Readings: Classical Greek Thought in The White Rose and Simone Weil

The last two non-fiction works I have recently read (Sophie Scholl & The White Rose by A. Dumbach and J. Newborn, and Simone Weil--Waiting on Truth by J. P. Little) show how both the young German pamphleteers of The White Rose and French philosopher, Simone Weil, turned to classical Greek models in their writings in response to, and against, the Nazi oppression of their respective societies.

In the third of six pamphlets written and distributed by The White Rose before Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and several other members of their inner circle were arrested, tried, and executed by the Nazis in 1943, Aristotle’s Politics, is thus quoted:

“Further…[a tyrant] should also endeavor to know what each of his subjects says or does, and should employ spies everywhere…and further, to create disunity and division in the population to set friend against friend, the common people against the notables, and the wealthy among themselves. Also he should impoverish his subjects; the maintenance of guards and soldiers is thus paid for by the people, who are forced to work hard and have neither the time nor the opportunity to conspire against him…Another practice of tyrants is to increase taxes, after the manner of Dionysius at Syracuse, who contrived that his subjects paid all their wealth into the treasury within five years. The tyrant is also inclined to engage in constant warfare in order to occupy and distract his subjects.”

In his study of the life and thought of Simone Weil, J.P. Little shows how Weil used the writings of Plato to describe the workings of a totalitarian regime:

“[…] Simone Weil turns…to the Greek world, to Plato’s image of society as ‘the Great Beast’…whom his masters (society’s leaders) try to tame by studying his moods and habits.

“[…] The Beast represents for her the elevation of society into an absolute, which is then judged without reference to anything exterior, so that in a very real sense nothing but the collective  exists. This is the characteristic of what Simone Weil calls totalitarianism, and here of course her usage is in line with what we have become accustomed to designate by that term. The Beast represents the totality of collective values and the destruction of the individual. Its main concern is existence, and since the existence of anything else is intolerable to it, its own existence involves infinite expansion, a total hold over the lives of its subjects.”

As it was in ancient Greece, so it was in World War II-era Europe; and as it is again (or still) now.

Reflections: What It Will Take for Us to Repair the Damage

Although there are still 40-some pages of appendices to be read, I have just now finished reading the main text of Sophie Scholl & The White Rose. I want here to share this emotionally stirring book's closing paragraph:

"The impact of the White Rose cannot be measured in tyrants destroyed, regimes overthrown, justice restored. A scale with another dimension is needed, and then their significance is deeper; it goes even beyond the Third Reich, beyond Germany: if people like those who formed the White Rose can exist, believe as they believed, act as they acted, maybe it means that this weary, corrupted, and extremely endangered species we belong to has a right to survive, and to keep on trying."

That's a big "maybe" -- but it's all we've got.

I find myself in love with a German girl who died four years before I was born.

Rants: It's the DNC, Stupid!

Wouldn't we do better to worry about the fact that those damning emails were written and sent in the first place, rather than obsessing over the possibility that it was Russian hackers who made them public?

I've seen no claim that the emails released were not genuine. So the disgusting attitudes and disgraceful behavior of the top DNC operatives revealed by those emails WAS genuine. That's what should worry American citizens who desire an honest election process and resulting representative government.

Fuck a bunch of Russians. It's corrupt Americans that I want to see purged from the system. They're in the toilet--let's flush it!

Reports: PSYOPS and the Totalitarian Coup

The "Evening News" has become the "Alleged News," as the deliberate disorientation of the belief systems of American citizens of every demographic group continues apace, with total success.

Rants: Day Six of The Dread

We are now watching the rapid dismantling of all those things the small measure of human decency that has been available in this superficial and vulgar consumer society had allowed to be enacted over the past 50 years. 

But we still have Netflix and pizza--so no biggie.

Reflections: On the New American Decadence

In a time when the casual use of the most vulgar language by school girls has become the norm, the ascendancy of a Trump is to be expected.

Trump is the Uber-Stereotype; the Ugly American finally evolved to full power.

Rants: B-bye Obama

Nobody paying homage to Barack Obama this week seems to give a damn about the havoc and horrors his foreign policy decisions have rained down upon the heads of ordinary people in seven foreign lands--all in support of American corporate hegemony. Such uncaring, de facto bigotry--for that is what it is--defines the ultimate moral failure of so many of my fellow countrymen.

