>PDF files can be a drag to read through. Thanks to bibl.se I found this great online PDF viewer that works like a charm and looks spectacular. It’s truly easy to publish PDF files, and it’s easy to embed them on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, whatever…
As bibl.se puts it: “If SlideShare is the YouTube of PowerPoint, this is definitely the YouTube of PDF!”
Check out Issuu right away!
Below you’ll find a pretty cool Ukrainian art e-zine named Rott Art.
>This is Part Two in the series about Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory.
Part One can be found here.
It was in an article in Foreign Affairs (1993) and a subsequent book (The Clash of Civilizations and The Remaking of World Order (1996)) that Samuel P. Huntington, Harvard Professor, caused a massive stir in the world of global politics.
Huntington predicted that global conflicts after the Cold War would no longer focus on ideologies, like communism and capitalism, but rather find energy in cultural differences like old battles rooted in old cultures (look at Kenya right now). He claimed that the West, and first and foremost America – at the time the world’s only super power, was in decline and that Islamic and East Asian civilizations were on the march (look at the Middle East, India and China today).
Is Huntington saying “I told you so!” to the world? We’ll see about that later. In this post I’d like to focus on the criticism that was and is directed towards his thesis, and in Part Three or Four I’ll look at what Huntington himself has to say looking back at his own work.
First, Huntington draws the global map with a very sharp pencil. It’s the West against the rest, where the West is all alone against seven civilizations: Islamic, African, Latin American, Hindu, Buddhist, Orthodox, Sinic and Japanese. By doing this he is defining cultures by power.
But the most important – and the most dangerous – “failure” in Huntington’s thesis is, as I see it, that he fails to see the difference between Islam and radical Islam, and thus fears the conflict between Islam and the West (Christianity) for the very wrong reasons, since radical Islam does not represent the Islamic civilization. Islam is not a coherent civilization. You don’t look at Christianity like that, do you? Of course not, because we know there’s about a million ways to praise the Lord within the Christian community. We should know that about Islam as well, but “the war on terror” and its false media won’t let us.
Radical Islamists are “nowhere men”, meaning they are children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. USA is fighting a war against disparate groups that are independent of nation states! They are not fighting Islam, even if that is what they (and the Western world?) seem to think. Also, they cannot cope with Islam as a state of power. Just look at their current relationship with Iran…
And hey, radical islamists are already here, either knocking at the gates of Europe or living amongst us all at this very moment. Things have changed drastically since Huntington began working on his thesis some fifteen years ago. Back then, Islam was beginning to rise. Now Islam has become a big part of the West, which many see as a negative thing pretty much thanks to “the war on terror” and false media not giving the whole story et cetera and so forth… Many seem to think that every muslim is a radical militant muslim. How sad and tragic of us to think so.
What Huntington should be afraid of though, and where I think he is right, is the fact that the West is rapidly losing its coherence and culture, its will and pride, feasting on materialistic ideologies and unsparing wars (dealing with the Arab world by using military force is one example), while Islam is growing stronger everyday – in spirit and soul.
I believe and hope that spirit and soul will prevail over materialistic interests.
Criticism will continue in Part Three.
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”Most people have no idea of the sacrifices involved in becoming a mixed martial arts fighter. They basically have to train in three disciplines: they have to train striking, they have to train wrestling and they have to be trained in submissions. These are three totally different games. You know, take-down defense, take-downs, striking, kicking, punches, knees, elbows… Then on top of that they have to learn jiu-jitsu. I mean, it’s an ubelievably involved sport.”
Joe Rogan, Ultimate Fight Night 4
Sure, there are bar fighters and street fighters, but they are there to entertain the crowd, sort of. Compare Anderson Silva with Tank Abbott for example. Not that I have anything against Tank (both fighters are on my fave list), but I believe there’s a slight difference when talking well-rounded fighters here…
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Just when I started to get really bored with death metal (Kaamos, come back!) I discovered these Swedish masters. Their album, Splenium For Nyktophobia, was released in 1994, but it was only yesterday that I got to hear them for the first time.
Their gig at yesterdays happening (Treblinka, Obscurity and Uncanny) made me rush home right away and download the album, and I sure as hell wasn’t disappointed (except for some minor shitty passages…). They play(ed) the kind of death metal that I adore: memorable and varied songs with a crushing production and awesome growls. And every once in a while their punk roots are revealed, especially when they sing in Swedish. It’s reminiscent of a metallised version of G-Anx or old Napalm Death, while the main work sounds a bit like old Entombed/Edge of Sanity. Something like that. Or maybe not.
