at the beginning of this piece -- is being undermined by moronation: another victim of the ignorance, conformity, intolerance, anti-intellectuality and self-destructiveness of the Moron Nation in which we are increasingly confined by our corporate masters, an affliction ever more obvious no matter where on the political spectrum one happens to focus.
Posted by: Loren at
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1
hey Loren
believe it or not, I feel bad about the things you describe, and I am not going to post anything inflammatory on your blog here.
However, you did coompletely and intentionally take the line about "this guy is nuts/headcase" out of context and reader's of your blog should be aware of that.
That line was meant as a DEFENSE of you vs those who were hurtling that accusation (you know who they were) and in the process of presenting this one-sided entry you have alienated of you biggest (and few) unconditional supporters.
I wish you the best
Posted by: kidoftheblackhole at January 27, 2007 04:27 PM (SHmzm)
2
If your intention was as you say, KOBH, it was surely not clear to me or to the moderator, who took the "nut case" comment exactly the same way I did. Nevertheless, there was neither misrepresentation nor quoting out-of-context, since I very deliberately avoided any individual attribution of the remarks (which as you acknowledge were quoted accurately), chosing instead to portray not the individuals but the collective malice underlying the entire episode. Moreover -- and just as you admit -- "hey this guy's a nut case" was in fact among the central allegations of my detractors. Thus neither of us have said anything here for which retraction is due -- all the more so since your identity remains safely concealed behind your screen name. And of course I appreciate your input, for which thanks.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 27, 2007 05:41 PM (RJF8+)
3
Westernesse
Will you expound on this please sir?
I am ignorant of the term but for blindpig's reference that it (may/) orginate with HRR Tolkien.
I might have some other questions. As you can see by the early reference to this word in your piece, I have not yet covered all of the ground before stopping to ask this. Nor have I read the linked article from the Economist yet.
Best,
Rusty
Posted by: pple at January 27, 2007 07:30 PM (sqaGv)
4
Whoops.
I already have another question, this time regarding a comment I had not yet read either.
Quote:
the line about "this guy is nuts/headcase" out of context.
That line was meant as a DEFENSE of you vs those who were hurtling that accusation (you know who they were)
--end quote--
This is illuminating (and most unexpected!) though I hope for further illucidation.
For a bunch of people hating on you Loren, we sure do admire you!
Knock me over with a feather.
Then teach me something while I am still and quiet, dazed by the communication breakdown
Rusty
Posted by: pple at January 27, 2007 07:35 PM (sqaGv)
5
Pardon the spelling error above. No edit function EXPOSES me every time!
Posted by: pple at January 27, 2007 07:36 PM (sqaGv)
6
Hello Rusty. "Westernesse" is indeed a Tolkienism, used here (as I have used it for a long time) as a synonym for Western Civilization mainly because I think it is actually a better, more inclusive and far more accurate term than "Christendom," not the least because Western Civilization begins not with the Cross but with the Standing Stone (as in Stonehenge) and is thus about 2500 years older than we have been led to believe. As to the "nut case" quote (and the fact it was NOT out of context as I used it here), please see my response to KOBH above.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 27, 2007 08:37 PM (RJF8+)
7
Fodder:
Even your elucidation falls short of the complexity of this writer's approach... his premise "Poltical Islam is a threat."
Copyleft: Mansoor Hekmat Internet Archive (marxists dot org) 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Written: Winter, 2001
First Published: Porsesh, a Quarterly Journal of Politics, Society and Culture, Number 3, Winter 2001 in Persian. Others participating in the round table were: Olivier Roy, Graham Fuller, Ervand Abrahamian and Ian Lesser.
Source: Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI Briefing)
Translators: Fariborz Pooya, Maryam Namazie
Transcription/Markup: Worker-Communist Party of Iran/Brian Basgen
http:// www. marxist s .org/archive/hekmat-mansoor/2001/misc/rise-fall-islam.htm
Question: What is your interpretation of concepts such as Islamic fundamentalism and political Islam? What is the difference between the two?
Mansoor Hekmat: I do not use the expression Islamic fundamentalism because I believe it is a calculated Right wing interpretation, which deliberately presents a misleading image of contemporary Islam and Islamic movements. What is real is the emergence of political Islam. In my opinion, political Islam is a contemporary reactionary movement; which has no relation, other than in form, to the late 19th and early 20th century Islamic movements. As for its social content and socio-political and economic objectives, this new movement is completely rooted in contemporary society. It is not a repeat of the same old phenomenon. It is the result of a defeated - or better put - aborted project of Western modernisation in Moslem-inhabited Middle Eastern countries from the late 60s and early 70s as well as a decline in the secular-nationalist movement, which was the main agent of this economic, administrative and cultural modernisation. The ideological and governmental crisis in the region heightened. With this political-ideological vacuum and the local bourgeoisie's confusion, the Islamic movement came to the fore as a Right-wing alternative for the reorganisation of bourgeois rule to confront the Left and the working class, which had emerged with the rise of capitalism. Even so, without the 1978-79 developments in Iran, these movements would still not have had a chance and would have remained marginal. It was in Iran that this movement organised itself as a state and turned political Islam into a considerable force in the region.
In my opinion, political Islam is a general title referring to the movement which sees Islam as the main vehicle for a Right wing restructuring of the ruling class and creating a anti-Left state in these societies. As such, it confronts and competes with other poles within the capitalist world, especially hegemonic blocs, over its share of power and influence in the world capitalist order. This political Islam does not necessarily have any given or defined Islamic jurisprudent and scholastic content. It is not necessarily fundamentalist and doctrinaire. This political Islam encompasses a varied and wide range of forces- from the political and ideological flexibility and pragmatism of Khomeini, to the rigid circles in the Right faction of the Iranian government; from the 'soft' and Western-looking Freedom Movement of Mehdi Bazargan and Nabih Berry's Amal, to the Taliban; from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to the 'Islamic Protestantism' of the likes of Soorosh and Eshkevari in Iran.
Western powers, the media and their academic world have put forth the notion of fundamentalism in order to separate the terrorist and anti-Western veins of this Islamic movement from its pro-Western and conciliatory branches. They call the anti-Western sections fundamentalist and they attack fundamentalism so they can maintain political Islam as a whole, which for the moment is an irreplaceable foundation of anti-Socialist and Right wing rule in the region. The anti-Western currents, however, are not necessarily the fanatic and rigid factions of this movement. The most fundamentalist sections of the Islamic camp such as the Taliban and Saudi Arabia are the closest friends of the West.
Question: To what extent is the gaining of power by Islamists a sign of religious regression? Is this religious regression in these societies, a return to religious values and beliefs in personal and social life?
Mansoor Hekmat: I think that this not rooted in a revival of Islam as an ideological system. This is not ideological Islam, rather it is political Islam based on specific political equations. Clearly, with the rise of the power of political Islam, pressure to revive religious appearances in society intensifies. This, however, is a political pressure. The people sometimes yield to these pressures. This Islamic 'renaissance' is backed by violence and terror, which takes one form in Algeria and another in Iran. In Iran, quite the reverse, the reality is that the rise of political Islam and religious rule has caused a staggering anti-Islamic backlash, in both ideological and personal spheres. The emergence of political Islam in Iran has become the prelude to an anti-Islamic and anti-religious cultural revolution in people's minds, particularly amongst the young generation, which will stun the world with an immense explosion and will proclaim of the practical end of political Islam in the whole of Middle East.
Question: Some say the fall of the Islamic Republic will not be the last nail in the coffin of the Islamic movement, because other trends, particularly non-Shiites, could disassociate themselves from this defeat. Do you agree with this analysis?
