Dostoyevsky: Why American dream was never a bargain

By Nicolas Bonnal

Ex: http://english.pravda.ru/

The American dream...We have been told for two centuries that America was the awesome land of dreams and achievement, and that the rest of the world was a mere failure; that in Europe everyone was starving while in America everything was lush and green. What if it was all a lie? If the conquest of the west was a nightmare for those who lived there, and if the life for the poor had been very hard, and not only during the interminable and unsolved crisis of 1929? As a libertarian French economist wrote recently, 90% of the American people would be considered poor in the so despised Europe, if only we included criteria like the cost of private health or education in the calculation of American way of life.

I don't mean to be provocative. Many superior minds were already provocative in respect of this humble reality: American dream never was a bargain.

Let's start from the seventeenth century and the founding fathers. Never forget that the American climate is one of the wildest in the world, that one could hardly survive, and that the American growth is mainly due to the second industrial revolution and the demographic explosion in Europe during the last third of nineteenth century! Otherwise, the living conditions were abominable and many times colons died during wintertime. So, how could one be so "eyes wide shut" to get there? The great sociologist Daniel Boorstyn, in his wonderful rhetoric of democracy, gives us the key:

• Print version
• Font Size
• Send to friend

There was never a more outrageous or unscrupulous or more ill-informed advertising campaign than that by which the promoters for American colonies brought settlers here.

Advertisement is the language of America. Advertisement is an arguing technique producing addiction and consumerism, including in religious matters (Protestantism and Puritanism). The development of printing means the development of lies and British extremist politics during cromwellian times (which are allegedly the model of Orwell's Oceania!). And thus, to populate America, this far, cold and deserted land, you had to lie a little bit:

Hopeful overstatements, half-truths, and downright lies... gold and silver, fountains of youth, plenty of fish, venison without limit, all of course were promised...

Despite this art of lying, and considering the impossible conditions of living in a pre-technical world, we understand why there were only three millions Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this golden age of their civilization and literature. The awkward difficulties of the American reality were thus appreciated by our favourite witness, Alexis de Tocqueville. At the time of Tocqueville, there is no European mass immigration. Yet there is an American immigration to the west, whose harshness shocks French traveller and writer:

Many of these adventurers, who rush so boldly onwards in pursuit of wealth, were already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the country. They take their wives along with them, and make them share the countless perils and privations which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who after having been brought up amidst all the comforts of the large towns of New England, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of their parents to a comfortless hovel in a forest.

The conditions are thus equal to those lived by John Ford's heroes and pioneers:

Fever, solitude, and a tedious life had not broken the springs of their courage. Their features were impaired and faded, but their looks were firm: they appeared to be at once sad and resolute.

What motivated these sacrifices? I should say idealism, in a word. America is an idealistic, somewhat fanatical country, run by a wishful thinking and a fascination for the bible, and the people there enjoy blinding they eyes: in Utopia the dream is still to come!

I'm not kidding, I'm just referring to the greatest genius of literature, Dostoyevsky, who describes an amazing episode of his possessed' life. They come to America, then:

"We hired ourselves out as workmen to an exploiter; there were six of us Russians working for him students, even landowners coming from their estates, some officers, too, and all with the same grand object. Well, so we worked, sweated, wore ourselves out; Kirillov and I were exhausted at last; fell ill went away we couldn't stand it. Our employer cheated us when he paid us off; instead of thirty dollars, as he had agreed, he paid me eight and Kirillov fifteen; he beat us, too, more than once. So then we were left without work, Kirillov and I, and we spent four months lying on the floor in that little town. He thought of one thing and I thought of another."

Dostoyevsky just explains that any bad condition of living in America is well received for the country is the land of light and freedom and highly motivated people. Everything is thus deified by the possessed; it is good just because it is American (it's like Vietnamese and Iraqi bombings...) and because the other men are simply children.

On the contrary, Kirillov and I made up our minds from the first that we Russians were like little children beside the Americans, and that one must be born in America, or at least live for many years with Americans to be on a level with them. And do you know: if we were asked a dollar for a thing worth a farthing, we used to pay it with pleasure, in fact with enthusiasm. We approved of everything: spiritualism, lynch-law, revolvers and tramps.

The slaves-adventurers are thus labelled "Men made of paper" by Shatov. With his habitual and implacable shrewdness, Dostoyevsky understands that any American trait will be celebrated by the adorers of Uncle Sam. He seizes that in the future America will fascinate the minds of many, even if this country will attain its status and wealth thanks to European wars and communism, communism that will delay the development of Russia (next world power in 1914) and China. In this meaning yes America was a lucky place.

Let us conclude: we are used to assert that a man fascinated by the presently fraying America is a liberal. And what is a liberal for Dostoyevsky?

"Our Russian liberal is a flunkey before everything, and is only looking for some one whose boots he can clean."

In France and in Europe today, we have a lot of flunkeys, and, would say the great Will, an American dream still strutting and fretting his hour upon a stage...

Nicolas Bonnal

REFLEXIONS SUR LA SYRIE ET L'IRAN

REFLEXIONS SUR LA SYRIE ET L'IRAN

Méridien Zéro vous propose d'écouter la conférence donnée récemment par Robert Steuckers à nos camarades du Cercle Non Conforme. Cette conférence porte sur l'histoire et l'actualité géo-politique de la Syrie et de l'Iran.

Enregistrement et montage réalisés par Lord Igor et Wilsdorf.

Pour écouter: http://www.meridien-zero.com/archive/2012/12/14/emission-n-123-reflexions-sur-la-syrie-et-l-iran.html

Brzeziński: USA werden Israel nicht wie ein »dummer Esel« hinterhertrotten

Redaktion

Der führende amerikanische Geopolitiker Zbigniew Brzezinński hat die Versuche Israels, mit seinem Drängen auf einen Krieg gegen den Iran die amerikanische nationale Sicherheitspolitik massiv zu beeinflussen, scharf zurückgewiesen. Washington werde Tel Aviv nicht blind folgen, sollte sich Israel für ein einseitiges militärisches Vorgehen gegen den Iran entscheiden, erklärte er.

Weiter sagte Brzeziński, er rate Präsident Barack Obama davon ab, ein militärisches Vorgehen gegen den Iran zu unterstützen, wenn Israel einen Krieg begönne. Diese Bemerkungen fielen auf einer Konferenz des National Iranian American Council (NIAC) und der Vereinigung für Rüstungskontrollmaßnahmen (ACA).

Sollte Israel den Iran angreifen, bevor dieser die von den USA gezogenen »roten Linien« überschritten habe, besteht aus Sicht Brzezińskis für die USA keine »unmittelbare Verpflichtung, wie ein dummer Esel den Israelis hinterher zu trotten, was auch immer sie tun«. »Sollten sie einfach aufgrund der Annahme, die USA würden automatisch in diesen Krieg mit hineingezogen, einen Krieg beginnen, ist es meiner Ansicht nach eine Freundschaftspflicht, deutlich zu machen: ›Ihr werdet niemals für uns Entscheidungen treffen, die wichtige nationale Interessen berühren‹«, sagte er weiter. »Meiner Überzeugung nach haben die USA jedes Recht, ihre nationale Sicherheitspolitik selbst zu bestimmen. Dieser Auffassung würden sicherlich die meisten Amerikaner zustimmen. Und daher ist es wichtig, diesen Punkt in aller Deutlichkeit herauszustellen, und dies gilt in besonderem Maße, wenn wir uns ausdrücklich und verbindlich der israelischen Sicherheit verpflichtet fühlen.«

 

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/geostrategie/redaktion/brzezi-ski-usa-werden-israel-nicht-wie-ein-dummer-esel-hinterhertrotten.html

 

Textes sur la Syrie

 

Textes sur la Syrie

Mediawerkgroep Syrië (MWS)  

http://mediawerkgroepsyrie.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/la-syrie-victime-dun-complot-une-preuve-de-plus/

Quand les néo-cons musulmans parlent le même langage que les USA

L’ennemi a au moins le mérite d’être franc et clair

Les terroristes de l’OTAN visent la Syrie et l’Algérie (NL-FR)

Amicalement.
Groupe-Média Syrie

 

Email: [e-mail]

Blog: http://MWSyria.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MWSyria

Twitter: @MWSyria

Autorenportrait Panajotis Kondylis

Autorenportrait Panajotis Kondylis

By Adolph Przybyszewski 

„Zu jeder Zeit liefert die Ideologie der Sieger den Besiegten einen Rahmen zur Interpretation der Wirklichkeit, ihre Niederlage wird gewissermaßen mit der Übernahme des Siegerstandpunktes besiegelt.“ Was sich liest, als stammte es aus der ersten von Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation, die dieser im Winter 1807 / 08 in Sorge um die geistige Lage im französisch okkupierten Berlin hielt, hat im Jahr 1998 ein bedeutender europäischer Skeptiker geschrieben: der Philosoph Panajotis Kondylis. Dieser Denker, der seine meisten Bücher in deutscher Sprache verfaßt hat, wurde am 17. August 1943 als Sproß einer griechischen Familie von Militärs und Politikern gboren, die während des Zweiten Weltkriegs auch in den Kampf gegen die deutsche Besatzung involviert war. Er studierte zunächst Philosophie und Klassische Philologie in Athen, wo er als Marxist unter der griechischen Militärjunta zum Dissidenten wurde; Kondylis wechselte sodann nach Deutschland, um neben der Philosophie die Politikwissenschaften und Geschichte zu belegen, bis er 1977 mit einer philosophiehistorischen Arbeit in Heidelberg promoviert wurde. Dort fand er auch seine zweite Heimat: Abwechselnd lebte er fortan in Griechenland und am Neckar; in Athen ist Panajotis Kondylis schließlich am 11. Juli 1998 knapp fünfundfünfzigjährig überraschend verstorben.

Da er vermögend genug war, um nicht auf Brotarbeit in den Mühlen des akademischen Mittelbaus und der Lehrstühle angewiesen zu sein, blieben ihm Verbiegungen und karriereförderliche Zugeständnisse an die Moden des Zeitgeistes erspart: Er konnte die Freiheit des ‚Privatgelehrten‘ kultivieren, um ein solitäres Werk hervorzubringen. Errang Kondylis anfangs als Außenseiter des akademischen Betriebs wenig Aufmerksamkeit, werden seine Arbeiten inzwischen längst auch von den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften an den Universitäten wahrgenommen und ausgebeutet. Sowohl in Deutschland als auch in Griechenland veröffentlichte er zahlreiche, teils dickleibige Monographien, die ein Spektrum vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, von der philosophiegeschichtlichen Spezialstudie bis zur Epochenanalyse und politischen Diagnostik umfassen, wovon mindestens seine Deutung der europäischen Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus, die Studie über den ‚Konservativismus‘, seine Analyse der Theorie des Krieges bei Clausewitz, Marx, Engels und Lenin wie auch seine Geschichte der neuzeitlichen Metaphysikkritik als Standardwerke gelten. Darüber hinaus hat er sich in erstaunlichem Maß als Übersetzer und Kulturmittler betätigt: Neben Schriften von Machiavelli, Chamfort, Montesquieu, Lichtenberg, Rivarol, Karl Marx und Carl Schmitt, um nur einige zu nennen, übertrug er auch ein heute so abgelegen scheinendes Buch wie James Burnhams frühe Analyse der Technokratie als Revolution der Manager ins Griechische. Die eigenen Arbeiten übersetzte er selbst in seine Muttersprache beziehungsweise ins Deutsche. Kondylis nahm außerdem mit zahlreichen Essays und Aufsätzen lebhaften Anteil an aktuellen Debatten in deutschsprachigen und griechischen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften.

Die Bedeutung seines Werkes geht jedoch über die akademischen und allgemein anerkannten Erträge etwa für eine europäische Geistesgeschichte hinaus: Sie ist vor allem in seiner klärenden Begriffsarbeit, seinem Denkstil sowie dem wachen Gespür für das Politische in Geschichte und Gegenwart zu sehen. Kondylis ging es zeitlebens um das Wesen des ‚Sozialen‘, um das ‚Politische‘, um das Wesen der ‚Macht‘ als das Menschliche schlechthin. Dabei suchte er Anschluß an klassisch gewordene ‚realistische‘ Denker wie Thukydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx und Nietzsche, übernahm aber auch wesentliche Akzente aus den Debatten der Zwischenkriegszeit, die sich etwa mit Namen wie Carl Schmitt, Ernst Cassirer und Karl Mannheim verbinden. Während Westdeutschland im Schatten nord-amerikanischer Atomraketen schlummerte, hat der Grieche damit einen auf konkrete Lagen und deren Eskalationsmöglichkeiten bezogenen Denkstil, einen politischen Analysemodus wachgehalten, der hier in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts unter einer offiziösen Kompromißund Konsensrhetorik endgültig verschüttet zu werden drohte. Als einer der „bedeutendsten Erben und Vollstrecker“ der deutschen philosophischen Tradition (Gustav Seibt) schien Kondylis deren fleischgewordene Synthese mit jenem auf die Antike gegründeten ‚Griechentum‘ zu bilden, auf das man hierzulande von Hölderlin bis Heidegger stets fixiert war.

Sein erstes deutsches Buch, eine über 700 Seiten umfassende gekürzte Variante seiner Dissertation, ist in souveränem Zugriff auf die Quellen der Analyse des frühen Denkwegs von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel gewidmet, der Entstehung der Dialektik, deren Ursprung er in Hölderlins Vereinigungsphilosophie erkannte. Schon hier verhandelte Kondylis in systematischer Hinsicht exemplarisch das Problem der Beziehungen zwischen Geist und Sinnlichkeit, der Lust an der Macht auch in der intellektuellen Welt. Die dabei entwickelte methodische Leitfrage, „wie sich ein systematisches Denken als Rationalisierung einer Grundhaltung und -entscheidung allmählich herauskristallisiert, und zwar im Bestreben, Gegenpositionen argumentativ zu besiegen“, bleibt auch für die folgenden Arbeiten zentral. In seiner großen Studie über die Aufklärung entfaltet Kondylis 1981 eine „Entdeckung“ seines ersten Buches: die „Rehabilitierung der Sinnlichkeit“ als wichtiges Anliegen jener Epoche. Ein beachtenswertes Ergebnis war in diesem Rahmen auch seine weiterführende Diskussion des nur scheinbar strikt antagonistischen Begriffspaares Rationalismus / Irrationalismus, die den irrationalen Urgrund jedes rationalen Systems herausstellt: Rationalismus ist für ihn nur „die zweckmäßige, formallogisch einwandfreie Verwendung der argumentativen Mittel, die das Denken zur Verfügung stellt, zur Untermauerung einer Grundhaltung“; diese Grundhaltungen beziehungsweise -entscheidungen selbst liegen „jenseits logischer Begründung“, müßten also „ihrem Wesen nach als mystisch bezeichnet werden“. Rationales Denken ist demnach, mit einfachen Worten, das methodisch schlüssige Entfalten eines Vorurteils zum begründeten Urteil. In solchen Grundentscheidungen haben auch die ‚Werte‘ ihre Basis, das heißt eine rationale Letztbegründung moralischer Normen scheint nicht möglich; Kondylis’ früh an ‚klassischen‘ Texten erarbeiteter Reflexionsstand erweist sich auch hierin späteren, insbesondere im angelsächsischen Raum mit anderem Instrumentarium vorangetriebenen Arbeiten als ebenbürtig.

Die bis dahin nur am Rande zweier materialreicher Studien in der Begriffsarbeit enthaltene philosophische Anthropologie bündelte und systematisierte er in einem seiner schmaleren Bücher, das zur Programmschrift der eigenen skeptischen Theoriebildung wurde: Macht und Entscheidung (1984) stellt die „Herausbildung der Weltbilder und die Wertfrage“ im allgemeinen auf den Prüfstand. Weltbilder sind für Kondylis grundsätzlich polemisch aufgebaut; sie beruhen auf Akten der Entscheidung im Sinne einer Komplexitätsreduktion, denen das einzelne Subjekt nicht nur seine Welt, sondern auch „seine Identität und konkrete Sehweise“ verdankt. Jeder dieser vorbegrifflichen und begrifflichen Akte der Sonderung ist für ihn bereits Machtanspruch, denn das Subjekt verbindet „den Sinn der Welt mit der eigenen Stellung in ihr“, also stets in der sozialen Relation zu anderen. Dabei ist dies keineswegs auf krisenhafte Zustände beschränkt, sondern eine grundlegende Operation menschlicher Existenz. Auch das „geistige Leben“ gehorche, so Kondylis, „den gleichen Gesetzen wie alle anderen Erscheinungen des sozialen Lebens“ und verschränke sich demgemäß ebenso „mit dem Selbsterhaltungstrieb und- bestreben, mit dem Machtanspruch und -kampf“. Es war symptomatisch, daß dieses Buch bei seinem Erscheinen nur wenig besprochen und damit öffentlich kaum zur Kenntnis gebracht wurde.
Kondylis, der sein Modell konsequent auch auf die Wissenschaften mit ihren abstrakten, mathematisierten, auf Werturteilsfreiheit gestützten Verfahren anwandte und darin dieselben polemisch-agonalen Prinzipien erkennen wollte, vertrat damit pragmatische Tendenzen der Wissenschaftstheorie; deren Wurzeln reichen in die erste Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts zurück und sind etwa schon in Karl Mannheims wissenssoziologischer Abhandlung über „Die Bedeutung der Konkurrenz im Gebiete des Geistigen“ von 1929 zu finden. Solche heute von manchen noch immer als Zumutung empfundenen Einsichten waren bei den avancierteren Intellektuellen der deutschen Zwischenkriegszeit, als „Ausnahmezustände“ fast die Regel schienen, bereits einmal Gewißheit, keineswegs nur in Alfred Baeumlers Nietzsche-Deutung oder bei Carl Schmitt, also bei den „Schmuddelkindern“, mit denen man bekanntlich nicht spielen darf. „Im Grunde freilich ist die einzige Gewähr der rechten Einsicht, Stellung gewählt zu haben“, propagierte etwa Walter Benjamin 1927 in Denkbilder – Moskau die „Entschiedenheit“ als Ergebnis einer den vorbewußten Akt einholenden „Entscheidung“. Dies gilt ebenso für ein auf konkrete Lagen bezogenes Denken, das, folgt man Bertolt Brecht, einerseits Situationen kannte, in denen höchste Einsätze, das „Einverständnis“ mit dem Sterben gefordert war, andererseits solche, die den „Neinsager“ mit der Forderung auf den Plan riefen, „in jeder neuen Lage neu nachzudenken“.

Freilich distanziert sich der von Marx herkommende Kondylis auf einer sachlichen Ebene vom „militanten Dezisionismus“ Carl Schmitts ebenso wie von seinen „normativistischen“ Gegnern: Man müsse um der theoretischen Neugier willen die These ernst nehmen, „Welt und Mensch seien an sich sinnlos“. Von daher sind auch Kondylis’ politische Ausführungen zur geistigen Selbstaufgabe durch „Übernahme des Siegerstandpunktes“ nicht etwa speziell auf die heutigen Deutschen gemünzt. Wer von diesen würde im übrigen denn eine „Ideologie der Sieger“ als solche erkennen und dann auch noch als Problem verstehen wollen? Der Grieche zielt vielmehr mit seinem „deskriptiven Dezisionismus“ auf allgemeine Befunde und gibt ein vom Spiel der Kräfte dieser Welt losgelöstes Erkenntnisinteresse vor: Er operiert scheinbar leidenschaftslos mit dem klinisch kalten Licht der Sezierung, die allein das Wirkungsgefüge sozialer – geistesgeschichtlicher, historischer sowie politischer – Konstellationen bloßlegen will. Dabei gestattet sich Kondylis allenfalls ein verhaltenes Pathos der Erkenntnis, wenn er als Credo formuliert: „Ich finde es aufregend und spannend, daß auf diesem Planeten die Materie oder die Energie, wie man will, zum Bewußtsein von sich selbst gekommen ist, daß es Wesen gibt, die in ihrem Machterweiterungsstreben den ‚Geist‘ in der ganzen Vielfalt seiner Formen und seiner erstaunlichen Spiele erzeugen und sich am liebsten mit Hilfe von Glaubenssätzen und Theorien gegenseitig vernichten“. Normativistische Einwände wischt Kondylis beiseite als Äußerungen einer auf Nestwärme erpichten, erkenntnisfeindlichen Empfindsamkeit einerseits, als selbst im Kampf um Macht instrumentalisierte geistige Waffen andererseits: Er will beharrlich das Factum brutum, die „Tatsachen“, die formalen Strukturen politischer, mithin sozialer Prozesse in den Blick rücken, um mit dem „Takt des Urteils“, so seine von Clausewitz stammende Lieblingswendung, möglichst verläßliche Grundlagen für eine „zukunftsorientierte Lagebeschreibung“ zu gewinnen. Kondylis, der in seiner auf drei Bände angelegten, durch den frühen Tod Fragment gebliebenen Sozialontologie Das Politische und der Mensch (1999) die Erträge seiner bisherigen Arbeit zu einer großen Synthese zusammenführen und seinen machtbezogenen Ansatz weiter ausbauen wollte, läßt freilich manche Fragen offen und hat bisweilen eine reduktionistische Tendenz: Wo er sich etwa dazu versteigt, „daß jede theoretische Position als Gegenposition“ entstehe, beschneidet er das Denken auf reine Re-Actio, die jede freie Actio negiert. Da von seiner theoretischen Gesamtschau, die auf die unterhintergehbaren Kategorien und Konstanten sozialen Seins von der menschlichen Urhorde an zielte, nur der erste Band vorliegt, muß aber offen bleiben, worauf das ganze Unternehmen letztlich zusteuerte.

Mit zwei großen Studien über den Konservativismus (1990) und den Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform (1991), die bereits wesentliche Bausteine seiner später in Angriff genommenen systematischen Sozialontologie enthalten, leitete Kondylis auch seine intensive Beschäftigung mit den globalisierten Dimensionen heutiger Politik ein. In ihnen zeigt sich der Wert einer gründlichen und kritischen Schulung an den Originaltexten von Marx und Engels: Kondylis’ ideenhistorische Analysen, die auf idealtypische formale Denkstrukturen und –figuren ausgerichtet sind, verlieren nie die Bodenhaftung, sondern bleiben sozialgeschichtlich verortet, damit im besten Sinn konkret. Diese beiden Studien beschreiben zwei folgenreiche historische Übergänge oder Brüche in Europa: Der Konservativismus wird begrifflich der alteuropäischen, ständisch geprägten Adelswelt zugeschlagen, deren Untergang in die liberale Moderne mündete. Diese wiederum ist als Epoche der Bürgerlichkeit von einer massendemokratischen Postmoderne abgelöst worden, in der eine „analytisch-kombinatorische“ Denkfigur zur Vorherrschaft kommt und weltweit ausgreift: Die unter dem Signum einer „synthetisch-harmonisierenden“ Denkfigur stehende bürgerlich-liberale Moderne hatte in Kondylis’ Augen grundsätzlich die Tendenz, eine Harmonisierung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse unter übergeordneten Kategorien, etwa dem Staat, anzustreben; die massendemokratischen Lebensformen basierten hingegen auf atomisierten, fast beliebig kombinierbaren, prinzipiell gleichberechtigten Elementen, deren kleinster gemeinsamer Nenner das Produzieren und vor allem das Konsumieren ist.
Aus diesen Arbeiten heraus entwickelte sich Kondylis zu einem veritablen Theoretiker der „Globalisierung“: Deren Gestalt und Ideologie versuchte er in den 1990er Jahren in dem schlanken, aber gewichtigen Buch Planetarische Politik nach dem Kalten Krieg und in zahlreichen Essays zu umreißen, deren wichtigste 2001 in dem Sammelband Das Politische im 20. Jahrhundert zusammengefaßt wurden. Ihm geht es dabei weiterhin vor allem um eine „mehr oder weniger sachgerechte Erfassung des Charakters jener Triebkräfte und jener geschichtlich aktiven Subjekte, die durch ihr Wirken und ihre Begegnungen die Vielfalt der Ereignisse ins Leben rufen und somit den Bereich möglichen Handelns abstecken“. Zukunft ist dabei nur als „Form und Möglichkeit, nicht als Inhalt und Ereignis erkennbar“. Die gegenwärtig zum Schlagwort verkommene Globalisierung via Technik und Wirtschaft steht in einer Kontinuität diverser Formen planetarischer Politik, die sich mit der Neuzeit entfaltete, von den frühneuzeitlichen Entdeckungsreisen, Eroberungszügen und dem Ausbau des Kolonialhandels an bis zur industriellen und liberalen Revolution im 19. Jahrhundert, die mit dem Liberalismus den klassischen Imperialismus hervorbrachte. Schließlich trieben die Wirkungen des liberalen Kapitalismus der so verfaßten Gesellschaften auch im Inneren jenen Vermassungsvorgang voran, den Kondylis als Transformationsprozeß des bürgerlichliberalen Systems in eine moderne Massendemokratie beschrieben hat.

Der sich damit durchsetzende Topos „Wohlstand für alle“ entspricht einer gesellschaftlichen Verfaßtheit mit fortschreitender „Demokratisierung“ und sozialer Mobilität, und dieser wiederum einer individualistischen, egalitären und wertpluralistischen, tendenziell hedonistischen Ideologie, die ihren Begriff im Ideologem der „Selbstverwirklichung“ der 1968er-Generation gefunden hat. Der Kommunismus als scheinbarer Antagonismus zum „Westen“ hat in seinen Wirkungen dafür gesorgt, daß sich der massendemokratische Anspruch auf Bedürfnisbefriedigung und Konsumzugang weltweit durchsetzen konnte, normativ widergespiegelt in den „Menschenrechten“ und der Würde jedes einzelnen Menschen, indem er eine eigene Interpretation der Menschenrechte im „antiimperialistischen Befreiungskampf“ einsetzte, verbreitete und dadurch „den Westen“ im Kampf um politischen Einfluß zu Überbietungsreaktionen herausforderte. „Das Auftreten der unteren Schichten der Weltgesellschaft auf der internationalen Bühne wird daher immer selbstbewußter und die Grenze zwischen den Subjekten und Objekten planetarischer Politik immer flüssiger. Diese dramatische und epochemachende Wandlung springt ins Auge, wenn man sich den Stellenwert mancher asiatischer oder arabischer Staaten in der planetarischen Politik vor fünfzig Jahren im Vergleich zu heute vergegenwärtigt“. Hier entstehe tatsächlich „zum ersten Mal in der menschlichen Geschichte eine wahre Weltgesellschaft, die zwar durch erhebliche faktische Ungleichheiten und Ungleichartigkeiten gekennzeichnet ist, doch sich andererseits zur prinzipiellen Gleichheit ihrer Mitglieder bekennt und ihnen dieselben Rechte zuerkennt“; sie ist zwar nicht realiter vollkommen umgesetzt, verwirklicht, aber sie ist stets als Anspruch, als propagiertes Faktum präsent, an dem sich alle politisch Agierenden bewußt oder unwillkürlich ausrichten. Damit wird, nach dem vorläufigen Ende des Kommunismus, jedoch keineswegs die liberale Utopie der befriedeten Weltgesellschaft evoziert: Kondylis ist, wie Armin Mohler treffend zugespitzt hat, ein „Anti-Fukuyama“, das heißt, er sieht mit der Auflösung der bipolaren Welt des Kalten Kriegs nicht etwa ein „Ende der Geschichte“ gekommen, da der Mensch als animal sociale stets den idealtypischen Handlungsoptionen von Konkurrenz, Konflikt und Kooperation, der Definition von Freund, Neutralem und Feind nicht entkommen kann. Allenfalls sieht er einen Formenwandel geschichtlicher Aktionen; im Gegensatz zu Francis Fukuyama, aber auch zu Carl Schmitt, ist für Kondylis das Ende der Staatlichkeit beziehungsweise der Nationalstaaten nicht ausgemacht: Erscheine die Nation diesem oder jenem Kollektiv überholt, müsse es sich „erweitern und sich für eine andere Form von politischer Einheit entscheiden“; da Kollektive aber „ohnehin immer im Spiel bleiben“, sei auch die Möglichkeit nicht von der Hand zu weisen, „daß dieses oder jenes Kollektiv die Nation und die entsprechende Organisationsform als das beste Mittel begreift, um seine Interessen geltend zu machen“. In Frage gestellt werden dürfe also nicht, ob „die Nation“ schlechthin überleben könne, sondern „ob diese oder jene bestehende Nation die Bedingungen der überlebensfähigen Einheit im planetarischen Zeitalter erfüllt oder nicht“. Es sei auch nicht die kulturelle Differenz als solche, die jenen clash of civilizations verursache, wie ihn der auf Kulturkreise fixierte Samuel Huntington annimmt; es ist vielmehr der „Verteilungskampf“, der „sich in bestimmten Lagen als Kulturkampf verkleiden“ muß. Kondylis, der Huntington eine „Unterschätzung des Nationalen“ vorwirft, geht also von konkreten, historisch gewachsenen Kollektiven als Handlungsträgern aus, das heißt den bestehenden Völkern und Staaten.

