Dictators, terrorists, and totalitarian ideologues, almost by definition, cannot tolerate being laughed at. Nor can anyone with an inflated ego and thin skin. Ridicule is their Achilles’ heel. And, humor is a robust underground phenomenon in any society. The Soviet leadership was so fearful of humor that the KGB had what Russian comedian Yakov Smirnov called a “Department of Jokes.” That was not the real name of the department, which had a more anodyne designation as a subunit of the KGB’s political enforcement section, the Fifth Chief Directorate, but Smirnov’s nickname for it made the KGB look all the more weak and bizarre (although all jokes still had to be KGB approved).6
Plainly, the defeat of “Nazi Germany” neither displaced the German language nor the German People (in their majority) but it did transform Germany into a modern and multicultural state haunted by and reacting to the crimes of the mid-20th Century.
The brutal, cowardly, and underhanded methods developed by the Nazis in their achievement and expression of martial and political power may remain — and I hope they remain – unparalleled in intensity and scope in history. Lesser cabal, like ISIL, and some states, as with Russia’s behavior in Syria, may prove equally sadistic but lesser in reach, not that we don’t pay attention.
Regarding Islam and “how many Islamists” — Daniel Pipes has been publishing on that question since 2005 — there are some approaches to coming up with percentages, but the bottom line is that Muslims would seem first in the way of jihadi violence, and so much so that their own security interests focus on keeping the Muslim Brotherhood and their relations neutralized and largely out of power.
The Moscow-Tehran relationship with Hamas and Hezbollah and others and the histories both centers of power have had with terrorism might encourage a good look those two and their historic promotions of anti-Semitism plus participation (state sponsorship for) associated with terrorism.
The prompt: an Islamophobic tirade blanketing all absent of resolving observation and reflection.
I would suggest that feudal mafia may or may not be honest as regards politics within their closed circles, but that the same will lie for absolute power, which power becomes always sadistic — the power to visit suffering on others with impunity — should go without saying. By contrast, the idea of the “good society”, or great one, may be predicated on empathy (one foundational thought in law: “because it could happen to you”) and integrity. In the feudal mode, our cares may be restricted — me and mine and the rest of the world can go to hell — and in the modern, we note cruelty and suffering meted to others and try to address that in law and in policy.
For a while now, my context has been “Moscow v Washington” — the system of secret police, absolute central power, aristocracy v a modern democratic open society. In which world should one care most to live — as favored in the former where loyalty to power displaces principles and values; or as neglected in the latter where one may get a fair shake, or no “shake” at all?
Your original post asked for one idea. Perhaps two need consideration: empathy matched by integrity.
The cliche goes that where one stands has much to do with where one sits.
If yours is the campaign desk in the palace, the prince might be a good man; if it is the laborer’s bench downwind from “sanitation”, the prince might be a thoughtless one.
In general, liberal democracies strive to attenuate human caprice in the experience of good and bad fortune: law and reason may be slipped between the person and The Power.
However — and here’s the inversion repeated — would you rather live favored in the treacherous atmosphere produced by Power or at loose ends in a more or less just system that takes no special interest in your affairs, your politics, or your fate?
Perhaps in hard times — or merely disappointing one — it may be more natural to seek favor than to extol the virtues of too clinical a system of justice and the “rugged individual” that may or may not make out well beneath it.
Abba — Arafat’s known and others may be suspect — bend to Moscow (the KGB record never goes away), and as Moscow has nowhere to go that wouldn’t be trapped in a century-and-one-half old imperial time bubble, neither has Abbas, who has not been able to do more for the Palestinians than enrich his own network through corruption.
Imho (who else’s?), the Middle East Conflict was Moscow’s post-WWII Cold War Era project, and here perhaps comes the beginning of the end with Abbas bottled up and — for having no place to go — floating backward into history.
It should be all over but the fighting, and on that surreal “Animal Farm” political habitat referred to as Moscow has lost for itself through its displays of barbarism in Syria and Ukraine all moral and noble authority. Neither the “Mafia State” nor Mahmoud Abbas’s need much effort for tarring as regards their corrupted systems.
With standards set by the definition of speech-related crimes (conspiracy, incitement, sedition, and a very few additional regions associated with prohibitions, rightly), I have been absolute about “Freedom of Speech” prerogatives for Americans. I not only see nothing wrong with such a statue but everything right if connected to greater contemplation requiring greater knowledge and humanity.
I own here a copy of Mien Kampf.
It doesn’t make me a Nazi.
In the area of public display managed by public offices or services, see this morning’s wall on Back-Channels.
In general, I endorse Milan Kundera’s observation, “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
States and their leaders do have their icons and standards, and it’s those that may be favored or disfavored across time and adjusted by public consensus openly as part of the process of governance. It would seem that gross historical revisionism has accompanied extremist ideologies and absolute power across time. Certainly, it has been “Communists”, “Fascists”, and “Socialists” along hard lines that have sought to erase the past. Perhaps an exception may be made for the eventual erasure of the names of Palestinian mass murderers who have been made into heroes beneath the despicable and upside-down guidance of Soviet Era thought about the relationship between State Power and “The Masses”. Extreme revolt against that would seem in order today — when and as the Palestinians learn how they have been abused by Moscow — but Confederate flags, statues of despots, books — place them where they belong, but keep them somewhere and don’t forget them or what they said they stood for, or what they really did with their lives.
Today . . . it’s last week’s Big Topic: from the post-Civil War statues of Confederate military nobility to one of Lenin in Washington State, American extremists have engaged in minor battle over what’s in the public presence while the public has been urged to review policy and, perhaps, considering “moving the furniture” of the public lawn or into the back rooms we call museums.
Here’s Laura Southern on the matter:
And here a statement from the National Trust on Historic Preservation (June 10, 2017): https://savingplaces.org/press-center/media-resources/national-trust-statement-on-confederate-memorials#.WZoELdQrJlZ
For how long should the sins of the fathers be visited on their sons?
It’s a timeless question.
To forestall the reemergence of similar evil, the answer is “forever”; to facilitate the doing of good, perhaps the answer should be “Not one more day.”
When I was a little boy recently moved into a new suburb, the still plain dirt yard of a neighbor’s new house and the clean siding of the same proved a too tempting target for the neighborhood’s eight-year-old mudslingers.
Kids.
It’s different with kids, of course.
How different adults are from children in their expanded powers, and yet how similar (in history and today) when it comes to a malicious thoughtlessness and “everyone else was doing it.”
Knowing how the Nazis worked as an infernal mafia, one may sympathize with the family business that intended to stay in business through the Nazi Era and now lives with the long hangover from a bad case of “civilizational narcissism” (reference Mobarak Haider’s work on the Taliban for more about that).
To the end of his life, my father who may have possessed a personality formed in the Depression Era and WWII, would not buy major manufactured German anything.
If today is different, it needs to be kept different and the past firmly consigned to the political period between The Great War and the end of the even greater insanity that came to its end for Germany 72 years ago.
Related Online
Accusation and guilt prove perennial if — or if not — haunting.
Now who would seek to divide the American political campus against its own best interests?
The above played live on YouTube earlier today. It’s now appears or sounds like a recording. (Post-Publication Note: the YouTube poster revoked third-party replay (perhaps) because it knows its feed was designed to present Charlottesville and the United States of America as a House Mightily Divided, and while it has seemed that through the election season and this most turbulent of Administrations, we may not be so divided as confused by so much media devoted to the dramatizing of extremes. “Active Measures”? Could be. The poster, “CCW News”, boasts (boasted) some arrangement with PressTV — and, reliably (if you click over to YouTube), listen to who is talking, masking away history, and framing the present.
Here, I will leave the copy as initially published.
*
We are told that we are divided.
Are we?
We’re “reminded” in the Jahi Issa interview that southern slavery was a colonial enterprise apparently absent of African and Arab practices in conquest and trade.
Here’s a block of URL’s on the history of the world’s most spiritually dismal industry:
Regarding the “southern” contribution, which seems archaic in this day and age: “blood and soil” and “the Jews will not replace us . . . .” — even absent of close-up evidence, the process has Moscow’s political “fingerprints” all over it.
Color codes previously noted and applied on Backchannels:
Red = Old Comrades (Soviet Era communists)
Green = Islamists (strident of Islam)
Black = Black Segregationists
“Red-Green Alliance” serves to represent the effort in the 20th Century to combine political forces to unseat the political intentions of the liberal democratic west. The “Black” component flows down, imho, from older radical politics.
“ANTIFA” is a mystery organization with a global footprint, BackChannels wonders who is behind its development, recruitments, and evidently (and ironically) uniform counter-demonstration programming.
Regarding the New Nationalism (and resurgent feudalism and embrace of the medieval mode) in Europe and North America, BackChannels has suggested that Islamic Terrorism (“Allahu Akbar Terrorism”) has been channeled to goad Americans and Europeans toward the defense of their respective homelands.
” . . . remember that I have bestowed favours upon you . . .”
Is that God?
Is that God and the Prophet?
” . . . remember that WE have bestowed favours upon you . . . .”
Mohammed will proclaim that the Jews perverted the Torah, but the Jews — and let’s acknowledge that the Torah has been “set” in history (okay, it was a committee) and then transcribed by hand on parchment in Hebrew for every living Torah letter by letter by scribes devoted to that extraordinary and regimented art — may claim that not one letter of the Torah has been altered through the ages . . . through the ocean of time between finality and what is read today.
What is “supersession” but a political attempt to “one-up” the Torah and claim final authority in the interest of personal aggrandizement and enrichment?
No Moses?
No Muhammad.
No Constantine?
No Church of Rome.
Frankly, I blame Hillel the Elder for striving to make Judaism accessible to the “restive of Rome”.
He succeeded.
But the Romans, whatever they were, were not necessarily Jewish in soul. They could and did abandon the Pantheon of the Gods (good thing), but they needed the symbols of the divine as Divine.
And oh ye Muslims . . .ye cannot brag the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza on one hand and convincingly tell of “no compulsion” on the other.
It doesn’t wash.
I’m an American of Jewish descent — an American Secular Humanist.
I appreciate the full range of thought about God, nature, and the universe, and much the appreciate today the fewer than 7,000 living languages into which our thoughts have been packed, each language representing an isolated People’s way of inventing responses to their own environmental and social challenges.
If I were drawing salary as an academic or writer, I would embark on a lengthy period of research and discussion about “modernity”, humanism, comparative religion, and multiculturalism. However, unpaid, occasionally validated, I may leave the above to stand as it stands.
Here is the renowned but under-publicized Daniel Everett on his experience with Christianity, primitives, language, and faith:
Everett’s terrific, a capable scholar of unquestionable integrity.
BackChannels 