Mansoor Hekmat: In my opinion, the Islamic movement in the Middle East and internationally will run out of breath with the fall of the Islamic regime in Iran. The question is not that Islamic Iran will be a defeated model, which others can disassociate themselves from. The Islamic Republic's defeat will arise within the context of an immense mass secularist uprising in Iran, which will touch the foundations of reactionary Islamic thought and not only discredit but condemn it in world opinion. The defeat of the Islamic regime will be comparable to the fall of Nazi Germany. No fascist can easily hold on to their position by merely distancing themselves organisationally and ideologically from this fallen pole. The entire movement will face decades of stagnation. The defeat of political Islam in Iran is an anti-Islamist victory, which will not end within the confines of Iran.
Question: You do not accept descriptions of countries like Iran as 'Islamic countries'. Why not?
Mansoor Hekmat: Any classification and labelling has a purpose behind it. Islam has been around in Iran for one thousand four hundred years and has obviously left its mark on certain things. But this is only one element in portraying this society � the same way that oppression, monarchy, police state, industrial backwardness, ethnicity, language, script, political history, pre-Islamic way of life, people's physical characteristics, international relations, geography and weather, diet, size of country, population concentration, economic relations, level of urbanisation, architecture, etc. are. All of these express real characteristics of the society. Now if out of the hundreds of factors that create differences between Iran and Pakistan, France and Japan, someone insists on pointing to the presence of Islam in some aspects of life in this society and brands all of us with this label - from anti-religious individuals like Dashty, Hedayat and you and I to the great majority who do not see themselves as believers and are not concerned about Islam and the clergy - then they must have a specific agenda. Iran is not an Islamic society; the government is Islamic. Islam is an imposed phenomenon in Iran, not only today but also during the monarchy, and has remained in power by oppression and murder. Iran is not an Islamic society. They have tried to make it Islamic by force for twenty years and failed. Calling the Iranian society Islamic is part of the reactionary crusade to make it Islamic.
Question: Do you see political Islam as a durable force in the political structure of Middle Eastern and North African Moslem-inhabited countries?
Mansoor Hekmat: Durability is a relative concept. Eventually there will come a time when the region will completely repel Islam and turn it into an antiquated phenomenon. Though it will still exist for people to watch, research, and even follow, it will in practice not play any part in people's lives. When this time will come, however, entirely depends on political trends in these countries and specifically the struggle for socialism and freedom. It is possible that still more generations will be forced to endure this Islam; and most definitely, some 'scholars' will see Islam as eternal. But there is nothing eternal and structural in the Middle East's Islamism. Progressive movements can close Islamism's chapter. The time to rid Iran of Islam can arrive very soon. In my opinion, the Islamic Republic and with it political Islam is in the process of being eradicated in Iran. If the political pressure of Islam and Islamism is eliminated, then the shallowness and emptiness of what is called the cultural dominance of Islam in a society like Iran will quickly become obvious. From being the stronghold of political Islam, within a few years, Iran will be the centre of and a leader in the fight against it.
In my opinion, terrorism is one of the forms in which political Islam will continue to exist in the region. The fight against Islamic terrorism will continue in the region after the victory of humanity over Islam for a few years. Sweeping away Islamic terror groups will require more time.
Question: In some earlier writings, you have largely linked the Islamic movement's renewal to the Palestinian Question and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Other participants in this roundtable discussion do not share your particular emphasis on this linkage.
Mansoor Hekmat: I think they have a static view of the issue. The issue is not only what problems and tensions have given rise to the Islamic movement. Although even within this limited context, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian question and the presence of an ethnic-religious-imperialist 'enemy,' to which Arab nationalism and secularism have succumbed, is a main source of the emergence of the Islamic movement as an alternative claim to power. The more important question is: what direction would the dominant ideological, political and cultural trends in the 20th century push the Arab- and Moslem-inhabited Middle East, if there were no Palestinian question and Israel had not been created in this particular geography? How much could this region have had the opportunity to get integrated into the 'Western' world order, like Latin America and South East Asia, for example? How far could capitalism, technology, industry and Western capital - with all its administrative and cultural levelling and assimilating force -- develop in the Middle East? How much could Islam like other 20th century religions become a recognised, modernised, moderated and absorbed strand in world capitalism's political superstructure? The issue is not whether or not the Palestinian question and this ongoing conflict have given rise to the new political Islam (though I think it has had a large share in it), but rather to what extent this conflict has prevented Moslems and Moslem-inhabited countries from integrating into the mainstream of the 20th century and the world capitalist system. How much has economic development, transfer of technology, integration into dominant Western culture, the development of the foundations of a capitalist civil society, the growth of Western-style political and administrative institutions, and the development of Western intellectual and cultural trends of thought (including secularism, modernism and liberalism) in these countries been hampered by the Palestinian question?
The process of modernisation, secularisation and westernisation of Islam-ridden countries had begun at the beginning of the 20th century and had, until the 1960s, achieved numerous results as well. The West, however, regarded the integration of the Middle Eastern society into the Western capitalist camp as unfeasible and unachievable because of the Palestinian question, a regional conflict that echoed a fundamental global polarisation during the Cold War, and because of its own strategic alliance with Israel. The real challenge to religious reaction can now only come from Socialism, but historically the rise of militant political Islam in the Middle East was the result of the defeat of bourgeois nationalism, secularism and modernism in these countries, which theoretically could and was even about to digest Islamism. Even if there was no talk of 'Islamic Protestantism', this process could have at least put Islam in these countries in the same position as Catholicism in Ireland. The condition for this bourgeois victory, however, was capitalist and industrial development and the transfer of technology and capital, which the West was reluctant to do because of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Cold War context. Since the creation of Israel, the Middle East and its people have been perceived as evil in the West's political culture; they are among the main negative personages in the West's political culture. For the West, the Middle East is not like Latin America and South East Asia. It is a no go area. It is unstable, perilous, unreliable and hostile. Political Islam emerged in this black hole. If the question of Israel did not exist, the problems of Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq would have been like that of Brazil, Peru and Mexico. Political Islam would still certainly exist, but it would have lingered on as a peripheral and sectarian movement and would not have entered the political centre stage in these countries.
Posted by: pple at January 28, 2007 12:02 PM (sqaGv)
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Comment Submission Error
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Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: marxists dot org
Please correct the error in the form below, then press Post to post your comment.
________________________
LAUGH MY ASS OFF
Posted by: pple at January 28, 2007 12:08 PM (sqaGv)
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I'm very sorry Rusty, about this censorship for "content submission errors." I have already inquired of MuNu administration why this is happening (it happened to Mike too). I suspect it is due to the fact the entire MuNu network has been under extreme attack from spammers lately, and that any message containing links (or even originating from a possibly commercial e-mail address) is thus subject to rejection. However this is admittedly just speculation; I am by no means nurd enough to understand all that is involved, particularly since the alleged "logic" of computers is so often contra-intuitive, even to one who is reasonally grounded in the sciences. Meanwhile I have added the marxist.org link to my recommended reading as "Marxist Reference Library," and when I tested it a few moments ago, the link worked perfectly.
In any case, if this sort of auto-censorship happens again, send the material directly to me
-- and again my apology.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 28, 2007 01:15 PM (RJF8+)
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Rusty (PPLE), I note you posted this on another site:
"Wolf's offense was wrong."