Vor dem Hintergrund der Begrenztheit der Ressourcen und des globalen Bevölkerungswachstums könne sich das „westliche“ Ordnungskonzept, das auf der Annahme einer bei allen Menschen gleichen „Würde“ basiert und eng mit materiellen Glücksversprechen verbunden ist, „in einen Auslöser von Unordnung verwandeln“. Nach der Ökonomisierung des Politischen im 20. Jahrhundert scheint auch künftig eine „Biologisierung“ der Konflikte und damit der Politik möglich: „Engpässe würden zur Instabilität und dauerhafte Krisen zu Zuständen führen, in denen sich die Ökonomisierung des Politischen zu einer Identifizierung der Politik mit der Verteilung von knapp gewordenen (auch ökologischen) Gütern steigern würde. Reduziert sich das Politische aber in Zeiten höchster Not auf die Güterverteilung, so muß eine Biologisierung desselben in doppelter Hinsicht eintreten: nicht nur wäre das (direkte oder indirekte) Ziel des politischen Kampfes ein biologisches, nämlich das Überleben in mehr oder weniger engerem Sinne, sondern auch die Unterscheidungsmerkmale, die dabei als Gruppierungskriterien dienen würden, wären höchstwahrscheinlich biologischer Natur, nachdem die traditionellen ideologischen und sozialen Unterscheidungen über den menschenrechtlichen Universalismus hinfällig geworden wären“. Was in der Globalisierungsanalyse von Panajotis Kondylis am Ende aufleuchtet, ist wiederum eine Haltung, die wir aus der Zwischenkriegszeit von marxistischer wie nationalrevolutionärer Seite her kennen: „Wenn das 20. Jahrhundert die kommunistische Utopie entlarvt hat, dann wird das 21. Jahrhundert die Abschaffung des Liberalismus bedeuten. Doch niemand weiß, welche konkreten Ereignisse diese großen Tendenzen im Hinblick auf das 21. Jahrhundert einleiten werden, das meines Erachtens das erschütterndste und tragischste Zeitalter in der Geschichte der Menschheit werden wird“.
Angesichts solcher Perspektiven rechnet Kondylis mit den traditionellen politischen „Lagern“ insbesondere in der deutschen Provinz ab. Die „Linke“ habe sich „zum Schlußlicht oder zum Rottenschließer des Amerikanismus gewandelt“, sie schöpfe „nicht mehr aus einer lebendigen marxistischen Tradition, nämlich der ausnahmslosen Verherrlichung des freiheitlichen Gedankenguts“. Sie, die einst den „‚nationalen Freiheitskampf des vietnamesischen Volkes‘ bejubelten“, verdammten „heute ‚alle nationalen Bewegungen‘, anstatt den Imperialismus anzuprangern, und machen sich für die Interpretation der Wirklichkeit die Parolen der Sieger zu eigen: die Globalisierung durch den internationalen Markt und durch die ‚Menschenrechte‘“. Die „Rechte“ wiederum suhle sich in „provinziellem Tiefsinn“ und bleibe in Deutschland – ebenso übrigens wie die „Linke“ – „auf die eigene nationale Vergangenheit fixiert“: Man betreibt „linken“ beziehungsweise „rechten“ Historismus und verliert die entscheidenden Fragen aus dem Blick. „Die strategische Frage lautet: Werden die wichtigsten europäischen Nationen durch Konsens oder durch gegenseitige oder einseitige Zugeständnisse eine handlungsfähige politische Einheit bilden, die in der Weltkonkurrenz bestehen kann, oder wird sich zu diesem Zweck die faktische Hegemonie einer Nation als notwendig erweisen – was an sich wünschenswerter wäre als der gemeinsame Untergang aller ?“

Der Gewinn von Kondylis’ an Hybris grenzender Attitüde eines zum Erdengewimmel nachgerade planetarisch distanzierten Beobachters ist eine intellektuelle Freiheit und Rücksichtslosigkeit, der standgehalten sein will. Als persönlicher Ermächtigungsversuch des Philosophen steht sein Werk ganz in der Tradition stoischer Denkübungen, geistiger Kneipp-Kuren, die die Widerstandskraft des gefährdeten – weil mit Einsicht geschlagenen – Intellekts erhöhen sollen, wie wir es etwa auch von der fatalistischen Monumentalperspektive des sensiblen Geschichtsdeuters Oswald Spengler oder den ins Imperiale gewendeten Schmerz-Etüden des Literaten Ernst Jünger kennen. Da Kondylis aber seine individuelle Freiheit für unbefangene philosophische und politische Analysen gerade der aktuellen restdeutschen beziehungsweise europäischen Zustände und Befindlichkeiten nutzte, ist ihr Wert auch für eine nüchterne, grundlegende Beurteilung der Lage „unserer“ im eigenen Geviert höchst bedrohten Horde evident: freilich allein für jene, die willens und fähig sind, sich über eine trostlose Eintagsfliegenexistenz hinaus als dauerhafteres, geschichtlich gewachsenes Kollektiv mit eigenen Interessen zu definieren und wahrzunehmen.

---

Article printed from Sezession im Netz: http://www.sezession.de

URL to article: http://www.sezession.de/6157/autorenportrait-panajotis-kondylis.html

Rassegna Stampa (Nov. 2012/2)

Rassegna Stampa: articoli in primo piano (Nov. 2012/2)

• Un tornado di contraddizioni
  di Marco Cedolin [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Il Corrosivo di Marco Cedolin [scheda fonte]

• Droni, il nuovo modello americano
  di Michele Paris [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Altrenotizie [scheda fonte]

• Non in mio nome la grande distribuzione ucciderà il commercio locale
  di Marco Barbon [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Movimento per la Decrescita Felice [scheda fonte]

• E. A. Poe scopritore di una nuova malattia dello spirito: la modernità
  di Francesco Lamendola [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

• Pulsional gender art
  di Valerio Zecchini [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

• La città del piede
  di Stefano Serafini [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: biourbanism.org

• Patto militare Italia-Israele. Un accordo scellerato e illegale
  di Antonio Mazzeo [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

• Trans-Iran
  di Antonello Sacchetti - Giovanna Canzano [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: giovannacanzano.it

• Legge elettorale, pasticci all'italiana prima dello tsunami
  di Massimo Fini [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Massimo Fini [scheda fonte]

• E poi dice che uno li butterebbe a mare!
  di Gianni Petrosillo [29/11/2012]
  Fonte: Conflitti e strategie [scheda fonte]

• Le “primarie”: la politica ridotta a farsa
  di Enrico Galoppini [27/11/2012]
  Fonte: europeanphoenix

• Consuma, consuma, e il pianeta finisce presto
  di Giorgio Nebbia [27/11/2012]
  Fonte: eddyburg

• Di come le colonne d’Ercole del politically correct limitano il pensiero degli intellettuali
  di Marco Tarchi [27/11/2012]
  Fonte: meridianionline

• Intellettuali e Potere
  di Massimo Fini - Francesco Ventura [27/11/2012]
  Fonte: meridianionline

• La Palestina un problema irrisolto: cause storiche e prospettive future
  di Antonella Ricciardi - Federico Dal Cortivo [24/11/2012]
  Fonte: europeanphoenix

• Siamo una società di coriandoli
  di Giuseppe De Rita - Antonello Caporale [24/11/2012]
  Fonte: il fatto quotidiano

• Lotta ai "Bankster" o bomba sotto l'America?
  di Valentin Katasanov [24/11/2012]
  Fonte: Come Don Chisciotte [scheda fonte]

• La grande offensiva israeliana
  di Giacomo Gabellini [24/11/2012]
  Fonte: statopotenza

• Vorrei chiederle scusa
  di Francesco Lamendola [24/11/2012]
  Fonte: Arianna Editrice [scheda fonte]

• Banche e governi crolleranno insieme
  di Giovanni Lollo [24/11/2012]
  Fonte: informazioneconsapevole.blogspot 

   Clicca qui per visitare il nostro Archivio articoli.

A Note on the Art of Political Conversion

By T.E. Hulme

 

Ex: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/

 

T.E. Hulme

Some day a wonderful book will be written on the art of persuasion, a new sophistic. One may suppose that psychology will ultimately become as complete a science as geometry and mechanics are now. It will be possible then to predict the effect of an argument on a man’s mind as surely as one can now predict the eclipse of the moon. On the basis of this developed science will be built an infallible set of rules for converting a man to any opinion you like. The mechanism of mind will be as bare as that of a typewriter. You will press the right levers, and the result you want will follow inevitably. The lover will sigh no more, but will consult the manual and succeed—unless the lady be similarly armed. So dangerous will the art be that the knowledge of it must be confined to a special caste, like Plato’s guards, disciplined and trained not to make any malicious use of their power. Or more probably the then prevailing form of government will seize it and make a monopoly of it as they now do of armed force, and used it for their perpetual preservation.

Pending the arrival of this political canvasser’s millennium, one can sketch out the beginnings of the thing. Materials for the art already exist: Schopenhauer’s “Art of Controversy,” Pascal’s “Pensées,” the manuals which the credulous Protestant imagines that the Jesuits are brought up on, and, more recently, James’s “Will to Believe,” and “L’Arte di Persuadere” of the brilliant Italian pragmatist Pezzolini, who would bring all philosophy to the service of such a sophistic.

All these are founded on a recognition of the basic fact of the absolute impotence of a mere idea to produce any change in belief. All conviction, and so necessarily conversion, is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind. No intellectual conception has any moving force unless it be hinged on to an emotion or an instinct. In every man’s mind there exist certain fixed instincts and prejudices, certain centers of emotion, tendencies to react to certain words. The expression “center” is not merely metaphorical. In all probability there does exist a corresponding organization of the neurones in the brain. These are the parts of a man’s mind which lead to conviction expressed in action, ballotwise or otherwise. You have got to get hold of these to produce any change. If you can’t do this, then the idea is “dead,” it has no motive power, the most logical presentation will have no effect. There must be in any successful propaganda, then, an element more important than good argument. A good case is the last, not the first part of a successful conversion. In practice men have always known this. Practice remains constant throughout the ages; it is not reserved for any particular century to “discover” anything new about the ways of the human. With theory, however, it is very different. That may be wrong continually, and may, at a definite moment, be put right. In this case it certainly is so. For a long time reason was given a too predominant place in psychology, and to it all other faculties were subordinated. Gradually, during the last 50 years in philosophy, instinct and emotion have asserted their rightful place, until at the present time the reaction has gone so far that the intellect is regarded merely as a subtle and useful servant of the will, and of man’s generally irrational vital instincts. Bergson, Le Roy, Croce, Eucken, Simmel are all anti-intellectualists.

The particular effect of this change of view which concerns me here is that of the difference it makes to the theory of politics. Formerly the prevailing conception was something of this kind—you perfected the mechanism of democracy until each man’s carefully thought-out opinion had its effect. You then, on any particular measure, set out on a campaign of careful argument. Each side stated their reasons to the best of their ability, the elector heard both sides, and recorded his vote accordingly. All this, of course, sounds very fantastical now in the light of what actually does happen at a General Election. But the Bentham-Mill School honestly regarded it as a possible idea. We all recognize this now as fantastical, but what must be substituted for it as a true account of the psychology of the matter? This kind of inquiry would have to go into two parts — an account of the process by which the mass of the electors are converted, and the quite different process in the minds of the intellectuals, The first has been done very completely and amusing by Gustave Le Bon in “Psychology of the Crowd,” and in Graham Wallas’s “Human Nature in Politics.” They recognize quite clearly that the process of conversion here is anything but intellectual.

They show the modern politician frankly and cynically recognizing this, setting out deliberately to hypnotize the elector, as the owners of patent medicines hypnotize the buyers. They don’t argue; they deliberately reiterate a short phrase, such as “Pears’ Soap” or “Pea Food,” until it gets into the mind of the victim, by a process of suggestion definitely not intellectual. But no one has yet given any connected theory of the more interesting part of the subject—the conversion of the “intellectual,” of the leisured middle-class wobbler. Wallas himself somehow leaves you with a suspicion in your mind that he does still think that the “intellectual” is in the position which Mill, in the age of naive belief in reason, imagined him to be—that of weighing arguments, and then calmly deciding a question on its merits. Now, nothing could be grater nonsense. No one can escape from the law of mental nature I have referred to. We are all subject to it. We may be under the delusion that we are deciding a question from purely rational motives, but we never are. Even the detached analyst of the phenomena is himself subject to the law. Conversion is always emotional and non-rational.

Now this does seem to me to be a point of practical importance if it helps us to convert this class. For though the type may not be numerous, it does have, in the end, a big influence in politics. Not very obviously or directly, for in no country do the intellectuals appear to lead less than in ours; but ultimately and by devious ways their views soak down and color the whole mass. The first step is to recognize the fundamental identity of the two processes of conversion — that en masse, and that of the intellectuals; in this respect that mere logical presentment is of very little use. As the modern electioneer sets out on a cynical recognition of the fact to convert the mass, so he should just as directly try to capture the smaller class.

There must be two quite different methods of attack, for what attracts the one repels the other. Great words empty of sense, promises of Elysium a few years ahead, have been, and always must be, the means by which the mass can be stirred, but they leave the few very cold. In this case, sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander, for the only resemblance is the fact of appetite. Now, here seems to me to be the weakens of the Unionists. They emphatically do not provide any sauce for the gander. They practice the other art well enough, the art which Graham Wallas analyzes — that of manipulating the popular mind by advertisement and other means. But the smaller one they neglect, for no one can seriously think that Mr. Garvin is fit food for the adult intelligence. I have in mind a particular minor variety of this class: the undergraduate who, arriving in London, joins the Fabian Society. Now there is nothing inevitable in this. He may imagine that an intellectual process landed him there. Nothing of the kind. The Fabian Society provides him with the kind of stuff to fit in with his complex prejudices, and the Conservatives do not. He is merely a Socialist faute de mieux. The emotions involved are fairly simple—an insatiable desire for “theories,” the vague idea to be “advanced,” and the rest of it. There is no reason in the nature of things why the other side should not cater for this. In France, Action Française has made it rather bête démodée to be a Socialist. The really latest and advanced thing is to be a Neo-Royalist. They serve their victim with the right kind of sauce. So successful has this been that Jaurès recently warned his followers against the cleverness of the bourgeoisie.

To get back, however, to the main position. I take the view for the time being that we are not concerned with truth, but with success. I am considering the problem that should present itself to the acute party entrepreneur—did such a mythical person exist—how can this particular type of people be converted? Here is the type; how can it be caught? They must be converted exactly as everyone else is—by hitching on your propaganda to one of their centers of prejudice and emotion. But the difficulty comes in the analysis and discovery of these centers. They must be there, but they are complex and elusive, and sometimes unknown even to the subject himself. Here is where the difference comes in between this and the other sophistic. The problem in the case of the laborer is not so much to find these centers as to get hold of them before the other man does and to stick to them. Some day, I surmise, all this analysis will be done for us in a neat little manual.

But meanwhile, I can give data for the future compiler of such a book by analyzing one of these typical complexes, which I found embedded in my own head and influencing my politics without my knowing it. I probed my mind and got rid of it as I might of a tumor, but the operation was a violent one.

It came about from watching my own change of mind on the subject of Colonial Preference. I was, I suppose the typical wobbler, for while politically inclined to be a Protectionist, yet, as a pupil of Professor Marshall’s, theory pulled me in the opposite direction. Now, amid the whirlwind of that campaign of argument, I noticed that two apparently disconnected and irrelevant things stuck in my head had a direct influence on my judgment, whilst the “drums and tramplings” of a thousand statistics passed over me without leaving a trace. The one was a cartoon in Punch—Mr. Chamberlain landing at Dover and being passed quickly by the Customs officer: “There is no bother here, sir; this is a free country.” The other was an argument most constantly used at the time, I imagine, by Sir Edward Grey, and recently revived by a supposedly Conservative paper which does most of its thinking in its heels. “To attempt,” he said, “to bind the Empire together by tariffs would be [a] dangerously artificial thing; it would violently disturb its ‘natural growth.’ It was in opposition to the constant method which has made us a successful Colonial power. Let other nations fail through trying to do things too directly.” This had a powerful effect on me, and I imagine must have had on a great many other people; for this reason: that whereas we all of us had a great many emotions and nerve-paths grouped round the idea of Empire, these were by this argument bound up with Free Trade. It seemed to bring Preference in conflict with a deeply seated and organized set of prejudices grouped round the word “free” and “natural,” for the moving force of the cartoon and Grey’s argument were the same. This may look like an intellectual decision, but it isn’t. I could not, at the time, have formulated it as definitely as I do now. It was then just a kind of vague sentiment which, in the intervals of argument, pulled one in a certain way. This was so because, as I have maintained, conviction is in the end an emotional process. The arguments on each side were so numerous that each one inhibited the slight effect the other might have had, and in the resulting stalemate it was just odd little groups of emotions and prejudices, like the one indicated, that decided one.

Now this is only a prejudice—why should one have a definite distrust of any constructive scheme, and think that leaving it to nature was so much better and so much more in the English tradition? Looking at it from an a priori standpoint, it seems probable that a definite policy directed towards a certain end will gain that end. Examples are all around us to prove it—that of German unity in particular. There was no leaving it to nature there. Yet, in spite of its absurdity from a reasonable point of view, this idea of what is “natural” and “free” remained a fixed obsession. It was too deep-seated to be moved by any argument, and had all the characteristics of one of those complex prejudices which I said must be analyzed as preliminary to the art of conversion. It has all kinds of ramifications, and affects opinion in many directions, on conscription, for example, and a score of other matters. It can be traced back from its origin in the disputes of rival schools of medieval physicians scholastically inclined. Berthelot has analyzed the influence of these medical doctrines on politics. It can be seen particularly well in Quesnay, at the same time a doctor and an economist, from whom Adam Smith borrowed the theory of free exchange. It can be followed through Adam Smith, Coleridge, and Burke to the formation of the political theory of laissez-faire which dominated the 19th century. This theory of politics — and, of course, it is this which produced the personal prejudice which influenced me — may be considered as a kind of Hippocratic theory of political medicine whose principal precept in the treatment of the social “body” is that on no account must the “natural” remedial force of nature be interfered with.

Now, once I had got the theory out fairly and squarely before me, had seen its origin and history, its influence over me had gone. It was powerful before because I really didn’t know that it existed. The thing that most interested me was how it got so firmly fixed in my mind-center without my knowing it; and here comes really the only practical part of this paper. In my own case, the prejudice, I ma certain, had been formed in this way—the histories I had been brought up on, while never stating this view as a theory, had yet so stated all events in our Colonial history as to convey it by suggestion. Always the English were shown as succeeding as by some vague natural genius for colonization or something of that kind. Never by a consistent constructive effect. The people who did make definite plans, like the French under Colbert, and later the Germans, were always represented as failing. Now, this was the reason that the idea was so embedded in one. If it had been presented definitely as a theory, it would have been destroyed by argument. It became an instinct because it was suggested to one in this much more indirect and subtle way.

It took me years to get rid of the effects of this. For when an idea is put into your head in this indirect way, you are never conscious of its existence. It just silently colors all your views. Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue, and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass. Ideas insinuated like this become in the end a kind of mental category; the naïve person never recognizes them as subjective, but thinks they lie in the facts themselves. Here, then, is my practical point. This kind of thing is dangerous. One is handicapped, as far as clear-thinking about politics goes, by being educated in Whig histories. It takes strenuous efforts to get rid of the pernicious notion implanted in one by Macaulay, say. My remedy would be this—prevention. I should adopt for secondary schools what was recently proposed as a solution of the religious difficulty in primary ones. Let there be so many hours set apart for history each week, and let each political party be allowed to send in their own historian. The first step towards this must be the writing o a definitely Tory history. The Whigs have too long had it their own way in this sphere. I can give a definite example of a recent successful accomplishment of this kind of thing in Charles Maurras’s history of the French Monarchy, which is converting scores of young Republicans.

After all, there is nothing ridiculous in the idea itself. It only appears so because it is a logical, definite application in a small scale of a process which is taken as a matter of course in greater ones. All national histories are partisan, and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves. We recognize that even while we laugh at the American school-books and the Belgian accounts of the Waterloo campaign. But we are not familiar with the same process in small affairs inside the nation. But it is coming rapidly. I can mention Howell Evans’s history of Wales, recommended recently by the Welsh Education Council, which ends up with a panegyric of the late Budget. Or take Mrs. Richard Green’s history of Ireland, now being sold at half-price to all secondary schools of a Nationalist character. It is definitely written to convince the Irishman that his country was not civilized by the English conquest, but had itself, in earlier times, the most cultured civilization in Europe. It is done by a careful selection and manipulation of old manuscripts. It goes flat against the known facts, for the poet Spenser described them as naked barbarians. But what does that matter? It fulfills its intention. Anyone who still has a lingering dislike of this frankly partisan type of history is under the influence of an opposite ideal. He would prefer an impartial record of facts. But this ideal standard by which he condemns the party history does not exist. True, there has been a school of scholars who definitely took it as their ideal — the modern Cambridge historians. But I remember the late Dr. Emil Reich telling me that the greatest triumph of his life took place in a room at Cambridge, when, after an argument on this very subject, he was able to take down from the bookshelves a well-known Jesuit history of the Elizabethan persecutions which contained nothing but facts, no biased comment or theory, but which, at the same time, produces an extreme anti-Protestant effect. According to his own account, this entirely silenced them.

No, the whole thing is impossible. No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased. Personally, I don’t regard this as a disagreeable necessity; I like the idea. After all, who would care an atom about the past were it not a reservoir of illustrations to back up his own social theories and prejudices? For purposes of political argument, I myself specialize in the history of the 4th century, for no casual opponent knows enough to contradict me. If I rashly illustrated them from the French Revolution, everyone can remember enough facts to back the opposite view.

Originally published in the Commentator, Feb. 22, 1911; March 1, 1911; March 8, 1911.

T.E. Hulme (1883-1917) was an English poet and critic whose books include Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art and Notes on Language and Style.

Alain Soral dédicacera « Chroniques d’avant-guerre » le samedi 8 décembre 2012 à la librairie Facta

Alain Soral dédicacera « Chroniques d’avant-guerre » le samedi 8 décembre 2012 à la librairie Facta

Alain Soral dédicacera son livre Chroniques d’avant-guerre le samedi 8 décembre 2012 de 14h30 à 18h30.

Venez rencontrer l’auteur à la librairie Facta :

4, rue de Clichy Paris IXe

Téléphone : 01 48 74 59 14

Courrier électronique : [e-mail]

Situer la librairie :

Sur Google Maps : http://maps.google.fr/maps?f=q&…

Sur Mappy : http://fr.mappy.com/map#d=4+rue+de+…

« Quand on est jeune et novice dans le débat d’idées, on croit qu’en politique c’est comme en sport, qu’il y a deux équipes : la vôtre et celle d’en face, les bons et les méchants, le pouvoir et l’opposition. Puis avec la pratique, pour ceux qui passent à la pratique – les autres n’y comprennent jamais rien –, on découvre que dans la vraie vie, comme dans 1984 de George Orwell, c’est plus compliqué que ça. Il y a le pouvoir, l’opposition au pouvoir et… Goldstein.

Soit l’opposant créé par le pouvoir, ou plutôt favorisé par le pouvoir – ne soyons pas complotistes – pour dévier les énergies contestataires vers la stérilité, l’inutile…

Gauchisme à la Prévert ou gauchisme à la Baader, qu’on soit dans les nuages ou qu’on fonce droit dans le mur, sur le plan de l’inefficacité politique – les années de prison mises à part – ça revient au même… »

Chroniques d’Avant-guerre, compilation des articles publiés dans l’éphémère revue Flash entre octobre 2008 et mars 2011, est le 11e livre d’Alain Soral. Reprenant, sur le mode chronologique plutôt qu’orthographique, le principe des textes courts de ses Abécédaires (Jusqu’où va-t-on descendre ?, Socrate à Saint-Tropez), il est aussi un complément utile à son essai majeur écrit au même moment : Comprendre l’Empire.

Freund oder Feind. Zur Aktualität Carl Schmitts

Freund oder Feind. Zur Aktualität Carl Schmitts

von Erich Vad

Der 1985 im Alter von 97 Jahren verstorbene Carl Schmitt hat sich nicht nur mit Staats- und Verfassungsrecht, sondern auch mit grundsätzlichen Fragen der Kriegstheorie, der Geo- und Sicherheitspolitik beschäftigt. Dabei wurde sein Denken nachhaltig von der Erfahrung des „Europäischen Bürgerkriegs“ (Ernst Nolte) geprägt, vor allem durch die spezifisch deutsche Bürgerkriegslage zwischen 1919 und 1923 sowie die Gefahr ihrer Wiederholung in den Jahren 1932 bis 1934. Schmitts Nationalismus und sein Eintreten für einen starken Staat lassen sich aus diesem Zusammenhang ebenso erklären wie seine Entscheidung zu Gunsten der staatlichen Ordnung, die notfalls unter Bruch der Verfassung gewahrt werden sollte, oder seine Entscheidung für eine zeitweise Kollaboration mit dem NS-Regime, das allein in der Lage schien, den vollständigen Zusammenbruch zu verhindern.

Wegen dieser Kollaboration mit dem Nationalsozialismus hat man Schmitt immer wieder beschimpft, als „geistigen Quartiermacher“ (Ernst Niekisch) Hitlers, als „charakterlosen Vertreter eines orientierungslosen Bürgertums“ (René König) oder als „Schreibtischtäter des deutschen Unheils“, so etwa Christian Graf von Krockow, der aber auch zugab, daß Schmitt, „… der bedeutendste Staatsrechtslehrer des 20. Jahrhunderts“ gewesen sei. Eine Beurteilung, die noch überboten wurde von dem Religionsphilosophen und Rabbiner Jacob Taubes, der über Schmitt sagte, dieser verkörpere eine „… geistige Potenz, die alles Intellektuellengeschreibsel um Haupteslänge überragt“. Schließlich sei noch Raymond Aron erwähnt, der in seinen Lebenserinnerungen äußerte: „Er gehörte zur großen Schule der Gelehrten, die über ihr Fachgebiet hinaus alle Probleme der Gesellschaft samt der Politik umfassen und somit Philosophen genannt zu werden verdienen, so wie es auch Max Weber auf seine Weise war.“
Diese Wertschätzung Schmitts erklärt sich vor allem aus dessen epochemachender Lehre vom Politischen, das er im Kern bestimmt sah durch die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind. Dabei meinte Schmitt „Feind“ im Sinne des lateinischen hostis, das heißt den öffentlichen, den Feind des Staates, nicht inimicus im Sinne von privater Gegner; eine Differenzierung, wie es sie auch im Griechischen mit polemios und echthros gibt. Gegen alle Versuche, die fundamentale Scheidung von Freund und Feind zu umgehen, wie sie vor allem in Deutschland nach 1945 üblich wurden, behauptete Schmitt, daß ein Volk nur durch Verleugnung seiner eigenen politischen Identität dahin kommen könne, die Entscheidung zwischen Freund und Feind vermeiden zu wollen. In seinem berühmten, zuerst 1927 erschienenen Essay Der Begriff des Politischen hieß es: „Solange ein Volk in der Sphäre des Politischen existiert, muß es, wenn auch nur für den extremsten Fall – über dessen Vorliegen es aber selbst entscheidet – die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind selber bestimmen. Darin liegt das Wesen seiner politischen Existenz.“
Wenn man diesen Satz auf unsere Lage bezieht, ergibt sich sofort der denkbar schlechteste Eindruck von der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik der gegenwärtigen Bundesregierung. Innenpolitische Probleme und Parteiinteressen bei Wahlkämpfen wirken stärker auf das Regierungshandeln als reale Bedrohungen des Landes und langfristige Strategien zur Wahrung nationaler Interessen. Im Glauben an einen herrschaftsfreien Diskurs auch in den Außenbeziehungen nimmt man bei akuten internationalen Krisen selbstgefällige, nur scheinbar überlegene moralische Positionen ein, um dann mittels utopischer Problemlösungsversuche die eigene Handlungsunfähigkeit zu verdecken. Man begnügt sich mit der Rolle des inzwischen als unzuverlässig geltenden Metöken, der gerade noch in der Lage ist, militärische Einrichtungen von Bündnispartnern im eigenen Land zu bewachen, ihnen Überflug- und Landerechte zu gewähren und andere Unterstützungsleistungen gerade so weit zur Verfügung zu stellen, daß eine Kabinetts- und Regierungskrise vermieden wird.