As John Lennon sang: "There's room at the top they are telling you still / But first you must learn how to smile as you kill."

Was nobody listening?

Rants: They Never Learn

I just gave up on an attempt to watch a 9 a.m. Sunday morning political/news show. There, on ABC, was the embarrassing sell-out, Obama, and on Fox, the even more disgusting huckster, Reince Preibus. All bullshit, all the time. More productively, I started reading Howard Zinn's The Twentieth Century: a People's History this morning. It is amazing to be clubbed over the head once again with the proof that "business-as-usual" for the U.S. of A. has not changed one iota since the inception of the 20th century. Then, it was Cuba and the Philippines; today it is the Middle East: same motives; same murderous tactics, still to the benefit of nobody but the corporate oligarchs. Then, it was the mysterious explosion that destroyed the battleship Maine; more recently it was the mysterious controlled demolition of the three buildings of the WTC. Same old, same old. The people never learn and apparently never will.

Reflectons: The Future of Loneliness

We will have nowhere to find out the effect on the suicide rate as a result of their shutting down the social media.

Rants: Where Have All the Flower(children) Gone?

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So what happened was, first all the long-haired "summer of love" freaks got bitch-slapped by the establishment. Then they crawled back to school on their hands and knees, got graduate degrees and sold out to the professions.Today, the only "left" in this country is a bunch of pussyfied neo-liberals with the moral fortitude of runt-of-the-litter, hind-tit-sucking, farm animals. 

Et voila, Donald Trump!
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Reflections: A People in Chains?

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Through Trump's cabinet nominations, this election has now revealed itself to have been a bloodless coup d'etat. Unless the electors, or the courts, find the courage and the will to overturn the results, the last vestiges of representative democracy will have gone by the board, replaced by the dictatorial rule of the oligarchic kleptocracy; the fascists in firm control.
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Reflections: A Clear and Present Danger

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"White Nationalism" is an empty pose; a movement with no valid basis and no achievable goal. That said, it is very dangerous. We are now witnessing its power to move huge numbers in directions that benefit the corporate oligarchs and the puppet masters of the shadow government. It has momentum. It is necessary to build an effective coalition of right-thinking factions to stem the tide. It is necessary to find a national leader with the ability to focus that effort. But such a figure has yet to emerge. Time is of the essence. It can happen here.
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Reflections: At Nadir

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I find this election season to be totally demoralizing. The followings of the two candidates who will oppose each other in the general election are absolutely cultic in their devotions. This devotion has almost nothing to do with these candidates' histories or political policy positions; it's all grounded in a hero worship that totally ignores their glaringly dangerous flaws. Both of them are equally lethal to American democracy and any hope for world peace. I grieve for my country. We are at nadir.
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Reflections: The Shape of Things to Come

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The craziest, most far-out of the conspiracy theories are gradually emerging as pretty damned accurate. Be very afraid, but project your fear onto the real monsters. A symptom to watch: the fairly rapid deployment of an international, militarized, mercenary police force.

These units, coordinated across national borders, unaccountable to the citizenry, wearing different colors, but fluid in deployment, apparently trump the authority of the local, constitutionally governed police, acting upon orders from the Shadow Government that is our oligarchic rulers.

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Readings: from Slaughterhouse-Five

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Howard W. Campbell, Jr., the central character of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night, is an American, raised in Germany, who during WWII worked for the Nazis as a propagandist, delivering radio messages which also contained coded messages (undetected by the Germans)  which gave valuable information to the allied forces. Below is an excerpt from a Campbell monograph, quoted in Vonnegut’s subsequent WWII novel, Slaughterhouse-Five:

            “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand—glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

            “Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

            “Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves. Once this is understood, the disagreeable behavior of American enlisted men in German [prisoner of war] prisons ceases to be a mystery.”

Vonnegut presents Howard W. Campbell, Jr. as a highly intelligent man. We might do well, therefore, to consider the plausibility of his words.