Your language is revealing. The fact you describe my views on Islam (or anything else) as an "offense" strongly suggests adherence to doctrines of political "correctness." Which in turn suggests your efforts here -- especially your attempt to portray a probable computer glitch as deliberate political censorship -- are a continuation of the effort to discredit me that began elsewhere. Of course I hope I am wrong (and I surely apologize if I am), but...
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 28, 2007 02:38 PM (RJF8+)
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Re: Mansoor Hekmat. Essentially he claims that Israel -- and not anything intrinsic in Islam -- is the cause of all the troubles that originate from the Middle East. I disagree, and vehemently so: this is like claiming -- as pacifists in England and the United States did in 1939 -- that Poland's refusal to surrender to Nazi Germany was the cause of World War Two.
Here is an alternate view:
It needs to be said: Islam considers itself doctrinally a religion whose destiny it is to dominate and rule the world. In the spiritual sphere it believes it has taken over from the older Jewish and Christian religions. It considers them outdated and itself therefore entitled to the recognition of its true and superior status, and to their deference. Politically others see Islam and it sees itself as the would-be successors of the Russians and now, strangely enough, of the Americans. Let us never forget the ideological dimension of Islam.
In Muslim countries which are far from the West and its protective mantle -- Pakistan, the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, among others -- Islam requires submission from its own people. Prison or death can be the penalty for those who do not acquiesce.
After the past 150 years of political eclipse, Muslim countries are no longer under colonial tutelage, and thanks to their oil deposits, they are now rich and powerful. They intend to make full use of these advantages and, in fact, are already doing that. Hopefully, some will draw their inspiration from tenth-century Cordova, where a gracious and highly cultured mixed civilization of Muslims, Jews, and Christians flourished. But I fear that an anti-Christian miscalculation may take over, inspired by the overconfidence that the presence of a few million Muslims in Europe may give. A Muslim friend in Paris told me a couple of years ago, “Our great strength is that people are afraid of us.” That type of thinking is also likely to lead to a major miscalculation in the way Islam approaches the West… (Paul Fregosi, Jihad, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY: 1998; pgs. 411-412)
Written in the late 1990s, these words have since been proven prophetic by 9/11 and the subsequent attacks on Europe.
And then there is this:
...a British publisher who rejected this book, because it feared reprisals, told me, “We have to play the game according to Muslim rules.” Obviously I have failed to do so. (ibid., pg. 412)
Indeed it is my own refusal “to play the game according to Muslim rules” -- another expression of my huge and lifelong commitment to the freedoms guaranteed by our First Amendment -- that prompts me to reject the politically “correct” adoration of Islam and the implicit submission to tyranny therein.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 28, 2007 04:07 PM (RJF8+)
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Your language is revealing. The fact you describe my views on Islam (or anything else) as an "offense" strongly suggests adherence to doctrines of political "correctness."
_________
I meant offense in the sense of gamesmanship, not in the sense of feelings, just to clarify. A capricious and poor choice of words. You're quite right.
As for the latter, I'll eschew responding to your supposition. I hope that is sufficient to let it pass.
With admiration, as always.
I'll give you further comments a read. I am glad my link engaged you.
Posted by: pple at January 28, 2007 04:58 PM (sqaGv)
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Essentially he claims that Israel -- and not anything intrinsic in Islam -- is the cause
________
I rteject your premise for want of precision and the messy complication precision would induce.
Posted by: pple at January 28, 2007 05:00 PM (sqaGv)
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Essentially he claims that Israel -- and not anything intrinsic in Islam -- is the cause
________
I reject your premise for want of precision and the messy complication precision would induce, a mess more completely tackled by the writer whom you seek to controvert by opening your post with that false frame.
Posted by: pple at January 28, 2007 05:01 PM (sqaGv)
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pretending that you are somehow above everyone else and under more scrutiny because you reveal your identity online is..ummmm. I mean you chose to do that, no one forced that on you. Maybe this is more about your recriminations about that choice since you can't exactly take it back?
As you well know, I approached you the a site where you were another mere random - just like me - exactly the same way as I approach you now.
I think you are just picking up mikes lame argument and running with it. Personally I'd drop it faster than a turd sandwich.
So, what is the intent of that argument? That I should be browbeat into revealing myself in some way as though that has any significance?
Secondly, I didn't say I thought or think you are nutcase and that is what you are misrepresenting.
Make no mistake, I'm still going to browse your stuff, I'm just going to totally back away from any discourse about it.
I really do wish you the best wolf
Posted by: kidoftheblackhole at January 28, 2007 05:30 PM (SHmzm)
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Hi, Glad you're back, although I miss your service as a sort of "missing link" as an L dotter.
Posted by: Mr. Nice Guy at January 30, 2007 07:43 AM (YadGF)
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Thanks, and good to have you back too. If enough Ldotters asked (and of course if Ms. Lucianne approved), I might start occasionally posting there again. Intelligent disagreement (as on most of my domestic socioeconomic views) is always preferable to rabid name-calling and froth-at-the-mouth denunciation.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 31, 2007 04:41 PM (RJF8+)
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January 17, 2007
WOMEN ON HORSES DO WHAT MEN WITH MACHINES COULD NOT
DESPITE MY HARSH CRITICISM of the U.S. brand of feminism -- chiefly for the bourgeois bias that allowed it to be co-opted by Big Business and turned into an instrument of class warfare (note the gender quotas that literally destroyed my life) -- I nevertheless passionately support female equality, and in fact have done so for as long as I can remember: to such an extent that often during my childhood and occasionally even in manhood as well, my friendships with girls and women got me labeled a sissy or suspected of being homosexual.
Moreover (and mostly on the basis of my experience as a journalist and part-time college instructor), I long ago concluded there are some things women actually do better than men. The most significant of these is thinking outside the proverbial box -- that is, solving problems by methods to which we men are for various reasons oblivious. To exemplify what I am saying, here is a videotape of four women on horseback who accomplished -- with a great saving of equine lives -- what any number of men with machines had been unable to do no matter how hard they tried.
Normally I am unmoved by musically accompanied news footage. But what happens in these frames is so profoundly mythic, the Celto-pagan flavor of the Vangelis accompaniment merely adds another (entirely appropriate) dimension to what is taking place. Thus I would be remiss if I failed to mention that in ancient times, such rescuers would have been considered specially blessed by Epona, the Celtic horse-goddess, who by her attributes is an incarnation of the Great Mother herself.
(Many thanks to my sister Elizabeth Bliss for forwarding me the ink to the video.)
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The text in that video calls the rescue a unique, different approach. Maybe the difference is in observing the natural flow of things: that rain will abate in time, that a herd will follow a strong leader. Maybe the uniqueness is trusting that a victim can be empowered to participate in his own salvation. Pagan belief is about our "creatureliness": always observing, learning from, and cooperating with nature. I don't know why the stereotypical male thinking is about dominating the natural forces and relying on tools and machines to do it. I'm optimistic that we can all think "out of the box" and that the tension of our male-female ways of thinking is a natural force, too, that will have a positive outcome. The universe has an eternity of time to shape both men and women. And those horses would have been rescued one way or the other because people had the will to attempt many approaches.
(And I secretly, sometimes blatantly, hum my heroic anthems when I go about my good-deed-doing, and my musicals as I go about living my comic little existence. So bring on the musical accompaniment!)
