• Home
  • About
  • Concepts, Coins, and Terms
    • Anthropolitical Psychology
      • Civilizational Narcissism
      • Conflict – Language Uptake – Social Programming and Scripting – A Suggestion
        • Language Uptake – Programming – On Learning to Listen
        • Mouth –> Ear –> Mind –> Heart System
        • Social Grammar
      • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
      • Malignant Narcissism
      • Narcissistic Scripting
      • Normative Remirroring
      • Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation
    • FTAC – “From The Awesome Conversation”
    • God Mob
    • Intellectual Battlespace
    • Islamic Small Wars
    • New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left
    • Political Spychology
    • Shimmer
  • Library
    • About Language
    • Russian Section
  • Comments and Contact

BackChannels

~ Conflict, Culture, Language, Psychology

BackChannels

Category Archives: Library

Smart Alik! Skating Across the Era of Soviet Absurdities

22 Friday Jun 2018

Posted by commart in Books, Journal, Library, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

contemporary Russia, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orwellian state, Pentacostal Christians, refuseniks, religious persecution, Soviet Era, Soviet history, Soviet injustice, Soviet intolerance

6 x 9Polishchuk, Arkady.  Dancing on Thin Ice: Travails of a Russian Dissenter.  Los Angeles: DoppelHouse Press, 2018.

In the news at the time:


At the unusual session, General Shchelokov was said to have told the Jews that he had heard of the alleged beatings on a newscast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. He insisted that he was not in charge of security at the reception office.

“I would never permit beating,” Mr. Shcharansky quoted the minister as having said. “If it were my affair, I would arrest the organizers.”

Four of the Jews were missing tonight. They were Boris Chernobylsky, a radio engineer; Arkady Polishchuk, a former editor of the magazine Asia and Africa Today; Viktor Yelistratov and Mikhail Kremen, both also radio engineers. It was not known whether they had been arrested.


Simpler, David K. “Jews in Moscow Resume Visa Sit-In.” The New York Times, October 22, 1976.

The missing “refuseniks” plus one — Arkady Polishchuk notes in his account of that distant day that he had not applied for a visa but was with a crew that had — knew where they were, and the one doing the remembering through his memoir was in that place called pain.

A doctor in the Sklifosofsky Institute said that I had two cracked ribs and recommended to wind a towel around my trunk.  He refused to give me an x-ray film or a written reference.  An exhausted night nurse of this principal trauma center muttered, “If we give a reference to every hoodlum beaten in a street fight  the country would soon run out of ink and paper.”

They certainly had shortages of x-ray films and painkillers.

p. 211

Having been Jewish but not at the time a refusenik, Polishchuk would similarly take up the cause of Pentacostal Christians persecuted by the Soviet Union for their possession of faith.  With empathy and wry humor, he conveys what it’s like for the criminalized pious:

“The local KGB should pray for you every day,” I said.  “Without you, they would’ve stagnated here, without an increase in rank and salary.”

After this lively exchange of views on the role of light and darkness in the spiritual life of mankind, we all crossed the kitchen garden planted with heavenly potatoes, passed by green onions and fragrant dill, and, through a narrow opening in the fence, began making our way to the house of Vera Shchukin.  One by one or in pairs, we used the most roundabout paths between houses.  The village was asleep.  Almost all windows were now unlit.

I wiped sweat from my forehead and whispered to Goretoi, “Muggy.”

He said nothing.  I couldn’t stop talking.  “For how long have you been aware that this gathering is prohibited by articles 142 and 227 of the Criminal Code?”

“For as long as I’ve believed in my Savior,” he whispered.

p. 244


Near the time of this writing, Polishchuk’s telling of the plight of Pentecostal Christians may take on an eerie resonance as Capo, Colonel, President, Emperor Vladimir Putin’s government goes after the community of Jehova’s Witnesses in today’s  Russia:

“It began about 10 o’clock in the evening and didn’t wind up until 4 a.m.,” Tatyana Petrova said of the raid. “I didn’t see how it started because I was in the kitchen, but I heard my husband go to the door. I heard a woman introduce herself as someone from the electric company. She said she needed to read the meter. My husband opened the door and then a whole crowd of people pushed into the apartment.”

