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Samuel P. Huntington died Wednesday at the age of 81. He was one of the greatest in the field of political science and was most famous for his clash of civilizations thesis. This reminds me of an unfinished series of articles I wrote almost a year ago. Time flies. I’ll try to take care of that in 2009.
Meanwhile, visit Oskorei and read his well put commentary (in Swedish) about Huntington and his ideas.
The Clash of Civilizations – Part One
The Clash of Civilizations – Part Two
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The U.S. war on terrorism (since 9/11) soon will have cost the American taxpayers $1 trillion – and counting. This impossible-to-grasp trillion dollar figure does not include, for example, long-term health care for the probably countless wounded or the interest payments on the money borrowed by the Federal Government to fund the war.
Nearly 5,000 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives in the conflicts. How many wounded? What if the U.S. would have fought their wars in the United States instead? How interesting…
And right now, Israel, with full U.S. support, is on yet another killing spree. We all know what the Bush administration has to say, but what about Obama? Now let’s hear him speak about hope, change and compassion regarding this U.S.-created, U.S.-supported disaster. Let’s hear him!
This is a world of violence. On proper terms, when rules and regulations dictate war and when equality and justice reigns supreme, I worship at the altar of Mixed Martial Arts – the greatest sport ever. And I usually hate sports…
Tonight is the ultimate MMA event of the year, UFC 92 – The Ultimate 2008. The fight card is unbelievable! I’ve been hyped up for this event for months and tonight it’ll finally climax. The 27th of December 2008 is Christmas Day for real.
This is the outcome I hope for. I’ll go back and edit this post when it’s all over.
Names in bold are my picks.
Forrest Griffin vs Rashad Evans –> Yes!
Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira vs Frank Mir –> No…
Quinton Jackson vs Wanderlei Silva –> Yes! Yes! Yes!
Cheick Kongo vs Mostapha Al Turk –> Yes!
C.B. Dollaway vs Mike Massenzio –>No…
Yushin Okami vs Dean Lister –> Yes!
Antoni Hardonk vs Mike Wessel –>No…
Matt Hamill vs Reese Andy –> Yes!
Brad Blackburn vs Ryo Chonan –> Yes!
Dan Evensen vs Patrick Barry –> No…
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I’m reading Jonathan Littell‘s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones, English translation due in March 2009, De välvilliga in Swedish) and I like it – but what must be repeated over and over again is this: this is fiction! The descriptions of everyday life in Nazi Germany bear little resemblance to reality. As with Elie Wiesel‘s Night, and to a certain extent Anne Frank’s Diary, this cannot be seen as some kind of evidence or witness description of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, a lot of people will use it that way because the majority of the people in the Western hemisphere are brainwashed and cannot think rational thoughts when dealing with such a sensitive subject as the Holocaust.
However, what I wanted to touch upon is Littell’s real life opinions about Israel and the Holocaust. Littell, of Jewish background, seems to have a clear standpoint that I consider very sane. Hear him out, quoted from an article in Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper:
“My reading of what you call ‘Holocaust’ is also less Jewish and Judeo-centric than that of my father. I think that what happened was far broader than a narrow issue of ‘Germans killing Jews.’ The English word ‘holocaust’ is certainly the wrong term to describe what happened. It is a religious term, rife with non-historical meaning. I don’t think the word ‘shoah’ is any better. It’s a controversy among historians. Raul Hilberg described it as ‘the destruction of European Jewry,’ but he encountered criticism because that was also the Nazi terminology.
Ulrich Herbert calls it the ‘National-Socialist extermination policy,’ and I find that a far more accurate description because it also includes the extermination of the homosexuals, the Gypsies, the disabled and other minorities.”
Indeed, according to Littell, the “National-Socialist extermination policy” was “only one of the several big genocides that have happened in human history.”
But doesn’t the unprovoked nature of the destruction of the Jews, the underlying ideology, the apparatus that was created to implement it, its scale, make it exceptional in human history?
“I personally understand the arguments for the exceptionality of the Holocaust, but I don’t agree with them. The basic argument is that the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews, but I don’t see the difference between that and an extermination policy that was aimed – and implemented on a large scale – at groups such as the peasants in the Soviet Union or in Cambodia. Every genocide is exceptional.”
“I think the extermination of the Jews is a universal problem, I think it concerns everyone. Beyond that, I think that today the issue is being used for political purposes in Israel.”
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It is political, a mechanism. It has no connection to what actually happened. The Holocaust, I think, is being exploited politically, in a way that the Nazi extermination policy against other groups – Russians, homosexuals, Gypsies – is not.”Asked whether he thinks the Holocaust shapes Israeli actions today, he replies: “On the one hand, Israel is a country that underwent a serious trauma, and the Holocaust made it dramatically paranoid. But then there is also greed and land-grabbing and all that shit. That’s just inexcusable. I’m sorry, but this cannot be excused by traumas that occurred 60 years ago.”