Posted by: Barb at January 18, 2007 07:07 AM (ndMcN)
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January 12, 2007
A TRUTH SUPPRESSED, A BIG LIE PROVEN, A PETITION IN PROTEST
BECAUSE THIS IS THE deadline week of the monthly journal I write for, I wonÂ’t have a lot of time or energy to contribute much original writing to this space for another several days. Meanwhile here is a miscellany of five important links, the first of which, from
The News Tribune of Tacoma, shows us how corporate-controlled public-school educators serve their murderously greedy Big Business masters by ensuring we remain ignorant of the looming environmental apocalypse. The next three links tell us all we need to know about how the dependably treacherous Democrats are already breaking their promise to raise the minimum wage -- a betrayal that provides yet another example of how utterly meaningless our elections have become: a reality clearly understood by the 50 percent of the electorate who vote “none of the above” by not voting at all. The last link accompanies a socioeconomically relevant letter I sent to Congress via an American Civil Liberties Union petition drive.
*********
Global warming, a genteel euphemism for what should more appropriately be labeled terminal climate change, will determine whether humanity survives or follows the dinosaurs into extinction. Our response to global warming should therefore be the core issue in every political ideology on the planet, for only if we respond appropriately is there even the slightest possibility we might yet save our species. Thus the deliberate obfuscation of the relevant details of terminal climate change is identical to deliberate concealment of an outbreak of terminal disease: a genocidal act in which not only are the original patients denied treatment, but the entire human community is deliberately exposed to mortal risk.
Never mind that an overwhelming majority of the world‘s most authoritative scientists have given An Inconvenient Truth the highest possible grades both for accuracy and for translating a complex subject into everyday language, the Federal Way, Washington, School Board has decided Al Gore’s movie on global warming is…
too hot for students to see without an opposing viewpoint.
It’s so hot that the board required Superintendent Tom Murphy to approve when the former vice president’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” can be presented. And teachers can show it only when it’s balanced with the other side of the issue.
Board President Ed Barney said Wednesday that heÂ’s received about half a dozen complaints from parents that their child was taking the film as fact after viewing it at school.
“We have to ensure that our schools are not being used to politically indoctrinate anyone,” added board member Dave Larson.
The remainder of this alarming and infuriating report, for which free registration may be required, is linked here.
Sociological note: most readers of Tacoma's TNT would know that Federal Way is one of the wealthier cities in Washington state, and that its population includes both a number of top-ranking corporate plutocrats and an unusual concentration of Christian fundamentalists: two groups united in their infinite contempt for nature and their bottomless hatred of environmental scientists and environmental science in general. Moreover, despite its wealth, Federal Way is a textbook example of how America has become a synonym for intentional ecocide: designed exclusively for the automobile, Federal Way is defiantly pedestrian-hostile, a breathtakingly ugly sprawl of garishly neon shopping malls surrounded by suburban developments that range from moderate impoverishment to high posh. Though I covered its politics, social issues and crime from 1976 through 1981, the felony that even now most aptly symbolizes the Federal Way state of mind occurred the year before my arrival, when -- just for kicks -- a couple of rich, pampered and malevolently anti-intellectual teenagers torched the local library and danced with self-congratulatory glee as it burned to the ground. Alas, such dysfunctional pseudo-communities are increasingly the norm throughout the United States: another reason for the terminal appropriateness of the label Moron Nation.
*********
More than any other campaign promise, the DemocratsÂ’ pledge to raise the federal minimum wage brought the chronically non-voting poor to the polls in greater numbers than any other such proposal in years -- a turnout perhaps without equal since Lyndon Johnson promised the Great Society would end poverty forever. But buried in one of yesterday's Associated Press reports is the embittering truth that makes it obvious the Democrats never had the slightest intention of defying their fat-cat corporate benefactors or actually giving the poorest working Americans a long-overdue raise:
The legislation, which now goes to the Senate, would raise the current $5.15 minimum to $5.85 effective 60 days after the measure became law. The minimum would go to $6.55 a year later and $7.25 a year after that.
The White House issued a statement of opposition to the legislation as drafted. It called for the increase to be accompanied by "tax and regulatory relief to help small businesses stay competitive and to help the economy keep growing."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has already signaled that Democrats will accept pro-business changes. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters that he and other lawmakers are working on between $8 billion and $10 billion in relief over 10 years.
The Democrats are thus guilty of at least four deliberate deceptions. First, throughout the 2006 campaign they gave the impression that the proposed raise -- due to corporate opposition the first such raise in a decade -- would be effective “within the first 100 days” of the new Congress. Now of course we see that’s a Big Lie: if the minimum wage is raised at all -- and the report cited above makes it obvious there’s a high probability it won’t be -- it will be raised only gradually. Secondly, Unitary Decider Bush will clearly veto any such measure -- a veto the Democrats cannot override. Thirdly, the Senate is still absolutely controlled by Big Business thanks to the fact many of the Democrats who make up the one-vote Democratic majority are in truth Republicans in disguise; therefore there is almost no chance the Senate will allow enactment of any significant minimum wage hike: never mind that a minimum-wage job is virtually slave labor -- a condemnation to inescapable poverty. Fourthly, the Democrats are already using the alleged minimum wage hike to rationalize still more looting of the federal treasury just to further fatten the bank accounts of the bosses -- yet another defacto tax cut for the rich.
With a thank-you to Truthout, the full text of the Associated Press report is linked here. Facts about the minimum wage including its history -- it originated as part of the New Deal -- are available here. And a revealing 2001 Senate vote on the re-imposition of indentured servitude via “bankruptcy reform” -- the vote provides absolute identification of the Democrats who despise working families and are thus nothing more than closet Republicans (never mind the lies these Democrats tell at election time) -- is reported here.
Though I claim no prophetic powers, what I suspect will happen (and what I believe the Democrats secretly intended all along), is that the minimum wage will remain at its present, obscenely below-the-poverty-level rate of $5.15 an hour, so that the Democrats can use it in 2008 to again bait the poor to the polls and again buy our votes -- when what we should be doing instead (and starting immediately) is begging organized labor to help us (and every other working American) unite in the solidarity of a viable third party.
*********
A longtime ACLU member, I regularly receive e-mails from that organization, one of which was yesterday’s request I sign a petition to Congress demanding the restoration of habeas corpus and due process; the end to torture in secret prisons; the end to warrantless eavesdropping on innocent Americans; and modification of the Patriot Act to bring it into compliance with the Constitution -- all of which I support. The petition, which I of course signed, also asked me to add my own “resolution for moving freedom forward in 2007.” Here is what I wrote:
“There is no freedom in the wage-slavery that is increasingly the identifying characteristic of America's working families. Thus to ‘move freedom forward in 2007’ we need not only the restoration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment freedoms methodically stolen from us by a long succession of increasingly despotic Republican and Democratic administrations, but also -- because political abstractions are meaningless when one is hungry, homeless or trapped in a sweatshop -- the restoration of the equality of socioeconomic opportunity that gave our now-officially-abandoned Constitutional principles such compelling power.”
I wrote what I did not because I expect the present Congress will heed it -- IÂ’m sure it wonÂ’t -- but because the ACLU is primarily an organization of the bourgeoisie: that is, a group of yuppies. And despite their commendable commitment to defend nine of the Bill of RightsÂ’ ten amendments (the ACLU fanatically opposes the right to keep and bear arms and in fact favors forcible disarmament -- one of the reasons I also belong to the National Rifle Association), these yuppies are predictably oblivious to socioeconomic reality and how it intersects with political reality. Protected as they are by their deceptively insulated yuppoid lives, too many ACLU members not only deny the reality of class warfare but smugly refuse to acknowledge the pivotal fact -- still well know in the labor movement but otherwise methodically brainwashed from American consciousness -- that without economic democracy, there is no democracy at all.
