I ran into an old friend at a NY party the other night, wealthy, conservative, and we had a polite conversation about his interests: hedge funds, corporate boards, the internet and the endurance of print media.
Then another friend came along, and the conversation became more frank. The first guy suddenly said, "I'm buying a 30.06 rifle."
"Why?" I said.
"It feels like all the rivets are popping off the system, I don't know what's going to happen next."
I said, "I think it's because you're in your mid-50s. People in their mid-50s think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It's always true of people in their mid-50s."
The third guy in the conversation agreed, but the first one shook his head. "OK but sometimes those people are right. Think what you'd have said in Germany in 1936. You'd have said, this doesn't feel right, and you'd be right."
The third guy then said, agreeing, "We live in dark times."
The third guy's comment got to me. I've always liked him. He's rational, balanced, and connected; he has a keen understanding of power, he knows how to function in the establishment. I thought, what does he know, what does he think. And then the conversation segued into whether the U.S. was going to bomb Iran...
When I left, I thought about John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer has a dark view of history. He can point to many large problems in history that got a lot worse before they got better, and the establishment drove the car off the cliff. His book on a leading English establishment military journalist of the 1930s says that the guy got German military strategy completely wrong and thereby damaged the English response to Hitler's rise. History is fragile, Mearsheimer writes in that book; and I guess that is why he is standing in the street today, banging pots about the Israel lobby and the Iraq war and the Iran war plans and America's complicity in the occupation/apartheid. I always say everything's going to work out in the end. Maybe I'm wrong.
I’d get a shotgun, instead.
“I’m buying a 30.06 rifle.”
“30.06″? ROTFL! It’s .30-’06. That is, projectile .30 inches in diameter in a case delineated “‘o6″ for “1906″ which became a standard. And the “rifle” part is completely redundant, there are no .30-’06 pistols.
But I know how it goes, I was a teenager once, myself. Just announcing “I’m gonna get a gun” is the shibboleth which makes you feel so much safer. Well, it’s always good to have a loaded working weapon around the house. The two most popular applications are shooting your wife, or making it readily available to a depressed adolescent.
You know Phil, you shouldn’t let your execrable opinion of yourself condemn you to hang out with people like this. And I don’t get it, do you think they won’t recognise themselves from the description in this post? Or was everybody to loaded to remember the evening?
Anyway, at one time, “I always say everything’s going to work out in the end” was a workable philosophy, as long as you could stay out of the way. But atomic weapons have made sure that things will work out for nobody.
And guess who’s gonna be the first to chuck one at the untermenschen?
“People in their mid-50s think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It’s always true of people in their mid-50s.”
Maybe so. I’m much more worried about the prevailing opinion among so many in their late teens and early 20s who are absolutely convinced that the world is going to hell, and that they have no future, thanks to the people who are now in their mid-50s or older.
“People in their mid-50s think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.”
Makes sense, at least for men. “Going to hell in a handbasket” is a euphemism for prostate problems.
Some euphemism, mooser. Shouldn’t it be: ‘Going to heaven in a wheelbarrow’
“People in their mid-50s think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It’s always true of people in their mid-50s.”
I’m in my mid-sixties, and I’ve thought the world was going to hell in a handbasket since I was fourteen.
I was right, too.
Phil, if you really want darkness take a peak at theeconomiccollapseblog.com – not much about I/P there but lots of statistics collected in one place. I think the guy who maintains that blog is keeping watch on the declining days of empire. Now that’s tunnel dark….
Here’s another good one to keep at the bedside table – this one from Chris hedges: link to adbusters.org
BTW, do take note of your hedge fund friend’s foreboding. Those guys are in the know – probably because what they keep tabs on is the confidence game that keeps the “system” going. They can smell from miles away that the precious fluid sprung a leak…..
Chris Hedges: scary. Can’t think of doing anything other than go back to yoga classes.
Phil, your perspective is what historians and literary historians call a romantic or even a comic perspective on history rather than a tragic reading of history. That is, you tend to believe that history and in this case, the history of Israel and the Palestinians is going to have a happy ending. In contrast, people like Mearsheimer and Andrew Bacevich and Eric Hobsbawm embody the notion of history as a tragedy.
In my spare time, I tend to count up which historians and philosophers and literary scholars see world history as tragedy and which see it as romance. Edward Said and Michel Foucault also tended to view history as tragedy.
On the other hand, Noam Chomsky is a good contemporary historian, but he embodies the classic romantic Enlightenment idea of history as progress– which is apparent in the first two seconds of when he speaks. Chomsky always opens his lectures by saying something like, “There has been enormous progress in political activism. Things are much better than they were in say 1968 with the anti-war movement.” I always laugh when I see him say this, because I can’t imagine what he means, because I share the more tragic view of history of Mearshiemer, Hobsbawm, and Bacevich. Interestingly, I think that Stephen Walt is also a romantic– a guy who sees history as progress, although sometimes he checks himself.