Listen to Soul Incest and bang your head for Satan!
(Hopefully you’ll be able to read my review of all gigs in the paper edition of Sweden Rock Magazine.)
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Google Sightseeing takes you on a tour of the world by using the Google Earth program and Google Maps in your browser. Since Google will take over the whole goddamn world within seconds, why not give in and freak out? Google rules.
They apparently update this site daily and there are loads of cool places to discover. The latest update shows the infamous “Death Road“, or Yungus Road, in Bolivia, often referred to as the most dangerous road in the world. Between 200 and 300 people die here each year, which is quite understandable if you load up the layers in Google Earth and zoom that crazy shit. I wonder how they built that stuff in the first place… The two-way traffic shares a space just 3,6 metres (12 feet) wide.
One of the local road rules specifies that the downhill driver never has the right of way and must move to the outer edge of the road. Imagine that when there are no guardrails! No wonder there are so many crosses along the path.
>Oswald Spengler answered that with the following text, originally published in Cosmopolitan 1936:
“The question whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.
Life is a struggle involving plants, animals, and humans. It is a struggle between individuals, social classes, peoples, and nations, and it can take the form of economic, social, political, and military competition. It is a struggle for the power to make one’s will prevail, to exploit one’s advantage, or to advance one’s opinion of what is just or expedient. When other means fail, recourse will be taken time and again to the ultimate means: violence. An individual who uses violence can be branded a criminal, a class can be called revolutionary or traitorous, a people bloodthirsty. But that does not alter the facts. Modern world-communism calls its wars “uprisings,” imperialist nations describe theirs as “pacification of foreign peoples.” And if the world existed as a unified state, wars would likewise be referred to as “uprisings.” The distinctions here are purely verbal.
Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous colored races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is always negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a static, terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence.
As long as man continues to evolve there will be wars. Should the white peoples ever become so tired of war that their governments can no longer incite them to wage it, the earth will inevitably fall a victim to the colored men, just as the Roman Empire succumbed to the Teutons. Pacifism means yielding power to the inveterate nonpacifists. Among the latter there will always be white men — adventurers, conquerors, leader-types — whose following increases with every success. If a revolt against the whites were to occur today in Asia, countless whites would join the rebels simply because they are tired of peaceful living.
Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and be rulers of the world.”
…THE COUNTERATTACK ON WORLD SUPREMACY…THE COUNTERATTACK ON WORLD SUPREMACY…
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“Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the German born Hebrew University professor, was probably the first to suggest that the Holocaust has become the new Jewish religion. ‘The Holocaust’ is far more than historical narrative, it indeed contains most of the essential religious elements: it has its priests (Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, etc.) and prophets (Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and those who warn about the Iranian Judeocide to come). It has its commandments and dogmas (‘never again’, ‘six million’, etc.). It has its rituals (memorial days, Pilgrimage to Auschwitz etc.). It establishes an esoteric symbolic order (kapo, gas chambers, chimneys, dust, Musselmann, etc.). It has its shrines and temples (Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and now the UN).
If this is not enough, the Holocaust religion is also maintained by a massive economic network and global financial infrastructures (Holocaust industry a la Norman Finkelstein). Most interestingly, the Holocaust religion is coherent enough to define the new ‘antichrists’ (the Deniers) and it is powerful enough to persecute them (Holocaust denial laws).”
Gilad Atzmon: From Esther to AIPAC
According to the above mentioned Holocaust denial laws, Wolfgang Fröhlich has been sentenced to six and a half years (!) in prison for thought crimes (!!). Unfortunately you won’t read about that in Amnesty Press (aren’t they supposed to write about political prisoners?) or anywhere else in the major media, so here is an article in German.
Another article on the subject of Holocaust religion:
Holocaust Religion and Holocaust Industry In The Service of Israel
from State of Nature, a quarterly online journal of the Left that “stands opposed to the capitalist economic order and the imperialist ambitions of the world’s great powers” and “remains committed to the development of protest movements and the construction of a radical alternative to the status quo”, and “aims to publish essays, interviews, commentaries, reviews, poetry and photography that inspire progressive thought, unite dissenting voices, and dispel the myths of the world order.”
And in case you missed the link above, check out Gilad Atzmon‘s page! Not only is he a great writer and political philosopher, he’s an awesome jazz musician as well and you can listen to his music on the homepage.