Die Kernfrage war für Schmitt immer die, wie wir als Erben der uralten brüderlichen Feindschaft von Kain und Abel mit dem zentralen Kriterium des Politischen umgehen sollen. In dem Zusammenhang ist ein von ihm handschriftlich kommentiertes Tagungsprogramm der Evangelischen Akademie Berlin aufschlußreich, das sich in seinem Nachlaß erhalten hat. Die Veranstaltung, die zwischen dem 26. und dem 28. November 1965 stattfand, hatte das Thema „Feind – Gegner – Konkurrent“. In der Einführung zum Programm eines „Freundeskreises junger Politologen“ („Freundeskreis“ von dem selbstverständlich nicht geladenen Schmitt rot markiert) wurde die Frage aufgeworfen, ob noch die Berechtigung bestehe, vom Feind zu sprechen, oder ob nicht an seine Stelle „Der Partner politischer und ideologischer Auseinandersetzung“ oder „Der Konkurrent im wirtschaftlichen Wettbewerb“ getreten sei. Schmitt notierte am Rande polemisch: „Der Ermordete wird zum Konfliktpartner des Mörders?“
Er wollte damit zeigen, daß die hier geäußerten Vorstellungen die Existentialität menschlicher Ausnahmelagen nicht treffen konnten. Und mehr als das: Der Programmtext war für Schmitt auch eine indirekte Bestätigung seiner These von der notwendigen Freund-Feind-Unterscheidung, insofern als man fortwährend Begriffe verwendete, die auf elementare Gegensätzlichkeiten hinwiesen, wie zum Beispiel „Ideologie“, „Theologie“, „der Andere“, „Liebe“, „Diakonie“ etc. Daß sich die Veranstalter dessen nicht bewußt waren, machte die Sache nicht besser. Schmitt bezeichnete ihre moralisierenden, auf Verschleierung des polemischen Sachverhalts abzielenden Formulierungen in einer Marginalie als „Entkernung des Pudels durch Verpudelung des Kerns“.
Schmitts Bestimmung des Politischen durch die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind gilt auch heute noch, trotz aller anderslautenden Beteuerungen. So, wenn die Vereinten Nationen ein Land wie den Irak faktisch aus der Völkergemeinschaft ausschließen und damit eine hostis-Erklärung im Sinne Schmitts abgeben, so, wenn die USA nach den Anschlägen vom September 2001 den internationalen Terrorismus und die ihn unterstützenden politisch unkalkulierbaren Staaten als Feind bestimmten. Eine mit modernsten Waffen operierende Guerilla oder eine weltweit vernetzte, organisierte Kriminalität können, auch wenn sie nicht selbst staatenbildend wirken, durchaus als Feinde im politischen Sinn betrachtet werden. Überhaupt ist die nichtstaatliche und privatisierte Form der Gewalt, also alles, was die low intensity conflicts kennzeichnet, nichts grundsätzlich Neues. Thukydides beschrieb sie bereits im Peloponnesischen Krieg, ähnliches gilt für Clausewitz oder die stark von ihm beeinflußten Theoretiker und Praktiker des revolutionären Krieges wie Friedrich Engels, Wladimir I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, den Vietnamesen Vo Nguyen Giap oder Che Guevara. Die Wandelbarkeit des Krieges war sogar schon einem seiner frühesten Theoretiker, dem Chinesen Sun Tze, bewußt, der vor 2500 Jahren zu der Feststellung kam: „Der Krieg gleicht dem Wasser. Wie Wasser hat er keine feste Form.“
Der Kampf heutiger Terroristen ist allerdings im Gegensatz zu dem, was Schmitt in seiner Theorie des Partisanen ausführte, nicht mehr „tellurisch“ verortbar, sondern global angelegt. Musterbeispiel dafür sind die raumübergreifenden Operationen der al-Qaida in Afghanistan, auf dem Balkan, dem Kaukasus und in den zentralasiatischen Staaten oder die terroristischen Anschläge auf amerikanische Botschaften und Einrichtungen in Afrika oder am Golf. Der Plan für die Terrorangriffe gegen die USA wurde in den Bergen Afghanistans und im europäischen Hinterland erdacht und dann auf einem anderen Kontinent exekutiert. Das Flugzeug, das Transportmittel der Globalisierung par excellence, setzte man als Waffe ein. Planung und Operation der Terroraktion hatten globale Maßstäbe. Weltweit operierende warlords wie Osama Bin Laden könnten bevorzugte Akteure dieser neuen Form des bewaffneten Kampfs werden.

Es spricht vieles dafür, daß die Zukunft des Krieges eher von Terroristen, Guerillas, Banditen und nichtstaatlichen Organisationen bestimmt sein wird, als von klassischen, konventionellen Streitkräften. Dort, wo die Macht immer noch aus Gewehrläufen kommt, führen zunehmend irreguläre Formationen in Privatund Söldnerarmeen Krieg. Religiöser oder politischer Mythos, generalstabsmäßige Planung und üppige Finanzressourcen bilden die Voraussetzungen eines veränderten Kriegsbilds. In seiner erwähnten Theorie des Partisanen nahm Schmitt diesen Aspekt der heutigen Sicherheitslage durchaus zutreffend vorweg, vor allem, wenn er die Bedeutung des Fanatismus als Waffe hervorhob: „Der moderne Partisan erwartet vom Feind weder Recht noch Gnade. Er hat sich von der konventionellen Feindschaft des gezähmten und gehegten Krieges abgewandt und sich in den Bereich einer anderen, der wirklichen Feindschaft begeben, die sich durch Terror und Gegenterror bis zur Vernichtung steigert.“
Wie soll man auf diesen Wandel reagieren, oder, – um die kritischen Fragen Schmitts aufzugreifen: Wer hat jetzt das Recht, den Feind zu definieren und gegen ihn mit allen Mitteln – das heißt unter den gegebenen Umständen auch mit Massenvernichtungswaffen – vorzugehen? Wer darf Strafen gegen den definierten Feind verhängen und sie – notfalls präventiv – durchsetzen? Und wie schafft man ein internationales Recht und die Fähigkeit, es notfalls mit Hilfe von Gewalt durchzusetzen? Schließlich: Wie verhindert man die Instrumentalisierung des Völkerrechts für nationale Macht- und Einflußpolitik?
Schmitt war grundsätzlich skeptisch gegenüber allen Versuchen ideologischer und das heißt auch menschenrechtlicher Legitimation des Krieges. Der Krieg, so Schmitt, sei im Kern nur zu begreifen als Versuch „… der seinsmäßigen Behauptung der eigenen Existenzform gegenüber einer ebenso seinsmäßigen Verneinung dieser Form“. Und weiter: „Es gibt keinen rationalen Zweck, keine noch so richtige Norm, kein noch so ideales Programm, keine Legitimität oder Legalität, die es rechtfertigen könnte, daß Menschen sich dafür töten.“
Die Legitimität des Krieges bei einer vorliegenden „seinsmäßigen Verneinung“ der eigenen Existenzform bekommt durch die modernen Bedrohungsszenarien, angesichts des internationalen Terrorismus einerseits und der Proliferation von Massenvernichtungswaffen andererseits, eine neue Dimension. Das Wesen des Politischen bleibt aber unberührt. Darüber belehrt auch jeder genaue Blick auf die Verfaßtheit des Menschen, der in dauernder Auseinandersetzung mit anderen Menschen lebt und nur aus Gründen der Selbsterhaltung und der Vernunft bereit ist, den „Krieg aller gegen alle“, den Schmitt wie Thomas Hobbes als natürlichen Zustand des Menschen betrachtete, durch einen staatlich garantierten Friedenszustand zu überwinden.
In Der Begriff des Politischen schrieb Schmitt: „Man könnte alle Staatstheorien und politischen Ideen auf ihre Anthropologie prüfen und danach einteilen, ob sie, bewußt oder unbewußt, einen ›von Natur bösen‹ oder einen ›von Natur guten‹ Menschen voraussetzen.“ Gerade mit Blick auf den heutigen Menschenrechtsuniversalismus und die gleichzeitige Verfügung über Massenvernichtungswaffen wird die tiefe Problematik jeder Lehre von der natürlichen Güte des Menschen deutlich. Denn der mögliche Einsatz von Massenvernichtungswaffen nötigt zur vorhergehenden Diskriminierung des Feindes, der nicht mehr als Mensch erscheinen darf – denn die Verwendung so furchtbarer Waffen widerspricht der Idee der Menschenrechte –, sondern nur noch als Objekt, das ausgelöscht werden muß, als Unmensch oder Glied eines „Schurkenstaates“.
Schmitt sah diese furchtbare Konsequenz moderner Politik deutlich ab, die so unerbittlich ist, weil sie im Namen hehrster Prinzipien vorgeht: „Die Masse der Menschen müssen sich als Schlaginstrument in Händen grauenhafter Machthaber fühlen“ – schrieb er nach dem Krieg und mit Blick auf seine persönliche Situation. Und hinsichtlich des Geltungsanspruchs universaler Forderungen nach Humanität kam Schmitt zu der bitteren Erkenntnis: „Wenn das Wort ›Menschheit‹ fällt, entsichern die Eliten ihre Bomben und sehen sich die Massen nach bombensicherem Unterstand um“.

Schmitt meinte, daß die Reideologisierung des Krieges im 20. Jahrhundert zwangsläufig den totalen, auch und gerade gegen die Zivilbevölkerung gerichteten Krieg hervorgebracht habe. Paradoxerweise ermöglichte die moralische Ächtung des Kriegs als Mittel der Politik den „diskriminierenden Feindbegriff“ und damit die Denunziation des Gegners, der nicht mehr als Kontrahent in einem politisch-militärischen Konflikt angesehen wurde, sondern als Verbrecher. Erst der totale Krieg schuf den totalen Feind und die Entwicklung der Waffentechnik seine mögliche totale Vernichtung.
Diese Einsicht Schmitts ist so wenig überholt wie jene andere, die weniger mit Krieg und mehr mit Frieden zu tun hat. Sein Ende der dreißiger Jahre entwickeltes Konzept des „Großraums“ und des Interventionsverbots für „raumfremde Mächte“ war, trotz offiziellem Tabu, nach 1945 und selbst in der Hochphase des Kalten Krieges das ungeschriebene Prinzip der außen- und sicherheitspolitische Konzepte beider Supermächte. Daran hat sich auch in Folge des Zusammenbruchs der Sowjetunion wenig geändert. Nach wie vor können Staaten, denen es ihr politisches, militärisches und wirtschaftliches Potential ermöglicht, eigene Einflußsphären aufbauen und durch angemessene geopolitische und geostrategische Maßnahmen schützen.
Mit seinen Schriften Der Leviathan, Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung und der „weltgeschichtlichen Betrachtung“ Land und Meer suchte Schmitt angesichts des Auftretens neuer, „raumüberwindender“ Mächte und einer nachhaltigen Infragestellung der traditionellen Staatlichkeit die Faktoren einer neuen Sicherheitspolitik zu bestimmen. Beim Blick auf die historische Entwicklung, insbesondere des Aufstiegs der Seemächte England und Nordamerika, erkannte er die Bedeutung des Großraums und einer entsprechenden Ordnung. Die amerikanische Monroe-Doktrin von 1823, die die westliche Hemisphäre als Interessengebiet der USA bestimmt hatte, gewann für Schmitt Vorbildcharakter im Hinblick auf eine europäische Konzeption.
Daß dieses Projekt eines „europäischen Großraums“ seitdem immer wieder gescheitert ist, sagt wenig gegen seine Notwendigkeit. Europa bildet wie andere geopolitische Räume eine Einheit auf Grund von Weltbild und Lebensbedingungen, Traditionen, Überlieferungen, Gewohnheiten und Religionen.
Es ist nach Schmitt „verortet“ und „geschichtlich konkret“ und es muß deshalb, um auf Dauer zu bestehen, einen adäquaten Machtanspruch erheben und weltanschaulich begründen. Im Bereich des Politischen sind solche Weltanschauungen nichts anderes als „Sinn-Setzungen für Großplanungen“, entworfen von Eliten in einem bestimmten historischen Moment, um sich selbst und den von ihnen zu lenkenden Massen den geistigen Bezugsrahmen politischen Handelns zu schaffen.

Die Aktualität der Überlegungen Schmitts zur Bedeutung solcher „geistiger Zentralgebiete“ ist im Hinblick auf einen „Kampf der Kulturen“ (Samuel Huntington) offensichtlich: In beinahe zweihundert Nationalstaaten der Welt existieren mehrere tausend Kulturen. Sie bilden die Grundlage „geistiger Zentralgebiete“ und schaffen damit auch das Bezugsfeld für Kriege. Was das „Zentralgebiet“ inhaltlich bestimmt, mag sich ändern, an dem Tatbestand selbst ändert sich nichts. So markierte der Grundsatz cuius regio eius religio eben ein religiöses Zentralgebiet, das nach der Glaubensspaltung des 16. Jahrhunderts von Bedeutung war, während das Prinzip cuius regio eius natio nur vor dem Hintergrund der Nationalstaatsbildung im 19. Jahrhundert zu verstehen ist und die Formel cuius regio eius oeconomia ihre Erklärung findet in der enorm gesteigerten Bedeutung internationaler Wirtschaftsverflechtungen seit dem Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Entsprechend haben sich die Kriege fortentwickelt von Religions- über Nationalkriege hin zu den modernen Wirtschafts- und Handelskriegen.
Die Kriege mitbestimmenden „geistigen Zentralgebiete“ waren für Schmitt stets Kampfzonen sich ablösender, miteinander konkurrierender und kämpfender Eliten. Sie können niemals nur Sphäre des Geistigen und ein Ort des friedlichen Nachdenkens und Diskurses sein. Das gilt trotz der in jüngster Vergangenheit so stark gewordenen Erwartung, daß der Krieg gebannt sei. Schmitt hat früh die Vergeblichkeit solcher Hoffnungen erkannt und etwas von ihrer furchtbaren Kehrseite geahnt: „Wir wissen, daß heute der schrecklichste Krieg nur im Namen des Friedens, die furchtbarste Unterdrückung nur im Namen der Freiheit und die schrecklichste Unmenschlichkeit nur im Namen der Menschheit vollzogen wird.“
Ein wesentliches Kennzeichen des modernen Kriegs ist gerade seine unkriegerische Terminologie, sein pazifistisches Vokabular, das die Aggression aber nur verdeckt, nicht beseitigt. Die „friedlichen“ Methoden der modernen Kriegsführung sind die vielfältigen Möglichkeiten finanz- und wirtschaftspolitischer Pression, das Sperren von Krediten, das Unterbinden der Handelswege und der Rohstoff- oder Nahrungsmittelzufuhr. Werden militärische Maßnahmen als notwendig erachtet, bezeichnet man sie nicht als Kriege, sondern als Exekution, Sanktion, Strafexpedition, Friedensmission etc. Voraussetzung für diese Art „pazifistischer“ Kriegführung ist immer die technische Überlegenheit des eigenen Apparats. Das moderne Völkerrecht folgt dieser Entwicklung, indem es die Begriffe zur Stabilisierung des politischen Status Quo liefert und die Kontrolle von Störern der internationalen Ordnung juristisch begründet. Es ist das Kennzeichen von Weltmächten, wie sie seit dem Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs auftreten konnten, Rechtsbegriffe mit universalem Anspruch zu definieren und dann souverän zu entscheiden, was Recht und was Unrecht ist. Die aktuelle Irakkrise zeigt auch hier, wie zutreffend die Einschätzung Schmitts war.
Die Zukunft der großen Staaten China, Indien, Rußland, aber auch der Vereinigten Staaten ist ungewiß. Wir können kaum einschätzen, welche Konstellationen sich entwickeln werden. Vielleicht entwerfen die USA für den asiatischen Raum eine ähnliche balance of power-Doktrin wie Großbritannien sie im 19. Jahrhundert gegenüber den europäischen Staaten besaß. Vielleicht gelingt es Washington, die Annäherung Rußlands an die NATO weiter voranzutreiben und es wie Indien in eine Geostrategie für den pazifischen Raum zwecks Eindämmung Chinas einzubinden. Weiter muß die Frage beantwortet werden, ob Europa Teil des atlantischen Großraums bleibt oder sich hier Tendenzen in Richtung auf eine gleichberechtigte Partnerschaft mit Amerika verstärken. Deutschland spielt in diesem Zusammenhang allerdings kaum eine Rolle, da sich seine derzeitige politische Führung bei außenpolitischen Problemen regelmäßig an der Innenpolitik orientiert, Bedrohungen ignoriert oder den Vorgaben anderer anschließt.

Die von Schmitt im Zusammenhang mit seiner Theorie der Staatenwelt analysierten Verteilungs-, Quarantäne- und Freundschaftslinien, die auch zivilisatorische Konfliktlinien sein können, drohen heute zu Grenzen zwischen unversöhnlichen Gegnern zu werden. Wir wissen nicht erst seit den Terroranschlägen auf das World Trade Center, daß sich die westliche Welt mit anderen Zivilisationen in Konkurrenz befindet. Die wichtigsten Auseinandersetzungen der Zukunft scheinen an den Grenzen aufzutreten, die Kulturkreise voneinander trennen. Hier könnten die Brennpunkte von Kriegen sein, die sich durch Regellosigkeit, Ent-Hegung und Rebarbarisierung auszeichnen. Hier entwickeln sich militärische und politische Herausforderungen globalen Ausmaßes, denen nur auf dem Wege eines neuen internationalen Ordnungssystems und eines erweiterten Verständnisses von Sicherheit begegnet werden kann.
Die gestiegene Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Ernstfalls, die für Deutschland nach den Angriffen vom 11. September 2001 sehr deutlich geworden und die Tragweite der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik deutlich gemacht zu haben schien, hat tatsächlich vor allem die Handlungsunfähigkeit einer nachbürgerlichen politischen Klasse gezeigt, deren Weltbild sich primär aus reeducation, aus den erstarrten Ritualen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Achtundsechziger-Mythologie speist. Diese geistigen Verirrungen bedürfen eines Gegenmittels, und in der politischen Philosophie Carl Schmitts könnte das zur Verfügung stehen.
Wie Hobbes im 17. entfaltete Schmitt im 20. Jahrhundert ein politisches Denken, das von der unnormierten Lage, das vom Ausnahmezustand und der ständigen Möglichkeit inner- und zwischenstaatlicher Anarchie und Gewalt ausging. Ein solcher Ansatz steht im Gegensatz zur idealistischen Utopie einer weltweiten Entfaltung der Menschenrechte, eines friedlichen Ausgleichs der Kulturen und Zivilisationen sowie freizügiger, offener und multikultureller Gesellschaften. Anders als viele hoffen, sind gerade diese Gesellschaftskonzepte potentielle Konfliktherde. Eine Gefahr, der man nicht durch moralische Appelle begegnen kann, sondern nur durch Gefahrensinn, politischen und militärischen Realismus und durch rationale Antworten auf die konkreten Herausforderungen der Lage.

---

Article printed from Sezession im Netz: http://www.sezession.de

URL to article: http://www.sezession.de/7844/freund-oder-feind-zur-aktualitaet-carl-schmitts.html

URLs in this post:

[1] pdf der Druckfassung: http://www.sezession.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Vad_Freund-oder-Feind.pdf

T. E. Hulme: The First Conservative of the Twentieth Century

T. E. Hulme: The First Conservative of the Twentieth Century

Ex: http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/

[significantly modified and expanded from a previous post at STORMFIELDS]

History should never have forgotten T.E. Hulme, and we would do well to remember him and what he wrote. Indeed, the German shell that took his life in the early autumn of 1917 might have changed a considerable part of the twentieth century by removing Hulme from it. Our whole “Time of Troubles” as Kirk defined it, might have been attenuated by the presence, personality, and witness of this man.

Eliot, certainly one of the greatest of twentieth-century men, understood the importance of Hulme in 1924. Eliot saw him as the new man—the twentieth-century man. In April 1924, he wrote: “When Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917 . . . he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and the author of two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language. In this volume [the posthumous Speculations, edited by Herbert Read] he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own.”

Hulme is, Eliot continued, “classical, reactionary, and revolutionary; he is the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century . . . . A new classical age will be reached when the dogma. . . of the critic is so modified by contact with creative writing, and when the creative writers are so permeated by the new dogma, that a state of equilibrium is reached. For what is meant by a classical moment in literature is surely a moment of stasis, when the creative impulse finds a form which satisfies the best intellect of the time, a moment when a type is produced.”

Eliot continued to praise Hulme in his private letters. In one, he stated bluntly to Allen Tate, “Hulme has influenced me enormously.” In another, Eliot claimed Hulme to be “the most remarkable theologian of my generation.”

Historian Christopher Dawson believed that Hulme, almost alone in his generation, understood the dangers of progressivism: “The essentially transitory character of the humanist culture has been obscured by the dominance of the belief in Progress and by the shallow and dogmatic optimism which characterized nineteenth-century Liberalism. It was only an exceptionally original mind, like that of the late T.E. Hulme, that could free itself from the influence of Liberal dogma and recognize the sign of the times—the passing of the ideals that had dominated European civilization for four centuries, and the dawn of a new order.”

In hindsight, the praise of such magnitude from both Eliot and Dawson should give any twenty-first century conservative pause. Who was this man who profoundly shaped the thought of two of the most recognized conservatives of the last century. Unfortunately, the name of “Hulme” no longer rolls off the tongue when we think or our lineage. We might think: Godkin, Babbitt, More, Nock, Eliot, Dawson, Kirk . . . . But, rarely does a conservative mention the name of Hulme.

Yet, at one time, few would have questioned his shaping of a movement.

In 1948, the Jesuit periodical, America, proclaimed Hulme as the model—mostly in thought, if not in person—for a literary revival. The English poet offered a “charter,” as the author put it, of Catholic arts and literature.

A writer in the New York Times in 1960 summed up Hulme’s influence nicely: “T.E. Hulme had modified the consciousness of his age in such a way that by 1939 his name had become part of a myth.”

It is a myth that we—those of us writing and reading the Imaginative Conservative, Ignatius Insight Scoop, Front Porch Republic, Pileus, etc.—would do well to revive.

Hulme, from all accounts, possessed a rather powerful personality, able to form communities of thought and art around himself. As just mentioned, he might well serve as a model for our own conservatism as we think about rebuilding what two decades have torn apart in terms of our coherence as an intellectual movement and what centuries have deconstructed in terms of culture and the rise of Leviathan and Demos.

If Hulme is remembered, he’s best remembered as a poet of influence. Most credit Hulme with founding Imagist poetry.

Imagism, as our own John Willson has argued, connected the horizon and the sky, the vertical and horizontal, time and eternity.

F.S. Flint, a companion of Hulme’s, remembered the creation of the Imagist movement in 1908, in the May 1, 1915, issue of THE EGOIST:

“SOMEWHERE in the gloom of the year 1908, Mr. T. E. Hulme, now in the trenches of Ypres, but excited then by the propinquity, at a half-a-crown dance, of the other sex (if, as Remy de Gounnont avers, the passage from the aesthetic to the sexual emotion. . . the reverse is surely also true), proposed to a companion that they should found a Poets' Club. The thing was done, there and then. The Club began to dine; and its members to read their verses. At the end of the year they published a small plaquette of them, called For Christmas MDCCCCVIII.”

Hulme’s poem “Autumn” appeared.

“A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.”

While this poem doesn’t strike me as anything profound in terms of its theme (though, maybe I’ve not spent enough time with it), I can readily see its influence on the work of Eliot. Could Eliot have produced The Wasteland, The Hollow Men, or the Four Quartets without the influence of Hulme and the school of poetry he founded? The Four Quartets is arguably the greatest work of art of the twentieth century. If for no other reason, I’m truly thankful Hulme contributed what he did simply in offering this new form of poetry.

Like Eliot, Hulme adopted and accepted modernist forms of art while rejecting the meaning and essence of modernity. In one of his most powerful essays, defining the nature of humanism, properly understood, Hulme argued that all scholarship and art must begin with the premise (fact) of original sin. “What is important, is what nobody seems to realise--the dogmas like that of Original Sin, which are the closest expression of the categories of the religious attitude. That man is in no sense perfect but a wretched creature who can yet apprehend perfection.”

Rousseauvian/enlightenment thinking had moved society away from understanding this fundamental truth of the human person. As Hulme saw it, Rousseauvianism is a “heresy, a mistaken adoption of false conceptions.” By focusing on feelings and individual desires and blind lusts (and glorifying them) it attempts to allow man to become a God—and, as a result, “creates a bastard conception of Personality.”

The human person only overcomes his depravity though heroic virtue, Hulme argued: “From the pessimistic conception of man comes naturally the heroic task requiring heroic qualities. . . virtues which are not likely to flourish on the soil of a rational and skeptical ethic. This regeneration can, on the contrary, only be brought about and only be maintained by actions springing from an ethic which from the narrow rationalist standpoint is irrational being not relative, but absolute.”

When Hulme received a commission in the British Army during the Great War, he embraced what he had preached, and he gave his life as a patriot of western civilization.
Even in the trenches, before his death, Hulme continued to shape his contemporaries. “In all this [group of poets] Hulme was ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate presentation and no verbiage; and he and F. W. Tancred, a poet too little known, perhaps because his production is precious and small, used to spend hours each day in the search for the right phrase. Tancred does it still; while Hulme reads German philosophy in the trenches, waiting for the general advance.” [EGOIST, May 1, 1915]

Critically, Hulme published a series of war notes from France. In one, he attempted to explain to the liberals that their version of history rested on dubious assumptions.

“Similarly our Liberal friends may be reminded that the lines now making a map of Europe are the result in every instance of local circumstances governable by men; and as they were determined by men they can be changed by men. Europe, in short, is a creation, not a blind evolutionary product; and nothing connected with its mental features is any more fixed than the present relations, as expressed in the trench-lines, between the Allies and the enemy.

Another prevalent Liberal assumption, hostile to a proper appreciation of the significance of the war, is that progress is both inevitable and of necessity in one direction. That change, like the girl in the play, may of itself or by the intention of those who bring it about, take the wrong turning seems never to enter the heads of some of our most popular doctrinaires. All that is not Liberal in Europe or elsewhere is in their opinion not even fundamentally anti-Liberal or other-than-Liberal,—it is merely an arrested development of an evolution which in any case must needs be Liberal in the end, or a reaction against, but still upon the line of Liberalism. This, I need not say after stating it, is not only an error, but a particularly insular error. In the first place, evolution in our sense of the word—that is, evolution towards democracy—is not only not inevitable, but it is the most precarious, difficult and exigent task political man has ever conceived. And, in the second place, far from it being the predestined path of every nation and race, only one or two nations have attempted to pursue it, while the rest deliberately and even, we might say, intelligently, pursue another path altogether as if that were progress, and are thus sincerely hostile to our own.” [Quoted from Karen Csengeri, ed., THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF T.E. HULME (1994), 333]

If only Hulme’s mind—per Eliot’s wishful thinking in 1924—had become the “twentieth-century mind.” We might very well have avoided a “progressive” world immersed in ideological terror on one side and in flabby citizens demanding unearned health care and subsidies for big businesses (so-called stimulus packages) on the other.

 

Conférence de Franck Abed

Conférence de Frank Abed

à La Charité sur Loire

Dimanche, 9 décembre 2012 - 15 h

Le grand chemin vers Jérusalem : le Hamas trahit l’Iran et la Syrie

par Fida DAKROUB

Ex: http://mediabenews.wordpress.com/

 

Lorsque l’émir du Qatar, Hamad, fut arrivé à Gaza, à la tête d’une importante délégation comprenant son épouse, Moza, et son premier ministre, Hamad – celui-ci un cheikh non pas un émir –, il fut accueilli par le chef du gouvernement du Hamas, Ismaïl Haniyeh, qui eut organisé une cérémonie officielle grandiose pour l’occasion. Les deux hommes se tinrent côte à côte pendant que les hymnes nationaux palestinien et qatari furent joués. Certainement, un tapis rouge eut été déployé en son honneur ; et l’émir fut ensuite accueilli par un parterre de responsables du Hamas, dont les ministres du gouvernement de Gaza et un dirigeant en exil du mouvement, Saleh Arouri, venu dans le territoire palestinien pour cette occasion très glorieuse [1].

En plus, monsieur Taher al-Nounou, le porte-parole du chef du gouvernement du Hamas à Gaza, qui eût avalé sa langue en récitant les allégeances à son nouvel émir, déclara que cette visite avait une grande signification politique parce que c’était le premier dirigeant arabe – plutôt « arabique » selon notre nomenclature [2] – à briser le blocus politique [3].

Des fusées d’allégresse furent tirées, évidemment, dans le ciel de la bande de Gaza, assiégée, depuis un millénaire et quelque, par la soldatesque israélienne et la trahison arabe.

Dans les rues, des milliers de drapeaux palestiniens et qataris furent accrochés, ainsi que des photos géantes du cheikh Hamad : « Merci au Qatar qui tient ses promesses » (sic.) ; ou « Bienvenue » pouvait-on lire sur des panneaux le long de la route Salaheddine, qui parcourait le territoire palestinien du nord au sud.

– L’émir a accepté d’augmenter l’investissement du Qatar de 254 à 400 millions de dollars, déclara monsieur Haniyeh, lors d’une cérémonie à Khan Younès, en présence de cheikh Hamad, pour poser la première pierre d’un projet de logements destinés à des familles palestiniennes défavorisées, qui porterait aussi le nom de son Allégresse : Hamad ou l’émir du Qatar.