Littell says Israel uses the Holocaust to justify “inexcusable” acts, by which he means the situation in the territories, and he likens the actions of the Israel Defense Forces to the behavior of the Nazis in the period before they came to power.
Would you really compare the two?
“No, we cannot compare: There is nothing like genocide in the territories, but they are doing absolutely atrocious things. If the government would let the soldiers do worse things, they would. Everyone says, ‘Look how the Germans dealt with the Jews even before the Holocaust: cutting the beards, humiliating them in public, forcing them to clean the street.’ That kind of stuff happens in the territories every day. Every goddamn day.
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“Like how what the Americans are doing in Iraq is unacceptable. I’m not talking about the war but about torture and things like Abu Ghraib. Understanding the Germans of 60 years ago may make you feel that you’re not that far from it, as Americans or as Israelis. So maybe it will be possible to enforce our social mechanisms to prevent our societies, at least, from going completely off the wall.”What should your Israeli readers do?
“I think the Israelis, instead of beating their breast, should take a long, hard look at what they are doing now. I am not saying that present-day Israeli society is comparable to Nazi society in World War II, but it is definitely one of the most crazed Western societies.”
“Look,” Littell sums up, in a delayed response to the question of his motivation and perhaps that of his protagonist as well, “Life is a question of a search for meaning – what’s it all about? Are we here to have fun? Make money? Have sex? No, clearly not. Then you have this whole religion thing. A lot of people find meaning in that – I don’t. I adhere to a point of view that says our existence is completely meaningless and completely absurd, and all the horrible things we do to each other are completely unjustified. And anyway, we are going to die. So the question is how you get through life if you accept this approach as the fundamental parameter. Personally, I sometimes find it pretty amusing, but most times it’s just grim. And I focus on the grim, because it’s there.”
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When finally caught, Theodore Kaczynski was at once dismissed as a nutcase. People said ”He killed because he was insane”, rather than asking themselves ”Why did someone so like me commit murder?”
And so, the man who media at first portrayed as a genius and then a hermit was now dubbed a nut. There was nothing more to explore. The man was a freak. Case closed. And then silence.
As for the proceedings in court, Kaczynski’s lawyers and family worked hard for the court to declare Ted mentally insane to save him from the death penalty. His family gave interviews to all the major newspapers and television shows, saying that Ted had been mentally ill since childhood. Their campaign was very effective. The only problem was that Ted himself constantly would object to the whole insanity thing. ”David knows very well that I would unhesitatingly choose death over incarceration”, he writes in his book Truth Versus Lies. Ted would rather die for his ideas than being humiliated in court, being labelled insane. He valued his ideology more than his own life.
Ted asked his lawyers for them to send for his test results that he recieved during his years at Harvard, when he was participating in Professor Murray’s psychological experiments. They would prove he was clearly not insane at the time. His lawyers didn’t put much work into it, and they did so for a reason: it would ruin their case. They were well known for being respectable and reliable and they had worked on this ”mentally defect” line for so long it would ruin their reputation if the old test results would show what Kaczynski claimed – that he was perfectly normal.
In fact, the defense attorneys refused to let Kaczynski meet with psychiatrists, fearing they would not come to the ”correct” conclusions. They said their client had a ”pathological dread of examination by psychiatrists”, which was very far from the truth. One professor of psychiatry, Phillip J. Resnick, was not convinced that Kaczynski suffered from a mental disease, the writings of the Unabomber did not show this at all. While media, the defense attorneys and the Kaczynski family cemented the belief that celibacy, primitivism and that kind of lifestyle and ideas were signs of mental illness, Kaczynski rationally concluded that if he was labelled mentally ill his political agenda would be denigrated and he could not sit back and accept that. Resnick wrote several letters to the court asking for Kaczynski to be examined by a psychiatrist, without success.
At the same time the story about Murray’s experiments in the 60’s surfaced in the press, and people immediately assumed that he had suffered from mental illness since he had been psychologically examined back then. But nobody knew exactly what had happened at Harvard, not even the family. It was all rumours and media kept the real significance of the Harvard data in the dark, letting the rumours grow.
It was not until February 1998, when it was too late to make a difference, that Kaczynski managed to persuade his attorneys to send his answers from these psychological tests, along with the answers of the twenty-one other study objects, to a psychological testing expert. Because the individuals who took these tests were identified only by code names the expert could conduct a blind evaluation measuring the answers without knowing who had given them.
The expert, Berthram Karon, found that on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 a complete abscense of illness and 10 the highest degree of illness, Kaczynski scored 0 for ”Schizotopy” and 2 for ”Psychopathy”. In other words, Kaczynski was perfectly normal.