Any readers who want to sign the ACLU’s petition -- and I urge you all to do so -- will find it here. (Click on “ACLU Calls on New Congress to Restore Civil Liberties” and please be patient as the secure link is damnably slow.)
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I wonder if Federal Way read this release from Washington State CTED and the Dept of Ecology:
Climate change is already affecting Washington's economy, according to a study requested by the departments of Ecology and Community Trade and Economic Development. Results were released this week.
A team of scientists and economists evaluated climate change in producing the state report, "Impacts of Climate Change on Washington's Economy." The study warns that economic effects are likely to grow in the Pacific Northwest as temperatures increase. A warming Pacific Northwest, extreme weather, reduced snow pack and sea level rise are four major ways climate change is disrupting Washington's economy, environment and communities.
Key evidence of climate change effects in Washington include retreating glaciers, decreasing snow pack, lower summer stream flows, more wildfires, and rising sea levels. Ecology and CTED have published the report on their new multi-agency climate change web portal.
After reviewing the report, Ecology Director Jay Manning said: "This study documents ongoing economic impact from climate change, and predicts even more significant economic disruption in Washington. Our regional scientists expect our climate to warm three times faster than it has during the 20th century, and absent focused efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to prepare, to the extent possible, for the environmental and economic changes that cannot be avoided, damage to our northwest economy will only increase."
Juli Wilkerson, who directs Washington's Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development, said: "This is a global issue and we're already connected to trading partners who are facing climate change issues along with us. If we're flexible and responsive, we can seize opportunities to help reduce climate change effects and benefit our region economically. Our ability to export technology and expertise can help us all prepare for climate changes and its effects," she added.
CONTACT: Nelsa Brodie, Ecology Water Resources Public Information Manager, 360-407-7139; or Seth Preston, Ecology Air Quality Public Information Officer, 360-407-6848
Posted by: Barb Gorzinski at January 12, 2007 09:36 AM (+ciF4)
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Thank you, Barb. That DOE/DCTED release -- vital information on its own -- makes the Federal Way school board's confuse-the-issue censorship even more of an outrage. Taken literally, FW board policy demands that if a teacher shows a film about the Holocaust, s/he's got to give equal screening to the Nazi apologists who deny the Holocaust happened. It also means that if teachers want to show a film about Martin Luther King Jr., they are required to counter it with a film about Robert K. Shelton, who at the time of the Civil Rights Movement was Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no doubt this applies equally to the evolution versus "intelligent design" controversy; maybe it even requires defense of the flat-earth/geocentric-universe theory in response to modern astronomy. But the policy's ultimate purpose is obviously furtherance of the (unspoken) goal of corporate-run public schools everywhere in America: the dumbing down of the population, the methodical moronation necessary to impose and maintain Moron Nation.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 12, 2007 12:11 PM (RJF8+)
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Bugger on over to popi, Wolf. The signup bug is fixed (they tell me).
Posted by: Mairead at January 12, 2007 12:32 PM (RerDK)
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Many thanks, Mairead; will try again tonight. (Too busy with deadline stuff just now and for the rest of the day.)
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 12, 2007 01:32 PM (RJF8+)
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Brilliant analysis and a compelling read, Loren. Thanks.
Posted by: Mike at January 13, 2007 12:47 PM (bUENF)
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Thank YOU, Mike. Will be joining you all at PopI very soon.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 13, 2007 06:59 PM (RJF8+)
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January 07, 2007
AMERICAÂ’S LEFT- RIGHT SUCKER-PUNCH: UNION-BASHING AND CLASS WARFARE
GEORGE ORWELL WROTE “Politics and the English Language” in 1946, but the collective degeneration that prompted him to write this provocative essay has become so widespread (and so obviously induced), the passage of 60 years has transformed the following paragraphs from protest to prophecy:
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric lights or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration...
(O)ne ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change all this in a moment, but one can at least change oneÂ’s habitsÂ…(Orwell, A Collection of Essays, A Harvest Book, Harcourt, Inc., New York: 1981; pgs. 156-157 and 170-171.)
Though Orwell would die in1950, he had already identified what by the 1960s would become the terminal affliction of the United States: the intellectual paralysis that enabled not only the slaying of the New Deal (and therefore the extinction of the American Dream) but also the assassination of the entire American experiment in constitutional democracy -- all victims of the deliberate process described today by a cunningly inoffensive and deceptively gentle label: “dumbing down.” Yet “dumbing down” is anything but gentle. Never mind how stealthy the assault or how slow the resultant death, “dumbing down” is nothing less than a murderous attack on the very skills that define our humanity -- the deliberate suppression of our individual intellects and thus our ability for collective action. “Dumbing down” is indeed the ultimate mechanism of sociopolitical control and socioeconomic predictability. It is the gradual imposition of a carefully cultivated mental retardation, a methodical zombification by which our corporate rulers (through their absolute control of public education and mass media) reduce us individually to mindless malleability and collectively to Moron Nation: this -- the process of forcible moronation -- obviously to make it that much easier to herd us all into the sweatshops of Global Capitalism. As Orwell said, “the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes…”
In which context compare the following two paragraphs:
A new business-backed groupÂ… mounting a highly visible attack against organized laborÂ…ran full-page advertisements in national newspapers yesterday and started a websiteÂ…asserting that many unions are corrupt and have hurt airlines, steel makers and automakers.
The worker's rights movement. I don't even want to say "labor movement" right now because that brings to mind unions and so many of them are corrupt too, doing very little to help protect worker's rights on a bigger scale.
The first paragraph is the lead of a news report, “Group Starts Anti-Union Campaign” by Steven Greenhouse, which appeared in The New York Times on 14 February 2006. The full text, for which free registration is required, is available here. The second paragraph -- identical in its condemnation of unions and unionism and rendered even more venomous by its distinctly personal tone -- appears in a 2 January 2007 moderators' post on Progressive Independent, a website that not only proclaims itself to be the cutting edge of leftist political thinking in the U.S., but anoints itself a virtual messiah, come “to shift the political center leftward to counteract the neo drift our country has been on for the last 40 years.” The post and its associated thread is linked here.
Never mind the issue of Orwellian meaninglessness evoked by the term “neo drift” (however much a “neo” -- whatever that is -- might be inclined to sink in a metaphoric sea). The point here is that the two superficially different websites -- one an unapologetic facilitator of corporate tyranny, the other a self-declared haven for those who label themselves “progressive” despite the huge contradiction of their definitively fascist attitude toward organized labor -- demonstrate identical hatred and contempt for those of us who recognize that union solidarity is our only defense against the wage-slave economy into which capitalism is undeniably transforming itself.
Thus are we led to a revealing lesson not only in the deterioration of language and the prevalence of the Big Lie, but in how the bigotry of the bourgeoisie -- the knee-jerk class-prejudice of the sneering yuppies who are the factotums of the real corporate Fat Cats -- shatters leftist solidarity even as it pretends to do the opposite. Until we in the working class recognize that affliction -- that is, until all of us who must sell our labor to survive understand not only that we are in the most merciless class war in human history but that we have been methodically denied the very language that would identify our plight (language that would also reveal rebuilding the labor movement as the logical first step toward our victory) -- we will continue to sink ever deeper into chaos and thus disempowerment. To paraphrase an old song of the coal-mine wars:
In this our stolen country
NeutralityÂ’s a lie
You either stand with working folk
Or with the thieves ally
O which side are you on
Which side are you on?
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1984 v Brave New World comparisons are a dime a dozen and pretty cliched, but I had a great commentary differentiating the two especially when it comes to Big Brother-style displays or the lack thereof in America today.