Cette omniprésence de son Allégresse qui précéda l’opération militaire israélienne baptisée « pilier de défense », cette précipitation subite de l’influence qatarie à Gaza, cette extase des chefs du Hamas au point de passage de Rafah, touchés par le Saint-Esprit du despotisme obscurantiste arabique, cette montée de l’émir pendant qu’il descendait, cette apparition pendant qu’il se cachait, ce silence pendant qu’il parlait, ce bruit pendant qu’il se taisait n’étaient pas un privilège de sa nature, comme le proclamaient l’émir et ses adulateurs, ni une hallucination collective, comme l’affirmaient ses détracteurs, non, simplement un faux calcul de la part des chefs du Hamas au lendemain de leur trahison ignoble envers la Syrie et l’Iran.

La trahison du Hamas envers la Syrie et l’Iran

Avant toute chose, ce qui manquait aux médias « résistants » pendant le dernier cycle de violences à Gaza, c’était le courage ! Non celui d’insulter leur « ennemi », ici Israël, mais bien plutôt le courage de décortiquer le soi-disant « allié » quand il se fut transformé en Dalila, et « l’alliance » avec lui en la chevelure convoitée de Samson [4]. C’est ce que les médias libellés « résistants » n’osèrent pas faire en réaction de la trahison du Hamas envers la Syrie et l’Iran.

D’ailleurs, loin des fracas des obus et des missiles tirés des deux côtés, une question très simple s’imposa dès le premier jour des opérations militaires à Gaza, sur laquelle ni les médias arabes « résistants » ni ceux d’Israël n’eurent pas la « générosité » d’y répondre : Quelle mouche piqua le premier ministre israélien, monsieur Netanyahou, pour qu’il donne le feu vert à une opération militaire ? La simplicité d’une telle question, au point de départ, n’exclut pas une certaine difficulté à répondre, au point d’arrivée ; et par « répondre », nous n’attendons pas, évidemment, un tel ou tel brouhaha médiatique qui ne sert ni à présenter les faits objectifs d’une telle opération ni à « répondre » à la question ci-devant. Autrement dit, tout ce que l’on eut dit, tout ce que l’on eut publié, que ça fût par les médias israéliens ou par leurs « ennemis », les médias « résistants », ne constitua, du point de vue de l’analyse de discours, aucune matière analytique des faits objectifs menant à l’opération « pilier de défense » ; et la seule synthèse à tirer des deux discours, israélien et « résistant », c’est que les deux groupes eurent bien maîtrisé, pendant le déroulement des opérations militaires, l’art de la propagande !

En effet, dès le début de la campagne impérialiste contre la Syrie, en mars 2011, le Hamas prit le camp de la soi-disant « révolution syrienne », voire de la guerre impérialiste contre la Syrie ; justifiant le « déplacement du fusil d’une épaule à l’autre », selon une expression libanaise, comme « soumission à la volonté des peuples arabes » en plein printemps des Arabes [5].

Il suffit de faire le parallèle avec la visite du premier ministre du mouvement islamiste palestinien Hamas, Ismaïl Haniyeh, au Caire, le 24 février 2012, lorsqu’il eut salué ce qu’il appela « la quête du peuple syrien pour la liberté et la démocratie [6] » (sic.).

« Je salue le peuple héroïque de Syrie qui aspire à la liberté, la démocratie et la réforme », déclara monsieur Haniyeh devant une foule de partisans réunis dans la mosquée d’Al-Azhar, pour un rassemblement consacré à « soutenir » (sic.) la mosquée Al-Aqsa, à Jérusalem, et le peuple syrien [7].

Il est intéressant de savoir aussi que la première visite officielle du premier ministre Haniyeh, hors du Gaza, fut pour les Frères Musulmans, dans leur quartier général de Moqattam au Caire, où il commenta que le Hamas était « un mouvement jihadiste des Frères musulmans avec un visage palestinien ».

Monsieur Haniyeh parlait devant une foule de partisans des Frères musulmans qui scandaient « Ni Iran ni Hezbollha » ; « Syrie islamique » ; « Dégage, Bachar, dégage espèce de boucher », tandis que sa Sainteté, monsieur Haniyeh, restait de marbre [8].

Ismaïl Haniyeh (à droite), chef du gouvernement du Hamas, avec le président du mouvement des Frères musulmans, Mohammed Badie, au Caire

D’ailleurs, il faut noter que le Hamas n’est pas seulement un mouvement islamiste palestinien, mais il est aussi issu d’une idéologie précise, celle des Frères musulmans, pires ennemis du pouvoir politique en Syrie. Ses trois fondateurs, Ahmed Yassin, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi et Mohammed Taha, étaient aussi issus des Frères musulmans ; ce qui explique la raison pour laquelle les chefs du Hamas se sont tournés contre le président syrien Bachar al-Assad, supporteur historique de la cause palestinienne, après qu’ils avaient reçu pendant de nombreuses années le soutien du pouvoir en Syrie face à Israël, pour se tourner brusquement 180°, pour se positionner dans le camp opposé à Damas, pour la trahir en prenant partie du camp de la Turquie, de l’Égypte et des émirats et sultanats arabiques du golfe Persique, pour se mettre en contradiction avec « l’axe-de-résistance », ou l’Arc chiite, selon la nomenclature de la réaction arabique et de l’impérialisme mondial.

Le Hamas sur le chemin d’un accord Oslo 2

Avant toute chose et selon Amos Harel, un analyste du quotidien israélien Haaretz, dès le début de l’opération militaire israélienne à Gaza, ni le Hamas ni Israël n’avaient intérêt à vagabonder dans une confrontation militaire prolongée, ni à s’engager dans une nouvelle « farce » comme celle de la guerre de Gaza en 2008 – 2009. En plus, Harel ajouta que l’évaluation des services de renseignements israéliens, rapportée au bureau du premier ministre Netanyahou, indiquait que le Hamas se considérait hors de la confrontation militaire, et n’avait pas intérêt à s’y mêler. Il précisa aussi que chaque fois que le Hamas devait choisir entre la valeur réelle de la résistance et le pouvoir politique, il choisissait toujours le deuxième [9].

Plusieurs indices nous entrainent à conclure ici que le Hamas se dirige vers un nouvel « Oslo », qui mènerait à une reconnaissance d’Israël.

Premièrement, en abandonnant « l’axe-de-résistance », en trahissant la Syrie et l’Iran, en recevant la bénédiction du Saint-Esprit de la réaction arabique, en se positionnant dans le camp des soi-disant « Arabes modérés », c’est-à-dire au sein de la guerre impérialiste contre la Syrie, le Hamas ouvre, en effet, une porte vers un nouvel « Oslo » qui mènerait à la reconnaissance d’Israël, parrainée, cette fois-ci, par l’émirat du Qatar. La visite « grandiose » de son Allégresse l’émir du Qatar à Gaza confirme cette hypothèse, surtout après que l’émir eut annoncé une aide de 400 millions de dollars US à Gaza [10] et 2 milliards de dollars à l’Égypte [11].

Deuxièmement, le parrainage de l’Égypte du dernier accord de cessez-le-feu entre Gaza et Israël, et sa conclusion subite, visait premièrement à couper le chemin aux autres organisations palestiniennes qui adoptent toujours le choix de la résistance, et qui ne se sont pas encore impliquées dans la Sainte-Alliance contre la Syrie, telles que le Jihad islamique, et le Front populaire pour la libération de la Palestine. À cela s’ajoute que l’intervention de l’Égypte et sa précipitation à déclarer un cessez-le-feu visaient aussi à maintenir l’autorité du Hamas à Gaza face au Jihad et au FPLP. Il faut noter ici que le Hamas ne prit part aux escarmouches qui précédèrent l’assassinat d’al-Jaabari entre Israël, d’un côté, et les organisations palestiniennes, de l’autre côté ; et que les combattants du Hamas ne tirèrent aucune balle contre Israël pendant les accrochages précédents ; leurs chefs ne voulaient pas se laisser entrainer dans une confrontation avec Israël, qui eût pu nuire à leur plan de se mettre sous la cape de l’émir du Qatar, Hamad. Plus tard, le Hamas fut obligé de prendre part des opérations militaires seulement après l’assassinat d’un de ses chefs militaires, al-Jaabari, sinon la « farce » eût été scandaleuse !

Troisièmement, lors de la déclaration au Caire du cessez-le-feu, le chef du Hamas, Khaled Machaal, ne fit la moindre allusion au rôle de la Syrie ni à celui de la République islamique de l’Iran, qui soutenaient, pendant de nombreuses années, la cause palestinienne, surtout le Hamas ; ce qui poussa le secrétaire général du Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, à faire allusion à l’ingratitude et au manque de reconnaissance des chefs du Hamas envers l’Iran et la Syrie [12].

Quatrièmement, la « surprise des surprises » que nous firent les chefs du Hamas, c’était la dernière fatwa [13]prohibant, sous peine d’excommunication, les attaques contre Israël [14] !  Une telle fatwa sert à établir un fondement et une légitimité religieux pour un prochain accord de paix entre Israël et le Hamas, et cela à trois niveaux : celui des relations avec Israël, celui des relations intra-palestiniennes, et celui des relations interarabes.

De la fatwa du Hamas prohibant les opérations militaires contre Israël

Primo, au niveau des relations avec Israël, une telle fatwa faciliterait, dans un futur proche, la déclaration de Gaza comme un territoire « indépendant », non pas d’Israël, mais plutôt indépendant de la Cisjordanie ; là où le chef de l’autorité palestinienne, Mahmoud Abbas, passe à Ramallah le restant de sa vie à lutter, pour ainsi dire, avec Simón Bolívar, contre la vacuité et l’ennui ; à chasser, dans son labyrinthe, les mouches vertes de son désœuvrement pénible [15].  En plus, cette fatwa confirmerait, avant toute chose, la frontière de la « Palestine » et l’officialiserait ! Non pas de la Palestine de 1948, ni celle de 1967, ni même celle de 1992, mais bien plutôt, une sorte de miniature d’une certaine Palestine quelconque et microscopique, qui s’étendrait tout au long de la côte méditerranéenne, du nord jusqu’au sud de la bande de Gaza !

Bravo Hamas ! Madre de Deus, nostro Sennor ! [16]

Secundo, au niveau intra-palestinien, une telle fatwa prohibe toute action militaire contre Israël, ce qui imposerait, par conséquent, le Hamas comme la seule autorité militaire, politique, civile et religieuse à Gaza, qui tiendrait seule la résolution de faire la guerre ou d’établir la paix avec Israël. Pourtant, cette « ascension » du Hamas au rang des dieux, officialiserait et institutionnaliserait non seulement son pouvoir à Gaza, mais aussi la division palestinienne et accélérerait la création de deux « entités » isolées et séparées l’une de l’autre par le territoire israélien : l’émirat du Hamas à Gaza et le comté de l’OLP en Cisjordanie.

Quelle comédie ! Quelle tragédie ! Et l’Éternel fut avec Josué, dont la renommée se répandit dans tout le pays [17].

Tertio, au niveau interarabe, la fatwa constitue une déclaration de la part du Hamas, aussi claire que le ciel bleu de Beyrouth au mois de juillet, indiquant la rupture complète avec le restant des pays arabes encore résistants à la normalisation avec Israël, et confirme aussi que la résistance n’est plus un choix ; et cela au grand dam du discours triomphaliste des fanfarons et des hâbleurs des médias palestiniens et de ceux libellés « résistants », au lendemain de la déclaration de la trêve entre Gaza et Israël.

Ce qui advint de Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin lorsqu’il coupa la branche sur laquelle il était assis

Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin était assis à califourchon sur une grosse branche de cerisier, ses culottes amples et son long burnous blanc enserrant sa taille et ses jambes se balançant d’un côté à l’autre, chaque fois qu’il maniait sa hache.

- Le salut sur toi, Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin Effendi ! Appela une voix en dessous.

- Sur toi le salut,  Khalid Effendi ! Dit Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin assis en équilibre sur la branche. Posant sa hache, il arrangea son turban qui avait glissé sur le côté.

- Tu vas tomber de cet arbre ! l’avertit Khalid, regardes comme tu es assis !

- Tu ferais mieux de regarder où tu marches, rétorqua Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin. Les gens qui regardent les cimes des arbres et les nuages sont sûrs de se cogner les orteils.

Soudain, la branche s’est retrouvée au sol, suivie par la hache, puis par Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin. Il était trop occupé pour remarquer qu’il était assis du mauvais côté de la branche qu’il était en train de couper.

En guise de conclusion, il nous paraît que le sort du Hamas, après la rupture avec la Syrie et l’Iran, et après la précipitation de ses chefs pour se soumettre sous la cape de l’émir du Qatar, ne serait, en aucun point, moins tragique que le sort du mullah Djeha-Hodja Nasreddin lorsqu’il eut coupé la branche sur laquelle il était assis. Coupé de son arrière-front – l’Iran et la Syrie –, la bande de Gaza se trouve désormais victime des humeurs des rois d’Israël.

Fida Dakroub, Ph.D

Site officiel de l’auteur : www.fidadakroub.net

Note

[1] L’Orient-Le Jour. (23 octobre 2012). « L’émir du Qatar, “premier dirigeant arabe à briser le blocus politique” à Gaza ». Récupéré le 15 novembre 2012 de

http://www.lorientlejour.com/category/%C3%80+La+Une/article/784187/Lemir_du_Qatar,_%22premier_dirigeant_arabe_a_briser_le_blocus_politique%22_a_Gaza.html

[2] Nous distinguons dans nos écrits entre l’Arabe et l’Arabique ou l’habitant de la péninsule Arabique qui, vue son substrat culturel, se tient en opposition avec le premier, l’Arabe. Ce dernier eut créé en Syrie, précisément à Damas, et par l’entremise de la civilisation grecque et syriaque, ou chrétienne syrienne, l’une des plus grandes civilisations dans l’histoire humaine, la civilisation arabe.

[3] loc.cit.

[4] Parmi les textes de la Bible ayant inspiré les artistes, on trouve l’épopée de Samson et sa mésaventure avec Dalila. Cette histoire figure au Livre des Juges (13 : 1 – 16 : 22).

[5] L’auteur utilise l’expression ironique « le printemps des Arabes » au lieu du « printemps arabe ».

[6] France 24. (24 février 2012). « Le Hamas officialise son divorce avec le régime de Damas ». Récupéré le 26 novembre 2012 de

http://www.france24.com/fr/20120224-leader-hamas-salue-resistance-peuple-syrien-contestation-ismail-haniyeh

[7] loc.cit.

[8] loc.cit.

[9] Harel, Amos (15 novembre 2012). “Gaza escalation doesn’t necessarily mean Israel is headed for war”. Publié dans Haaretz. Récupéré le 26 novembre 2012 de

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/east-side-story/gaza-escalation-doesn-t-necessarily-means-israel-is-headed-for-war.premium-1.478169#

[10] Rudoren, Jodi. (23 octobre 2012). “Qatar’s Emir Visits Gaza, Pledging $400 Million to Hamas”. Publié dans le The New York Times. Récupéré le 26 novembre 2012 de http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/world/middleeast/pledging-400-million-qatari-emir-makes-historic-visit-to-gaza-strip.html?_r=1&

[11] Henderson, Simon. (22 octobre 2012). « Qatar’s emir visits Gaza ». Publié dans le Washington Institute. Récupéré le 26 novembre 2012 de

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/qatars-emir-visits-gaza

[12] Une annonce en public du secrétaire général du Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Récupéré le 26 novembre 2012 de

http://audio.moqawama.org/details.php?cid=1&linkid=3674

[13] Une fatwa est, dans l’islam, un avis juridique donné par un spécialiste de loi islamique sur une question particulière.

[14] Kamal, Sana. (27 novembre 2012). حماس تُحرّم خرق التهدئة وتسيّر دوريات حدوديّة Publié dans al-Akhbar. Récupéré le 26 novembre 2012 (vue le décalage de l’heure entre le Liban et le Canada) de

http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/172380

[15] Allusion au roman de Gabriel García Márquez «  Le Général dans son labyrinthe ». Il s’agit d’un conte romancé des derniers jours de Simón Bolívar, le libérateur et le leader de la Colombie ; il retrace aussi le voyage final de Bolívar de Bogotá à la côte nord de la Colombie dans sa tentative de quitter l’Amérique du Sud pour un exil en Europe.

[16] Mère de Dieu, notre Seigneur. Le manuscrit des Cantigas de Santa María est un des plus importants recueils de chansons monophoniques de la littérature médiévale en Occident, rédigé pendant le règne du roi de Castille Alphonse X dit El Sabio ou Le Sage (1221-1284).

[17] Le Livre de Josué, 6 : 27.

Docteur en Études françaises (The University of Western Ontario, 2010), Fida Dakroub est écrivain et chercheur en théorie bakhtinienne. Elle est  aussi militante pour la paix et les droits civiques.

Après Erdogan, Morsi ? Autant en emporte le vent

Après Erdogan, Morsi ? Autant en emporte le vent

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org/

Il y a une semaine, nous constations la chute accélérée de la position du Turc Erdogan, qui n’avait pu réussir, au long de la crise de Gaza (Gaza-II), à se rétablir dans la perception de l’opinion musulmane et de celle du reste du monde. Gaza-II n’avait démontré qu’une chose : la toute-puissance de la position de Morsi, l’homme-clef de la crise, montrant de la fermeté vis-à-vis d’Israël tout en contrôlant le Hamas et en s’attirant le soutien enthousiaste de Washington. C’était effectivement le 23 novembre 2012 que tout cela était rapportét.

«D’un côté, il y a une appréciation générale selon laquelle Erdogan s’est trouvé dans cette crise à la remorque de Morsi, tandis que son attitude durant ces quelques jours est perçue plutôt comme de la gesticulation sans beaucoup de substance. […][S]elon un article du New York Times [… :] “The analysts stressed that while Turkey became a vocal defender of Palestinians and a critic of the Israeli regime, ‘it had to take a back seat to Egypt on the stage of high diplomacy.” […] “While most of the region’s leaders rushed to the nearest microphone to condemn Israel, the normally loquacious prime minister was atypically mute,” said Aaron Stein from a research center based in Istanbul. Stein added that while Erdogan was touring a factory that makes tanks, Egypt President Mohamed Morsi had “put his stamp on world réaction…»

• L’impression est immanquable : Erdogan est “perdu corps et bien”, Morsi est le grand homme d’une époque nouvelle… Combien de temps, cette “époque nouvelle” ? Eh bien, disons, une semaine, dix jours, deux semaines ? Aujourd’hui, Morsi est à la dérive ; l’on dirait presque, bientôt, qu’il est “perdu corps et bien”… Le constat semble aussi rapide que le temps qui passe et que l’Histoire se fait.

• Ces trois-quatre derniers jours, Morsi s’est trouvé entraîné dans le tourbillon d’une contestation qui prend des allures, une fois de plus, révolutionnaires, ou plutôt déstructurantes ; destructrices de structures encore si fragiles mises en place peu à peu depuis le départ de Moubarak, et dont Morsi avait pensé qu’elles suffiraient à canaliser les passions et les fureurs. Le schéma est assez simple : deux ou trois jours après sa “victoire” dans Gaza-II, au pinacle de sa puissance nouvelle, Morsi s’est jugé en position de force pour assurer son pouvoir intérieur en relançant sa querelle avec le pouvoir législatif, contre lequel il avait lancé jusqu’ici des assauts contenus et même retournés contre lui, et cette fois lui-même pour placer un coup décisif. Il semble que Morsi se soit trop appuyé sur ses conseillers juridiques, selon le journaliste Rana Mamdouh, du quotidien Al-Akhbar English, ce 27 novembre 2012 : «As Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi faces yet another showdown with the judiciary, this time over his recent decree placing himself beyond the power of the courts, sources tell Al-Akhbar that the real masterminds behind these disastrous decisions are Mursi’s advisors.»

Rana Mamdouh semble, d’après ses sources, assez pessimiste sur l’issue de la crise pour Morsi, qu’il voit dans une nouvelle capitulation du même Morsi face au pouvoir législatif : «The president, on the other hand, met with the Higher Judicial Council on Monday in an attempt to close the rift caused by the declaration. The meeting was widely seen as an attempt to find a way out while allowing Mursi to save face – this would be the fourth reversal of a presidential decision in relation to the judiciary.»

• …Pourtant, serait-on tentés d’écrire, Morsi semblait avoir assuré sa position, notamment auprès des USA. Justement : à quoi servent les USA aujourd’hui et qui s’en soucie vraiment, au Caire, dans la rue par où doit passer toute décision politique ? La caution des USA, n’est-ce pas la caution de l’incendiaire donnée à l’apprenti-pompier ? Le même Al-Akhbar English, du 27 novembre 2012, publie une rapide et savoureuse mise en situation sur son Live Blog, le 27 novembre au matin ; laquelle nous montre 1) que le côté américaniste est affolé et ne comprend plus rien à une situation qu’il n’a jamais comprise, avec l’ambassade tweetant que, finalement, elle serait plutôt contre Morsi et aux côtés des révolutionnaires, du peuple et des droits de l’homme ; 2) que les contestataires anti-Morsi n’ont rien à faire des manifestations diverses de l’américanisme affolé, sinon à leur faire passer texto le message qu’ils ne veulent plus des accords de Camp David (accord de paix Israélo-Égyptien)…

«Who cares what the US says anyways?

»Are the Americans back peddling on Mursi? Under Mubarak, the US maintained its opposition to the Brotherhood. When Mursi won the presidential election and made clear his intentions to maintain ties with Israel and keep providing them with fuel, the US backed him. It was just a few days ago that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Mursi's “leadership” on Gaza. Now today, the US Embassy in Cairo basically called Mursi a dictator or Twitter:

»“@USEmbassyCairo : The Egyptian people made clear in the January 25th revolution that they have had enough of dictatorship #tahrir”.

»Conveniently, the embassy failed to address the incident just outside its doors earlier today when an activist was killed by riot police. Those protesters aren't just sending a message to Mursi, they are also rallying against US meddling in their internal affairs, and in particular, Camp David.»

• Première conclusion (sous forme de question) : Morsi est-il en train de prendre une direction semblable à celle d’Erdogan, par d’autres voies ? Seconde conclusion : il semblait bien que ces deux dirigeants musulmans, supposés habiles, certainement réformistes et un poil révolutionnaire, populiste sans aucun doute, charismatiques, étaient du genre “qui a compris que la rue pèse d’un poids terrible” après le “printemps arabe” ; eh bien, sans doute ne l’ont-ils pas assez bien compris.

… Mais est-ce bien une question de “bien comprendre”, finalement ? L’impression générale, dans la région, est véritablement celle d’un tourbillon évoluant en spirale vers un trou noir, que plus personne ne peut espérer contrôler. La tension générale ne rend pas compte de lignes de force tendant à imposer leurs lois, mais au contraire d’un désordre grandissant, d’un chaos où s’accumulent toutes les composantes de la crise terminale du Système, de type postmoderniste. Tous les pays autour de la Syrie sont en train de se transformer en une sorte de Pakistan circulaire, encerclant la Syrie-Afghanistan. La Turquie attend la réponse la plus stupide possible de l’OTAN (un “oui”) à la requête la plus stupide possible qu’elle ait faite, de déployer des Patriot de pays de l’OTAN (on connaît leur redoutable et presque légendaire inefficacité) à la frontière syrienne, sous contrôle d’engagement de l’OTAN. Tout le reste est à l’avenant, avec l’hypothèque absolument terrifiante de la destinée de l’Arabie Saoudite, qui se trouve au seuil d’une période explosive et absolument déstructurante. Tous les grands projets plus ou moins teintés d’idéologie religieuse et activiste, sunnites, salafistes, etc., sont en train de s’évaporer sous la poussée du désordre, avec même le Qatar qui se retire de plus en plus, tandis que les diverses forces en présence se transforment de plus en plus en bandes, en réseaux du crime organisé, etc. La pathétique sottise américaniste-occidentaliste domine tout ce champ de ruines de sa haute taille et de sa prétention sans faille et au pas précautionneux, – l’image du paon ferait bien l’affaire, – attentive à venir poser, à la moindre occasion, par exemple à l’aide d’un de ses drones dont le président BHO “qui marche sur l’eau” a le secret, un de ces actes stupides, absurdes, nuisibles et illégaux, pour encore aggraver ce qui est déjà si grave.

Dès qu’un homme apparaît et paraît pouvoir prétendre “chevaucher le tigre”, – et même un de ces hommes au demeurant d’allure et de conviction qui nous le rendraient sympathiques, – il est finalement désarçonné, et nullement au profit du Système qu’il semblait en position de pouvoir affronter, mais dans un dessein finalement radicalement antiSystème, – parce que cet homme-là, justement, n’est pas assez antiSystème pour les desseins supérieurs consentant à s'occuper des choses du monde. Bien qu’un Erdogan en son temps, puis un Morsi dans le sien, soient loin de nous sembler des marionnettes du Système, et même au contraire, la terrible loi du comte Joseph de Maistre joue contre eux. «On a remarqué, avec grande raison, que la révolution française mène les hommes plus que les hommes la mènent. Cette observation est de la plus grande justesse... [...] Les scélérats mêmes qui paraissent conduire la révolution, n'y entrent que comme de simples instruments; et dès qu'ils ont la prétention de la dominer, ils tombent ignoblement.» Erdogan et Morsi ne sont pas des “scélérats”, à l’image des révolutionnaires français, mais ils restent au service de desseins extérieurs à eux, qui se débarrassent d’eux s’ils prétendent trop précisément interrompre le cours de “la révolution”, qu’on nomme ici “printemps arabe”, qui n’a pas pour tâche d’établir ni la démocratie ni les droits de l’homme, qui a pour tâche d’abattre les structures du Système et rien d’autre. Le chaos a un envers qui le rend lui-même nécessaire.

Carl Schmitt: Il Machiavelli del '900 contro il potere di tecnici e finanza

Carl Schmitt: Il Machiavelli del '900 contro il potere di tecnici e finanza

 

Marcello VENEZIANI

 

Ex: http://agsassarialtervista.blogspot.be/ 

 

 

L'aveva chiamata san Casciano la sua casa del buen retiro a Plattenberg, il luogo natìo in cui tornò per trascorrere la lunga vecchiaia fino alla morte, all'età di 97 anni, nel 1985. San Casciano, come l'ultima casa-esilio di Niccolò Machiavelli, quando si ritirò dall'attività di Segretario. 

 

Ma Carl Schmitt confidò in un'intervista che aveva battezzato così la sua casa non solo in onore di Machiavelli ma anche perché San Casciano è il santo protettore dei professori uccisi dai loro scolari. Schmitt si identificava in ambedue, nell'autore de Il Principe, nel suo lucido realismo politico e nel suo amore per la romanità; ma anche nel Santo, perché si sentì tradito da molti suoi allievi. Quell'intervista dà il titolo a una raccolta di scritti di Carl Schmitt, curata da Giorgio Agamben e riapparsa da poco (Un giurista davanti a se stesso, Neri Pozza, pagg. 314, euro 16,50).

Non è un caso ma un destino che Carl non si chiami Karl. La matrice cattolico-romana e latina è decisiva nella sua biografia intellettuale. La tradizione a cui si richiama Schmitt è lo jus publicum europaeum, di cui «padre è il diritto romano e madre la Chiesa di Roma»; la fede in cui nacque, visse e morì è quella cattolica apostolica romana; «la concezione di Schmitt - notava Hugo Ball - è latina»; la lingua latina era per lui «un piacere, un vero godimento»; un suo saggio chiave è Cattolicesimo romano e forma politica, e l'annesso saggio sulla visibilità della Chiesa. E non solo. La critica di fondo che Schmitt rivolge alla sua Germania è «il sentimento antiromano» che la percorre da secoli e che sostanzia la differenza tra cultura evangelica e cattolica. È una divergenza che spiega molte cose del passato e anche qualcuna del presente. Compresa quell'asprezza intransigente dei tedeschi e di altri popoli di derivazione protestante verso i Paesi mediterranei di formazione greco-latina e cattolico-romana. È quello per Schmitt il vero spread tra tedeschi e latini.

Ma Schmitt va oltre e coglie l'incompatibilità tra «il modello di dominio» capitalistico-protestante dei tedeschi e il concetto romano-cattolico di natura, col suo amore per la terra e i suoi prodotti (che Schmitt chiama terrisme). «È impossibile - scrive Schmitt - una riunificazione tra la Chiesa cattolica e l'odierna forma dell'individualismo capitalistico. All'alleanza fra Trono e Altare non seguirà quella di ufficio e altare o fabbrica e altare». È possibile invece che i cattolici si adattino a questo stato di cose. Per Schmitt il cattolicesimo ha il merito d'aver rifiutato di diventare «un piacevole complemento del capitalismo, un istituto sanitario per lenire i dolori della libera concorrenza». Schmitt ravvisa un'antitesi radicale tra l'economicismo, condiviso dai modelli americano, bolscevico e nordeuropeo, e la visione politica e mediterranea del cattolicesimo, derivata dall'imperium romano. Rifiuta pure di riferirsi ai valori perché di derivazione economicista.