After much delay and stalling from Ted’s attorneys the court finally sent for psychiatrist Sally Johnson to examine Kaczynski. She spent ten days interviewing him and reading his writings. She concluded that he was competent to stand trial and represent himself, which was exactly what he wanted. She wrote that ”he does no show evidence of overt disorganization or psychotic symptomology”, and does not show ”evidence of a mood disorder, obvious thought disorder, intellectual dysfunction”. But – and this is the weak threads on which they hung a diagnosis of mental illness – he is ”introverted, shy, and socially insecure”, and he believes ”the system as it exists is bad and rebellion against it is justified”, and that ”freedom and personal dignity have greater importance than comfort and security”. She saw it equally symptomatic that he ”feels compelled to live a life of extreme isolation and to focus his energy against all aspects of society that are attempting to control the masses.”
Media immediately hailed the report as proving Kaczynski insane.
Only three days after Johnson delivered her report to the court the trial was on. The judge – to everyone’s astonishment – denied Kaczynski’s request for self-representation, even though the report clearly stated that he’d be able to represent himself in court. What the hell happened?
The only explanation the court could provide was delay: Kaczynski had waited too long to invoke his right to self-representation. It was obvious that this cheap judge wanted a quick trial so he could go on with his life.
Facing a humiliating trial in which his attorneys would portray him as insane and his philosophy as the ravings of a mad man, Kaczynski capitulated: In exchange for the government’s agreement not to seek the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to thirteen bombings that killed three men and seriously injured two others, and took responsibility for sixteen bombings from 1978 to 1995.
On May 4, 1998, Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
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Ok, so Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama’s primary rival, is now the secretary of State. Now, why would Obama, a man who ran a campaign based on a new kind of politics that was an implicit rejection of the Clinton years, choose a potent symbol of those years as his chief diplomat? You digest that for a second.
This clearly is yet another soap-opera starring corrupt politicians. It should be obvious to everybody except for the truly naïve who always fail to see through the political fakery (for example, Swedish “blog stars” who usually write columns about fashion or casual crap wrote how they cried when Obama made his victory speech…).
Mike Whitney says it much better than me in his article The Obama “Dream Team”, where he explains what it’s pretty much all about:
The truth is, Obama was shoehorned into the White House because the ruling elite saw that the country was slipping into a consumer-led depression. They needed a bright new face to restore confidence and spark optimism during the tough times ahead. But now that he’s been elected, they’ve surrounded him with the very men who, to great extent, created the present crisis.
Do read the full article!
Like I said before, it’s a huge step having a black man in the White House, but it won’t make that difference a lot of people seem to hope for. No change. Not for the one’s that need it anyway.
I’d like to quote the amazing Swedish poet Bruno K. Öijer here:
Men imponerad skulle jag först bli den dag när en homosexuell indian väljs till president i USA.
(When a homosexual American Indian is elected as President of the United States, that’s when I’d be impressed.)
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The years before World War I were very vital for Pound. He was occupied with his poetry, with journalism, with his work as editor of the journal Poetry, and with new writers like T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. When WWI exploded everything was shattered. Pound, recieving frontline reports from his friends, felt the best part of his generation had been ravaged by an absurdly wasteful war. Having begun his career with the studies of love poetry, now venom, antagonism and invective were to become equally important motivations for his own work.
He began to loathe Western civilization because it had no room left for its artists, and ”because it seemed systematically bent on its own extinction through warfare”. He hated the liberal modern state, where there seemed to be no strong leaders and where responsibility had become corrupted by insane bureaucracy. He also hated the influence of organized religion, and took as his models the two grand masters of hatred: Dante and Villon. He began to incorporate his anger and criticism in The Cantos, a booklenght long epic poem of 120 sections which was to become his lifework.
Pound, an American by birth, moved to London in 1908, and in 1921, dissatisfied with England after the war, he moved to Paris, and four years later to Rapallo, Italy. Here he became very interested in economics and he campaigned viciously against the Western banking system. He began to fear the preparations of yet another great war, ”a second instance of organized madness”, and he imagined Jews to influence political systems, the banking business and the weapon industries. He thought they would begin the next war to create a huge debt and new profits.
He began writing letters to American senators and congress men: ”Every man in high office is a thief’s accomplice”. He also campaigned against the obscenity laws affecting great literary works like James Joyce’s Ulysses. Of course, this was not a popular thing to do amongst the men of power. Even his closest friends began to protest against him.
When World War II was a fact, Pound ventilated his feelings of anger in a series of broadcasts on Italian State Radio where he – besides speaking of cultural matters – defended fascism, savaged America and incorporated what most would call anti-Semitism in his denunciations of the war. His radio rage was monitored by the FBI, and in 1943 he was arrested for treason by the United States government. He was incarcerated and isolated for three weeks in a very small wire cage, subject to broiling sun and searchlights all night. He was interrogated in an U.S. Army detention center where they usually dealt with troops who had raped civilians or disobeyed their officers. No one was allowed to talk to him, not even the guards, and from his gorilla cage he witnessed several inmates being shot to death in escape attempts. Finally, after weeks of fear, he ”believed something snapped” in his head, and he ”suffered a nervous breakdown”.