Damn if I can find the link now though, I think it was posted on PI once but the fucking search feature there sucks
Posted by: Kid at January 07, 2007 10:28 PM (Nlh1R)
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Exceptional Loren -- Little more than enablers of a class system they, themselves, take for granted-as if the advertisement of elevated socio-economic status makes their efforts so much more laudable, suggesting they could've been successful professionals, disappointing the folks--multimillionaire lawyers! Instead, they prostrate themselves in front of their mirror images and peer down their noses at those who discuss class inequity, while they feel better about the activist service they provide--protesting, demonstrating, waving banners for peace--platitudes replete with acceptance of political expedient realities--which make it all null and void.
Why pay attention to their mindless, clueless vain prattle and back-slapping about shared privilige, effort and sacrifice that we should be in awe of elevating themselves to banish others who may have had a different life path experience. Imagine the gross deceptive hypocrisy of touting unity after they bullied and booted those not in lock-step out. What a pathetic joke. Just like their new age guru, who talks the language of peace but doesn't make political votes to bak it up when there are lives actually in the balance.
Posted by: Raphaelle at January 08, 2007 09:27 AM (xTERB)
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Interesting post. Much different from most of the blogs I read. Keep up the good work!
Posted by: PoliticalCritic at January 10, 2007 07:34 AM (W976p)
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January 04, 2007
RETITLED TO ELIMINATE WORDS THAT SEEM TO ATTRACT SPAM
THIS PAST WEEK I was beset by a worse-than-usual conjunction of the kinds of crippling disasters that typically mean financial ruin when we are impoverished -- disasters that invariably plunge us ever deeper into poverty and thus underscore the inescapable misfortune inflicted by life under capitalism. First my too-old-to-ever-again-be-reliable automobile broke down once more; next my left eye began showing symptoms suggestive of retinal detachment; then I was hammered by the emotional one-two punch of a deeply respected employer felled by a heart attack and my primary source of income suddenly threatened as a consequence; and now finally atop everything else, I have come down with a truly miserable chest cold -- all these Happy New Year presents from Jesus leaving me either terrified or depressed or both and thus utterly draining me of the emotional energy to write or indeed do anything much more productive than sullenly stare at my apartment walls.
Hence instead of writing anything original, IÂ’ll quote other writers' works in enough detail to show why I regard their particular essays as significant -- not to my personal circumstances (to which, with all the taboos on writing about poverty, virtually nothing published these days has any relevance at all), but significant in terms of shedding light on some of the greater issues by which we are now collectively confronted. As always, I have followed the excerpts with links to the complete texts.
*********
On the top of this weekÂ’s recommended-reading list is Christopher HitchensÂ’ superb Slate piece reminding us why it is entirely appropriate to be nauseated by the funereal production-numbers and general graveyard histrionics surrounding the burial of the late President Gerald Ford. (I was similarly sickened -- though at the time I chose not to say so -- by the mindless deification of Ronald Reagan, who was the most methodically vicious enemy of organized labor in U.S. presidential history.) In any case, Hitchens seems to be the only English-language journalist anywhere who dared give voice to what a lot of us were surely thinking -- that by pardoning Nixon, Ford made himself one of the greater villains in the death of American liberty.
Quoth Hitch:
One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn't excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald FordÂ…Instead, there was endless talk about "healing," and of the "courage" that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana republic.
The remainder of HitchensÂ’ commentary is linked here.
Next is Le Monde’s thought-provoking report on Venezuela and Hugo Chávez’s new approach to socialism -- an approach that seeks to solve the structural deficiencies that became so evident in the Soviet model:
Before Chávez was elected in 1998, two parties shared power for 40 years: the Venezuelan Christian Democratic party (Copei), and the social democratic party, Democratic Action (AD). They were adept at using petrodollars to deal with problems. They handed out government posts to calm social unrest but had to comply with the neoliberal ideology of the North and the need to limit public policies. The only way to offset the bloated state apparatus was to organise its inefficiency. With Venezuela’s social divisions, skilled civil servants often come from backgrounds resistant to social change, sometimes because of ignorance of the conditions in which most Venezuelans live…
The Fifth Republic Movement that brought Chávez to power is not a political party. After 1994 (3) it grew out of a coalition of leftwing parties and former guerrilla movements disgruntled with their leaders, who some thought settled too comfortably into the society they had struggled against. Young activists trained by AD and Copei quickly realised that the Chávez candidature would open up new ways to reach power and many joined his ranks…
Now the community is the basic structural unit of government of the new state, legally defined as 200-400 families in urban areas, around 20 in the countryside and from 10 up for the indigenous population. The Spanish political analyst Juan Carlos Monedero observed that the main reason 20th-century socialism failed was a lack of participation by the people. Communal councils may be instrumental in the construction of VenezuelaÂ’s 21st-century socialism.
The full text is linked here.
Last is a Le Monde analysis of the psychodynamics of the war on terror -- the best work of its kind I have seen anywhere.
In the global war on terror…making money has been a key aim. US interest in Afghanistan is inseparable from the oil and gas fields of the Caspian, just as US interest in Iraq is linked to the oil. Beyond that, fresh legitimacy has to be found for the vast US military-industrial infrastructure that burgeoned during the cold war (another profitable war in which the enemy was rarely directly engaged). The demon-du-jour has been redefined as fundamentalism, rogue states, drugs, narcoterrorists, al-Qaida, Hizbullah. The terrorist remains elusive but the targets for retaliation — Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or Lebanon, Iran — are readily found on a map.
As Hannah Arendt understood in relation to 1920s Germany, when a military reversal (defeat in the first world war) is combined with serious social and economic uncertainty, the search for a clearly identifiable enemy may become intense. The point is not to be right but to be certain, however flimsy the evidence. The lack of evidence linking Saddam and 9/11 is seen as an irrelevance.
Through actions that provoke the enemy, both sides may prove themselves “right.”… Today’s terrorists have turned the US into something that resembles their own propaganda: the indiscriminate nature of the US war on terror (targeting Iraq after 9/11) creates the impression that victims are targeted just because they are Arab or Muslim…If terrorists can seek to nurture the enemy’s brutality, the same may apply to counter-terrorists. Those waging a counterproductive war on terror stand to gain the perverse satisfaction of confirming that the enemy was just as dangerous, brutal, indiscriminate and pervasive as they imagined.
The imprecision of retribution may be functional, as in the ancient witch-hunt. There need be no logical connection between the crime and the chosen victim…Those who challenge the morality or efficacy of the witch-hunt may be labelled as witches, or now as anti-American…Punishment may be taken as evidence of guilt. (Arendt observed of the Holocaust: “Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz with the plausible argument: ‘What crime must these people have committed that such things were done to them’.”) Many Americans, deferential to their president, took the targeting of Iraq as evidence that it must be linked to 9/11. On the eve of the war, a poll suggested that 72% of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11.
This disturbing analysis -- which explains why the so-called War on Terror has become self-sustaining and is therefore inescapable without outside-the-box thinking (precisely the mode of thinking our de-evolving species increasingly finds impossible) -- is linked here.
*********
As to my own circumstances:
My employerÂ’s condition has stabilized and, contrary to earlier reports, is markedly improving, and just as his original affliction caused me double grief, this new development gives me double pleasure: the pleasure of a revered colleague apparently saved from deadly danger, and the pleasure of renewed hope our work together will continue toward the mutual fruition we each envision.
Meanwhile, thanks to the intervention of my best friend, who is among other things not only a skilled mechanic but a former automotive service manager, my car is running again: this time the problem seems to have been a combination of an under-charged new battery and over-corroded old contacts (and not the total charging system failure I suspected), a diagnosis supported by voltmeter readings.
Because I am among the rapidly decreasing number of retired persons who can still afford supplemental Medicare insurance -- I belong to Group Health, a truly wonderful nonprofit healthcare cooperative that dates from the era my present home-state was damned as “the Soviet of Washington” -- I now know my eye problem is vitreous deterioration, an unavoidable consequence of aging, and not retinal detachment, which is a complication of vitreous deterioration and presents with nearly identical symptoms but, unlike vitreous deterioration, demands immediate surgical correction lest blindness ensue. As to this damn cold that has lowered my voice to a gravel-crusher bass, it feels as if my lungs are filled with wet cement -- though now at least the clean-up crew (spelled “Robitussin”) is starting to hose it away.
As to my penchant for anticipating the very worst of outcomes whenever such disasters threaten, I will make no apology for that. It is merely the voice of experience: the coldly rational response of a person who has been literally wiped out by many such episodes before, the infinitely bitter personal history of one who has always been impoverished in a land that not only criminalizes poverty but despises the poor -- and therefore the undeniable fact that under any such circumstances it is the deepest and most profound wisdom to expect nothing but ruination -- no matter how hard one struggles to achieve the opposite.
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I think no one's posting bc Hitchens is such an insufferable asshole
Posted by: Kid Of The Black Hole at January 05, 2007 11:02 PM (Nlh1R)
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The Hitchens link is a perfect example of my own political INcorrectness -- precisely the alleged "unreliability" that makes me forever unwelcome in dictatorships of dogma such as Democratic Underground or Progressive Independent. Speaking as the editor I once was of the ethics I still hold dear, I don't give a damn how ideologically unattractive someone might be if what s/he writes is at least occasionally true -- and in this case, Hitchens seems to be the only big-name commentator (at least the only one I could find) who had the courage to speak the ugly truth about Ford: that Ford's pardon of the archcriminal Nixon publicly and to our nation's eternal disgrace proved the American claim of equal justice under law is but another Big Lie -- that the U.S. Ruling Class has a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card. Had even a robotic rightist like George Will dared make the same point, I'd have linked him too. Journalism -- at least journalism as I practice it -- is not a popularity contest. Which is no doubt one of the reasons I'm not a "popular" journalist.
That said, another reason for the loud silence might be that the Pacific Northwest, where a lot of my relatively few readers live, is being kicked around by yet another Pacific storm: the power is already out in a couple of places, and a lot of people are staying off-line to avoid incipient electrical surges. I'm shutting down too after posting this reply.
Nevertheless -- and this is NOT sarcasm -- thank you for the observation. At the very least you provided me with a unique opportunity to make a point about my own values.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 06, 2007 12:21 AM (Lenvb)
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Actually I wasn't trying to be snide really, although I've seen Hitch on TV a copule times and..
I was thinking that the three articles you linked to at least merited some discussion, although I haven't had time to digest them as of yet.
Posted by: Kid Of The Black Hole at January 06, 2007 12:03 PM (Nlh1R)
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Have you considered cross-posting this on PopI? Specifically the article regarding Chavez? Because I would REALLY love to see what Mike and Anax and Raph have to say about all of that.
I understand exactly what you are saying about the message being greater than the source, or even gleaning the significant parts of about what's being said and discarding the rest (chaff)
For instance I just revisited this article today:
http://www.harunyahya dot com/articles/70national_geographic.php
(I had to break the link bc the blog classifies it as questionable content)
To me the challenge is to take those critiques and turn it around so it isn't about God. As a related primer, here is an article thats (half-spoken) theme is that Platonic thought amounts to fundamentalism and is actually only thinly separated from Creationism
http://www.sheldrake.org/Onlineexp/offline/constants/index.html
I wish you guys would get busying righting societal wrongs already so I could go back to studying outer space
PS sorry if none of that stuff particularly interests you or is passe
Posted by: Kid Of The Black Hole at January 06, 2007 04:21 PM (Nlh1R)
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Am taking a mental-health break from blogging (or any other kind of thinking), but will be back soon. Meanwhile please note that Populist Independent in it's present form (or at least as it was late Thursday) is still under construction and had no provision for registering new members; I said nothing to Mb et all because I didn't want to bug them while they're in the throes of site-building. As to the Venezuelan piece from LeMonde, you're absolutely right it would be perfect for PopI, especially if it were linked in such a way my blog got credit for finding it.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 07, 2007 02:49 AM (/y+st)
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I read the Sheldrake material with great interest but could not access the herunyahya site no matter how I reassembled the link. As to Sheldrake, the notion of constants "being immanent in nature" (and thus as subject to change as anything else) is implicit in the core principle of modern paganism: that the entire cosmos and everything thing/being in it is the body and spirit of the Mother -- that in the beginning the Mother gave birth (perhaps so she might experience herself to the fullest extent possible). This is the breathtakingly ancient principle rediscovered by space-age ecological research and embodied in the Gaia Hypothesis -- that the Earth (and thus by extention the entire cosmos) is alive, conscious and self-regulating. It is also the reason every younger scientist I have ever known is a genuine pagan, not in the absurd woo-woo/look-at-me/rituals-in-the-park sense but out of the deeply private spirit-quest encounter with what Zen calls Suchness that is science itself, whether practiced now by physicists in a particle accelerator at Stanford or 4500 years ago by astronomers on the Salisbury Plain. This same immanence is also among the many meanings of what I regard as the most infinitely profound spiritual observation ever set down by humans, the opening lines of
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu's epic exploration of Taoism:
The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao.
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 07, 2007 07:24 PM (/y+st)
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This is something I'm hesitant to bring up at PopI because Mike and anax and the rest of hypercritical of New Age-ism (rightly so IMO) and I suppose you could lump what you are talking about here -- the Gaia hypothesis if I understnad it correctly -- into that category.
This closely mirrors my own thinking, although I don't particularly see the need to frame it with all the trappings of ancient mythologies and religions.
I want to bust out a Phillip K Dick quote here but I don't know which one..
I agree that sometimes these guys do get caught up in some pretty absurd fantasy-land crap like 10 dimensions in String Theory.
Lets stick to first principles at least, e.g. dimensions can be measured with a ruler
PS I also think this is vitally important to the PopI mission, because without some kind of reawakening, I don't see how we are ever going to escape the hierarchical social order whether it calls itself theocracy, capitalism, socialism, whatever.
I got think link form chlamor and maybe it helps put it in perspective a little, even though it all seems so vague to me.
http://www.3rdearmusic.com/forum/fighting.html
Posted by: Kid at January 07, 2007 10:06 PM (Nlh1R)
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Nah, the "Gaia Hypothesis" is a metaphor, with perfectly good science under it. Snot New-Age-y at all (tho it can be, probably has been, co-opted). The "it's alive" part means "it exists in a complicated dynamic balance", which is a pretty good heuristic definition of life when you think about it.
Good to hear that things are not as bad as your pessimism made them seem, Wolf. I find that I go off the deep end that way too, but with me it's an artifact of the (untreatable) depression that's been hanging around my neck since childhood.