Nei saggi e nelle interviste raccolti da Agamben, figura anche un testo che apparve in Italia nel '35, in un'antologia curata da Delio Cantimori col titolo di Principi Politici del Nazionalsocialismo. Peccato che non siano stati più ripubblicati il saggio introduttivo di Cantimori e la prefazione di Arnaldo Volpicelli che sottolineava le divergenze tra fascismo e nazismo, e fra la teoria di Schmitt sull'Amico e il Nemico e l'idealismo di Gentile, a cui egli si ispirava, per il quale il nemico era accolto e risolto nell'amico, ogni alterità era superata nella sintesi totalitaria e «sostanza e meta ideale della politica non è il nazionalismo ma l'internazionalismo». Qui sta, diceva Volpicelli, «la differenza fondamentale e la superiorità categorica del corporativismo fascista sul nazional-socialismo». A proposito di Hitler, Schmitt ricorda che una volta confessò di provare compassione per ogni creatura e aggiunse che forse era buddista. Hitler era gentile nei rapporti personali, nota Schmitt, e non aveva mai visto il mare. Riferendosi al suo ascendente sul pubblico, rileva «la sua dipendenza quasi medianica da esso, dall'approvazione, dall'applauso interiore».

Le interviste percorrono i punti centrali delle opere di Schmitt: la critica al romanticismo che sostituisce Dio e il mondo con l'Io; il Nomos della terra e la contrapposizione con le potenze del mare; la derivazione teologica dei concetti politici; la dialettica amico-nemico; la teoria del partigiano e la sovranità come decisione nello stato d'eccezione; quel decisionismo peraltro estraneo alla sua indole («Ho una peculiare forma di passività. Non riesco a capire come la mia persona abbia acquisito la nomea di decisionista», confessa con autoironia). E poi la sua raffinata passione letteraria, anche in questo erede di Machiavelli.

C'è una ragione di forte attualità del pensiero schmittiano. È la sua doppia previsione della spoliticizzazione che avrebbe portato al dominio mondiale dei tecnici e dell'avvento di guerre umanitarie che sarebbero state più inumane delle guerre classiche, perché condotte nel nome del bene assoluto contro il male assoluto. L'intreccio fra tecnica, economia e principi umanitari è l'amalgama che comanda oggi il mondo. Per assoggettare i popoli, scrive profeticamente nel '32, «basterà addirittura che una nazione non possa pagare i suoi debiti». Schmitt descrive «la cupa religione del tecnicismo» e nota che oggi la guerra più terribile può essere condotta nel nome della pace, l'oppressione più terrificante nel nome della libertà e la disumanità più abbietta nel nome dell'umanità. L'imperialismo dell'economia si servirà dell'alibi etico-umanitario. Il potere, avverte Schmitt, è più forte della volontà umana di potere e tende a sovrastare in modo automatico, impersonale: «non è più l'uomo a condurre il tutto, ma una reazione a catena provocata da lui». Non dunque un complotto ordito da poteri oscuri ma un automatismo indotto da una reazione a catena non più controllata dai soggetti umani. Quella reazione a catena passa dall'incrocio fra tecnica e finanza ed è visibile nell'odierna crisi globale. Da qui la necessità di rifondare la sovranità della politica. E di ripensare al Machiavelli del '900, quel tedesco in odore di romanità che ipotizzava la nascita di un patriottismo europeo. La Grande Politica di Schmitt e il suo nemico: il Tecnico, bardato di etica, a cavallo della finanza.

 

(di Marcello Veneziani) 

Pubblicato da agsassari.altervista a 14:56 Nessun commento:

Etichette: cultura

 

Eliot, Pound, and Lewis: A Creative Friendship

By Henry Regnery

 

Ex: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/

 

 

Portrait of T.S. Eliot by Wyndham Lewis (1938). Wikimedia Commons.

It may be a source of some pride to those of us fated to live out our lives as Americans that the three men who probably had the greatest influence on English literature in our century were all born on this side of the Atlantic. One of them, Wyndham Lewis, to be sure, was born on a yacht anchored in a harbor in Nova Scotia, but his father was an American, served as an officer in the Union Army in the Civil War, and came from a family that has been established here for many generations. The other two were as American in background and education as it is possible to be. Our pride at having produced men of such high achievement should be considered against the fact that all three spent their creative lives in Europe. For Wyndham Lewis the decision was made for him by his mother, who hustled him off to Europe at the age of ten, but he chose to remain in Europe, and to study in Paris rather than to accept the invitation of his father to go to Cornell, and except for an enforced stay in Canada during World War II, spent his life in Europe. The other two, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, went to Europe as young men out of college, and it was a part of European, not American, cultural life that they made their contribution to literature. Lewis was a European in training, attitude and point of view, but Pound and Eliot were Americans, and Pound, particularly, remained aggressively American; whether living in London or Italy his interest in American affairs never waned.

The lives and achievements of these three men were closely connected. They met as young men, each was influenced and helped by the other two, and they remained friends, in spite of occasional differences, for the rest of their lives. Many will remember the picture in Time of Pound as a very old man attending the memorial service in Westminster Abbey in 1965 for T.S. Eliot. When Lewis, who had gone blind, was unable to read the proofs of his latest book, it was his old friend, T.S. Eliot who did it for him, and when Pound was confined in St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, Eliot and Lewis always kept in close touch with him, and it was at least partly through Eliot’s influence that he was finally released. The lives and association of these three men, whose careers started almost at the same time shortly before World War I are an integral part of the literary and cultural history of this century.

The careers of all three may be said, in a certain way, to have been launched by the publication of Lewis’ magazine Blast. Both Lewis and Pound had been published before and had made something of a name for themselves in artistic and literary circles in London, but it was the publication in June, 1914, of the first issue of Blast that put them, so to speak, in the center of the stage. The first Blast contained 160 pages of text, was well printed on heavy paper, its format large, the typography extravagant, and its cover purple. It contained illustrations, many by Lewis, stories by Rebecca West and Ford Maddox Ford, poetry by Pound and others, but it is chiefly remembered for its “Blasts” and “Blesses” and its manifestos. It was in this first issue of Blast that “vorticism,” the new art form, was announced, the name having been invented by Pound. Vorticism was supposed to express the idea that art should represent the present, at rest, and at the greatest concentration of energy, between past and future. “There is no Present – there is Past and Future, and there is Art,” was a vorticist slogan. English humour and its “first cousin and accomplice, sport” were blasted, as were “sentimental hygienics,” Victorian liberalism, the Royal Academy, the Britannic aesthete; Blesses were reserved for the seafarer, the great ports, for Shakespeare “for his bitter Northern rhetoric of humour” and Swift “for his solemn, bleak wisdom of laughter”; a special bless, as if in anticipation of our hairy age, was granted the hairdresser. Its purpose, Lewis wrote many years later, was to exalt “formality and order, at the expense of the disorderly and the unkempt. It is merely a humorous way,” he went on to say, “of stating the classic standpoint as against the romantic.”

The second, and last, issue of Blast appeared in July, 1915, by which time Lewis was serving in the British army. This issue again contained essays, notes and editorial comments by Lewis and poetry by Pound, but displayed little of the youthful exuberance of the first – the editors and contributors were too much aware of the suicidal bloodletting taking place in the trenches of Flanders and France for that. The second issue, for example, contained, as did the first, a contribution by the gifted young sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska, together with the announcement that he had been killed while serving in the French army.

Between the two issues of Blast, Eliot had arrived in London via Marburg and Oxford, where he had been studying for a degree in philosophy. He met Pound soon after his arrival, and through Pound, Wyndham Lewis. Eliot’s meeting of Pound, who promptly took him under his wing, had two immediate consequences – the publication in Chicago of Prufrock in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, and the appearance of two other poems a month or two later in Blast. The two issues of Blast established Lewis as a major figure: as a brilliant polemicist and a critic of the basic assumptions and intellectual position of his time, two roles he was never to surrender. Pound had played an important role in Blast, but Lewis was the moving force. Eliot’s role as a contributor of two poems to the second issue was relatively minor, but the enterprise brought them together, and established an association and identified them with a position in the intellectual life of their time which was undoubtedly an important factor in the development and achievement of all three.

Lewis was born in 1882 on a yacht, as was mentioned before, off the coast of Nova Scotia. Pound was born in 1885 in Hailey, Idaho, and Eliot in 1888 in St. Louis. Lewis was brought up in England by his mother, who had separated from his father, was sent to various schools, the last one Rugby, from which he was dropped, spent several years at an art school in London, the Slade, and then went to the continent, spending most of the time in Paris where he studied art, philosophy under Bergson and others, talked, painted and wrote. He returned to England to stay in 1909. It was in the following year that he first met Ezra Pound, in the Vienna Cafe in London. Pound, he wrote many years later, didn’t greatly appeal to him at first – he seemed overly sure of himself and not a little presumptuous. His first impression, he said, was of “a bombastic galleon, palpably bound to or from, the Spanish Main,” but, he discovered, “beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleur de lis and spattered with star-spangled oddities, a heart of gold.” As Lewis became better acquainted with Pound he found, as he wrote many years later, that “this theatrical fellow was one of the best.” And he went on to say, “I still regard him as one of the best, even one of the best poets.”

By the time of this meeting, Lewis was making a name for himself, not only as a writer, but also an artist. He had exhibited in London with some success, and shortly before his meeting with Pound, Ford Maddox Ford had accepted a group of stories for publication in the English Review, stories he had written while still in France in which some of the ideas appeared which he was to develop in the more than forty books that were to follow.

But how did Ezra Pound, this young American poet who was born in Hailey, Idaho, and looked, according to Lewis, like an “acclimatized Buffalo Bill,” happen to be in the Vienna Cafe in London in 1910, and what was he doing there? The influence of Idaho, it must be said at once, was slight, since Pound’s family had taken him at an early age to Philadelphia, where his father was employed as an assayer in the U.S. mint. The family lived first in West Philadelphia, then in Jenkintown, and when Ezra was about six bought a comfortable house in Wyncote, where he grew up. He received good training in private schools, and a considerable proficiency in Latin, which enabled him to enter the University of Pennsylvania shortly before reaching the age of sixteen. It was at this time, he was to write some twenty years later, that he made up his mind to become a poet. He decided at that early age that by the time he was thirty he would know more about poetry than any man living. The poetic “impulse”, he said, came from the gods, but technique was man’s responsibility, and he was determined to master it. After two years at Pennsylvania, he transferred to Hamilton, from which he graduated with a Ph.B. two years later. His college years, in spite of his assertions to the contrary, must have been stimulating and developing – he received excellent training in languages, read widely and well, made some friends, including William Carlos Williams, and wrote poetry. After Hamilton he went back to Pennsylvania to do graduate work, where he studied Spanish literature, Old French, Provencal, and Italian. He was granted an M.A. by Pennsylvania in 1906 and a Fellowship in Romantics, which gave him enough money for a summer in Europe, part of which he spent studying in the British museum and part in Spain. The Prado made an especially strong impression on him – thirty years later he could still describe the pictures in the main gallery and recall the exact order in which they were hung. He left the University of Pennsylvania in 1907, gave up the idea of a doctorate, and after one semester teaching at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, went to Europe, to return to his native land only for longer or shorter visits, except for the thirteen years he was confined in St. Elizabeth’s in Washington.

Pound’s short stay at Wabash College was something of a disaster – he found Crawfordsville, Indiana, confining and dull, and Crawfordsville, in 1907, found it difficult to adjust itself to a Professor of Romance Languages who wore a black velvet jacket, a soft-collared shirt, flowing bow tie, patent leather pumps, carried a malacca cane, and drank rum in his tea. The crisis came when he allowed a stranded chorus girl he had found in a snow storm to sleep in his room. It was all quite innocent, he insisted, but Wabash didn’t care for his “bohemian ways,” as the President put it, and was glad for the excuse to be rid of him. He wrote some good poetry while at Wabash and made some friends, but was not sorry to leave, and was soon on his way to Europe, arriving in Venice, which he had visited before, with just eighty dollars.

While in Venice he arranged to have a group of his poems printed under the title A Lume Spento. This was in his preparation for his assault on London, since he believed, quite correctly, that a poet would make more of an impression with a printed book of his poetry under his arm than some pages of an unpublished manuscript. He stayed long enough in Venice to recover from the disaster of Wabash and to gather strength and inspiration for the next step, London, where he arrived with nothing more than confidence in himself, three pounds, and the copies of his book of poems. He soon arranged to give a series of lectures at the Polytechnic on the Literature of Southern Europe, which gave him a little money, and to have the Evening Standard review his book of poetry, the review ending with the sentence, “The unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper volume, and words are no good in describing it.” He managed to induce Elkin Mathews to publish another small collection, the first printing of which was one hundred copies and soon sold out, then a larger collection, Personae, the Polytechnic engaged him for a more ambitious series of lectures, and he began to meet people in literary circles, including T.E. Hulme, John Butler Yeats, and Ford Maddox Ford, who published his “Ballad of the Goodley Fere” in the English Review. His book on medieval Latin poetry, The Spirit of Romance, which is still in print, was published by Dent in 1910. The Introduction to this book contains the characteristic line, “The history of an art is the history of masterworks, not of failures or of mediocrity.” By the time the first meeting with Wyndham Lewis took place in the Vienna Cafe, then, which was only two years after Pound’s rather inauspicious arrival in London, he was, at the age of 26, known to some as a poet and had become a man of some standing.

It was Pound, the discoverer of talent, the literary impresario, as I have said, who brought Eliot and Lewis together. Eliot’s path to London was as circuitous as Pound’s, but, as one might expect, less dramatic. Instead of Crawfordsville, Indiana, Eliot had spent a year at the Sorbonne after a year of graduate work at Harvard, and was studying philosophy at the University of Marburg with the intention of obtaining a Harvard Ph.D. and becoming a professor, as one of his teachers at Harvard, Josiah Royce, had encouraged him to do, but the war intervened, and he went to Oxford. Conrad Aiken, one of his closest friends at Harvard, had tried earlier, unsuccessfully, to place several of Eliot’s poems with an English publisher, had met Pound, and had given Eliot a latter of introduction to him. The result of that first meeting with Pound are well known – Pound wrote instantly to Harriet Monroe in Chicago, for whose new magazine, Poetry, he had more or less been made European editor, as follows: “An American called Eliot called this P.M. I think he has some sense tho’ he has not yet sent me any verse.” A few weeks later Eliot, while still at Oxford, sent him the manuscript of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Pound was ecstatic, and immediately transmitted his enthusiasm to Miss Monroe. It was he said, “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. Pray God it be not a single and unique success.” Eliot, Pound went on to say, was “the only American I know of who has made an adequate preparation for writing. He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.” Pound sent Prufrock to Miss Monroe in October, 1914, with the words, “The most interesting contribution I’ve had from an American. P.S. Hope you’ll get it in soon.” Miss Monroe had her own ideas – Prufrock was not the sort of poetry she thought young Americans should be writing; she much preferred Vachel Lindsey, whose The Firemen’s Ball she had published in the June issue. Pound, however, was not to be put off; letter followed importuning letter, until she finally surrendered and in the June, 1915, issue of Poetry, now a collector’s item of considerable value, the poem appeared which begins:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table …

It was not, needless to say, to be the “single and unique success” Pound had feared, but the beginning of one of the great literary careers of this century. The following month the two poems appeared in Blast. Eliot had written little or nothing for almost three years. The warm approval and stimulation of Pound plus, no doubt, the prospect of publication, encouraged him to go on. In October Poetry published three more new poems, and later in the year Pound arranged to have Elkin Matthews, who had published his two books of poetry to bring out a collection which he edited and called The Catholic Anthology which contained the poems that had appeared in Poetry and one of the two from Blast. The principal reason for the whole anthology, Pound remarked, “was to get sixteen pages of Eliot printed in England.”

If all had gone according to plan and his family’s wishes, Eliot would have returned to Harvard, obtained his Ph.D., and become a professor. He did finish his thesis – “To please his parents,” according to his second wife, Valerie Eliot, but dreaded the prospect of a return to Harvard. It didn’t require much encouragement from Pound, therefore, to induce him to stay in England – it was Pound, according to his biographer Noel Stock “who saved Eliot for poetry.” Eliot left Oxford at the end of the term in June, 1915, having in the meantime married Vivien Haigh-Wood. That Fall he took a job as a teacher in a boy’s school at a salary of £140 a year, with dinner. He supplemented his salary by book reviewing and occasional lectures, but it was an unproductive, difficult period for him, his financial problems increased by the illness of his wife. After two years of teaching he took a position in a branch of Lloyd’s bank in London, hoping that this would give him sufficient income to live on, some leisure for poetry, and a pension for his wife should she outlive him. Pound at this period fared better than Eliot – he wrote music criticism for a magazine, had some income from other writing and editorial projects, which was supplemented by the small income of his wife, Dorothy Shakespear and occasional checks from his father. He also enjoyed a more robust constitution that Eliot, who eventually broke down under the strain and was forced, in 1921, to take a rest cure in Switzerland. It was during this three-month stay in Switzerland that he finished the first draft of The Waste Land, which he immediately brought to Pound. Two years before, Pound had taken Eliot on a walking tour in France to restore his health, and besides getting Eliot published, was trying to raise a fund to give him a regular source of income, a project he called “Bel Esprit.” In a latter to John Quinn, the New York lawyer who used his money, perceptive critical judgment and influence to help writers and artists, Pound, referring to Eliot, wrote, “It is a crime against literature to let him waste eight hours vitality per diem in that bank.” Quinn agreed to subscribe to the fund, but it became a source of embarrassment to Eliot who put a stop to it.

The Waste Land marked the high point of Eliot’s literary collaboration with Pound. By the time Eliot had brought him the first draft of the poem, Pound was living in Paris, having left London, he said, because “the decay of the British Empire was too depressing a spectacle to witness at close range.” Pound made numerous suggestions for changes, consisting largely of cuts and rearrangements. In a latter to Eliot explaining one deletion he wrote, “That is 19 pages, and let us say the longest poem in the English langwidge. Don’t try to bust all records by prolonging it three pages further.” A recent critic described the processes as one of pulling “a masterpiece out of a grabbag of brilliant material”; Pound himself described his participation as a “Caesarian operation.” However described, Eliot was profoundly grateful, and made no secret of Pound’s help. In his characteristically generous way, Eliot gave the original manuscript to Quinn, both as a token for the encouragement Quinn had given to him, and for the further reason, as he put it in a letter to Quinn, “that this manuscript is worth preserving in its present form solely for the reason that it is the only evidence of the difference which his [Pound’s] criticism has made to the poem.” For years the manuscript was thought to have been lost, but it was recently found among Quinn’s papers which the New York Public Library acquired some years after his death, and now available in a facsimile edition.

The first publication of The Waste Land was in the first issue of Eliot’s magazine Criterion, October, 1922. The following month it appeared in New York in The Dial. Quinn arranged for its publication in book form by Boni and Liveright, who brought it out in November. The first printing of one thousand was soon sold out, and Eliot was given the Dial award of the two thousand dollars. Many were puzzled by The Waste Land, one reviewer even thought that Mr. Eliot might be putting over a hoax, but Pound was not alone in recognizing that in his ability to capture the essence of the human condition in the circumstances of the time, Eliot had shown himself, in The Waste Land, to be a poet. To say that the poem is merely a reflection of Eliot’s unhappy first marriage, his financial worries and nervous breakdown is far too superficial. The poem is a reflection, not of Eliot, but of the aimlessness, disjointedness, sordidness of contemporary life. In itself, it is in no way sick or decadent; it is a wonderfully evocative picture of the situation of man in the world as it is. Another poet, Kathleen Raine, writing many years after the first publication of The Waste Land on the meaning of Eliot’s early poetry to her generation, said it

…enabled us to know our generation imaginatively. All those who have lived in the Waste Land of London can, I suppose, remember the particular occasion on which, reading T.S. Eliot’s poems for the first time, an experience of the contemporary world that had been nameless and formless received its apotheosis.

Eliot sent one of the first copies he received of the Boni and Liveright edition to Ezra Pound with the inscription “for E.P. miglior fabbro from T.S.E. Jan. 1923.” His first volume of collected poetry was dedicated to Pound with the same inscription, which came from Dante and means, “the better marker.” Explaining this dedication Eliot wrote in 1938:

I wished at that moment to honour the technical mastery and critical ability manifest in [Pound’s] . . . work, which had also done so much to turn The Waste Land from a jumble of good and bad passages into a poem.

Pound and Eliot remained in touch with each other – Pound contributed frequently to the Criterion, and Eliot, through his position at Faber and Faber, saw many of Pounds’ books through publication and himself selected and edited a collection of Pound’s poetry, but there was never again that close collaboration which had characterized their association from their first meeting in London in 1914 to the publication of The Waste Land in the form given it by Pound in 1922.

As has already been mentioned, Pound left London in 1920 to go to Paris, where he stayed on until about 1924 – long enough for him to meet many people and for the force of his personality to make itself felt. He and his wife were frequent visitors to the famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Co. run by the young American Sylvia Beach, where Pound, among other things, made shelves, mended chairs, etc.; he also was active gathering subscriptions for James Joyces’ Ulysses when Miss Beach took over its publication. The following description by Wyndham Lewis of an encounter with Pound during the latter’s Paris days is worth repeating. Getting no answer after ringing the bell of Pound’s flat, Lewis walked in and discovered the following scene:

A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves – I thought without undue exertion – a hectic assault of Ezra’s. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus (parried effortlessly by the trousered statue) Pound fell back upon the settee. The young man was Hemingway.

Pound, as is well known, took Hemingway in hand, went over his manuscripts, cut out superfluous words as was custom, and helped him find a publisher, a service he had performed while still in London for another young American, Robert Frost. In a letter to Pound, written in 1933, Hemingway acknowledged the help Pound had given him by saying that he had learned more about “how to write and how not to write” from him “than from any son of a bitch alive, and he always said so.”

When we last saw Lewis, except for his brief encounter with Pound and Hemingway wearing boxing gloves, he had just brought out the second issues of Blast and gone off to the war to end all war. He served for a time at the front in an artillery unit, and was then transferred to a group of artists who were supposed to devote their time to painting and drawing “the scene of war,” as Lewis put it, a scheme which had been devised by Lord Beaverbrook, through whose intervention Lewis received the assignment. He hurriedly finished a novel, Tarr, which was published during the war, largely as a result of Pound’s intervention, in Harriet Shaw Weaver’s magazine The Egoist, and in book form after the war had ended. It attracted wide attention; Rebecca West, for example, called it “A beautiful and serious work of art that reminds one of Dostoevsky.” By the early twenties, Lewis, as the editor of Blast, the author of Tarr and a recognized artist was an established personality, but he was not then, and never became a part of the literary and artistic establishment, nor did he wish to be.

For the first four years following his return from the war and recovery from a serious illness that followed it little was heard from Lewis. He did bring out two issues of a new magazine, The Tyro, which contained contributions from T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read and himself, and contributed occasionally to the Criterion, but it was a period, for him, of semi-retirement from the scene of battle, which he devoted to perfecting his style as a painter and to study. It was followed by a torrent of creative activity – two important books on politics, The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and The Lion and the Fox (1927), a major philosophical work, Time and Western Man (1927), followed by a collection of stories, The Wild Body (1927) and the first part of a long novel, Childermass (1928). In 1928, he brought out a completely revised edition of his wartime novel Tarr, and if all this were not enough, he contributed occasionally to the Criterion, engaged in numerous controversies, painted and drew. In 1927 he founded another magazine, The Enemy, of which only three issues appeared, the last in 1929. Lewis, of course, was “the Enemy.” He wrote in the first issue:

The names we remember in European literature are those of men who satirised and attacked, rather than petted and fawned upon, their contemporaries. Only this time exacts an uncritical hypnotic sleep of all within it.

One of Lewis’ best and most characteristic books is Time and Western Man; it is in this book that he declared war, so to speak, on what he considered the dominant intellectual position of the twentieth century – the philosophy of time, the school of philosophy, as he described it, for which “time and change are the ultimate realities.” It is the position which regards everything as relative, all reality a function of time. “The Darwinian theory and all the background of nineteenth century thought was already behind it,” Lewis wrote, and further “scientific” confirmation was provided by Einstein’s theory of relativity. It is a position, in Lewis’ opinion, which is essentially romantic, “with all that word conveys in its most florid, unreal, inflated, self-deceiving connotation.”

The ultimate consequence of the time philosophy, Lewis argued, is the degradation of man. With its emphasis on change, man, the man of the present, living man for the philosophy of time ends up as little more than a minute link in the endless process of progressive evolution –lies not in what he is, but in what he as a species, not an individual, may become. As Lewis put it:

You, in imagination, are already cancelled by those who will perfect you in the mechanical time-scale that stretches out, always ascending, before us. What do you do and how you live has no worth in itself. You are an inferior, fatally, to all the future.

Against this rather depressing point of view, which deprives man of all individual worth, Lewis offers the sense of personality, “the most vivid and fundamental sense we possess,” as he describes it. It is this sense that makes man unique; it alone makes creative achievement possible. But the sense of personality, Lewis points out, is essentially one of separation, and to maintain such separation from others requires, he believes, a personal God. As he expressed it: “In our approaches to God, in consequence, we do not need to “magnify” a human body, but only to intensify that consciousness of a separated and transcendent life. So God becomes the supreme symbol of our separation and our limited transcendence….It is, then, because the sense of personality is posited as our greatest “real”, that we require a “God”, a something that is nothing but a person, secure in its absolute egoism, to be the rationale of this sense.”

It is exactly “our separation and our limited transcendence” that the time philosophy denies us; its God is not, in Lewis’ words “a perfection already existing, eternally there, of which we are humble shadows,” but a constantly emerging God, the perfection toward which man is thought to be constantly striving. Appealing as such a conception may on its surface appear to be, this God we supposedly attain by our strenuous efforts turns out to be a mocking God; “brought out into the daylight,” Lewis said, “it would no longer be anything more than a somewhat less idiotic you.”

In Time and Western Man Lewis publicly disassociated himself from Pound, Lewis having gained the erroneous impression, apparently, that Pound had become involved in a literary project of some kind with Gertrude Stein, whom Lewis hated with all the considerable passion of which he was capable. To Lewis, Gertrude Stein, with her “stuttering style” as he called it, was the epitomy of “time philosophy” in action. The following is quoted by Lewis is in another of his books, The Diabolical Principle, and comes from a magazine published in Paris in 1925 by the group around Gertrude Stein; it is quoted here to give the reader some idea of the reasons for Lewis’ strong feelings on the subject of Miss Stein:

If we have a warm feeling for both (the Superrealists) and the Communists, it is because the movements which they represent are aimed at the destruction of a thoroughly rotten structure … We are entertained intellectually, if not physically, with the idea of (the) destruction (of contemporary society). But … our interests are confined to literature and life … It is our purpose purely and simply to amuse ourselves.

The thought that Pound would have associated himself with a group expounding ideas on this level of irresponsibility would be enough to cause Lewis to write him off forever, but it wasn’t true; Pound had met Gertrude Stein once or twice during his stay in Paris, but didn’t get on with her, which isn’t at all surprising. Pound also didn’t particularly like Paris, and in 1924 moved to Rapallo, a small town on the Mediterranean a few miles south of Genoa, where he lived until his arrest by the American authorities at the end of World War II.

In an essay written for Eliot’s sixtieth birthday, Lewis had the following to say about the relationship between Pound and Eliot:

It is not secret that Ezra Pound exercised a very powerful influence upon Mr. Eliot. I do not have to define the nature of this influence, of course. Mr. Eliot was lifted out of his lunar alley-ways and fin de siecle nocturnes, into a massive region of verbal creation in contact with that astonishing didactic intelligence, that is all.

Lewis’ own relationship with Pound was of quite a different sort, but during the period from about 1910 to 1920, when Pound left London, was close, friendly, and doubtless stimulating to both. During Lewis’ service in the army, Pound looked after Lewis’ interests, arranged for the publication of his articles, tried to sell his drawings, they even collaborated in a series of essays, written in the form of letters, but Lewis, who in any case was inordinately suspicious, was quick to resent Pound’s propensity to literary management. After Pound settled in Rapallo they corresponded only occasionally, but in 1938, when Pound was in London, Lewis made a fine portrait of him, which hangs in the Tate Gallery. In spite of their occasional differences and the rather sharp attack on Pound in Time and Western Man, they remained friends, and Lewis’ essay for Eliot’s sixtieth birthday, which was written while Pound was still confined in St. Elizabeth’s, is devoted largely to Pound, to whom Lewis pays the following tribute:

So, for all his queerness at times–ham publicity of self, misreading of part of poet in society–in spite of anything that may be said Ezra is not only himself a great poet, but has been of the most amazing use to other people. Let it not be forgotten for instance that it was he who was responsible for the all-important  contact  for James  Joyce–namely  Miss Weaver. It was his critical understanding, his generosity, involved in the detection and appreciation of the literary genius of James  Joyce. It was through him that a very considerable sum of  money was put at Joyce’s disposal at the critical moment.