In Washington he defended his action as a ”protest against a system which creates one war after another, in a series and in system”. He refused to admit he’d been wrong.
Treason is punishable by death, and the U.S. government now faced a dilemma: Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if one of the world’s leading democracies executed one of its leading writers? But why should an artist deserve special treatment, even if he had contributed more than most to the general cultural level of the times?
The solution was to declare him insane.
In 1946 he was sent to what he called the ”Hell-hole”, a ward for lunatics in St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., an insane asylum where he was to be kept for the next twelve years of his life, from age sixty to seventy-two. He spent twelve years in the company of screaming men in straitjackets. Despite his suffering he continued writing The Cantos, which he had been working on since 1915. Now the themes of economics, governance, and culture were integral to its content. He also translated the Confusian classics while being held prisoner in this lunatic asylum.
He was often visited by a Library of Congress researcher named Eustace Mullins. Pound commissioned Mullins to write a book about the history of the Federal Reserve, which resulted in Secrets of The Federal Reserve. Pound believed that the bankers in charge of the Federal Reserve and their associates in the Bank of England were responsible for getting the United States into both World Wars, in an effort to drive up government debt beyond sustainable levels. He claimed that bankers hide behind the screen of the central banks and pull political strings to drive countries into the war, creating immense profits for themselves as the principal beneficiaries of wartime debt. Pound advocated an abandonment of the current system of money being created by private bankers.
Released in 1958 after pressure from T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost, writers he had helped as critic and editor, he returned to Italy where he gave in to despair and depression. For the last ten years of his life he almost stopped writing and speaking, the man who had spent all his life doing just that: raging against the system in the name of poetry. The releaser of words spent his last ten years wordless. He died in 1972, two days after his 87th birthday, in Venice where he is buried.
The Cantos was never finished, but is nevertheless published. Still, along with the 794 pages long A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound I don’t understand much at all… Even scholars claim that The Cantos is an extreme piece of work, and it is said that Pound himself got depressed when realizing he’d spent most of his life writing a poem few people would understand. What I understand, though, is that The Cantos is the work of a genius.
Besides being a poet, critic, author, journalist and editor, Pound was also a translator and composer. In Paris he composed two complete operas and several pieces for solo violin. Pound’s first radio opera, transmitted in October 1931 under the title The Testament of François Villon, was one of the first electronically enhanced operas to be broadcasted in Europe.
Personally, I have no understanding at all for this thing they call opera, but you may listen and judge for yourself at Amazon. More info at ezrapoundmusic.com.
Current selling prices for an original copy of Ezra Pound’s A Lume Spento (1908):
$45000-$90000 /£24000-£48000
More info at bookride.com.
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The separation wall in Israel/Palestine.
Remember to click all images to enlarge!
This isn’t graffiti, but it’s part of the art crime scene and the idea is pretty much the same. Gigantic posters smeared all over, in your face, without authorization. Pretty much like commercials, except that graffiti ain’t trying to sell you anything, but to make you think.
JR is an art genius and a great photographer (he uses only a camera that he found once in the subway). His street art project Face2Face has resulted in the film Faces which has been broadcasted at the same period by the Israeli TV and the Arab channels. It is also presented by the International Festival of Muslim Films in Kazan as well as The UK Jewish Film Festival in London. This must be unique!
Here’s the description of the Face2Face project:
When we met in 2005, we decided to go together in the Middle-East to figure out why Palestinians and Israelis couldn’t find a way to get along together. We then traveled across the Israeli and Palestinian cities without speaking much. Just looking to this world with amazement. This holy place for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This tiny area where you can see mountains, sea, deserts and lakes, love and hate, hope and despair embedded together.
After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families. A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he his endlessly fighting with him. It’s obvious, but they don’t see that.
We must put them face to face. They will realize. We want that, at last, everyone laughs and thinks when he sees the portrait of the other and his own portrait.
The Face2Face project is to make portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and to post them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. In a very sensitive context, we need to be clear.
We are in favor of a solution for which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders. All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nussibeh, Geneva Accords) are converging in the same direction. We can be optimistic. We hope that this project will contribute to a better understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.
Today, “Face to face” is necessary.
Within a few years, we will come back for “Hand in hand”.
JR has also done some amazing paste work in Rio De Janeiro and the favellas, as well as in London, New York, Brussels, Carthagene… Well, pretty much everywhere. Here’s a mixture of his stuff. Check out more at his website.