If you see the world romantically through the enlightenment world, then you tend to focus on the history of domesticity– the role of women, the domestic space, the recent history of the West, the abolishing of slavery, a legal framework for a realm of personal liberty, and the history of technology. In these areas, you can be fairly comfortable that you will tend to see progress in history, because in all of these areas there has been enormous progress.
If you consider the history of international relations, the history of war, the history of diplomacy, the laws of war, then you tend to see stasis or even decline and tragedy in human relations, as Hobsbawn does. If you look at the history of ethical thought, as Alisdair MacIntyre does in After Virtue, you also tend to see stasis or even decline. Interestingly, it is the Enlightenment, thinkers like Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, that tend to cause the decline in the historical outlook of philosophers like MacIntyre, because Machiavelli and Hobbs tend to locate the source of ethical judgment in individual reason rather than the community or in tradition, and they tend to see human nature as fundamentally selfish and egoistic, whereas an earlier Aristotelian, Augustinian conception of human nature was that humans are fundamentally good. One of the contradictions of MacIntyre– that while he wants to view humans through the Aristotle lens of humans having a great potential for good, he sees decline in philosophy and ethics because of the abandonment of that particular view of humanity.
There are other historians like Niall Ferguson that seem ambivalent on the question of progress– Ferguson tends to view the recent 150 years of industrial and scientific progress in the larger picture, and he speculates that it is not sustainable in the long run because of certain Malthusian constraints that will come into play at some point. It is hard to know when such constraints will come into play, but I tend to agree with this reading of history.
Humans, particularly Westerners, did a very good job for the past 300 years of providing for themselves, due to agricultural advances– mainly the production of sugar, potatoes and corn– and the exploitation of slaves and then the exploitation of petroleum-based technologies. The so called information age is a relatively minor advance in this view of history, which will be constrained by the limits of resources.
I tend to see history tragically– while technology has increased our lifespans, most people tend to be more and more appendages of machinery or cogs in a bureaucratic or managerial regime rather than enlightened beings. Whereas 400 years ago, many middle-class humans were their own masters, now they find themselves powerless to determine their own fate in all but the smallest realms. In terms of war and international relations, the decline of the Catholic Church, which adjudicated the European international sphere and certain benign empires like the Ottoman empire, the Austrian-Hapsburg empire, the old Russian empire have made the world a much more dangerous potentially explosive place. And of course, advances in technology cause humanity and much of life to teeter on the edge of extinction.
Well said, Madrid!
I think this romantic/optimistic outlook is behind the enthusiasm for the BDS movement, which is never, never, never going to weaken the Israeli occupation. But the starry-eyed see not only a solution but a morally acceptable solution that sheds no blood and breaks no laws. A nice solution.
The seeds of Israel’s fall have already sprouted and the end is inevitable, but it will take too long and there is small likelihood that things will not be worse by that time, for everyone.
I agree that the BDS movement will have a limited effect on Israel’s behavior. Much more difficult for Israel will be when the US and the West comes to the conclusion that it can no longer afford the luxury of Israeli intransigence and behavior– because of the precious resources that are controlled by the Arab countries.
The problem is – how much damage will they be able to do before it’s over?
An important aspect of this is that nuclear-armed Israel does not subscribe to Enlightenment traditions from the West; rather, it has, through sometimes spokesmen, and very much through its institutions and actions, rejected the Enlightenment completely–but only for itself. Oil will remain a very important part of the Great Game for another 75 years or so. China, most especially wants more. Natural gas–the US has this in abundance.
Thanks, Madrid, for a very interesting comment. On the whole, I agree with potsherd’s assessment that BDS will have little real effect, but a) it’s the right thing to do, and b) we may be wrong.
On the other hand, hoping that “the US and the West [will] come(s) to the conclusion that it can no longer afford the luxury of Israeli intransigence and behavior” (for whatever reasons), is also somewhat “romantic”. The most likely scenario is simply ever greater oppression and violence for a very long time. That is no excuse however, for fatalistic inaction (see points a and b, above).
On the other hand, hoping that “the US and the West [will] come(s) to the conclusion that it can no longer afford the luxury of Israeli intransigence and behavior” (for whatever reasons), is also somewhat “romantic”.
Thanks for this comment. I have to admit that I was a bit puzzled by a combination like the one below:
the classic romantic Enlightenment idea of history
From the perspective of a literary scholar it is also quite interesting, to see a Renaissance man and a Baroque philosopher added to a very specific Enlightenment mix.
What sticks out for me is the conservative conventional wisdom of “the Romantics” as the ultimate danger combined paradoxically with the condemnation of reason (Enlightenment). Interesting hybrid.
True, but Europe has very little nat. gas.
Madrid ~ I think this moment passed after the 1973 oil crisis. Which nation that supplies the US/West with oil/gas is sufficiently angry about Israel’s persecution of Palestinians to actually do something? None that I see.
Two guests on C Span the other day discussed the search for alternate forms of energy for the US.