Lewis concludes his comments on Pound with the following:

He was a man of letters, in the marrow of his bones and down to the red rooted follicles of his hair. He breathed Letters, ate Letters, dreamt Letters. A very rare kind of man.

Two other encounters during his London period had a lasting influence on Pound’s thought and career–the Oriental scholar Ernest Fenollosa and Major Douglas, the founder of Social Credit. Pound met Douglas in 1918 in the office of The New Age, a magazine edited by Alfred H. Orage, and became an almost instant convert. From that  point on usury became an obsession with him, and the word “usurocracy,” which he used to denote a social system based on money and credit, an indispensable part of his vocabulary. Social Credit was doubtless not the panacea Pound considered it to be, but  that Major Douglas was entirely a fool seems doubtful too, if the following quotation from him is indicative of the quality of his thought:

I would .. make the suggestion … that the first requisite of a  satisfactory governmental system is  that it shall divest itself  of the idea that it has a mission to improve the morals or direct  the  philosophy of  any of  its constituent citizens.

Ernest Fenollosa was a distinguished Oriental scholar of American  origin who had spent  many years in Japan, studying both Japanese and Chinese literature, and had died in  1908. Pound met his widow in London in 1913, with the result that she entrusted her  husband’s papers to him, with her authorization to edit and publish them as he thought  best. Pound threw himself into the study of the Fenollosa material with his usual  energy, becoming, as a result, an authority on the Japanese Noh drama and a lifelong student of Chinese. He came to feel that the Chinese ideogram, because it was never entirely removed from its origin in the concrete, had certain advantages over the  Western alphabet. Two years after receiving the Fenollosa manuscripts, Pound published  a translation of Chinese poetry under the title Cathay. The Times Literary Supplement  spoke of the language of Pound’s translation as “simple, sharp, precise.” Ford Maddox  Ford, in a moment of enthusiasm, called Cathay “the most beautiful book in the  language.”

Pound  made other translations, from Provencal, Italian, Greek, and besides the book of  Chinese poetry, translated Confucius, from which the following is a striking example, and  represents a conception of the relationship between the individual and society to which Pound attached great importance, and frequently referred to in his other writing:

The men of old wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the  home, they  first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts; they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they sought to extend  their knowledge to the utmost. This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories.

When things had been classified in organic categories, knowledge moved toward fulfillment; given the extreme knowable points, the inarticulate thoughts were defined with  precision. Having attained this precise verbal definition, they then stabilized their hearts, they disciplined themselves;  having attained self-discipline, they set their own houses in order; having order in their own homes, they brought good  government to their own states; and when their states were  well  governed, the empire was brought into equilibrium.

Pound’s major poetic work is, of course, The Cantos, which he worked on over a period of more than thirty years. One section, The Pisan Cantos, comprising 120 pages and eleven cantos, was written while Pound was confined in a U.S. Army detention camp near Pisa, for part of the time in a cage. Pound’s biographer, Noel Stock, himself a poet and a  competent critic, speaks of the Pisan Cantos as follows:

They are confused and often fragmentary; and they bear no relation structurally to the seventy earlier cantos; but shot through by a rare sad light they tell of things gone which somehow seem to live on, and are probably his best poetry. In  those few desperate months he was forced to return to that point within himself where the human person meets the outside world of real things, and to speak of what he found there. If at times the verse is silly, it is because in himself Pound was often  silly; if at times it is firm, dignified and intelligent, it is because  in himself Pound was often firm, dignified and intelligent; if it  is fragmentary and confused, it is because Pound was never  able to think out his position and did not know how the matters with which he dealt were related; and if often lines and  passages have a beauty seldom equaled in the poetry of the twentieth century it is because Pound had a true lyric gift.

As for the Cantos as a whole, I am not competent to make even a comment, much less to  pass judgment. Instead I will quote the distinguished English critic Sir Herbert Read on  the subject:

I am not going to deny that for the most part the Cantos present insuperable difficulties  for the impatient reader, but, as Pound says somewhere, “You can’t get through hell in a hurry.” They are of varying length, but they already amount to more than five hundred pages of verse and constitute the longest, and without hesitation I would say the greatest, poetic achievement of our time.

When The Waste Land was published in 1922 Eliot was still working as a clerk in a  London bank and had just launched his magazine, The Criterion. He left the bank in 1925 to join the newly organized publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, later to become Faber  and Faber, which gave him the income he needed, leisure for his literary pursuits and  work that was congenial and appropriate. One of his tasks at Fabers, it used to be said,  was writing jacket blurbs. His patience and helpfulness to young authors was well known–from personal experience I can bear witness to his kindness to inexperienced publishers; his friends, in fact, thought that the time he devoted to young authors he felt had promise  might have been better spent on his own work. In spite of the demands on his time and  energy, he continued to edit the Criterion, the publication of which was eventually taken  over by Faber. He attached the greatest importance to the Criterion, as is evidenced by the following from a letter to Lewis dated January 31, 1925 which is devoted entirely to  the Criterion and his wish for Lewis to continue to write regularly for it, “Furthermore I  am not an individual but an instrument, and anything I do is in the interest of art and literature and civilization, and is not a matter for personal compensation.” As it worked  out, Lewis wrote only occasionally for the Criterion, not at all for every issue as Eliot had proposed in the letter referred to above. The closeness of their association, however, in spite of occasional differences, may be judged not only from Eliot’s wish to have something from Lewis in every issue, but from the following from a letter to Eliot from  Lewis:

As I understand with your paper that you are almost in the position I was in with Tyro and Blast I will give you anything I have for nothing, as you did me, and am anxious to be of use to you: for I know that every  failure of an exceptional attempt  like yours with the Criterion means that the chance of  establishing some sort of critical standard here is diminished.

Pound also contributed frequently to the Criterion, but at least pretended not to think much of  it–“… a magnificent piece of editing, i.e. for the purpose of getting in to the  Athenaeum Club, and becoming permanent,” he remarked on one occasion. He, by the  way, accepted some of the blame for what he considered to be Eliot’s unduly cautious approach to criticism. In a letter to the Secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, written  in 1925 to urge them to extend financial assistance to Eliot and Lewis, he made the  following comment:

I may in some measure be to blame for the extreme caution of his [Eliot’s] criticism. I pointed out to him in the beginning that there was no use of two of us butting a stone wall; that he’d  never be as hefty a battering ram as I was, nor as explosive as Lewis, and that he’d  better try a more oceanic and fluid method of sapping the foundations. He is now respected by the Times  Lit. Sup. But his criticism no longer arouses my interest.

What Pound, of course, wished to “sap” was not the “foundations”of an ordered society,  but of established stupidity and mediocrity. The primary aim of all three, Pound, Eliot  and Lewis, each in his own way, was to defend civilized values. For Eliot, the means to  restore the health of Western civilization was Christianity. In his essay The Idea of A Christian Society he pointed out the dangers of the dominant liberalism of the time, which he thought “must either proceed into a gradual decline of which we can see no end, or reform itself into a positive shape which is likely to be effectively secular.” To attain,  or recover, the Christian society which he thought was the only alternative to a purely secular society, he recommended, among other things, a Christian education. The purpose of  such an education would not be merely to make people pious Christians, but primarily, as he put it, “to train people to be able to think in Christian categories.” The great mass of any population, Eliot thought, necessarily occupied in the everyday cares and demands of life, could not be expected to devote much time or effort to “thinking about the objects of faith,” their Christianity must be almost wholly realized in behavior.  For Christian values, and the faith which supports them to survive there must be, he  thought, a “Community of  Christians,” of people who would lead a “Christian life on its highest social level.”

Eliot thought of “the Community of Christians” not as “an organization, but a body of  indefinite outline, composed of both clergy and laity, of the more conscious, more spiritually and intellectually developed of both.” It will be their “identity of belief and  aspiration, their background of a common culture, which will enable them to influence and be influenced by each other, and collectively to form the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.” Like William Penn, Eliot didn’t think that the actual form of  government was as important as the moral level of the people, for it is the general ethos of the people they have to govern, not their own piety, that determines the behaviour of  politicians.” For this reason, he thought, “A  nation’s system of education is much more  important than its system of government.”

When we consider the very different personalities of these three men, all enormously  gifted, but quite different in their individual characteristics–Pound, flamboyant, extravagant; Eliot, restrained, cautious; Lewis, suspicious, belligerent–we can’t help but wonder how it was possible for three such men to remain close friends from the time they met as young men until the ends of their lives. Their common American background no doubt played some part in bringing Pound and Eliot together, and they both shared certain characteristics we like to think of as American: generosity, openness to others, a fresher, more unencumbered attitude toward the past than is usual for a European, who,  as Goethe remarked, carries the burden of the quarrels of a long history. But their close association, mutual respect and friendship were based on more than their common origin on this side of the Atlantic. In their basic attitude toward the spirit of their time, all three were outsiders; it was a time dominated by a facile, shallow liberalism, which, as Eliot  once remarked, had “re- placed belief  in Divine Grace” with “the myth of human  goodness.” Above all they were serious men,  they were far more interested in finding and expressing the truth than in success as the world understands it. The English critic  E. W.  F.  Tomlin remarked that a characteristic of  these three “was that they had mastered their subjects, and were  aware of  what lay beyond them. The reading that went into Time and Western Man alone exceeded the life-time capacity of many so-called ‘scholars.’” The royalties Lewis earned from this book, one of the most important of our time, which represented an immense amount of work and thought of the highest order, didn’t amount to a pittance, but Lewis’ concern, as he put it toward the end of his life, was for “the threat of extinction to the cultural tradition of the West.” It was this mutual  concern, on a very  high level, and an utterly serious attitude toward creative work that  brought them and held them together.

Why did Pound and Eliot stay in Europe, and what might have happened to them if they had come back to this country, as both were many times urged to do, or to Lewis if he had  gone to Cornell and stayed over here? In Pound’s case, the answer is rather simple, and was given in essence by his  experience in Crawfordsville, Indiana, as a young man, and the treatment he received following the war. There is no doubt that in making broadcasts on the Italian radio during wartime he was technically guilty of treason; against this, it seems to me, must be weighed the effect of  the broadcasts, which was zero, and his achievement as a poet and critic, which is immense. One can’t expect magnanimity from any government, and especially not in the intoxication of victory in a great war and overwhelming world power, but one might have expected the academic and literary  community to have protested the brutal treatment meted out to Pound. It didn’t, nor was there any protest of his long confinement in a mental institution except on the part of a few individuals; his release was brought about largely as a result of protests from Europe, in which Eliot played a substantial part. When, however, during his confinement in St.  Elizabeth’s, the Bollingen prize for poetry was given him for the Pisan Cantos, the liberal establishment reacted with the sort of  roar one might have expected had the Nobel Peace Prize been awarded to Adolf Hitler.

Lewis spent some five years in Toronto during World War II, which, incidentally, provided him with the background for one of his greatest novels, Self Condemned. He was desperately hard up, and tried to get lecture engagements from a number of  universities, including the University of Chicago. A small Canadian Catholic college was the only representative of the academic institutions of North America to offer this really great, creative intelligence something more substantial than an occasional lecture. Since his death, Cornell and the University of Buffalo have spent large sums accumulating Lewis material-manuscripts, letters, first editions, drawings, etc. When they could have done something for Lewis himself,  to their own glory and profit, they ignored him.

The American intellectual establishment, on the other hand, did not ignore the Communist-apologist Harold Laski, who was afforded all the honors and respect at its  command, the  Harold Laski who, in 1934, at the height of Stalinism–mass arrests, millions in slave labor camps and all the rest–had lectured at the Soviet Institute of Law.

Following his return to England the Labour government gave Lewis, “the Enemy” of socialism, as he called himself, a civil pension, and the BBC invited him to lecture regularly on modern art and to write for its publication, The Listener. He was even  awarded an honorary degree by the University of Leeds. Can anyone imagine CBS, for  example, offering a position of any kind to a man with Lewis’ unorthodox views, uncompromising intelligence, and ability to see the world for what it is, the Ford  Foundation offering him a grant, or Harvard or Yale granting him an honorary degree? Harold Laski indeed yes, but Wyndham Lewis? It is inconceivable.

The following taken from letters from Ezra Pound, the first written in 1926 to Harriet Monroe, and the second in 1934 to his old professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Felix Schelling, puts the problem of the poet in America as he saw it very graphically:

Poverty here is decent and honourable. In America it lays one open to continuous insult on all sides.  . . Re your question is it any better abroad for authors: England gives small pensions; France provides jobs.  . . Italy is full of ancient libraries; the  jobs are quite comfortable, not very highly paid, but are  respectable, and can’t much interfere with the librarians’ time.

As for “expatriated”? You know damn well the country wouldn’t  feed me. The simple economic fact that if I had returned to  America I shd. have starved, and that to maintain anything like the standard of living, or indeed to live, in America from 1918  onwards I shd. have had to quadruple my earnings, i.e. it wd. have been impossible for me to devote any time to my REAL work.

Eliot, of course, fared much better than Pound at the hands of the academy. As early as  1932 he was invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, many universities honored themselves by awarding him honorary degrees, he was given the  Nobel Prize, etc. One can’t help but wonder, however, if his achievement would have been  possible if he had completed his Ph.D. and become a Harvard professor. He wrote some  of his greatest poetry and founded the Criterion while still a bank clerk in London. One can say with considerable justification that as a clerk in Lloyd’s Bank in London Eliot had more opportunity for creative work and got more done than would have been possible had he been a Harvard  professor. It was done, of course, at the cost of intensely hard  work–in a letter to Quinn in the early twenties he remarks that he was working such long  hours that he didn’t have time either for the barber or the dentist. But he had something  to show for it.

It is impossible, of course, to sum up the achievement of these three men. They were very much a part of the time in which they lived, however much they rejected its basic assumptions and point of view. Both Lewis and Eliot described themselves as classicists, among other reasons, no doubt, because of the importance they attached to order; Lewis  at one time called Pound a “revolutionary simpleton,” which in certain ways was probably justified, but in his emphasis on “precise verbal definitions,” on the proper use  of language, Pound was a classicist too. All three, each in his own way, were concerned  with the health of society; Eliot founded the Criterion to restore values; in such books as  Time and Western Man, Paleface, The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis was fighting for an intelligent understanding of the nature of our civilization and of the forces he thought were undermining it. The political books Lewis wrote in the thirties, for which he was violently and unfairly condemned, were written not to promote fascism, as some simple-minded critics have contended, but to point out that a repetition of World War I would  be even more catastrophic for civilization than the first. In many of his political judgments Pound was undoubtedly completely mistaken and irresponsible, but he would  deserve an honored place in literature only for his unerring critical judgment, for his ability to discern quality, and for his encouragement at a critical point in the career of each of such men as Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot, Frost, and then there are his letters–letters of  encouragement and criticism to aspiring poets, to students, letters opening doors or asking for help for a promising writer, the dozens of letters to Harriet Monroe. “Keep on remindin’ ’em that we ain’t bolsheviks, but only the terrifyin’ voice of civilization, kultchuh, refinement, aesthetic perception,” he wrote in one to Miss Monroe, and when she wanted to retire, he wrote to her, “The intelligence of the nation [is] more important than the comfort of any one individual or the bodily life of a whole generation.” In a letter to H. L. Mencken thanking him for a copy of the latter’s In Defense of Women, Pound remarked, almost as an afterthought, “What is wrong with it,  and with your work in general is that you have drifted into writing for your inferiors.” Could anyone have put it more precisely? Whoever wants to know what went on in the period from about 1910 to 1940, whatever he may think of his politics or economics, or  even his poetry, will have to consult the letters of  Ezra Pound–the proper function of  the artist in society, he thought, was to be “not only its intelligence, but its ‘nostrils and  antennae.’” And this, as his letters clearly show, Pound made a strenuous and, more often than not, successful effort to be.

How much of  Lewis’ qualities were a result of his American heritage it would be hard to say, but there can be no doubt that much in both Pound and Eliot came from their  American background. We may not have been able to give them what they needed to realize their talents and special qualities, they may even have been more resented than  appreciated by many Americans, but that they did have qualities and characteristics which were distinctly American there can be no doubt. To this extent, at least, we can  consider them an American gift to the Old World. In one of Eliot’s most beautiful works,  The Rock, a “Pageant Play written on behalf of the forty-five churches Fund of the Diocese of London,” as it says on the title page, there are the lines, “I have said, take no thought of the harvest, but only of perfect sowing.” In taking upon themselves the difficult, thankless task of being the “terrifying voices of civilization” Eliot and his two friends, I am sure, didn’t give much thought of the possible consequences to themselves,  of what there “might be in it for them,” but what better can one say of anyone’s life than “He sowed better than he reaped?’’

Originally published in Modern Age, June 1972. Reprinted with the permission of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. 

Henry Regnery (1912-1996) was an American publisher.

 

 

Wyndham Lewis: Radical for the Permanent Things

Wyndham Lewis: Radical for the Permanent Things

 

by Stephen Masty

 

Ex: http://imaginativeconservative.org/

 

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), dead for more than half a century, may still take celestial delight in remaining so frustrating: he certainly tried hard enough.

 

Firstly, his enormous breadth of talent overwhelms today’s overly-specialised critics in their imposed pigeon-holes: some still call him England’s greatest Twentieth Century portraitist and draughtsman, his substantial shelf of novels could keep another league of critics busy, and his volumes of social criticism a third. Next, nobody could be so marvellously abrasive without lots of practice, so whomever you adore from the first half of the Twentieth Century, Lewis said something snarky about him at least twice. Lastly, he had an almost magnetic attraction to being politically-incorrect, giving any sniffy modern who has not read Lewis a good excuse to dismiss him out of hand. So he is largely ignored: a big mistake.

 

When Lewis is recalled apart from his paintings it is usually for his invective. In one book, he devoted a whole chapter called “The Dumb Ox” to Ernest Hemingway, who went berserk after reading it in the famous Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris, smashed a vase and ended up paying thousands of francs (but he got even and described Lewis as having the eyes of “an unsuccessful rapist”). Virginia Wolfe was scared to show her face in Oxford or Cambridge, the students were so impressed by the drubbing she got from Lewis. James Joyce’s “Ulysses” he described as “a suffocating moeotic expanse of objects” that would remain among the canons of literature, “eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarrhoea” (if I go “halves” will anyone help get this carved in stone?).

 

While his best friends, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, called Lewis, respectively, “the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky,” and “the most distinguished living novelist,” he said the former lacked even “a trace of originality,” and accused the latter of “dogmatic insincerity.” However the context is lost to me, they remained friends nevertheless, and this entertaining gossip is still only the “People Magazine” of literary criticism, a nutrition-free distraction.

 

 

 

The man who taught Marshall McLuhan everything he knew about “the global village” (except for the phrase itself), Wyndham Lewis remains desperately timely in his critiques of the youth-cult and its cultural effluvia, the treachery of capitalism, the paucity of well-manipulated bourgeois democracy, and above all the dumbing-down of Western culture and society. If by your friends we shall know ye, think of T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell and Russell Kirk: in other words he was a conservative defender of The Permanent Things although an ultra-radical, avant-garde modernist, as contradictory as that sounds at first.

 

Born to an English mother and an American Civil War-hero father on a yacht off Nova Scotia, (Percy) Wyndham Lewis was later to write a novel in which, perhaps unique in literature, the heroine kills herself out of sheer hatred for Canada. Educated at Rugby School and The Slade School of Art, he painted and drew for several small groups attempting to forge Modernism out of the artsy-craftsy movements of the late Victorian era, culminating in Vorticism.

 

The Vorticists, England’s first indigenous avant-garde movement, were captivated by Cubism and were among the earliest to embrace abstraction, often with industrial themes. Vorticism rebelled against a populist fin-de-siècle fashion for the feminine, the floral and the facile but its thrusting and very masculine techno-optimism died in the trenches of the Great War along with some its talented members.

 

Its flat, mechanistic images were fine teething-material for Lewis’s draughtsman’s eye and unerring hand, and Vorticism proved a good marketing platform for the ambitious young artist at a time when various Modernist movements seemed to run a dime a dozen: Cubism, Futurism, Tubism, Suprematism, Expressionism, Verismus (may I stop now?) all trying to cram art into an ideological suitcase that was, of course, fully branded, wholly marketable and potentially lucrative. Ultimately, after a stint as an artilleryman, Lewis returned home and moved on, while Vorticism became what veteran art-critic Brian Sewell calls “in the history of western art, no more than a hapless rowing-boat between Cubism and Futurism, the Scylla and Charybdis of the day.”

 

Vorticism’s inspirations had been far from only graphic and Lewis developed them into a more coherent and visceral rejection of perceived decadence, with antecedents including Hegel and Nietzsche: the former in a belief that art is generated by a conflict resembling the dialectic, differing little from Eliot’s more sophisticated assertion that art progresses through clash but may achieve union, through tradition, with the timeless. Influenced by the latter, Lewis rejected the bourgeois effect on art, which today one might call “dumbing down.”

As Lewis began to write more and paint less, he looked beyond graphic art to see larger forces at work including science, united against individualism and excellence, and this separates him from futurist-utopians of the day such as H. G. Wells. He became, in effect, an anti-Modern Modernist, writing:

 

“The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of 'decency.' The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.”

 

Russell Kirk described their mutual friend, the poet Roy Campbell, as “a hot hater” and Lewis fit the description to the letter, so his objections are often clearer than his beliefs. But Lewis was, fundamentally, a conservator of social dynamism in the same sense that Eliot believed that modern art could be well-applied to defend The Permanent Things.

 

Even then, the Left’s thus-far relentless Long March to Cultural Revolution identified modernist reforms only with revolution, chiefly through an overly-simplistic notion that new graphics or literary styles somehow had to go hand-in-hand with new, ideologically-driven systems. Hence the startling originality of Lewis on canvas, or Eliot in print, must have confounded Leftist aesthetes who perhaps rarely fathomed how modernism can be part of traditionalism. As both men knew, Western values and vigour are worth conserving, not the delivery-mechanisms.

 

Propelled by his excellent choice in enemies but still a child of his age, Lewis echoed Oscar Wilde in charging Revolution with the high-crime of being a bore:

 

“Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a ''revolutionary'' review, or read a ''revolutionary'' speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly ''revolutionary'.' What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!”

 

Yet Lewis, in his diagnostic skills a political sophisticate, saw revolution as a mere con-job by ruling elites, part of the intentional process of dumbing-down that strengthened control. He wrote:

 

“A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere...The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.”

 

Lewis would have regarded today’s simplified political bifurcation, so essentially American, as hopelessly naive: Capitalism good, Socialism bad. He complained that, “In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of 'freedom,' like a bastard brother of reform.” He deplored:

“a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state."

The forces of feminisation, homogenisation and dumbing-down were many, while true artists manned the last barricade. Whether by cheap products, cheap art or cheap politics, the herd was stampeded by its clever masters, chiefly under the banner of equality:

 

“The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.”

 

Lewis flirted briefly with Italian Fascism as a means of redirecting society away from self-centred decadence, but soon found that Mussolini’s vainglorious strutting and attempting to replicate Roman glory were retrograde, backward-looking. Briefly in the early 1930s, he thought that Hitler might be a force for peace and cultural reinvigoration but he denounced Nazism in one book and Anti-Semitism in another, even though years before he had fictionalised Jewish characters unflatteringly. The twin verdicts may be that, as so many others, he entertained views now wholly and happily anathema, but he never feared to reverse himself honourably; a better record than many of his adversaries who pimped for Stalin until much later or unto the bitter end.

 

Meanwhile, Lewis had a remarkable gift for seeing far down the socio-ideological train-track.

 

In his 1928 “The Doom of Youth,” he described a cult that plagues us yet. A society that destroys faith in the hereafter can live only for earthly life, taking refuge from death in an unnatural fixation with youth and protracted adolescence; hence maintaining the appearance of youth until it becomes ludicrous. Since real youths lack experience, achievements and contacts, “official” public youths will be older and older. Politicians, he predicted, will jump onboard with bogus youth-wings, nevertheless controlled by middle-aged party-apparatchiks; presupposing the Hitler Youth Movement and even the fat, balding and comically-inept, 50-year-old, KGB “youth representatives” sent to international youth conferences to mingle with real Western and Third World teenagers into the 1980s. On to then-trendy monkey-gland treatments, more complicated cosmetics and foundation-garments, real and fake exercise regimens and the rest, until nowadays where in any Florida geriatric home (“God’s waiting-room,” my dad calls it) are toothless, pathetic wrecks hobbling around dressed as toddlers.

 

Lewis was by no means a systematic philosopher, he was an artist; but his draughtsmanship alone can imply an insistence on precision in thought. Taking art seriously, he saw creativity as a moment of intense thought looking ahead and essentially prescriptive, creating something needed and new yet influenced by tradition.

 

In his 1927 “Time and Western Man,” he attacked a decadent and romanticised aesthetic that sapped modern creativity of its forward-looking dynamism. Yale critic Kirsty Dootson explains Lewis and:

 

“...the 'time-cult,' which he perceived to be the dominant philosophy of the early twentieth century promulgated by Henri Bergson...and practised by authors such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Lewis condemned the demonising of 'space' due to the rise of the 'time-mind' as, for him, Bergsonian time stood for all that is degenerate in art: flux, change, romanticism, the crowd and the unconscious, whereas space represents all that is desirable: stability, fixity, classicism, the individual and consciousness...The former separates us and keeps us still, while the latter binds us all together and keeps us constantly moving.”

 

Time can be a muddle and a cul-de-sac: is the child the father of the man?  The focus turns inward to the self, its influences, conflicts and reactions, and can lead to navel-gazing, solipsism, inertia and paralysis. Space describes the road ahead, even though the artist travels with the essential baggage of values, culture and tradition that influence his every act.

 

Lewis’s friend Roy Campbell, says Professor Roger Scruton, “began to see the three aspects of the new elite—sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics—as aspects of a single frame of mind. These three qualities amounted, for Campbell, to a refusal to grow up.” For Lewis, the time-cult enabled the process.

 

A prescient collaboration between Lewis and Campbell resulted in “Satire and Fiction,” a 1930 pamphlet promoting the former’s savage, satirical novel “The Apes of God.” There the authors argue that satire becomes impossible in a rootless age lacking normative behaviour, for satire mocks things against an unstated but presumed cultural norm: Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” would not have succeeded satirically had Georgian Englishmen actually approved of eating Irish babies. Without shared values, satire cannot function: forty-two years later, Terry Southern remarked belatedly that satire became impossible after Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

In the same decade Lewis returned to painting, establishing his reputation as being perhaps England’s greatest portraitist of the last century. Walter Sickert put him in an even bigger league as “the greatest portraitist of this or any other time.”

 

Critics attempt to analyse his ingredients of success, some saying that his draughtsman’s attention to detail, or his hybrid of portraiture and caricature, provided the impact. It may be something different augmented enormously by his technical mastery, namely his rare ability to perceive essences of character in those whom he portrayed. The sense of melancholy in his portrait of Eliot, so callously overlooked by the Royal Academy in 1938, is sometimes said to be modern Britain’s finest portrait. Or his picture of the aristocratic and aquiline Edith Sitwell in a cold room, wearing a vast turban and surrounded by her old books, is another example of many. The sparse sketch of a handsome and oddly lissome, young Roy Campbell, drawn with the disciplined, concise lines of a Japanese master of sumi-e brushwork, is one more.

 

Russell Kirk met Lewis in London circa 1950-1951, living in a condemned flat in Notting Hill that the artist referred to wryly as “Rotting Hill.” He soon gave up his job as art-critic for The Listener (clever it was, uniting his graphic-eye and writing skills for a radio-review magazine) because he began to go blind due to a pituitary tumour. Dr. Kirk memorialised him in a chapter of “Confessions of a Bohemian Tory,” recalling that the old lion feared sightlessness slamming shut a door that would nevermore be opened.

 

Lewis died in 1957, within a few months of his friend Roy Campbell who was 19 years his junior, and almost eight years before T. S. Eliot. Lewis was long interested in Catholicism but never converted, and his ashes are buried in London’s Golders Green Cemetery.

 

Besides his startling graphic talent and his socio-political prescience, Lewis deserves the attention of Imaginative Conservatives by blasting the still-prevalent notion that modern art needs be the private preserve of the Leftist, the revolutionary, the meddler and the moon-calf. He lived what he preached with relentless vigour, and in that sense his portrait-bust sits comfortably beside that of T. S. Eliot: two radical-conservatives, modernist-traditionalists and indefatigable champions of The Permanent Things.

 

Stephen Masty lives in Kabul and London.

Brzeziński: »Von der Bevölkerung getragener Widerstand« bringt Neue Weltordnung in Gefahr

Paul Joseph Watson

Der frühere amerikanische Nationale Sicherheitsberater Zbigniew Brzeziński warnte vor Kurzem in einer Rede in Polen die Eliten, eine weltweite »Widerstands«bewegung gegen »Kontrolle von außen«, die von einem »vom Volk getragenen Aktivismus« befördert werde, gefährde das Projekt einer Neuen Weltordnung.

Brzeziński bezeichnete die Vorstellung, das 21. Jahrhundert sei das »Amerikanische Jahrhundert«, als »verbreitete Illusion«. Aufgrund der sich beschleunigenden sozialen Veränderungen durch praktisch in Echtzeit arbeitende Massenkommunikationsmittel wie Radio, Fernsehen und das Internet, die zu einem immer stärker werdenden »allgemeinen Erwachen eines weitverbreiteten politischen Bewusstseins« geführt hätten, sei eine amerikanische Vorherrschaft nicht länger möglich.

Mehr: http://info.kopp-verlag.de/hintergruende/deutschland/paul-joseph-watson/brzezi-ski-von-der-bevoelkerung-getragener-widerstand-bringt-neue-weltordnung-in-gefahr.html 

Dietro l’eterno conflitto per i minerali nel Congo

Dietro l’eterno conflitto per i minerali nel Congo

Ex: http://geopoliticamente.wordpress.com/

 

E’ proprio destino che il Congo non conosca pace. Il conflitto in corso è cominciato lo scorso aprile, quando centinaia di soldati del governo congolese disertarono e si unirono ai ribelli dell’M23, movimento erede diretto del Congresso Nazionale per la Difesa del Popolo (CNDP), formazione paramilitare di prevalente etnia Tutsi attiva dal 2006 e da allora coinvolta nel conflitto del Kivu.

Il 20 novembre l’M23 ha preso la città di Goma, dopo aver incontrato la debole resistenza delle forze armate della RDC. Davanti a oltre mille persone radunate in uno stadio, il movimento ha annunciato (probabilmente solo a scopo di propaganada) il suo obiettivo: prendere Kinshasa.
Nei giorni precedenti l’M23 aveva posto un ultimatum alla capitale: demilitarizzazione della zona intorno a Goma e riapertura del canale di accesso con l’Uganda. Al rifiuto del governo di accettare tali condizioni, i ribelli sono passati all’azione. Nella confusione generale che ne è seguita, i soldati della RDC hanno aperto il fuoco alla frontiera col Ruanda, uccidendo due persone, secondo fonti ruandesi. Kinshasa ha chiesto scusa.
Nel frattempo, il Consiglio di Sicurezza dell’ONU e il Segretario Generale Ban Ki-Moon hanno di nuovo ribadito la loro condanna all’aggressione da parte dell’M23. Quest’ultimo ha già detto che le forze d’interposizione delle Nazioni Unite rimarranno a Goma, anche se non è chiaro se, ora che la città è caduta, la loro missione potrà comunque continuare.
Non indifferente è il prezzo, dal punto di vista umanitario, che il Congo orientale sta pagando. Alcune agenzie umanitarie stimano 1,6 milioni di sfollati tra Nord e Sud Kivu.

I problemi del Congo sono un drammatico riflesso di ciò che accade nel vicino Ruanda. I membri dell’M23 sono principalmente (ma non tutti) di etnia Tutsi, sterminata dagli Hutu durante il genocidio del 1994. Conclusa la pulizia etnica, i Tutsi sono gradualmente tornati ad occupare i posti di comando nel Paese, che avevano fin dai tempi del dominio coloniale. Ciò ha spinto molti Hutu, nel timore di subire ritorsioni, ad attraversare il confine e rifugiarsi nel Congo orientale. Il Ruanda mantiene da allora un grande interesse verso quella zona: sono in molti a denunciare (compresi alcuni rapporti ONU) che Kigali armi e addestri i ribelli che provano ad assicurarsene il controllo.
Negli ultimi anni, Kinshasa ha combattuto due guerre contro il vicino Ruanda, l’ultima delle quali (dal 1998 al 2003) è ricordata come il più grande conflitto armato della storia africana, coinvolgendo in un modo o nell’altro metà dei Paesi del continente (in particolare Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola, Sudan e Ciad).

Lo scenario internazionale, l’importanza di Goma e l’identikit dei gruppi coinvolti sono illustrati in questa analisi di Daniele Arghittu e Michela Perrone su Limes. In sintesi, i potenti d’Africa stanno giocando nella RDC una partita a scacchi con l’Occidente. Gli eredi delle forze coloniali stanno perdendo influenza politica ed economica a favore della Cina, la quale offre ciò che l’Africa necessita: investimenti e denaro per i governi e le imprese. Anche Joseph Kabila, presidente congolese dal 2001, quando ereditò la poltrona dal padre (assassinato nel corso del secondo conflitto col Ruanda), non ha esitato a fare affari con il colosso asiatico. La perdita di interesse dei Paesi occidentali (in particolare quelli anglosassoni) per Kinshasa ha consentito ai movimenti filoruandesi (e anti-Kabila) di crescere e rafforzarsi indisutrbati.
Ora, dal 1° gennaio il Ruanda entrerà nel Consiglio di Sicurezza ONU al posto del Sudafrica, dando luogo ad una situazione diplomatica paradossale per cui a livello internazionale tutti sanno che il Ruanda fiancheggia i ribelli, ma poi si spingono a denunciarlo apertamente:

L’imbarazzo dell’Unione Europea è evidente: nella riunione del Consiglio dei ministri degli Affari Esteri della scorsa settimana è stato condannato il comportamento dell’M23, ma il Ruanda non è mai stato nominato. Philippe Bolopion, direttore per l’Onu dello Human Rights Watch, cioè dell’Osservatorio per i diritti umani, teme che i dubbi e le incertezze delle Nazioni Unite possano avere gravi conseguenze sulla popolazione: «Se il Consiglio di sicurezza vuole realmente proteggere i civili a Goma, deve inviare un messaggio più chiaro a Kigali. Sorprende il silenzio degli Stati Uniti su questo punto, a dispetto della loro influenza sul Ruanda».
Un passo importante tuttavia è stato compiuto: per la prima volta l’Onu ha accusato il Ruanda di appoggiare l’M23, insinuando addirittura che Kagame [il presidente ruandese] possa essere la mente del movimento. Il rapporto, che avrebbe dovuto uscire solo a fine novembre, è stato anticipato qualche giorno fa dall’agenzia di stampa Reuters.

La storia recente ci insegna che ciò che succede a Goma ha sempre avuto ripercussioni a Kinshasa, nonostante i 1.600 km che le dividono:

La presenza sul territorio congolese dei cosiddetti “genocidari” – gruppi armati responsabili dei massacri, uniti a migliaia di hutu moderati, di donne e bambini – ha offerto a Paul Kagame il pretesto per ingerirsi nella situazione politica del Kivu e dell’intera Rdc.
Il governo di Kigali, negli anni, ha cambiato alleanze e strategia. Nel corso della prima guerra del Congo – tra il 1996 e il 1997 – ha appoggiato, insieme all’Uganda, l’Afdl (Alliance de forcés démocratiques pour la libération du Congo, Alleanza delle forze democratiche per la liberazione del Congo), un gruppo ribelle di stanza in Kivu con a capo Laurent-Désiré Kabila, padre dell’attuale presidente. Kabila senior ha guidato forze a maggioranza tutsi contro i gruppi armati hutu, giungendo a controllare Goma e i due Kivu (Nord e Sud). Successivamente, nel 1997, ha rovesciato la dittatura trentennale di Mobutu, assumendo la guida dell’intero paese.
Non sentendosi adeguatamente garantito nei propri interessi da Laurent-Désiré Kabila, il Ruanda ha cominciato a sostenere un altro gruppo ribelle originario di Goma, l’Rcd (Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie, Raggruppamento congolese per la democrazia), formato principalmente da banyamulenge, i tutsi congolesi in Kivu. L’Rcd ha conquistato Bukavu, la capitale del Kivu del Sud, dando il via alla seconda guerra del Congo – meglio conosciuta come guerra mondiale africana per il numero degli Stati coinvolti – che si è conclusa solo nel 2003. Da quel momento i territori attorno a Goma ospitano un crogiolo di gruppi ribelli in conflitto, appoggiati più o meno direttamente – e con fortune alterne – da Ruanda, Uganda e Burundi. Il 23 marzo 2009 diverse fazioni ribelli hanno firmato un trattato di pace con il governo della Rdc, ottenendo di essere integrate nelle Fardc.

Questo il quadro politico. Al quale se ne affianca uno economico, dalle tinte non meno fosche: se la guerra è il più grande dei drammi per chi c’è dentro, allo stesso tempo è anche un ghiotto business per chi sta fuori. Il Congo non fa eccezione. Tralasciando la deforestazione, che vede coinvolte anche aziende italiane, la ricchezza (e la sventura) del Kivu vengono dalle sue immense risorse minerarie. E la cosa ci riguarda molto da vicino.
Con il nome Coltan si indica una combinazione di due minerali, columbite e tantalite, essenziale nell’industria elettronica perché in grado di ottimizzare il consumo della corrente elettrica nei chip di nuovissima generazione, ad esempio nei telefonini, nelle videocamere e nei computer portatili. I condensatori al tantalio permettono un notevole risparmio energetico e quindi una maggiore efficienza dell’apparecchio.
In Congo, il coltan veniva già sfruttato prima della Seconda Guerra Mondiale, ma è diventato di importanza strategica solo da qualche anno, con il boom dell’industria high-tech. Con l’aumento della richiesta mondiale di tantalio si è fatta particolarmente accesa la lotta fra gruppi para-militari e guerriglieri per il controllo dei territori congolesi di estrazione, in particolare nella regione congolese del Kivu.
Nota da anni (si veda questa lunga ed esauriente analisi su Peacelink del 2005), la corsa al minerale ha avuto una drammatica impennata nell’ultimo biennio, dando origine ad un duplice saccheggio: il primo tra le multinazionali con l’appoggio del governo di Kinshasa, il secondo di frodo, ad opera di migliaia di persone, minatori e contrabbandieri. E dei gruppi ribelli che sfruttano le miniere clandestine per finanziare la lotta armata. Un lungo rapporto della situazione sul campo, corredato da un elenco di aziende accusate di trafficare questi minerali, si trova sul sito Pace per il Congo.
MetalliRari riporta che secondo l’associazione Enough Project’s Raise Hope for Congo Campaign: “i gruppi armati guadagnano centinaia di milioni di dollari l’anno, vendendo quattro principali minerali: stagno,tantalio, tungsteno e oro. Questo denaro consente alle milizie di acquistare un gran numero di armi e di continuare la loro campagna di violenza brutale contro i civili”. In ottobre l’associazione ha pubblicato un rapporto che classifica le maggiori aziende del settore high-tech in base ai progressi compiuti sui minerali insaguinati:

“Credo che Nintendo sia l’unica azienda che in pratica si rifiuti di riconoscere il problema o cerchi di intraprendere una qualche iniziativa a riguardo,” ha riferito alla CNN Sasha Lezhnev, co-autore del rapporto e analista politico per Enough Project. “E questo nonostante sia da due anni che tenti di mettermi in contatto con loro.”
Anche Canon, Nikon, Sharp e HTC occupano posizioni basse in classifica. Intel, HP, Motorola Solutions, AMD, RIM, Phillips, Apple, e Microsoft invece hanno un buon punteggio.
“HP e Intel sono andate oltre al loro dovere per quanto riguarda i ‘minerali insanguinati’,” ha riferito Sasha Lezhnev in conferenza stampa.

Il sangue del Congo scorre nei nostri cellulari. E quello dei congolesi, nei luoghi dove esso viene estratto.
Già nell’aprile 2011 l’International Crisis Group denunciava in una lunga analisi il fallimento dei tentativi di tracciare la provenienza dei minerali. Poiché l’adozione del Dodd-Frank Act da parte del Congresso USA nel 2010 (entrato in vigore lo scorso agosto) richiede alle grandi imprese americane di rivelare l’origine dei minerali che utilizzano, l’istituto aveva inviato una missione nel Nord Kivu per valutare le diverse strategie impiegate per combattere il contrabbando delle risorse provenienti da quella zona. Con risultati finora non proprio confortanti.

Wenn Opfer zu Tätern werden

 

Wenn Opfer zu Tätern werden

von Helmut MÜLLER

 

Ex: http://helmutmueller.wordpress.com/

Seit meiner Jugend bin ich nicht nur meinem Volk auf das engste verbunden, sondern habe mich nachweislich immer wieder für unterdrückte und  ihrer Freiheit beraubte Völker eingesetzt. Es ist mir deshalb in Zeiten der Desinformation und des Hochverrats, vor allem auch angesichts des Leids eines Volkes, ein Anliegen, den israelisch-palästinensischen Konflikt betreffend, einiges klarzustellen, aber auch verständlicher zu machen.

So wird im Zusammenhang mit den letzten israelischen „Vergeltungsangriffen“ nicht nur von zionistischer Seite stets der Standardsatz, „Israel habe ein Recht auf Selbstverteidigung“ propagiert. Dem wäre nicht zu widersprechen, ginge es nur um eine angemessene Verteidigung der Grenzen von 1967.  Aber der jüdische Staat beansprucht weiteres besetztes, also geraubtes Land, auf dem aber allein den Palästinensern das Recht zur Selbstverteidigung zustünde und auch zusteht.

Die palästinensische Bevölkerung im Gaza-Streifen, auf engstem Raum wie in einem KZ zusammengepfercht, leidet seit Jahren unter widrigsten Lebensbedingungen. Es fehlt, dank israelischer Blockade,  immer wieder an Strom, Trinkwasser, Medikamenten, Brennstoff und Lebensmitteln.                                                                                                        

Daß Israel seit Jahren den Friedensprozess im Nahen Osten blockiert, wird von den Freunden Israels derart abgetan, in dem man die Palästinenser zu den einzigen Schuldigen erklärt.

Im Gaza-Krieg 2008 starben durch israelische Angriffe mehr als ein Tausend Palästinenser, darunter 400 hundert palästinensische Frauen und Kinder gewesen sein sollen. Auch in dem letzten Konflikt war wieder die Zivilbevölkerung, darunter Säuglinge (auch diese Terroristen?), die Hauptleidtragende. 161 Palästinenser wurden getötet, mehr als 800 verwundet. Große Teile der Infrastruktur, darunter ein Krankenhaus und ein Kindergarten, wurde zerstört.                                                                                                                                                             Von ausgewogener „Vergeltung“ kann keine Rede sein, denn die durch palästinensische Angriffe zu Tode gekommen Israelis kann man wahrscheinlich an einer oder  beiden Händen abzählen, und der materielle Schaden auf israelischem und auf dem von israelischen Siedlern besetzten Gebiet ist im Vergleich zu dem in Gaza angerichteten eher unbedeutend. Auch das weiß alle Welt.

Was uns die Medien und die meisten Politiker aber verschweigen, ist die Vorgeschichte des israelischen Angriffs. Zuvor hatte nämlich Ägypten bereits einen Waffenstillstand zwischen Hamas und Israel ausgehandelt gehabt. Doch 48 Stunden danach schaltete Israels Armee durch einen gezielten Schlag den militärischen Strategen der Hamas, Ahmed al-Jabaari, aus.                                                                                                                                                       Nebenbei bemerkt, jenen Mann, der die Freilassung eines israelischen Soldaten bewirkt hatte  und für eine lang anhaltende Waffenruhe eingetreten ist. Israelischen  Regierungsvertretern zufolge ein „schlauer taktischer Schachzug“, denn damit habe man die  Hamas provoziert. Und so nahmen die Dinge ihren Lauf.

Nun mag man mehrere Gründe und noch mehr Argumente zur Rechtfertigung der verbrecherischen Politik der  israelischen Führung vorbringen, aber eines sollte dabei, auch wenn es nicht als Entschuldigung dienen kann, vielleicht nicht ganz außer acht gelassen werden: die psychologische Seite.

Der jüdisch-britische Labour-Abgeordnete Gerald Kaufmann, der sogar ein Waffenembargo gegen Israel forderte, meint, die Israelis würde an dem Opfer-Syndrom leiden und seien zu „Victimizers, das heißt, zu Strafenden geworden, und die Palästinenser seien eben (Anm.: statt der Deutschen) ihre Ersatz-Opfer .                                                  

„Meine Großmutter (Anm.:wohl in Anspielung an den Holocaust) will nicht als Schutzschild dazu mißbraucht werden, um palästinensische Großmütter in Gaza zu töten, meinte Kaufmann.

In dieselbe Kerbe schlägt auch der in London im „Exil“ lebende Israeli Gilad Atzmon, Israel-Kritiker und Jazz-Musiker, wenn er im Falle der  überzogenen israelischen Reaktionen gegenüber den Palästinensern von einer „psychologischen Kompensation“ spricht.                                                                                                                                              

Atzmon meint damit, auch in gewisser Andeutung, „wenn die wahren Täter schon lange tot und vergessen sind, mag dafür als leicht zu besiegender oder zu schlagender Ersatz eine andere Gruppe oder anderes Volk herhalten“.                                                                                                                                                            William Manson, auf Psychologie und Psychiatrie spezialisierter Autor, will ähnliche Beweggründe auch bei der ehemaligen sich erst spät als Jüdin „geouteten“  Ex-US-Außenministerin Albright ausgemacht haben. Dies allerdings im Zusammenhang mit dem Irak-Krieg und dem Jugoslawien-Konflikt.                                                                                  

In dem einen Fall soll sie erklärt haben, die durch die US-Sanktionen getöteten irakischen Kinder (Anm.: eine halbe Million!) seien die Sache „wert“ gewesen, in dem anderen trat sie für  eine unbarmherzige Bombardierung Serbiens ein.

Offensichtlich scheint bei manchen Völkern das Bedürfnis nach  Rache sogar Generationen danach präsent zu sein, zumindest solange bis man dieses an einem passenden Ersatz gestillt hat. Ob nicht nur im aktuellen Falle auch endgültig, wird der weitere Verlauf  der Geschichte zeigen.

Bleibt vorerst die Ungewißheit, ob die Israelis bzw. deren menschenverachtende Politik aktiv unterstützende Juden anderswo  einmal sich so einsichtig zeigen werden wie die ehemalige Präsidentin der Bosnischen Serbischen Republik, Biljana Plavsic, es vor dem Haager Tribunal sein wollte. Sie meinte: „In unserer Zwangsneurose, nie wieder Opfer werden zu wollen, wurden wir selbst zu Tätern“. Die zu bewundern, wie mancherorts geschieht, jeden Menschenfreund oder freiheitsliebenden Politiker ein Greuel sein sollte.

How the American matrix destroys every culture

 

How the American matrix destroys every culture

By Nicolas BONNAL

Ex: http://english.pravda.ru/

 

 

As I already showed in these columns, Alexis de Tocqueville is the best commentator of the modern agenda of alienation, giving aristocratic critics to the American matrix which starts its nuisances at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville foresees a bleak American future for Europe and the whole world. His analyses are as implacable as those of Edgar Poe, a violent opponent to the so-called democratic order, as writers like Hawthorne or Melville.

In his famous book about democracy, Tocqueville describes and explains the destruction of the two victim races of these times, the blacks and the Indians. We shall start by the black slaves:

The Negro of the United States has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges.

The black slave is thus the prototype of the global citizen desired by the magazine the Economist and the New World Order agenda. He has no past, no family, and no nation:

The Negro has no family; woman is merely the temporary companion of his pleasures, and his children are upon equality with himself from the moment of their birth.

Half the babies born in France have no father nowadays! Today's parents are their children's pals! And who knows his babushka in America? Why do you think so many people stroll around in the shopping centres nowadays?

Like the masses of today obsessed by sex, money and fame, driven by pleasures, captivated by the rich and famous storytelling, the American slave adores his masters:

The slave scarcely feels his own calamitous situation... he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him: his understanding is degraded to the level of his soul.

This modern slave or modern man, adds Tocqueville, doesn't love freedom, for independence is often felt by him to be a heavier burden than slavery. He is just manipulated by his desires, fabricated fantasies and material needs. As if he has inspired the Prisoner of McGoohan, Tocqueville writes:

A thousand new desires beset him, and he is destitute of the knowledge and energy necessary to resist them: these are masters whom it is necessary to contend with, and he has learnt only to submit and obey. In short, he sinks to such a depth of wretchedness, that while servitude brutalizes, liberty destroys him.

The destruction of the Indians has different meanings. The Blackman symbolised the weak or the poor, the submitted proletarian, the Indian the feudal lord, the warrior, doomed to disappear during the industrial revolution, like the religious man. Marx made the same analysis in his famous manifesto. This man of elite is such sentenced to disappear by the civilization of money-lenders and businessmen:

When the North American Indians had lost the sentiment of attachment to their country; when their families were dispersed, their traditions obscured, and the chain of their recollections broken; when all their habits were changed, and their wants increased beyond measure, European tyranny rendered them more disorderly and less civilized than they were before.

A simple animal, or a mere sinner, the man is easily mind-programmed by consumption; and the brave and frugal Indians inevitably fell in front of the new needs and strange goods:

The Europeans introduced amongst the savages of North America fire-arms, ardent spirits, and iron.... Having acquired new tastes, without the arts by which they could be gratified, the Indians were obliged to have recourse to the workmanship of the whites; but in return for their productions the savage had nothing to offer except the rich furs which still abounded in his woods.

Tocqueville in every page of this marvellous and unread book sees the perils of the so-called American civilization. One of these perils is of course pollution and... noise. The noise produced by isolated colons could thus exasperate the Indians, hastening a cruel stroke. Let's understand the causes of these reactions:

Thousands of savages, wandering in the forests and destitute of any fixed dwelling, did not disturb the beasts of chase; but as soon as the continuous sounds of European labour are heard in their neighbourhood, they begin to flee away, and retire to the West...

The retirement of the game meant for the Indians discombobulated anguish, exhausting migrations and a progressive starving. The race was thus exterminated passively, the invaders needing no such massacres and slaughters as one could believe. This is the same mean Hitler, this great admirer of Anglo-Saxon America, wanted to use in Russia (I say wanted, for the people there resisted more, and so had to be slaughtered by the colonial conqueror until the defeat of the last).

Last but no least: if we contemplate the disastrous cultural balance of this civilization, couldn't we admit that she is one of the worst ever occurred? Tocqueville admits that the Spaniard conquest of the south continent was horrible; yet the Indians survived, mixed and intertwined with their masters, thus creating the beautiful Hispano-American civilization. You have tens of architectural masterworks and ancient colonial cities in southern America, and how many in the US?

Anyway, and this remark must be underlined at the hour of philanthropic and humanitarian wars anywhere (Palestine, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan... not to mention the past ones), Tocqueville thinks that the American modern way of life (or death) is more destructive than any other. And he had not in mind the McDonald's, the highways, the desperate suburbs, the shopping malls and the amusement parks!

The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.

Tolkien writes somewhere that a monster (he refers to giant spider Ungoliant) finishes up the job devouring his own flesh. This is what happens to American civilization today. Philanthropically, she is destroying herself. But unhappily humanity who has chosen this way of death, in the East like in the South, is doomed too, since the American matrix has overcome any resistance.

Yet childish technology, money obsession, humanitarian wars and amusement parks will take us nowhere. We need to replace the American way to design a new world.

Nicolas Bonnal

Erdogan, perdu corps et bien…

Erdogan, perdu corps et bien…

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org/

Le Premier ministre turc Erdogan a semblé s’engager d’une façon radicale dans la crise de Gaza et semblé, dans les un et deux premiers jours, devoir y jouer un rôle important. Cette impression s’est rapidement dissipée, pour être remplacée par celle d’une action d’une importance mineure, notamment au regard du rôle dirigeant de la crise qu’a tenu Morsi. Il s’agit bien entendu d’une question de perception, mais l’on comprend évidemment que cette perception joue un rôle fondamental dans cette époque dominée par la puissance du système de la communication. Au demeurant, la perception, éclairée par divers faits, reflète sans aucun doute une vérité de la situation d’Erdogan.

On donne ici, comme exemple de la situation de la perception deux sources ayant rassemblé des appréciations d’experts sur le rôle qu’a tenu Erdogan. On dispose ainsi d’un matériel de communication pour pouvoir mieux apprécier la position générale d’Erdogan, et tenter de l’expliciter. On découvre qu’Erdogan est critiqué dans tous les sens, à la fois pour avoir tenu un rôle effacé, à la fois pour n’avoir pas assez soutenu les Palestiniens et le Hamas d’une façon efficace, à la fois pour être trop anti-israélien…

• D’un côté, il y a une appréciation générale selon laquelle Erdogan s’est trouvé dans cette crise à la remorque de Morsi, tandis que son attitude durant ces quelques jours est perçue plutôt comme de la gesticulation sans beaucoup de substance. Cette appréciation est surtout sensible en Turquie même, selon un article du New York Times dont PressTV.com donne un résumé, ce 22 novembre 2012, article fait surtout de quelques citations d’experts et d’universitaires turcs.

«The analysts stressed that while Turkey became a vocal defender of Palestinians and a critic of the Israeli regime, “it had to take a back seat to Egypt on the stage of high diplomacy.” “Egypt can talk with both Hamas and Israel,” university professor Ersin Kalaycioglu said, adding, “Turkey, therefore, is pretty much left with a position to support what Egypt foresees, but nothing more.”

»The analysts also criticized Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayyeb Erdogan for being initially silent on the outbreak of the Israeli attacks on Gaza and being slow to address the offensive publicly. “While most of the region’s leaders rushed to the nearest microphone to condemn Israel, the normally loquacious prime minister was atypically mute,” said Aaron Stein from a research center based in Istanbul. Stein added that while Erdogan was touring a factory that makes tanks, Egypt President Mohamed Morsi had “put his stamp on world reaction by kicking out the Israeli ambassador and dispatching his prime minister to visit Gaza.”»

• Une autre source, le journaliste Tulin Daloglu, dans le quotidien Al Monitor du 20 novembre 2012, restitue, également au travers d’avis d’experts et d’universitaires, la perception de l’attitude et du comportement d’Erdogan vus d’Israël. Il s’agit d’appréciations très extrêmes et très hostiles, qui impliquent son ministre des affaires étrangères Davutoglu perçu comme une sorte de diabolus ex machina d’Erdogan (ce qui est peu aimable pour la force de caractère qu’on attribue de ce fait à Erdogan). L’article rappelle qu’Erdogan s’est signalé, durant la crise, par une rhétorique enflammée, dénonçant le 15 novembre Israël comme “un État terroriste” puis s’attaquant, le 20 novembre, aux USA et au bloc BAO («Leading with the US, all the West talks about a two-state solution. Where is it? They’re working to vacate Palestine in order to surrender it to Israel […] If we’re going to die, we shall do so as men do. This is not justice.»)

«…“Davutoglu may be right to condemn Israel for excessive use of force, but he also needs to call on Hamas to stop firing rockets into Israel. But he does not,” said Gareth Jenkins, a senior fellow at the Institute for Security and Development Policy. “The fact remains that, while Hamas is firing missiles into Israeli territory, Israel is much more likely to respond militarily. And any violence plays into the hands of extremists on both sides.” […]

»“As Erdogan cannot accept shelling against Turkey, we cannot accept shelling against our one million people in the south part of Israel.” Binyamin Fuad Ben Eliezer, former Israeli defense minister, told Al-Monitor on Nov. 15, just as the sirens went on over the Tel-Aviv area… […]

»[Erdogan] cannot give me conditions. He cannot sit in Turkey and tell me what to do,” says Ben-Eliezer. “Erdogan could have taken the position of one of the most important leaders in the area,” Ben Eliezer said. “I’m sorry that he took a very radical position against Israel.” Still, he does not consider — like many other Israelis — that the Turkish prime minister’s unequivocal alliance with Hamas, a militant group that is recognized by the US and European countries as a terrorist organization — goes as deep as challenging Israel’s right to exist.

»However, Ofra Bengio, a professor at Tel Aviv University, is confident that Turkey’s new position is just that. She argues that both sides have gone too far, and while focusing only on Israel’s mistakes may be politically rewarding for Erdogan, it should not hide Turkish foreign policy’s new attitude toward Israel of vengeance and punishment. “If they’re taking Hamas' position, then it’s quite clear that they’re aiming at the legitimacy [of Israel],” she told Al-Monitor. “Especially, take a look at Davutoglu. If you read his essays, for him, Israel does not exist.”