Filimonov, Andrei and Robert Coalson. “‘Extremist’ Faith: Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses Report Wave Of Police Raids, Detentions.” Radio Free Europe, June 15, 2018.


In Polishchuk’s day:

Children giggled and jostled each other in the ribs.  The men were pushed up against the walls.  Two old women sat close to the invisible gap between the door and its frame, in hope of catching a breath of fresh air.  On stools sat an old man, white as chalk, and two pregnant women.  One of them, with a hand-copied New Testament, offered me her chair, but I shook my head and clung to the wall.  When nearly forty persons had squeezed into the house, the deacon turned on the light, and ducked outside to check if it escaped to the street.

p. 244


Life’s a long enough journey for most, but in the Soviet Union, the unutterable sadness of situations posed against the boasted heroic strength of the state must have made it seem so much longer.  “Alik”, when referred to with affection, sent to write about a community for the blind discovers instead of a refuge for those so afflicted a familiar metaphor and dismal reality:  “. . . a leper colony.  There was nothing I could write about them.  I was frantically looking for a way to say at least half-truths about their everyday concerns instead of reporting on the contribution of the blind to our common cause of building socialism.”

In the wings always and frequently spotlighted: spooks . . .  KGB — as colleagues (around whom to be cautious) on publications; as agents sent to disconnect his home phone before the refusenik Natan Sharansky could relay a statement by Andrei Sakharov to a listener in Canada; as minders, followers, and thugs.

The games played in Putin’s courts today seem no different then they were then.  Polishchuk covered one of the trials of Dr. Mikhail Stern whose latest crime had been to give his son “a written permission” required in support of the application of the same to emigrate.  The whole becomes an absurd nightmare of examinations of minute evidence to none.

While the phantoms of the Soviet live on in the spiritual descendants of the KGB, perhaps the haunting swirls on in the earlier victims of their omnipresent bureaucracy, observation, manipulation, sabotage, entrapment and framing, capricious “justice”, and punishment.

Additional Reference

Wikipedia. “Soviet Dissidents”.

–33–

 

FTAC – Retreating Into the Library

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by commart in Journal, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Arrived! David Remnick’s Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire and Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? — I may be absent for a while . . . .http://books.simonandschuster.com/Putins-Kleptocracy/Karen-Dawisha/9781476795195


Fatigue sets in.

# # #

Odds ‘N’ Ends 130916-1422ET

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Journal, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

independent scholarship, journal, politics

In Washington, D.C. — WASHINGTON: As many as 3 gunmen attack Navy Yard, 6 dead – Politics Wires – MiamiHerald.com

From Cairo — Tarek and John are on hunger strike | Justin Podur — Two Canadians detained by Egypt’s interim government (ever the optimist, I am putting off the day when I may be forced by time to call it a “ruling junta”) have gone on a hunger strike.

Rather than cover the second-hand news for the rest of the afternoon (unless someone really wants me chatyping and doing the social network pass-along furiously (and offers sponsorship to do it), I’m inclined to continue reading Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin: Ben Judah: 9780300181210: Amazon.com: Books.  As the numbers on this blog climb, I feel it incumbent upon myself to read as if in the ivory tower — with concentration and patience enough to better see what I feel I have been seeing.

Related: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah – review | Books | The Guardian 6/27/2013.  The author, Luke Harding, has had a young career as a Kremlinologist and has gotten a couple of books out of it: Expelled: A Journalist’s Descent into the Russian Mafia State, which is due here quite soon, and Mafia State: How one reporter became the enemy of the brutal new Russia.

