For criminal horror and scale, Hitler’s Germany remains at the top of a still lengthening heap of unimaginable — but observable — cruelty.
At least Rwanda’s over.
However, add to the Islamic Small Wars and the ever smoldering Middle East Conflict the dark notes continuing to spill out of Burma, southern Sudan, Congo, Mexico, Colombia, and Somalia.
Love thy neighbor as thyself?
Not for ourselves alone (do we pray)?
It is true: for those who pray only for themselves, nature has a way of visiting the same unkindly. Our species may be indeed stronger — better adapted, defended, and fit — when “not for ourselves alone do we pray.”
This started with a photograph of hundreds of women lined up at Birkenau, the Nazi death camp, and on their way to the gas chambers. It has been reported that they sang “Hatikvah”, Israel’s national anthem, as they walked to their deaths.
The conversation online has covered many things, including the invitation to argue the existence of God, but as I wanted to wrap up the thread, I wrote this cap —
* * *
Let’s wrap this thread and move into the new week (in which I’m enjoying a so far mild hurricane).
Regarding choices having to do with divinity, there were no ends, and it seems Pharaoh himself believed himself a God. Man as god, plants as gods, rocks as spirits, gods in the skies (those of Greece and Rome were to come), there were many possibilities, including (film recommendation here: Agora), the possibility of reason and science.
The power to intimidate, rob, and murder others by way of political will includes the intent to humiliate, so to go down firm in spirit, to sing in the face of death, is another form of exodus — an act of defiance and liberation beneath the twinned shadows of madness and death. The Nazis lost a lot more than their country, their preferred identity (as Nazis born to rule the world), and their lives, and for them that’s something that might be said of the living as well as the dead: they lost their way when they jettisoned their humanity.
In consideration of the evolution of mind that may be associated with biological “brain power” (x size x abilities), our species would seem to be gregarious with great consciousness, self-consciousness, a highly developed language ability, and with it the advent of a complex of social norms, personal conscience, and values and sentiments of all kinds. Given that life of the mind, life alone is not the highest reward (even though we Jews toast with “La chaim” — “To life!” Dignity and freedom matter. We avoid and rightly fear humiliation and shame.
Survival may be the highest reward, but in human life, “survival” involves a great deal more than animal — copulate, eat, defecate — existence.
On one or two of my blogs, I’ve a quote by Simon Weisenthal, the Nazi hunter, made n the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: “The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing.”
That is living and a living testament to the discernment of right from wrong, which may be essential in both the evolution, including political and social evolution, and survival of our species.
Christopher Hitchens famously and repeatedly asked a simple question: “Do you need God to be good?”
I’ve never argued otherwise, and yet . . . from Moses to Maimonides to the Adlers (pioneers in contemporary psychology and humanism), this quest to learn from all or the Almighty or the universe seems to have been invested in those who thought enough of themselves to walk away from Pharaoh or who chose to end their lives — or begin new ones — singing “Hatikvah”.
” . . . and I’ll say that, of course, an attacker, who could be called the agent of Satan, he attacked, but after that I found angels on all my side, everywhere, all around me to this time and this place.”
I’m not editing videos (yet), but here I’m also not entertaining so much.
Malala’s story has had a profound impact on Pakistan’s perspective on itself and attitude toward its extremists. If by itself the tragedy proves less than pivotal, it will nonetheless feed into the weighing of justice and choices in commitments to values in whatever happens next.
When a writer has “done the homework” but withheld information in order to throw mud on a human target for entertainment and manipulation of even less informed minds, that’s evil. When a writer has not done the homework, has packed together the same mudball for the same audience, that’s not only evil, it’s cosmically pernicious.
At least that how I feel about propaganda and ignorance both.
The government’s awful; the monks have a dark side; this particular Muslim sect has been caught a long time between its inhospitable “landing zone” and the sea — and then comes to this, so it seems, the AQ complex of deeply fragile, equally narcissistic and sociopathic ideation. What seems like a very dark space in cultural psychology may be less so in anthropological views.
“The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority living in northern Rakhine state in Western Myanmar. They face religious and ethnic discrimination by Myanmar’s military regime, which refuses to recognize the Rohingya as Myanmar citizens. The Rohingya people are not considered one of 135 legally recognized ethnic minority groups in Myanmar. Myanmar considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, but they have lived in Myanmar for centuries, and Bangladesh will not accept them as its citizens.”
Regarding responses to familiar anti-Semitic rants, I wouldn’t mind seeing a WordPress or other blog architected specifically to rebuff the favored mud of the day.