Posted by: Mairead at January 08, 2007 03:24 AM (4efLI)
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As Mairead observed, the Gaia Hypothesis is anything but New Age: Gaia describes a universe in which individuals are twigs on an exquisitely branchy tree, implicitly therefore with a consciousness (though the Gaia Hypothesis does not address this question) that is but the pinpoint of the greater tree-consciousness -- or as our pagan ancestors believed, the extended consciousness of our mother the goddess focused to an infinity of individual pinpoints whether inanimate or animate: Ed Sander's "tiny sparks of the universe." Hence Taliesin's "there is nothing in which I have not been"; hence too the formidable logic behind the central chant of the Ghost Dance: "we shall live again." And -- if I may return once more to the analogy of the branchy tree -- beyond this there is the greater community of treeness, what Gary Snyder aptly calls "Earth Household," the implicitly socialist, implicitly communalist realm of being that was instinctively recognized by most of humanity throughout most of its history -- that is, until the advent of patriarchy spawned the absolutism of Abrahamic separatism which in turn produced capitalism and is now predictably metastasizing into fascism: its ultimate form -- of which New Age is a vital support-element.
Indeed New Age is the diametrical opposite of Gaian community and solidarity. New Age is the quintessence of existential isolationism, the ultimate (and ultimately selfish) exclamation of the fascist concept of
ubermenschen und untermenschen, man and superman -- and thus absolute self-centeredness rationalized as maximum virtue -- in exactly the same way capitalism is absolute greed rationalized as maximum virtue.
To enlarge slightly on something I recently wrote (in a New-Age-infested venue from which I was ousted for daring to express these very observations): never mind that the core of New Age doctrine is a fuck-you-I-am-god belief that can only further defiance of the environmental mandates of Earth Household; the fascism implicit in the New Age credo lies in the fact that -- even more than the doctrines of Abrahamic religion (which divide all the word into the
ubermenschen of the "saved" and the
untermenschen of the "damned") -- the mind-over-matter dogma of the New Age cleaves humanity into the “evolved souls” of the "fully conscious" or "enlightened" elite (those “spiritually progressed beings” -- hence "progressives" -- allegedly able to control their own fates merely by the power of their own thoughts), and the dunce-cap proletariat of the "un-evolved" masses, (all the rest of us who for whatever reason refuse to accept the New Age gospel). And just as the Christians elevate wealth to proof of divine favor, denounce the poor as “sinners” and rail that our poverty is proof of our “sin,” so do the New Agers exalt riches as proof of enlightenment, dismiss poverty as nothing more than a “self-destructive lifestyle choice” and sneer at us poor as “hopelessly un-evolved.” In either case, what is deftly ignored is the fact that capitalism is a slave ideology -- a giant pyramid scam fueled by the ever-worsening survival struggles of an ever-expanding underclass increasingly condemned to inescapable wretchedness.
Thus we see the true function of New Age dogma: to replace the dying dogmas of Abrahamic religion and thereby reinforce the genuinely Nazi ethos at the core of capitalism. Just as Christian capitalists relentlessly savage their workers but find reassurance of their righteousness in church on Sunday, so now New Age executives do likewise in the privacy of their own posh dwellings: they chant some self-affirming mantra and assure themselves of their superiority merely by believing they can "visualize peace." Thus too the so-called New Age is merely the latest attempt to rationalize capitalism -- the most ecocidally parasitic, genocidally selfish ethos in human experience -- a fact proven beyond a scintilla of doubt by the huge corporate beneficence that finances the propagation of New Age beliefs. By contrast, the Gaia Hypothesis is positively subversive: it is the missing link that harmonizes ecology with socialism and -- by implication -- bonds spirituality and science in a mutually supportive manner unknown since the rise of patriarchy. It does all this because it brings us back, via science, to the ecological interdependence of all being -- the ancient knowledge that if one part of Earth Household becomes so predatory it jeopardizes the whole, the entirety of the household is programmed to rise against it and kill it: precisely the self-inflicted apocalypse we now euphemistically describe as global warming. To which adherents of the New Age -- defiantly self-centered to the pollution-bitter end -- will no doubt respond with yet another bumper-sticker: "visualize global cooling."
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 08, 2007 08:35 PM (T1afI)
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Sorry, I wasn't really using clear terminology. I just meant that it is easy for doctrinaire types to dismiss these things as psychobabble and/or argue that it doesn't belong as part of the sober, deliberative discourse PopI is shooting.
Which I'm cool with, even while disagreeing
Posted by: Kid at January 08, 2007 08:59 PM (Nlh1R)
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While I emphatically agree with the need for sober discourse, I also believe that includes serious metaphysical scholarship and speculation. Here are a couple of good examples: Graves, Robert:
The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York: 1966 (original copyright 194
. Sjöö, Monica and Mor, Barbara:
The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, Harper & Row, New York: 1987. These works are important because they show how the present apocalyptic crises are the direct result of the values implicit in Abrahamic religion, from which capitalism and fascism are each logical progressions. To round out the anthropology and metaphsics with solid eco-political theory, try Kovel, Joel:
The Enemy of Nature: the End of Capitalism Or the End of the World, Zed Books Ltd.: London 2002. The last volume, which I am reading now, is predictably difficult to find in the United States but can be ordered through Amazon (no doubt with your name reported to Homeland Security accordingly).
Posted by: Loren Bliss at January 09, 2007 12:30 AM (T1afI)
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You have an uncanny ability to integrate things that superficially seem partitioned off from each other.
Remind me never to debate metaphysics with you
Posted by: Kid at January 09, 2007 08:23 AM (Nlh1R)
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Kid wrote: "I just meant that it is easy for doctrinaire types to dismiss these things as psychobabble and/or argue that it doesn't belong as part of the sober, deliberative discourse PopI is shooting."
In doing that, they betray their shallowness of understanding. Consider: we ourselves are not unitary organisms. We're actually a bundle of cooperating organisms that somehow has acquired an overarching, unitary-feeling sense of identity.
But if one of the famous bug-eyed aliens came down and picked one of us up to do a little anal probing or whatever, they could pick their victim to bits without ever discovering the bit that holds the "me" part. Each and every part of us is the same little "poached egg"-looking cell, mas o mene, yet something about their juxtaposition appears to create a gestalt that somehow, somewhere, holds the "me" part.
How could we even
test whether Earth also has a "me"?
Posted by: Mairead at January 11, 2007 04:26 AM (ik300)
Posted by: Raphaelle at January 11, 2007 05:38 AM (xTERB)
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How could we even test whether Earth also has a "me"?
Well, coming at the problem from alot of different angles helps
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_principle
Posted by: Kif at January 11, 2007 10:25 AM (FEON4)
Posted by: Dumbass of the Black Hole at January 11, 2007 10:26 AM (FEON4)
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Kid writes
"Well, coming at the problem from alot of different angles helps"
Can you say more about how you feel that would help with this particular problem? Despite being a physicist, Ernst Mach did make some useful contributions to cognitive psychology, but I'm not sure how your citation of his physical principle would fit in here.
Posted by: Mairead at January 11, 2007 11:17 AM (BWcJ1)
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Well, like you said we ourselves are not unitary organisms and in the same sense, it appears that all things in the universe are inter-connected.
One of the re-statements of Mach's Principle is that you can predict inertial force using the positions of the stars.
So in context maybe there's no such thing as a unitary organism.
It's subtle and I'm not that good at connecting the dots, so hopefully you see where I'm going with that.
Posted by: Kid Of The Black Hole at January 11, 2007 11:22 AM (FEON4)
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Hey guys, there's another English person about,
I'm a new on wolfgangvonskeptik.mu.nu
looking forward to speaking to you guys soon
Posted by: vipsticks at February 12, 2007 05:04 PM (kdx3e)
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Hello
It's just great thing that you're doing!
Keep the good work, etc.
Bye
Posted by: suicebet at May 22, 2007 11:29 AM (X/gyd)
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