Never mind autocrats: any conflict involving integrity and power also involves a lot of thinking about the management of surface, sub-surface, and compartmented information.  Neither countries nor persons may wish to “let it all hang out” (God forbid) but the development beyond copyright, patent, and basic proprietary business concerns of extended secrets-keeping societies bodes ill for humanity.  The dignity of man, if there is to be any, demands to know the substance of true states of affairs.

The cuckoo and two peacocks, one in the brig, another in Ecuador, the last in Russia may have been a bit screwed up about the relationship between their empowerment, their observation, and their views, but taken together and with a continuously emerging global intelligentsia, the idea that mankind will live like a happy idiot in a cave managed and fought over by supertechnologists has a particularly enslaved and hideous aspect to it.

Related and also cued around this place: Brazil and 12 Monkeys.

# # #

A Quiet 9/11 for BackChannels

11 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Journal, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Weather: mid-Atlantic, late summer, sunny and hot.

Reading: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin: Ben Judah: 9780300181210: Amazon.com: Books

Seen on Facebook Before 8:30 a.m.

http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/i-believe-a-911-tribute 9/11/2013

9/11: America’s Unfinished Business – Michelle Malkin – Page 1 9/11/2013

2 Millions Bikers to DC (Facebook Page)

Around the Web

CNN.com – September 11 Memorial

Explosion damages Libya’s Foreign Ministry on anniversary of 9/11 attack on U.S. Consulate – NY Daily News

Opinion: Jihadist terrorism in America since 9/11 – CNN.com

12 years later, horrors of 9/11 shaping American opinion on Syria, Middle East – Indian Express 9/11/2013

Honor September 11th: National Day of Service and Remembrance | The White House 9/11/2013

Column: 10 changes since 9/11 : Opinion 9/11/2013

______

You can surf the web too?

How about that!

And that’s good reason for me to take it easy on the chatyping all around — blogs, correspondence, Facebook — and immerse in a good book.

# # #

Abbas Zaidi’s Wicked Humor and Magical Realism

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by commart in Books, Journal, Library

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abbas Zaidi, fiction, literary, literature, Pakistan, short stories, south Asia

Zaidi, Abbas.  Two And A Half Words And Other Stories.  Gowanus Books, 2012.

What might it like to live in an atmosphere rife with bigotry, fear, and hypocrisy accompanied by the author’s and reader’s own cackling laughter?

Slip your mind into Abbas Zaidi’s slim and thoroughly delightful, also wondrously transgressive, first volume of short stories inspired by the south Asian Muslim experience and find out.

Truly, Zaidi’s Two And A Half Words And Other Stories comes off a wickedly good trip from the first mention of “Blessed Companions of the Prophet Street” (“The Shadows”) to the pitch perfect near ending wrap-up, “On that rainy evening, the four minarets of the Shahi Mosque were standing tall in the distance surrounded by the dimly-lit alleys where the ladies of the night, their pimps, and customers were getting ready for business.  I lit a cigarette . . . .”  (“Passions of Khalifa Hakeem”).

From the title story of the collection:

What I remember them saying was that the jhalli kuri in Number 3 had lost her mind after remaining silent and refusing to eat for days.  These words had no meaning for me.  But one night I woke up screaming.  I dreamed that the jhalli kuri was standing over me.

A “mad girl”, a troubled apartment, mysteries . . . .

As this blog swims around in the area of language and politics, I may mention that the volume is not bereft of the latter but for western readers may be uncomfortably startling in its depictions.  At one point, for example, a general notes, “if the Americans want to isolate Iran, courting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is not a bad idea” and a reporter similarly struck with grand conspiracy theorizing chimes back, “Don’t be surprised if one day a Taliban squad is found blowing up bridges in Beijing in the name of Islam but actually serving American . . . .”