»Ben Eliezer concurs. “If you ask me where the big change was in [Erdogan's] behavior,” he said, the answer is “Davutoglu! It’s his entry as the foreign minister to the erea, and he was the one who no doubt influenced Erdogan totally against Israel. He has made many mistakes because so far, he could not gain anything.” Before then, he said, he had been able to build a close relationship with Erdogan such that they were able to share jokes and laughter together. He does not believe that Erdogan is anti-Semitic or personally anti-Israel…»

On est donc conduit à observer que, les unes dans les autres, ces appréciations donnent une image extrêmement défavorable du Premier ministre turc, cette image semblant désormais devoir être son nouveau “statut de communication” : un homme qui parle beaucoup, qui s’enflamme, qui agit peu, qui est de peu d’influence et auquel on prête de moins en moins d’attention ; un homme au point de vue anti-israélien extrémiste, mais selon l’influence de son ministre des affaires étrangères et non selon son propre jugement, ce qui implique de très graves doutes sur son indépendance d’esprit et son caractère. De quelque côté qu’on se place, et de quelque opinion qu’on soit dans ces diverses appréciations, le sentiment général sur Erdogan est défavorable : un homme à l’humeur incontrôlable, au caractère finalement faible et très influençable, préférant les mots et surtout les éructations à l’action…

Notre propre appréciation est que ce que nous nommons effectivement la “situation de la perception” d’Erdogan est injuste par rapport à ce qu’il a été et ce qu’il a fait jusqu’ici, – injuste, dans le sens où cela ne “lui rend pas justice”. En même temps, elle constitue un fait et, par là même, se justifie par elle-même et rend compte d’une vérité de situation, – justice ou pas, qu’importe. En d’autres mots, nous dirions qu’Erdogan a perdu, en un an et demi, le formidable crédit qu’il avait construit depuis 2009 par sa politique indépendante, quasiment “gaulliste” dans sa conception. Nous pensions, sans tout de même beaucoup d’espoir, qu’il pouvait, qu’il devait effectivement tenter de redresser cette “situation de perception” durant cette crise de Gaza-II (voir le 15 novembre 2012) : «Le même “Israel is saying… ‘F* You’” ne vaut-il pas également pour Erdogan, qu’on attendait en visite à Gaza, où il entendait affirmer la préoccupation turque pour la défense et l’intégrité des pauvres Palestiniens ? Que va faire Erdogan ? Va-t-il ménager une base arrière pour des “combattants de la liberté” volant au secours des Palestiniens ? Va-t-il affréter une “flottille de la liberté”, comme celle du printemps 2010, pour se rendre à Gaza, sous les bombes israéliennes ? Va-t-il menacer d’envahir Israël comme il menace d’attaquer la Syrie ?»

Le constat est clair et sec. Erdogan n’a pas réussi à “redresser cette ‘situation de perception’”, il a même encore perdu de son crédit. Cet homme semble avoir définitivement chuté avec l’affaire syrienne, dans laquelle il s’est engagé follement. L’indignité et l’illégitimité de l’affaire syrienne, dans le sens où il s’est engagé, a profondément modifié sa “situation de la perception”, nous dirions d’une façon quasiment structurelle qui n’est pas loin d’être irrémédiable. (Cela, d’autant qu’en même temps qu’il tentait cette maladroite “réhabilitation” avec Gaza-II, il continuait sa politique syrienne par son pire aspect, avec l’accord de l’OTAN d’envoyer des Patriot à la Turquie, cela qui met en évidence le stupide jeu des menaces [syriennes] inventées, et le non moins stupide alignement-asservissement de la Turquie aux structures les plus perverses du Système, l’OTAN avec les USA derrière et la quincaillerie technologique.) Erdogan a voulu s’inscrire dans le jeu du Système avec la Syrie, abandonnant la référence principielle d’une politique d’indépendance et de souveraineté, – laquelle suppose qu’on respecte chez les autres (chez les Syriens, certes) les mêmes principes (indépendance, souveraineté) auxquels on se réfère pour soi-même. Il a abandonné la puissance de la référence principielle pour la politique moralisatrice et belliciste que le Système inspire au bloc BAO en général. Ce faisant, il a été totalement infecté et subverti par le Système et s’avère manifestement trop faible pour s’en dégager, si encore il parvient à distinguer la nature et la puissance de l’enjeu.

 

Brzezinski, son CPHW et l’insurrection du monde

Brzezinski, son CPHW et l’insurrection du monde

Ex: http://www.dedefensa.org/

28 novembre 2012 – Il ne faut pas craindre les acronymes… Zbigniew Brzezinski ayant décidé de parler du «The Role of the West in the Complex Post-Hegemonic World», il nous a paru bienvenu et bureaucratiquement de bon aloi de comprimer l’essentiel de son intervention à l’acronyme CPHW (« Complex Post-Hegemonic World). Avec cette expression, Brzezinski nous dit exactement ce dont il s’agit : les USA ne peuvent plus assurer une hégémonie sur le monde, le bloc BAO pas davantage, et d’ailleurs personne non plus en-dehors de cela, – ni la Chine, ni la Russie, etc. Nous sommes donc passés, depuis la fin de la guerre froide, de l’“hyperpuissance” seule au monde multipolaire, au G2 (USA + Chine), à la Chine seule, à rien du tout sinon le désordre… Car c’est bien cela que nous dit Brzezinski. Complémentairement mais non accessoirement, il nous dit que la révolte des peuples, ou l’“insurrection du monde”, est en marche et que cela marche bien.

C’est Paul Joseph Watson, de Infowars.com, qui nous informe de l'intervention du vieux guerrier devenu sage, le 26 novembre 2012. Ce que nous dit Brzezinski est sans aucun doute très intéressant.

«During a recent speech in Poland, former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned fellow elitists that a worldwide “resistance” movement to “external control” driven by “populist activism” is threatening to derail the move towards a new world order. Calling the notion that the 21st century is the American century a “shared delusion,” Brzezinski stated that American domination was no longer possible because of an accelerating social change driven by “instant mass communications such as radio, television and the Internet,” which have been cumulatively stimulating “a universal awakening of mass political consciousness.”

»The former US National Security Advisor added that this “rise in worldwide populist activism is proving inimical to external domination of the kind that prevailed in the age of colonialism and imperialism.” Brzezinski concluded that “persistent and highly motivated populist resistance of politically awakened and historically resentful peoples to external control has proven to be increasingly difficult to suppress.”»

Brzezinski est une “vieille crapule” du temps de la guerre froide mais bon observateur, à peu près aussi finaud à cet égard que l’autre “vieille crapule” Kissinger, bien que les deux hommes se détestent comme s’entendent à le faire deux assolute prime donne. On observera que Brzezinski donne une leçon de lucidité à tous les pseudo-penseurs et simili-experts de nos diplomaties du bloc BAO de la génération actuellement opérationnelle, tous ces pseudos-similis enfermées dans la politique-Système et leur affectivité de midinette perdue dans les couloirs de l’ONU, sans savoir qu’ils s’y trouvent (enfermés dans le Système et perdus dans les couloirs). Lui, Brzezinski, semble bien se douter de quelque chose, à propos de cet enfermement et de ce vagabondage sentimentalo-hystérique…

Il est intéressant de noter qu’il introduit le terme de “post-hégémonique”, signifiant que plus personne ne peut exercer sérieusement une hégémonie en tant que telle, d’un poids et d’une ambitions significatifs, impliquant le contrôle géopolitique d’une région, d’une alliance, d’un empire, – “du monde” enfin, pour faire bref, à la manière d’un neocon du bon vieux temps virtualiste de GW à l’ombre de 9/11. Nous ne sommes pas, nous à dedefensa.org, étonnés ni surpris par la nouvelle

En fait, nous dit Brzezinski, le monde est devenu trop compliqué (le “monde complexe post-hégémonique”), et cette situation dans le désordre le plus complet, pour encore répondre aux lois de la géopolitique ; en cela, nous signifiant, lui, Brzezinski, le géopoliticien glacé et implacable, que l’ère de la géopolitique est close et que lui succède, ou lui a déjà succédé, quelque chose comme l’ère de la communication. En l’occurrence, nous ne sommes pas plus étonnés ni surpris, et nous avons déjà pris la résolution, depuis un certain temps, de proposer de nommer l’ère succédant à l’ère géopolitique, du nom d’“ère psychopolitique”. Brzezinski s’empresse de s’expliquer dans ce sens, en citant des forces en action, en vrac mais se référant toutes au système de la communication et, implicitement, à l’action de ce système sur la psychologie, – «an accelerating social change driven by “instant mass communications such as radio, television and the Internet,” which have been cumulatively stimulating “a universal awakening of mass political consciousness”».

Essayez de décompter le nombre de divisions que représentent les “réseaux sociaux” ou le “réveil d’une conscience politique de masse” ; aucune possibilité de traduire cela en termes géopolitiques, en espace à conquérir ou à contrôler, grâce à l’influence dominée par la quincaillerie ; par conséquent, fin de l’ère géopolitique, développement de l’ère psychopolitique, déclin accéléré du système du technologisme, affirmation générale du système de la communication… Ce pourquoi, constate Brzezinski, dans la première phrase de son raisonnement politique, – ridiculisant presque ceux (les neocons) qui avaient lancé le slogan d’un New American Century, – ce pourquoi l’idée d’une nouveau “siècle américain” avec le XXIème siècle est au mieux une “désillusion”, ou, de façon plus réaliste, une complète et trompeuse illusion devenue une erreur fatale dans la façon que cette illusion conduit encore certaines politiques et certaines conceptions.

… D’où le salut de reconnaissance, contraint et sans la moindre complaisance, de Brzezinski à ces nouvelles forces qui s’affirment partout avec fracas, cette pression populaire (le populisme) s’affirmant non par des révolutions, des émeutes, des grèves insurrectionnelles, etc., mais des “événements de communication”, c’est-à-dire des masses révolutionnaires sans révolution, des émeutes sans renversement de gouvernement, des grèves insurrectionnelles sans insurrection. L’important est l’écho de communication qu’on crée, qui paralyse les pouvoirs comme le “regard” du crotale fascine sa proie, qui pousse un vieux dictateur à la démission, qui conduit à infléchir la politique courante jusqu’à faire une autre politique, qui bouleverse les relations stratégiques les mieux établies par la seule crainte que cet écho introduit dans les esprits de dirigeants dont la psychologie reste sans réaction. Bien entendu, tout cela devient un obstacle énorme sur la voie de “la gouvernance mondiale”, expression sans aucune substance désignant, comme mille autres, le Système en action, et citée implicitement par Brzezinski devant son auditoire complice comme la référence de ses propres préoccupations.

Brzezinski a donc bien compris que les nouvelles forces du système de la communication sont fondamentalement antiSystème, par “effet-Janus” en mode turbo. L’on notera certes qu’il s’adresse à ses amis en vrai “globaliste”, c’est-à-dire ayant intégré que l’ensemble US et d’influence US s’est quelque peu transformé en un “bloc” où nul, là non plus, n’assure vraiment une hégémonie. Il s’agit bien sûr de “notre” bloc américaniste-occidentaliste (bloc BAO), et Brzezinski a compris que ce n’est plus un faux nez pour les USA, que ce temps-là a passé, mais qu’il s’agit bien du cœur du regroupement général auquel les “globalistes” voudraient nous confier… Il semble que ce soit de plus en plus, selon Zbig, le grondement des populations en fureur qui se charge de répondre à cette proposition globalisante.

Et puis, à ce point, changement complet… (De notre commentaire et de son orientation.)

De BHL à Alex Jones

Watson présentait son texte en “précisant” (drôle de précision) «During a recent speech in Poland […] The remarks were made at an event for the European Forum For New Ideas (EFNI), an organization that advocates the transformation of the European Union into an anti-democratic federal superstate, the very type of bureaucratic “external control” Brzezinski stressed was in jeopardy in his lecture…»

L’on découvre que le discours a été donné le 27 septembre, à Sopot, en Pologne, pour ce qui semble être la deuxième grande fiesta européaniste et transatlantique de ce riche institut polonais qu’est donc cet EFNI (European Forum for New Ideas, – vaste programme) ; rassemblant des pipole du calibre habituel du très haut de gamme (BHL était invité, c’est dire tout à ce propos), mais aussi des représentants du corporate power, présents nominalement et avec le portefeuille bien garni, et même des groupements d’ONG… (Par exemple, extrait du “carton d’invitation”… «Lech Walesa Institute’s Civic Academy, Intel Business Challenge Europe, a technology business plan competition for young entrepreneurs and Konkordia, the European cooperation forum of non-governmental organizations.») Dès le 27 septembre 2012 en fin de soirée, le journal Gazeta Swietojanska mettait sur YouTube un DVD de l’intervention de Brzezinski. Ensuite, rien de remarquable à signaler, le texte rendu public ne retient guère l’attention et reste limité à la Pologne. En fait, l’événement serait plutôt marqué par une occurrence de type mondain bien identifié, probablement de nature à impressionner fortement BHL : la présentation d’un documentaire sur la vie de Brzezinski présenté lors du même séminaire de Sopot.

Deux mois plus tard, le discours resurgit. Comment, par quel canal ? On peut tout imaginer, d'autant que le document n'est pas secret, et il nous semble que les circonstances les plus banales et les plus simples sont les plus probables, jusqu’au moment où un œil intéressé “découvre” la possibilité d’exploitation du discours. Cette fois, le document est arrivé dans de bonnes mains, celles d’un polémiste anti-globalisation, qui voit dans Brzezinski un des inspirateurs de la globalisation et qui l’entend pourtant annoncer que les obstacles sur la voie de la globalisation, et notamment le “populisme” et les réactions populaires, semblent de plus en plus insurmontables (c’est cela qui intéresse Watson). Le site Infowars.com a une très forte popularité et le texte est repris sur de nombreux autres sites. Le 26 novembre 2012 un DVD est mis en ligne comme une nouveauté alors qu’il s’agit du même document que celui qui fut mis en ligne le 27 septembre. Les déclarations de Brzezinski sont jugées tellement intéressantes qu’elles sont même reprises… en Pologne, – où elles étaient pourtant d’accès direct depuis deux mois, – notamment par des sites activistes (voir le site AC24, le 26 novembre 2012). Le 27 novembre 2012, Infowars.com en tant que tel (c’est-à-dire essentiellement Alex Jones, le directeur et l’inspirateur de l’organisation) lance à partir de ce texte de citation de Brzezinski un véritable appel aux armes et à la mobilisation, relayé par Planet Infowars, par Prometheus enchained, etc. :

«Resist! Hold The Line! (…) We are winning. The elemental force that is the Freedom Movement is winning the war. It may not seem it at first glance, with the expansion of the police and surveillance states and the slew of federal schemes and plots being announced and implemented, but we are winning. How can I justify a statement like this? I have taken if from the horse’s mouth…Zbigniew Brzezinski…»

 

Désormais, les déclarations de Brzezinski sont un événement dans l'information concernant l’évolution des relations internationales, dans le monde de l’information et du commentaire alternatifs, alors qu’elles sont disponibles depuis deux mois. Au reste, elles sont assez intéressantes pour être de toutes les façons un événement, le 27 septembre ou le 26 novembre (pourvu, disons, qu’on reste dans le même semestre, la chose tient la route). Ce qui importe en l’occurrence, c’est le moment que choisit le système de la communication pour s’emparer de la déclaration et l’exploiter à mesure… Nous parlons sans hésitation ni ambiguïté d’un “système” (celui de la communication) qui choisit, selon la circonstance bien plus que selon des manigances humaines. Cela, pour dire également notre conviction que c’est effectivement ce qu’on nomme “un concours de circonstances” qui a d’abord animé le voyage de la déclaration semi-publique mais effectivement rendue publique de Brezinski, de Sopot, en Pologne, jusque vers le Texas, dans les bureaux de Watson et d’Alex Jones, avant d’être perçu par des relayeurs sur sa valeur effective de communication politique, et relayé finalement vers sa destination finale dans le but désormais explicite de l’exploiter comme on voit faire actuellement.

Le cas est intéressant parce que nous sommes au départ dans un domaine fortement réglementé et soumis à des processus très précis, aussi bien du côté de l’“émetteur” (le conférencier Brzezinski) que de l’utilisateur (l’auditoire “globalisant”-complice, la presse-Système, le monde politique), et que l’on voit ainsi in vivo l’intervention semeuse de désordre du système de la communication. Des éléments comme l’influence dans les milieux de la communication et alternatifs antiSystème, la capacité de jugement pour l’utilisation subversive, la perception de l’effet de communication, l’opportunité de l’utilisation, le point de vue “engagé”, etc., ont joué un rôle primordial. Ce n’est pas l’“émetteur”, le producteur d’action (ou d’information, dans ce cas) qui mène le jeu, mais l’utilisateur, et un utilisateur par effraction, qui s'impose. Cet utilisateur imposteur (dans le meilleur sens, plutôt celui de Thomas l'imposteur) agit en fonction de critères qui lui sont propres, hors de toute considération factuelle habituelle, selon l'appréciation rationnelle dont le Système fait son mie, – le fait que, dès qu’elle est dite, cette déclaration devrait être exploitée et commentée ou bien qu’elle ne le serait jamais, ni exploitée, ni commentée comme on voit aujourd'hui. (Et cela vaut quel que soit l’avis ou le sentiment de l’“émetteur”… Peut-être Brzezinski, s’il l’apprend, sera très satisfait qu’on fasse un tel écho à ses déclarations, même s’il est en désaccord avec les commentaires, disons par simple satisfaction personnelle et un peu vaniteuse, et goût de la notoriété… Ce point n’a pas de rapport de cause à effet direct avec le cas de l’exploitation par le système de la communication qu’on expose.)

C’est bien là qu’on voit la fin de l’ère géopolitique : la puissance (celle de la géopolitique) ne disposant plus de tous les atouts, elle ne peut plus s’imposer en rien parce que les règles qui lui permettaient de faire valoir sa force sont changées. Dans le cas exposé ici, la puissance brute, c’est Brzezinski et son prestige, le statut et l’influence des réseaux où s’inscrit l’EFNI, avec BHL et tout son cirque. Du point de vue de la disposition des circonstances originelles, de l’utilisation des “concours de circonstances”, c’est pourtant le système de la communication (représenté par les Alex Jones et consort) qui règne… C’est le système de la communication, lui qui est d’habitude plutôt “au service” ou “à l’affut” des informations et de ceux qui les émettent, qui est dans ce cas maître du jeu. Quoi qu’il en soit des intentions des uns et des autres, et des circonstances également, l’impulsion de la déstabilisation et de la déstructuration du Système, la marche de la dissolution du même, sont au rendez-vous.

Une présentation plus appuyée mais conformes des déclarations de Brzezinski le 27 septembre auraient eu beaucoup moins d’effets antiSystème que dans le cas présent, où elles sont tombées dans le domaine d’un “complotiste”, d’un spécialiste de la sensation, d’un anti-globalisation et ainsi de suite. L’écho n’est pas important dans la presse-Système, mais la presse-Système n’a plus aucune importance pour nous, du point de vue du crédit, de sa capacité d’influence, de sa substance même, devenue aussi décisive dans le vent de la crise que le papier qui la porte. Bien plus intéressante est la voie actuelle, parce que les déclarations de Brzezinski, d’un poids réel, ont un très fort pouvoir de polémique lorsqu’elles sont bien utilisées… Zbig comme nous l’avons compris, ou interprété, a raison : nous sommes dans l’ère de la communication, ou ère psychopolitique, et cela depuis un certain temps déjà. Comme nous l’avons souvent dit, dans cette nouvelle “ère”, la fonction antiSystème est variable, diverse et multiple, et peut s’emparer de médias et de messagers inattendus lorsque les circonstances s’y prêtent. En l’occurrence, Brzezinski joue un rôle antiSystème, aussi bien qu’un Alex Jones appelant aux armes. On ne demande son avis, ni à l’un, ni à l’autre, car ainsi en a décidé le système de la communication dans l’ère psychopolitique. Cela ne veut pas dire que la révolution est pour demain, cela veut dire que l’évolution vers la déstructuration et la dissolution du Système progresse toujours plus et accélère encore, plus que jamais.

Histoire de la Flandre maritime

Prußen - die ersten Preußen

 

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

liebe Kollegen,

 

wir möchten Ihnen eine Neuerscheinung unseres Verlages vorstellen:

 

Beate Szillis-Kappelhoff

Prußen - die ersten Preußen

Geschichte und Kultur eines untergegangenen Volkes

 

395 Seiten, 123 Abbildungen, gebunden, fester Einband

ISBN 978-3-937820-00-2

 

Erscheinungstermin: soeben druckfrisch eingetroffen und ab sofort lieferbar!

 

Preis: 19,80 Euro

 

Beate Szillis-Kappelhoff widmet sich in dieser ersten umfassenden Darstellung der Geschichte und Kultur der Prußen, jenem geheimnisvollen Volk, das dem späteren Staat Preußen seinen Namen gab.

Über viele Jahrhunderte verteidigten die Prußen, die zur baltischen Sprachfamilie gehörten, tapfer und zäh ihr Siedlungsgebiet zwischen der Weichsel und der Minge, also dem späteren West- und Ostpreußen. Schon zu Beginn des 11. Jahrhunderts hatten sich die Prußen stetig zunehmender Übergiffe der Polen zu erwehren, die eine Verbindung zur Ostsee suchten. Als sie zu Beginn des 13. Jahrhunderts aus der reinen Verteidigung zu Vergeltungsschlägen gegen das nordpolnische, masowische Gebiet übergingen, rief der polnische Herzog Konrad von Masowien den Deutschen Orden um Hilfe. Im Laufe des 13. Jahrhunderts gelang es den Rittern des Deutschen Ordens in einem besonders brutal geführten Eroberungskrieg, die Prußen zu besiegen und schließlich zu christianisieren. Aber es dauerte noch Jahrhunderte, bis die Sprache und Kultur der Prußen durch Unterdrückung, Missionierung und Assimilation verloren gingen.

Dieses Buch begibt sich auf die Spurensuche nach der versunkenen Kultur des einst so kämpferischen und stolzen Volkes der Prußen.

Wir möchten Sie bitten, dieses wichtige Werk über eine bedeutende und identitätsprägende Epoche der deutschen Geschichte in Ihr Verkaufssortiment aufzunehmen.

Vielen Dank!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Heiderose Weigel

Bublies Verlag - Bergstr. 11 - D-56290 Schnellbach

Tel. 06746 / 730046, Fax: 06746 / 730048

Internet: www.bublies-verlag.de

E-Brief: [e-mail]

Inhaltsverzeichnis

 

Vorwort /

Geografische Lage /

Die Prußen /

Eigenname, Fehlschreibungen und Aussprache /

Besetzungen durch den Deutschen Orden /

Sonderrolle Memelgebiet /

Unterwerfung /

Freiheitskämpfe /

Lage der ländlichen Bevölkerung /

Fischerei /

Wildnis /

Waldbienenzucht /

Häusliches Leben /

Angebliche Ausrottung /

Schrift der Prußen /

Sprache, Sprachdenkmäler, Namen /

Musik /

Die zwölf Prußenstämme /

Die Sage von Bruteno und  Widewuto und  Brutenos Nachfolger  /            

Barta (Barten) /

Chelmo (Kulmerland) mit Lubawa (Michelauer Land) /

Lubawa (Löbau, Michelauer Land) /

Galindo (Galindien) /

Nadruwa (Nadrauen) /

Notanga (Natangen) /

Pagude (Pogesanien) /

Pamede (Pomesanien) /

Same (Samland) /

Sasna (Sassen) /

Skalwa (Schalauen) /

Suduwa (Sudauen/ Jatwingen) /

Warme (Ermland) /

Religion der Prußen /

Die Naturreligion /

Göttinnen, Schlangen und Kröten /

Götter, Pferde und Ziegenbock /

Romowe /

Geburt und Taufe /

Verlobung /

Hochzeit /

Totenfeier /

Christenzeit /

Die Prußen und ihr nachbarliches Umfeld /

Die Kuren /

Sprachdenkmäler /

Die Karschauer /

Die Žemaiten und die Litauer /

Die Kaschuben, Masovier, Kujavier und Polen /

Prußen heute /

Einige Orts- und Gewässernamen /

Königsberger Stadtteile /

Liste baltischer Götter, Göttinnen und Gottheiten /

Zeittafel /

Literatur /

Weblinks /

El poder de una lengua es el poder de aquellos que la hablan

El poder de una lengua es el poder de aquellos que la hablan

 

Alberto Buela (*)

 

Cuando hablamos hoy del lenguaje y de la lengua, tema sobre el que hay miles y miles de trabajos escritos, sabemos que sigue vigente la enseñanza de Guillermo Humboldt, que cada idioma fomenta un esquema de pensamiento y unas estructuras mentales propias. Dime en que idioma te expresas y te diré cómo ves el mundo.

Así los hablantes modelan una lengua y ésta modela la mente proyectando un modelo de pensamiento que adquiere su expresión máxima en las identidades nacionales o regionales.

En el caso del castellano, éste es expresión de unas veinte identidades nacionales consolidadas.

Pero la lengua no es aquella aprendida, no es la segunda lengua. La lengua como lugar de poder es la asumida existencialmente. Y así podemos comprender como siendo 56 los países francófonos y 22 los hispanoparlantes, tenga el castellano mayor peso internacional que el francés.

Es que de los 56 países franco parlantes solo tres o cuatro han asumido el francés vitalmente, el resto lo usa por conveniencia. En general, para pedir créditos a la metrópoli.

Con el inglés pasa algo parecido pero en menor medida, porque el peso poblacional de los anglo parlantes es mayor (USA, Inglaterra, Australia, Sudáfrica, Nueva Zelanda), no obstante la mayoría de los países que han declarado el inglés como idioma oficial, 59 en total, utilizan de hecho, infinidad de lenguas locales, que reducen la expresión de lo nacional en inglés. Por ej.: en Nigeria se hablan 521 lenguas. O en la India, ¿en qué expresa la identidad nacional el inglés, declarado idioma oficial? En nada.

Entonces, afirmamos que la lengua es un instrumento de poder cuando es asumida existencialmente, de lo contrario es un simple vehículo de comunicación como lo es el inglés en los aeropuertos.

En este sentido, el castellano como lengua occidental tiene una ventaja infinita respecto del inglés y del francés. Pues aun cuando supera al inglés, su máximo competidor, en más de cien millones de hablantes, posee la infinita ventaja que es efectivamente, la lengua oficial de veintidós naciones.

Si a ello le sumamos la proximidad lingüística del portugués (Brasil, Portugal, Mozambique, Angola et alii) se constituye una masa crítica de 800 millones de personas que pueden comunicarse entre sí sin mayor esfuerzo y, lo que es más importante, con estructuras mentales similares.

Esto no es un chiste, ni una anécdota, es un dato geopolítico de crucial importancia para comprender el mundo actual en profundidad.

Es incomprensible como de 31 Estados (22 hispano parlantes y 9 luso parlantes) no haya uno, al menos, que tenga una política internacional de defensa de la expresión lingüística luso-castellana.

Es incomprensible que los teóricos franceses, tan sutiles para otros asuntos, no se hayan apercibido que “la mayor presencia del español como lengua de trabajo internacional, garantiza una mayor presencia del francés, frente al inglés”.

En este campo específico estamos rodeados de un hato de ineptos. Ineptos que como el “rey cazador de elegantes” sostuvo en la última cumbre Iberoamericana de Cádiz que somos cuatrocientos millones los hispanoparlantes o como las autoridades del Instituto Cervantes que sostiene que somos 450 millones de castellano hablantes en el mundo ( cuando hoy sumamos 550 millones) y, para colmo de errores, que es la segunda lengua después del inglés: stultorum infinitus numerus est.

Más allá del rey Borbón y del Instituto Cervantes los usuarios habituales del castellano se han metido en el corazón del imperio talasocrático y así suman en USA, 45 millones. Este hecho bruto, real e indubitable ha hecho exclamar al estratega Samuel Huntington en El Reto Hispano, uno de sus últimos trabajos:  “los estadounidenses están aceptando que se convertirán en dos pueblos, con dos culturas (anglo e hispana) y dos lenguas (inglés y español)…. Por primera vez en la historia de Estados Unidos, cada vez hay más ciudadanos (sobre todo negros) que no pueden conseguir el trabajo o el sueldo que sería de esperar porque sólo pueden comunicarse en inglés… Si la expansión del español como segunda lengua de EE UU sigue adelante, con el tiempo podría tener serias consecuencias para la política y el gobierno”.

Es que el castellano además es un idioma pluricéntrico, pues a diferencia del inglés o el francés donde Londres y París se han constituido como centros de poder lingüístico, Madrid no tiene vocación de centralidad lingüística.

Es hora que nuestros gobiernos asuman una política internacional de la lengua. Que es castellano sea utilizado como lengua de trabajo de ámbito mundial. Informaciones recientes nos dicen que hoy en China el castellano es la lengua extranjera más estudiada. Que no hay un millón de hispano parlantes en Filipinas sino alrededor de diez millones. Que en Brasil el castellano no es considerada lengua extranjera en las universidades, pues su uso profesoral es habitual. En fin, contamos en definitiva con un instrumento geopolítico y metapolítico poderosísimo que no está explotado.[1]

 

(*) arkegueta, aprendiz constante

[e-mail]

 

---

[1] Nobleza obliga y tenemos que rendir homenaje acá al esfuerzo del Prof. Renato Epifanio y quienes lo acompañan en el Movimiento Internacional Lusófono quien desde hace años viene trabajando en la consolidación del portugués como lengua internacional. (www.zefiro.pt)