For those specifically interested in language behavior and attitudes, I’ve a blog I’d like to boost in that area — http://conflict-backchannels.com. In relation to that, I’ve been more active in the Pakistani community than Israel’s, but the work is the same: there are those who reason with integrity (and we find one another in this affinity-encouraging environment) and those who reason their wills or willpower and do so disingenuously.
I’m a strong free speech advocate and really don’t want to shut anyone up (or have anyone banned from the commons, online or in real space) but rather help produce the community, worldwide, in which bigoted and intemperate loons find themselves making themselves smaller and in their “actions” (as old communist’s might say) transforming themselves into common criminals.
I started out a romantic in many ways, but age plus a little education has taught me to look at the numbers when looking at the many characteristics — amplitude, frequency, distribution, intensity — of an adverse signal.
Also the Hebe’s GB’s (of the boat show persuasion should any need the hint) provide for armoring and training. I got into this area with an Ozraeli just a few years ago and had never encountered The Bigot (or the bigots) so closely, if ever.
I’d no idea there were so many dozens influencing thousands to millions unable to contain or restrain either themselves or their hate.
I have shared a reading log through “delicious” for a while, but with this blog I’m inclined to try posting each day, or for every few days, a rolling list of articles, the kind of thing I had intended for the “Fast News Share (FNS) category. This seems like it might be less disruptive to the blog as well as more pleasant for the reader stopping by in his own newsy meandering through the conflict arena and related subjects. –jso
Possibly intended to assure or incite westerners in the MEMRI fashion, Quradhawi is telling a story about political and sectarian Islam without fully comprehending the post-WWII arrangements that today have Syria’s nuts — seriously as well as every possible pun intended — in a vice.
Posted by MEMRI, October 15, 2012.
In the post-WWII world, Syria has been Russia’s client and buffer for decades, and the mixed bag of a revolution in Syria has threatened to bring Russia and NATO into conflict. Recognizing that, both have agreed to stand off while Russia fulfills its contractual obligations with the Assad regime (for economic and military support) and the United States, probably most unhappy with this state of affairs, fears Turkey tugging on its leash to drag into a war in which it has little interest.
Within Islam in the middle east, large rivalries defined as Shia vs. Sunni and Arab vs. Turkish vs. Iranian (I’m not going to endorse the morally hideous regime there by linking it with “Persian”, even though that is what it wants) will keep blood flowing in Syria because there is no solution to the kinds of problems combatants (from the dictator to the shia to the sunni to the Turk, the Arab, and the Iranian) have in their heads.
War in Syria involves the power of language and promises expressed.
One — to be clear, everyone — would inherit their power by family or ethnic or sectarian assignation, not by building the same painstakingly on good business and good deeds all around.
Interfering with transformation: the locked down mind cultivated by multiple literary clerical bodies insulated from criticism through a haut posturing developed to reject the same out of hand.
Well, the Malala Yousufzai backlash took all of … five minutes. The outpouring of shock and outrage over the Taleban’s attempted assassination of the teenager who advocated for girls education has been replaced with a campaign of character assassination and conspiracy theories.
A Times correspondent ending a three-year assignment reflects on the fears and horrors, but also on the beauty and people that will make her miss Afghanistan.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times
October 22, 2012, 5:04 p.m.
KABUL, Afghanistan — After years of comings and goings, almost everything about leaving Kabul is familiar: the ride through dusty dawn streets, skirting past old men on bicycles and boys in horse-drawn carts, the long airport trudge through four luggage screenings and pat-downs, the way the plane’s wingtips seem to almost scrape the jagged peaks surrounding the city.
Everything is the same — but the knowledge that this is the last time.
Produced on the Bill Maher Show, September 21, 2012. Sitting left to right:Chris Matthews, Rana Foroohar, “Roger”, whom I do not know and who does not get a name tag throughout the run of the clip, then Bill Maher and Salman Rushdie.
If I blog too quickly, I may revise my posts to provide greater perspective or expanded reference.
On my old blog, which I will preserve through 2013, at least, I’ve written about Hitchcock’s The Birds — as I’ve posted a clip on this blog too — as a meditation on inexplicable evil. The URL for that has been referenced at the end of this post.
From Bill Maher’s show, it’s refreshing here to hear some interest in moving from squawking about a challenge, and it is a mountain of a challenge, my favorite metaphor for it being “K2” in recognition of the position of my Pakistani friends standing before the same, to discovering ways to address it.
Those following this blog know my way in: language drives thought, and the creative principle in language resides in the invention of its poetics. Those poetics then serve as maps to a metonymy in mind, i.e., the ways in which symbols weigh together with both great stability — or there would not usefulness to making noises with our mouths — and areas of vulnerability by way of archaic language (old machinery for the times) and the appeal of honestly born new language technology.
We “English” cannot do the work needed.
Our friends within the cultures of other languages can.
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