Wealth may be needed to preserve the conditions in which the literary experience of the 19th Century thrived, either that or equal tolerance for impoverishment, for even reading through the dozen expertly crafted short stories contained in Zaidi’s first collection requires time away from the web and time unencumbered by other concerns — call the proper condition “leisured time”: the experience of such work becomes that of a thin but notable and latent powerful new intelligentsia.  For that set — and if you’re here, I hope you’re a part of it — such stories provide both a critique of and a map to the spirit of the world in which the author has lived.

We may never have a perfect world — God forbid it — but in Abbas Zaidi, a part of it may have given the gift of a perfect and perfectly scathing reflector and entertainer.

A Page for the In-House Library

29 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by commart in Journal, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

conflict, home library, in-house library, library, peace, peace studies

Reference: BackChannels Library Page

My library contains about 2,000 volumes.

Should I ever get it into a house (life’s not looking so good for that at the moment), I should like to have it in one room or continuously spanning one serious load bearing wall.  Here in the apartment they’re arrayed over the studs one to three bookcases along sections of wall.

So far, so good.

I’ve gone to Kindle, which is not bad for curiosity but awfully bad for the disposition of even a small (the smallest) estate in books, and I may revert to collecting hardcovers.

While I mull that, I thought I would share here with readers a portion of what’s been imported in areas relevant to light commentary on politics.  Were the funds available, say through a big fat fairy tale of a grant (but maybe there are angels), I would have an assistant work up cards and key them for a while.  As it is, if I add a few volumes a week, just a couple at a time, that might do as well.

While items listed are here, not everything listed has been read (the infamous  “RAT” is still sitting stealthily on a speaker cabinet beside the television), and not everything read has been remembered; however, I have out of necessity become more careful about quality time with books, the distractions posed by the Internet, especially Facebook, having become so fragmenting and time consuming.

In fact, I have here the habits of a way of life, but it’s a scrambling and scrapping information-bound way of life, shifting gears always between the academic and the personal, the chatyping session on the social network and the research-and-typing session that turns out a post, and the concerns of an author (would-be, wannabe, maybe is) and those of the guy who lives in “real space” after all.  Apart from the nifty act of hauling a cogent quote onto a blog or into online chat, I’ve always found reading among the most calming and focusing of activities.

With a library in the home — not a lonesome bookcase in the squire’s office but rather 20 bookcases packed and packed along from grade school to graduate school (and sprinkled with inheritance: my father’s Durant and Le Carre collections are here, for example) and assembled for a dime on the dollar from thrift shops — it’s good not to always have too much burden in the way of other distractions and indulgences.

There’s not too much on the page as I type here this Tuesday afternoon in late January, only mention of five volumes, but there’s more where they came from.

READING NOW

Servadio, Gaia.  Mafioso.New York: Stein and Day, 1976.

Collection

Political Psychology

Fromm, Erich.  The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.  New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973.

Post, Jerrold M.  Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior.  Forward by Alexander L. George.  Ithica: Cornell Universty Press, 2004.

Regions and States

CENTRAL ASIA

Cohen, Stephen Philip.  The Idea of Pakistan.  Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004.

Rashid, Ahmed.  Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.  New York: Viking, 2008.

Salman Rushdie Reads from His Memoir, ‘Joseph Anton’

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Free Speech, Library

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

author, Joseph Anton, reading, Salman Rushdie

Source: The Daily Beast.  “11 Revelations from Salman Rushdie’s Memoir, ‘Joseph Anton’.” September 18, 2012.

Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg

17 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Library, Religion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

book review, books, civilizational narcissism, history, Islam, Mobarak Haider, narcissism, political psychology, politics, religion, Taliban

Civilizational Narcissism

Everything you wanted to know about why what is wrong with Islam — that abysmal present soaked in blood, dependence, hate, ignorance, and failed or failing or drifted states from Asia to Africa to the Middle East — may be covered in Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg.