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Readings: from God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

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The following is an excerpt from a letter, written by Eliot Rosewater, President, Rosewater Foundation, and meant for his successor in that privileged position. The letter was triple-sealed and locked in a safe. Eliot is the novel's protagonist, and the Rosewater named in the title:

     "When the United State of America, which was meant to be a Utopia for all, was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect: those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen should be limited. This oversight was engendered by a weak-kneed sympathy for those who love expensive things, and by the feeling that the continent was so vast and valuable, and the population so thin and enterprising, that no thief, no matter how fast he stole, could more than mildly inconvenience anyone.
     "Noah and a few like perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.
     Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America.  Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, and bang in the noonday sun.
     "E pluribus unum is surely an ironic motto to inscribe on the currency of this Utopia gone bust, for every grotesquely rich American represents property, privileges, and pleasures that have been denied the many. An even more instructive motto, in the light of history made by the Noah Rosewaters, might be: Grab much too much, or you'll get nothing at all."

So we see, dear readers, that Kurt Vonnegut understood America, and that he was warning us, decades ago, about what many of us are only now coming to realize as our sordid fate. 
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Rants: A Translation from Facebook

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 A couple of days ago, I posted the following on my Facebook timeline.  Several people read it and expressed their agreement, but it did not evoke the controversy that I expected. Evidently nobody read it who was willing to question its validity:

All ideological conservatives are essentially either gullible or evil. If gullible, they are also, consequentially, prone to being evil-doers. If essentially evil, and also intelligent, they may endeavor to drive whole herds of the gullible into such things as war and divisive hatred of the Other. Thus, conservatism, although it uses religion to recruit gullible mobs to be used as it suits a particular conservative agenda, is in reality antithetical to every major religion in the world. Conservatism is evil because it is founded upon selfishness and greed, both of which things are destructive to agape which is central to true religion.

 I don't know whether to be pleased or disturbed that his rather harsh estimation of contemporary American political conservatism raised no howl of protest.
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Rants: All Scam, All the Time

I don't know about anybody else, but the result of my crashing disappointment in Obama has been that I've simply stopped following politics; I've realized that it's all scam, all the time. Politics is a television show, staged for the sole purpose of mentally/emotionally herding the bleating merinos toward the economic abattoir. Anybody who makes it to the top of any particular political ladder--congress, the senate, governorship, POTUS--has long since been bought and paid for; he is working neither to express the will, nor for the good, of the American people. The media are, needless to say, in uniform compliance, in that they treat it all as "real," even if seeming to be in strong opposition. Ergo, Rachel Maddow is as much a whore as anybody on Fox News in the final analysis.

Rage: Watered Down in Watertown

I cannot remember feeling less positive about being an American, or less hopeful about the foreseeable future of America, than I felt as I sat before my television, watching the citizens of Watertown, Massachusetts pour out into the night-time streets to stomp their feet and cheer, taking up the mindless chant of U ! S ! A !    U ! S ! A !   U ! S ! A !  as the armored vehicles carrying Kevlar-clad storm troopers withdrew from their neighborhoods.

What were they cheering about? They were cheering that an army, numbering in the thousands, clad as Black Op commandos, had finally run to ground a single, allegedly badly wounded, almost certainly scared shitless, nineteen-year-old boy; a boy who turned out not even to have been armed.

In the course of accomplishing this stupendous feat of bravery, this phalanx of commandos had gone door-to-door, forcing the citizens of Watertown to leave their already locked-down homes, hands on their heads, looking into the muzzles of military assault weapons: martial law, folks, martial law—right here in River City.

What I did not see captured on video from behind the lace curtains of any citizen’s upstairs window was any card-carrying NRA patriot, standing on his front porch wielding his weapon in defiance of this order to evacuate his castle, and singing hymns about the  snatching of his Fourth Amendment rights only from his cold, dead hand by the agents of Big Government Tyranny.

No. I did not see Courageous Defender of Liberty, Justice and the U.S. Constitution number one.

What I saw was a compliant herd of bleating merinos, standing on their hind legs in the dark, looking almost like men.

How very cheap is talk.

How easily is any ideal stepped around when the master’s voice is heard.

Time now to turn all mirrors to the wall. Time to grab your ankles and grit your teeth. It’s going to hurt; but always remember—it’s for your own good. God bless America.

Reflections: Disinformation Rampant

 

I can't understand what went down in Watertown after the Boston Marathon as anything other than a drill for the eventual imposition of martial law. I ask my self: what are they planning? I ask myself: what are we not being told? I ask myself: why were the moronic residents out in the streets chanting U! S! A! when they should have been furious about what had been done to them?