In an unusual response to the usual plea for US energy independence that uses Islamophobia as a goad, ie, “The US must stop buying oil from states that hate us . . . ” the rejoinder was, “40% of US energy needs are supplied by US sources; of the remainder, the largest share comes from Canada, with Mexico a close second. Middle Eastern sources supply only in the single digits.”
So, how long until them Cannucks get fed up with Israeli intransigence? (nb. A variant of the Israel lobby is almost as powerful in Canadian electoral politics as in the US. see Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups: American and Canadian Jews Lobby for Israel by David Howard Goldberg.)
“… Much more difficult for Israel will be when the US and the West comes to the conclusion that it can no longer afford the luxury of Israeli intransigence and behavior– because of the precious resources that are controlled by the Arab countries. ” -Madrid
It’s as you said Sumud, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the Arabs to provoke another oil crisis because of their vast wealth invested in the west as they’d be the first to get hurt by it and when it comes to looking out for their money, Arabs aren’t stupid and above all, they aren’t romantic. It any event, this is very unlikely to happen since the Arabs are now tripping over each other to deal over and under the table with Israel and the Palestinians’ problems appear to have been dropped from their list of priorities. As a small sampling on how the BDS business is not really getting anywhere of importance, you have various countries from France to Sweden sticking a finger in the multi-national Veolia’s/Alstom’s eye for building the light rail system between Jerusalem and settlements on the WB while an Arab country that is supposed to lead by its example disregarded the BDS call and awarded this rogue company several billion’s worth of contracts to build a fast rail line, a power plant and a desalination plant. How do you measure this against the nikel and dime successes of harrassing the Dead Sea cosmetics company or protesting in front of the shyster’s jewellery store on Madison Ave because he builds on stolen land on the WB while he is welcomed with open arms to open a couple of outlets in Dubai? It’s going to take much more than BDS to rattle Israel, especially that those who could have really done something about it aren’t interested. Speaking of natural gas, keep in mind how Egypt has been selling natural gas to Israel at a cheaper rate than what it charges to its own impoverished population and this while Israel is strangling Gaza.
Walid ~ I agree that BDS will have limited (or no) success in Middle East nations but it’s a different matter in nations where the grassroots isn’t suppressed by the government. Israel craves legitimacy, but refuses to set borders it can legitimately defend. This just isn’t sustainable, even if it’s worked “kinda OK” til now. It’s been achieved by hiding Israel’s crimes, which is no longer possible thanks to the internet.
Out of curiosity, which country awarded Veolia the fast rail/plant/desal contracts? I did know about Dubai and the diamond trade, though not when I lived there (I didn’t understand I/P at the time).
If you think the Ahava boycott is just about nickels and dimes you don’t understand how a social movement builds. In fact, with the “buycott” Ahava’s profits could conceivably increase. It’s the knock-on effect that is important: after decades of almost unilateral support for Israel, it’s forcing American jews (not only, but this sector is extremely important) to confront and question what Israel is up to, as demonstrated by this recent post by Phil. When enough people say “no” governments will have to change their positions. I wrote further down how this has already started with Norway and the five nations boycotting the OECD conference.
The boycott movement in South Africa started in the early 60s (after the Sharpeville Massacre) and took ~30 years to end apartheid. BDS is only five years old, it’s going great guns.
Sumud, it took 30 years and it had the US on the side of the good guys and in this situation, you have the US riding shotgun for Israel in everything it does so it would take 60 years. I can feel the wave coming too but its still a small wave but the consolation is that American Jews are getting on board. The Arab country in question is Saudi Arabia and you can find these various contracts discussed on the internet. Veolia/Alstom that has been under pressure for the Jerusalem line signed a funny deal with Egged Transport of Israel a couple of days ago selling it its shares in the Jerusalem Light Rail with tranfer of title 5 years after the rail line opens (2011), so on paper the sale was made but Veolia continues being there for another 5 years but part of the back office and out of the limelight. With funny stuff like that going on, it will take forever for BDS to really have an impact. The Norwegian Sovereign Fund divested a million from Leviev’s company and a few millions from Elbit Systems and we all cheered but Elbit is super huge with contracts for future deliveries in the billions so the millions that the Norwegians recalled were like a joke to Elbit, especially that the Norwegian Fund still has money in 41 other Israeli companies. For BDS to have a real impact, companies inside Israel have to be on the list.
Sumud – check it out:
Lev Leviev
Walid – I agree with you. The Arab countries are followers, not leaders. Once the populations look at the rest of the world and see a vibrant BDS movement, their governments will then participate and then somehow claim credit for spurring the movement.
Until then, the Arabs are doomed to being slaves to money, indoctrination, fear, or ignorance (yes, ignorance. I’ve asked Saudis in their 20s whether they knew what the Nakba was, or what year it took place….I got blank stares.), or all of the above in their own countries.
potsherd,
I think something far more banal than romanticism or optimism is behind the BDS movement. It’s called ‘We have to do something’.