“Narcissism is a psychic state of extreme subjectivity.  The civilizational narcissists have mostly two alternating mental states: either they are perfectly unaware of the role of the world around them or if they are aware, they are sure that it admires or envies them.  This infatuation with their own charm renders them totally impervious to the beauty and merit of others.  Civilizational narcissism is therefore collective to the extent that all the admirers of their own civilization admire only abstract concepts; no living human or the existing pattern of civilization impresses them.”

With Pakistani street cred and cosmopolitan ivory tower brights and insight, Haider walks the reader through each dimension of cultural, geopolitical, linguistic, psychological, and social history and thought in laying out the case for an unbridled narcissism as the core component promoting the misery the Muslim Ummah continues to deal to itself and to others in the name of Allah.

In addition to the psychology, which I regard as rich and spot-on, Haider’s honesty and integrity in scholarship in and of itself stands signal to the kind of change the whole world wants as regards Islam’s ability to accept criticism, to develop by first developing itself (through other than alms and arms) and to enjoy — now these are my words — the world’s present and most assuredly future “cultural polyphony”.

I have found an implacability in conservative Muslim and American circles in which one party or the other is not only being victimized by the other, but reverting, or stuck, in the mechanics of the most woeful prejudice, which may be reduced to the statement, “they are all like that.” For some, every Muslim is a Jihadi-head (and it may be tragic for Muslims that whatever potential lay in the term “Jihad”, it really has become synonymous with “bombs on two legs” and the like); and for some opposite, every “right-winger” is Pamela Geller  or Robert Spencer (I like them both): my way out of that debacle has been through the window of a term I refer to as “shimmer” — i.e., for what’s coming over the berm, uncertainty as to who, in impassioned numbers, really wants what.

Not to be the “useful idiot” in this crowd, I have at this point engaged many Muslim friends (around the world too), most of whom I genuinely enjoy in an atmosphere as generous in mutual regard as I have ever experienced in conversation.

Nonetheless, in the hands of clerics, the Taliban, and the Arabs who profit mightily on religion — the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, may be valued at $30 billion annually according to a Gulf News report — the culture produced within the vaunted “religion of peace” has serious social issues with the rest of the world.

And it can’t stand to hear about them.

After so much delving into contributing cultures and history, Haider makes this general observation, which I feel should be taken to heart:

“In all these forms of contact — individual, tribal, and civilizational — supremacy of one over the other, i.e., ascendancy of one sex over the other, of one tribe over the other, or of one civilization over the other, is a bad arrangement.  It is less productive and cannot hold forever.  It has been observed that if clash is less frequent than kindness, in these forms of relationships, the resulting posterity is healthier and happier.  The concept of dominance seems to be the less developed form of behavior in human history.  That is perhaps why all doctrines and philosophies of wisdom preached against it.” (p. 174).

I would suggest our species more gregarious than not and altogether more inclined toward real goodness and good relationships than not.

However, be that as it may, a little farther on in a chapter titled, “Hate the Jew: And Do Not Ask”, Haider notes, “The tragedy does not lie in the inability of Muslims to learn or think” — here I interrupt to note my friends do learn and do think, wonderfully, but they may be neither representative of all nor few, a subject to be taken up at another time . . . but back to Haider’s telling sentence — “it lies in the absolute dominance of Islamic dogma that has been carefully defended, so that no critical approach could ever raise a finger . . . .  In Saudi Arabia, even now geocentric astronomy is taught as syllabus; Abdul Rahman bin Baaz, the head of Medina University received award of merit for his thesis that the Earth is static while the Sun and the Moon move.”

I believe the veracity of Haider’s anecdotal evidence.

Those who believe Abdul Rahman bin Baaz’s theory would seem capable of believing anything, not that anyone dare tell them that.

Reference

American Psychiatric Association. Personality disorders. In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc; 2000:717-731.

Ali, Jasim.  “Sweeping economic impact of the Haj.”  Gulf News, November 7, 2011.

Altaf, Waseem.  “We need multiple measures to start a return: Mobarak Haider.”  Viewpoint, n.d.