In the words of Frederick Douglass, who said it better than I: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”
The Gazans asked for help with the one thing they knew wouldn’t get them shot. There’s a divine practicality in that.
Well said, MRW.
The Gazans asked for help …
Never underestimate the value of solidarity – showing both oppressed and oppressor that some of us care and will not be silent.
What are those seeds then potsherd, if you don’t think BDS will have an effect?
I don’t share your pessimism re: BDS. Israel is a house of cards which has acquired [extorted] it’s legitimacy based on misinformation, outright lies and holocaust blackmail. Ever more psychotic behaviour, and the free flow of information that is the internet is rapidly undoing more than 60 years of hasbara. This aspect of BDS – as a conduit for education and information, and grassroots rallying point – is probably more important than the actual boycotts, divestments and sanctions which it achieves. At least I think it will be that way for the few years. When these grassroots efforts are sufficiently large, governments will have to act. It has started already (Norwegian Gov. pension fund divestments, five nations boycotting the upcoming OECD tourism conference in Jerusalem), a phenomenal outcome for a campaign just five years old. Of course the US is going to be last nation to act. But after Bush II and his wars, and Bush III (Barack OBush) and his wars, hating the US (not the people of course) is a no-brainer.
I’d be fascinated to see the results of a survey covering what percentage of populations have heard of BDS.
Israel’s legitimacy is based on the consent of the governed within Israel.
Please don’t feed the troll.
Aren’t you in fact responding to RW?
Scroll down yonira.
If it takes some time for RW to get the message, so be it. I anticipate outliving him.
Internal demographics, Sumud. The only thing uniting Israelis is a shared paranoia.
It is almost completely impossible to get a nation to do something its leaders are determined not to do. Iran keeps building nuclear reactors in defiance of sanctions. The entire world condemns China for holding the Nobel Peace Prize winner and his wife under arrest – nobody can do anything to free them.
And nobody can get Israel to act justly when it doesn’t want to do it.
In fact, the most likely results are contrary, bolstering the “they’re all against us” paranoia and unifying the population in a spirit of defiance.
potsherd ~ how do you account for the collapse of apartheid in South Africa then? Wasn’t that an example of a BDS campaign succeeding? Of course, the Afrikaneers didn’t control US Congress, so that’s a complication, but not insurmountable. Israel is being ‘outed’ as an apartheid state, and that simply won’t wash with the US population. I think that’s why the Lobby is getting particularly aggressive with journalists and media personalities such as Octavia Nasr, Helen Thomas and Rick Sanchez. It’s a “zero tolerance” approach. I think Dylan Ratigan will be next to go. Him and Glenn Greenwald really went to town on Cliff May a few weeks ago.
- – - – -
I know the paranoia in Israel is a potentially huge problem. In her radio interview with Hazel Kahan, psychotherapist Avigail Abarbanel talks about the Massada complex in Israel and how she thinks there’s a very slim chance they may just blow the whole region up with nuclear weapons. Terrifying really. But I think the leadership in Israel is much more pragmatic than the general population. Think of the ’67 war for example. The general population was whipped into a frenzy, many seriously believing that Egypt was about to perpetrate another holocaust. But in fact, Israel’s leaders knew Nasser had neither the capability or intention of attacking, and even if he did, that they would beat him easily.
At a certain point, when BDS bites hard enough, a pragmatic Israeli leader will emerge that will finally stop scarifying Israelis and either force a withdrawal to the ’67 lines and facilitate a two=state outcome, or work towards a single bi-national state.
It’s optimistic I know, but I’m like that. I know there will be some terrible things that will occur between then and now.
So half of the population of Palestine consented to being shot at and having their villages raised, Witty?
MADRID- I suspect that Chomsky opens his talks in an optimistic fashion in part to motivate the audience to activism. I have read a lot of Chomsky and do not consider him a “romantic” at all. Rather, I think he is a realist that combines inherent optimism with a sense of foreboding. As an example, I quote two paragraphs from his book “Hegemony or Survival.” He begins by referring to a biologist who refutes the notion that intelligence improves survivability, that “dumb” beetles and bacteria are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival.
“We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of ‘biological error,’ using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.”
“The species has surely developed the capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold calculated savagery, on each other as well.”
great post, Keith, with some of the ‘best of Chomsky’
“I have read a lot of Chomsky….”
Ah, but did you purchase the complete Chomsky-on-Tape from Halfwitty Publishing? Cause that’s how we tell the cadres from the padres around here, fella!
Very interesting post, but one nitpick–
“Aristotelian, Augustinian conception of human nature was that humans are fundamentally good.”
Augustine doesn’t belong there, I don’t think. Augustine was sort of a proto-Calvinist, or rather, Luther and Calvin took Augustine’s pessimistic view of human nature and ran with it.
In the early 1950s, Bradley Westerfield, Dick Cheney’s favorite professor at Yale, wrote in a foreign policy textbook that Jews held disproportionate power in the US for three main reasons: they were wealthy, organized and zealously energetic; they knew how to work the electoral system by dominating key states; and no other group seemed powerful enough to counterbalance their influence.
It would have seemed to me that in 1953, when Westerfield was writing, the Catholic church in the US DID have the ability to balance Jewish power.
Over the years, and particularly since the Vatican II, internal stresses have eroded the power of the Catholic church. However, just as many Jewish bloggers speak of “dog whistle” ability to discern antisemitism in remarks critical of Israel, I hear a lot of anti-Catholicism on media where the rules of political correctness demand that Israel and Jewry be handled with kid gloves. International organizations of rabbis as well as Israeli and Jewish-American politicians and influence shapers frequently take advantage of opportunities to bash the Catholic church, catholic teaching, Catholic doctrine, and to highlight Catholic institutional “sins.”
Given Westerfield’s formulation, it seems logical that organized American Jewry would exploit every occasion to disempower institutional Catholicism. It also seems to me that the US was a better place when Catholicism was MORE powerful.
nb. Madrid’s assessment is a tremendous contribution to understanding the broad sweep of history. I would quibble a bit with the assertion that it is the Enlightenment, thinkers like Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, that tend to cause the decline in the historical outlook of philosophers like MacIntyre, because Machiavelli and Hobbs tend to locate the source of ethical judgment in individual reason rather than the community or in tradition, and they tend to see human nature as fundamentally selfish and egoistic, whereas an earlier Aristotelian, Augustinian conception of human nature was that humans are fundamentally good.
cause might be giving Macchiavelli more power that he deserves; it is my understanding that Macchiavelli observed and reflected upon, rather than “caused,” a particular view of history. In any event, Macchiavelli is usually misunderstood and his prescriptions taken out of context.
The light at the end of the tunnel might be coming from an oncoming train.
Exactly…nice metaphor.
PHIL- These are indeed dark times. With the threat of nuclear war as great or greater than it ever was, with environmental catastrophe looming on many fronts, with never ending imperial warfare, with the ongoing globalization/financialization of the planet and corresponding loss of local sustainability, things are getting worse fast. The rivets popping off imagery suggests that your friend senses the impending implosion of the financial system. I concur. Let’s just hope that we are all here this time next year to comment on what transpires during the next twelve months. Keep your seat belt fastened!
Keith, you done said a mouthful! I myself intend to follow the dictum which has kept me safe through 35+ years of motorcycling; “Leave no turn unstoned”
MOOSER- Motorcycle? A Harley-Dufferson?
Keith, I said a “motorcycle”, not a two-wheeled garden tractor. Me and the rest of the guys in “The Livaks” (my all-Jewish sport-bike posse) call them “HELOC-Davidsons”.
I wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch within a hundred yards of a Hardly-Ableson.
I’ve got a Honda VTR-1000 (the “Superhawk”) and a Ducati SS-900. I just gave my Honda VFR-750 to a friend who needed it. Some day, he might even pay me for it.
MOOSER- Wow, you’re really into this! A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I owned a couple of motorcycles. A Honda 305 in college, and later a Honda CJ 360. The stuff you ride is too big for my taste. Nowadays, I confine myself to my bicycle, an eco-friendly two-wheeled vehicle powered by a gas-bag.
I concur; some people on Wall St still seem to think there are real hedge funds to be created and milked while the milking is still good while Soros is investing in China and Swiss bank accounts bloom. The ordinary folk, those with little capital to play with, are withdrawing whatever cash they have and burying it in the ground, and keeping a weapon in the home.
“and keeping a weapon in the home.”
Which will be used, unless statistics lie, to shoot a spouse, enable an adolescent to commit suicide, facilitate some kind of accidental shooting, or be stolen and get into the hands of criminals.
But if a good gun fantasy makes you feel better about your prostate, you’re welcome to it.
I am definitely in need of some major weaponry. I am a quiet, polite, soft-spoken, unassuming little man who keeps himself to himself. This is the standard description neighbours give of the beserk mass-murderer, so clearly that is my destiny.
If I were to live up to it at the moment, all I could do is hit someone with a rolled-up newspaper.
And that would be pathetic.
A blog is mightier than a rolled-up newspaper. And you don’t have to leave the house ;)
“The rivets popping off imagery” suggests (in the hedge-funder context) someone who has RECENTLY come to the view that the theories or practices of capitalism (or of regulation or, moire likely, non-regulation) doesn’t and will not in future work and cannot in time be saved.
On the environment I’ve always believed that the long gradual buildup of population — resulting in a long buildup of people doing what (rich) people do — will be very hard indeed to reverse (i.e., the rivets will pop out) because you cannot quickly reduce the number of people (short of very, very massive increase in death rates for whatever reasons) and human nature will not easily accept a return to what will be perceived as poverty, namely, rational use of resources in the context of finding enough water for people and minimizing GH gas emissions (as far as we still can, that is, much time already having passed).
The dark times are of forms of “populism”, the tea party, that has energy but no coherent principles, no fundamental ones, no incidental ones.
Anger and then frustration.
Is that why the Tea Party and its candidates are, to a man or woman, extremely pro-Zionist and support Israel’s intransigence? Find me one that isn’t.
The extremist Pro-Zionists are running the Tea Party in my view, and like good judo masters, using the energies of those they can whip up to cast it as some founding fathers party…always a good ploy. The Zios have their fingers all over this.
Ron Paul and co. should aggressively reach out to those supporting the Tea Part(ies). I don’t agree with Libertarianism but if people are authentically concerned about large-scale government corruption (and think small government is the only answer) that’s where they belong, among libertarians.
By coincidence, a couple of today’s posts over at Dandelion Salad seem quite germane to the topic. The first is a series of excerpts by Fidel Castro of a speech and Q&A by Michel Chossudovsky at Havana University. This is followed by one paragraph concerning AfPak.
“At present, I would like to focus more on the issue of the military venture underway. It is an alliance between the United States, NATO and Israel: a military project, but at the same time, an economic project, since it is a project aimed at economic conquest.”
“…these military operations meet […] objectives of an economic nature […] the major economic objectives are oil and natural gas […] from the eastern Mediterranean to the Chinese borders and the Caspian Sea, South of Saudi Arabia […] the Middle East-Central Asia. This region —according to statistics— contains around 60 percent of the world reserves of oil and natural gas.”
“Another factor: it is not the commander in chief, that is to say the US president, who decides to use the nuclear bomb. The nuclear bomb, reclassified by the Senate in 2002 with that category —a small bomb, which is up to six times the Hiroshima bomb—, is now part of the arsenal of conventional weapons [...] in military terminology it is also in the armory, the tool box. [...] it is in the tool box of the commanding general, three stars [...] the guy says: [...] ‘here’s the mini-Nuke, he’s reading the manual [...] It says right here that you can use that nuclear bomb. ‘”
“We are in an extremely serious situation regarding the US fiscal structure, which is leading to a de facto privatization of the state, because there is no money to fund health, education, public works, whatever. Then, gradually, it is a privatization of the state and also the privatization of war. This is already underway; an important part of this war is being carried out by private companies, mercenaries, which are also linked to the military or industrial complex.”
“… an economic crisis, in my opinion the worst in history, without precedent, not even the 1930s, which was a very localized crisis, not a global crisis as such, it had a dynamic in certain countries and regions of the world. “
“… the financial war is closely linked to the war in the military sector, there are even links between the World Bank and the Pentagon. [...] former United States Defense ministers became presidents of the World Bank [...] the new world order is run by financial manipulation mechanisms [...] regime changes, destabilization of governments and military operations of various kinds [...] capitalism has institutions, both civilian and military, that work together, this is a very important concept. Behind these institutions are the intellectuals, the think tanks in Washington, there are secret clubs for the elites [... ] the process of war, which now threatens humanity, is important at all levels of society.”
Also from Dandelion Salad, featured writer Rick Rozoff:
“Two recent news items emanating from the United States have begun to reverberate in Pakistan and give rise to speculation that growing American drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in that country may be the harbingers of far broader actions: Nothing less than the expansion of the West’s war in Afghanistan into Pakistan with the ultimate goal of seizing the nation’s nuclear weapons.”
My comment: Things seem to be getting real bad real fast.
relevant to this, a very informative article :
Pepe Escobar : Pipelineistan’s New Silk Road, October 12 on TomDispatch :
link to tinyurl.com
Regarding Chomsky’s so-called “optimism”, I think there is a certain way to understand it, and that is, if we don’t think that what we are doing will have positive results sometime in the future, exactly why are we wasting our time at all on this? Let’s just go have lunch…
Here is an interesting talk he gave at Boston U., in which he refers to discussion on the “one state” solution as misleading, in that it generally ignores what is actually happening – annexation of parts of the West Bank, to leave the rest as cantons to be left to their own devices, without any responsibility taken on the part of Israel. It’s also worth watching for the J-Street representatives (vociferating against BDS) and hasbaristas putting him under fire during the Q and A session after the talk, and how he deals with them. Highly recommended :
Noam Chomsky at BU Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) :
link to bu.edu
RE: “I always say everything’s going to work out in the end. Maybe I’m wrong.” – Weiss
MY COMMENT: I give “Reverend” John Hagee holy hell all the time about his ‘End Times’ nonsense. But sometimes, when my Weltschmerz is particularly profound, I wonder if he might not ironically be right (but for the wrong reasons).
P.S. Repent! The end is nigh. Make yourself ‘Rapture Ready™’ before its too late.
I recommend Hot Yoga
Good Christians™ are in no hurry to join the Rapture™. Why? Well according to noted Christian, Jesus, in whose footsteps Good Christians™ wish to walk, abandonment * of their brothers and sisters is not an option.
Besides, salvation is a individual process, not an event. And, according to our tradition, God gave up on collective judgement after the Deluge debacle. These days, when all is said and done, he weighs our hearts, one by one. :-)
* “… I am with you always, even to the end of the world. …” -Matthew 28:20
شر البلية ما يضحك
What’s even more tragic, which is verging on the comical for comfie me sitting behind this computer screen, is the fact that the political center of Zionism has a base of lunatics who support Israel only because they want to see it destroy it.
I’m sorry, I don’t think M. Night Shyamalan could have conjured up such a sick, crazy twist to this plot. It’s too comical to be true. Every time I hear Pastor Hagee on his rampage, I start laughing for some reason.
I need a gun as much as I need a hole in the head..If it really gets rough and tough just get out of the frigging place! You don’t need a gun in Europe and MANY other places in this world..
Insane!!
“a leading English establishment military journalist of the 1930s ”
Why not say Liddell Hart, rather than this circumlocution? Everyone knows who he is.
“and thereby damaged the English response to Hitler’s rise. ”
British response. Wales, Scotland, and the Empire were involved as well.
I believe Kathleen has mentioned how Mondoweiss and Flynt and Hillary Leverett’s blog, raceforiran.com, cross-fertilize each other. The newest article on raceforIran, namely, The True Significance of Ahmadinejad’s Visit to Lebanon, quoted extensively from an essay by Alistair Crooke’s view on Ahmadinejad’s visit to show the mirror-image of Phil Weiss & friends’ “dark times.” In Crooke’s assessment, Ahmadinejad represents a reestablishment of basic ethical values on an international platform; the empowerment of nonelites; and a spark igniting the non-elites in their acts and attitudes of resistance to empire.
The West calls the period between the fifth century and about the twelfth century the “Dark” ages — a time when the light of European/Christo-Roman culture was dim in Western Europe. But those Dark Ages include in their sweep of time the height of Islamic culture, the dominance of Islam over Mediterranean trade and commerce, and Jewry’s 500-year long Golden Age, in Islamic Andalusia.
It may be true that WE live in dark times, but it is not because all light is extinguished; rather, it is because the West has dominated the light for its time and now another — the East and the South — are poised to take their turn in the light.
Golda Meier is said to have quipped the Moses made a mistake in failing to lead the Jews to oil lands. Israeli Jews, intent on bringing the light of the West and, improbably,* the Enlightenment, to the benighted mizrahunt , once again find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, on the wrong side of history.
* (see Citizen, @ #13: An important aspect of this is that nuclear-armed Israel does not subscribe to Enlightenment traditions from the West; rather, it has, through sometimes spokesmen, and very much through its institutions and actions, rejected the Enlightenment completely–but only for itself.
It seems Golda was wrong:
“Estimates of the amount of oil in the Rosh HaAyin discovery have risen to 1.5 billion barrels, and there is more oil off-shore, but it is not yet known how much of the “black gold” can be extracted for commercial use.
The new estimate, along with the gas and oil finds off the Mediterranean Coast, raise the likelihood that Israel will be self-sufficient for energy for the next three decades and even become an exporter of gas. The amount of oil at Rosh HaAyin represents a tiny percentage of Israel’s oil consumption, but development is continuing in the area as well as in the Dead Sea.
Economists have noted that the discoveries will have a huge impact on society, creating more jobs and strengthening the shekel against word currencies.”
link to israelnationalnews.com
I hate to say it, but Israel will most likely be in much better shape economically than the US and Europe during the next decade. They will not let go of the gas fields off-shore Gaza and Lebanon. If they have to go to war to secure them, they’ll do so, and the US/Nato will not stop them. Human/Palestinian rights? Please. No Western government will give a fig about the Palestinians if this should interfere with their own self-interest, or definition of self-interest, however wrong it may be
The sight of a thriving Israeli off-shore gas or oil industry being proudly shown to the world while the people of Gaza, the real owners of the shore, remain close to starvation – ‘protection of vital gas resources against terrorism’ will become another pretext for the blockade – will be quite grim, won’t it?
Yes, grim. But I don’t think the blockade will continue much longer. There will perhaps be attempts to put Gaza under Egyptian control, and hold on to the gas fields in one way or another. I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel manages to get money from the US/EU to sort of compensate the Gazans for honoring so-called past agreements/signing over their rights to Israel. Anybody who does not comply with such bribery is a fanatic and lunatic from the Western perspective. Hence the hatred of Ahmadinejad
PG, interesting points. I thought the western world determined the Dark Ages right up to the end of the 1400s, when Isabel was on the rag about Catholic purity and ridding Spain of heretics, but perhaps I’m wrong.
the East and the South — are poised to take their turn in the light. I would welcome it.
The history of Italian city-states from fall of Rome all the way to Unification suggests that some version of a light of (western, Christian, Greco-Roman) culture was kept glowing in discrete locales, if not throughout Western Europe. Thus, placing dates on the Dark Ages is a dubious exercise. Bologna and Padua had thriving, secular universities as early as the early tenth century; Milan sustained the thriving culture that was established there four hundred years before the birth of Christ.
The Italian City States are a beacon to Americans confronting the US’s impending Dark Ages: as Chris Hedges observes in the brilliant but frightening essay linked earlier on Mondoweiss, the hope for survival lies in organizing small, cooperative, sustainable communities. That’s how the city states of the Italian peninsula survived while protect and even advancing the cultural legacy of the pre-Dark ages world.
That’s how the German lands survived, too. Goethe took the view that centralization and unification would be a disaster for the Germans and their cultural development. And so it was.
In England we tend to date the Dark Ages from 410, when the Emperor refused a request from the Civitates – States of Britain – to send an army to protect them against invaders. This event was almost immediately denounced by church writers as a result of a way my (then British, more recently Welsh) ancestors had troubled the Empire by ‘ingratitude’ and trying to get more of the taxes raised here spent here. The result was terrible political fragmentation and openness to ruthless invaders. We tend to think of 1066, when the feudal monarchy was established, as the point when the Dark Ages finally gave way to the higher Middle Ages whose trademark is the great romanesque cathedrals. This is a bit simple-minded but I think that there was indeed some genuine progress and I also think it was marked by an increasing Jewish presence, rather brutally ended by the expulsion of 1292.
Well, I think that the Islamic forces of medieval times had their own imperialist tendencies. I’ve always had a soft spot for Byzantium and so cherish some resentment of the way it was snuffed out.
However, it does seem that it was the exchange of propaganda between Muslim and Christian apologists that led to the hesitant return of independent thinking, or philosophy, to the Western and ME worlds. They – the likes of Averroes and Aquinas – had to think of reasons that were not, or were not all, based on appeals to religious authority, so had no choice but to appeal to reason.
Wake up and smell the Bacon, MHughes; some historians identify Francis Bacon as the thinker most responsible for the most significant intellectual revolution the West has ever known, the revolution from Aristotelian, authority-based thinking, to what we identify as the scientific method: observance of nature and the application of the laws of reasoning and logic applied to observed nature. Isaac Newton’s laws followed Bacon’s procedures.
Joseph Campbell’s words are ringing in my ears: At the time of one of the first moon shots, Compbell explained to Bill Moyers in one of their series of dialogues, an engineer from mission control asked the astronauts, “Who is navigating the ship?” The quick-as-a-wink response, from out in space, was: “Newton, sir.”
Either in the same or in a different conversation, Campbell noted with palpable disdain that earth-based commentators on the moon shots had used Old Testament verses to celebrate the achievement. A preeminent mythologist, Campbell was beside himself at the failure of the earthbound to understand the distinctions and progressions of human intellectual achievement. Campbell did, however, believe that at least one observer, Italian poet Giuseppi Ungaretti, understood and expressed the monumental achievement that space exploration represented. Ungaretti wrote, in 1969, on the occasion of the first moon walk: Questa e una notte diversa de ogni altra notte del mondo.
I wonder if Israelis are using Talmudic processes to discover and recover oil wealth from the maritime possessions of the people of Palestine, land which Israelis claim as their own, based on Torah.
“I wonder if Israelis are using Talmudic processes to discover and recover oil wealth from the maritime possessions of the people of Palestine, land which Israelis claim as their own, based on Torah.”
Wonder no more:
link to oilinisrael.net
IMHO, Aristotelian science itself (rather than the first and second Aristotelian Renaissance in Europe) is not ‘authority-based thinking’ but much closer to what you describe as the modern scientific method: ‘observance of nature and the application of the laws of reasoning and logic applied to observed nature’. Historians of science have all but ‘forgotten’ about the occult roots of modern science, and how we got from alchemy to chemistry. Bacon, for instance, from Roger to Francis.
I would say the real reason why religion (Christian theology) had to go to make way for the scientific revolution is the restrictions it placed on scientific inquiry and technological invention. The ‘early scientists’ were rooted in magic and associated with the devil and his work: the ape and rival of God, and antithesis to Christian humility: Dr. Faustus & Co, accepting no moral or natural limits. That stigma had to go to blast the path for the modern age.
Another stunning example for the continuing and apparently anachronistic connection between religion and science/technology: The Stuxnet computer worm and the Book of Esther.
link to richardsilverstein.com
I don’t deny that there was much more philosophical bacon to smell in the age of Bacon and Locke than there had been in the Middle Ages, or that the medieval philosophers tended to appeal to (and grossly misrepresent) Aristotle as if he were a kind of substitute Bible/Koran – though all that said I still think that there were some genuine arguments. The ‘proofs of the existence of God’ on which both sides worked are still taken with some seriousness. Of course we’d read them now in the light of the sceptical critique of Hume and Kant, a critique made possible by the absence of a Europe-wide religious authority after the Reformation. The outbreak of religious arguments can and does lead to extreme violence but it can also lead to freer forms of argument and thought.
Not, I must admit, that there has been an outbreak of constructive philosophy around the Zionist problem. Quite the opposite.