Ambardar, Sheenie and David Bienenfeld.   “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”  Medscape Reference, updated May 24, 2011.  (References 2000 DSM-IV-TR).

Kreger, Randi.  “Don’t Diss the Narcissists!”  Psychology Today, May 24, 2010.

← Older posts
  • Compassion
  • Empathy
  • Justice
  • Humility
  • Inclusion
  • Integrity
____________

Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
___________

Recent Posts

  • Nicolas Tenzer On A Russia That Must Be Condemned, Defeated, Taken Apart, and Taken Down
  • FTAC: Why Putin Won’t Stop Until Stopped
  • KGB FSB ROC M-O-N-E-Y
  • FNS: Morning Lies
  • FTAC–A Note: Iron River, Narcotics, and the Ecology of Latin American Mass Migration
  • Surrealpolitik: Orban & Putin & ‘Illiberal Democracy’

Categories

  • 21st Century Feudal
  • 21st Century Modern
  • A Little Wisdom
  • Also in Media
  • American Domestic Affairs
  • Anti-Semitism
  • Asides
  • BCND – BackChannels News Day
  • Books
  • Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology
  • COVID-19
  • Epistemology
  • Events and Other PSA's
  • Extreme Brown vs Red-Green
  • Fast News Share
  • foreign aid
  • Free Speech
  • FTAC
  • FTAC – From The Awesome Conversation
  • International Development
  • Islamic Small Wars
    • Gaza Suzerain
  • Journal
    • Library
  • Journalism
  • Links
  • Notes On Reading BackChannels
  • Philology
  • Philosophy
  • Poetry
  • Political Psychology
  • Political Spychology
  • Politics
  • Psychology
    • Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy
  • Qualities of Living (QOL)
  • Referral
  • Regions
    • Africa
      • Central African Republic
      • Guinea
      • Kenya
      • Libya
      • Mali
      • Morocco
      • Nigeria
      • South Africa
      • Sudan
      • Tunisia
      • Zimbabwe
    • Asia
      • Afghanistan
      • Burma
      • China
      • India
      • Myanmar
      • North Korea
      • Pakistan
      • Turkey
    • Caribbean Basin
      • Cuba
    • Central America
      • El Salvador
      • Guatemala
      • Honduras
      • Mexico
    • Eastern Europe
      • Serbia
    • Eurasia
      • Armenia
      • Azerbaijan
      • Russia
      • Ukrain
      • Ukraine
    • Europe
      • France
      • Germany
      • Hungary
      • Poland
    • Great Britain and United Kingdom
    • Iberian Peninsula
    • Middle East
      • Egypt
      • Gaza
      • Iran
      • Iraq
      • Israel
        • Palestinia
      • Jordan
      • Kurdistan
      • Lebanon
      • Palestinian Territories
      • Qatar
      • Saudi Arabia
      • Syria
      • United Arab Emirates
      • Yemen
    • North America
      • Canada
      • United States of America
    • Norther Europe
    • Northern Europe
      • Sweden
    • South America
      • Argentina
      • Brazil
      • Columbia
      • Ecuador
      • Venezuela
    • South Pacific
      • Australia
      • New Zealand
      • Papua New Guinea
      • West Papua
  • Religion
  • Spain
  • Syndicate Red Brown Green
  • transnational crime
  • Uncategorized
  • Visual Data

Europe

  • Defending History
  • Hungarian Spectrum
  • Yanukovych Leaks

Great Britain

  • Stand for Peace

Israeli and Jewish Affairs

  • Chloe Simone Valdary

Journals

  • Amil Imani
  • New Age Islam

Middle East

  • Human Rights & Democracy for Iran
  • Middle East Research and Information Project

Organizations

  • Anti-Slavery
  • Atlantic Council
  • Fight Hatred
  • Human Rights First Society
  • International Network Against Cyberhate
  • The Center for Victims of Torture

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in 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."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • BackChannels
    • Join 351 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • BackChannels
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar