Category Archives: quotes

literature, quotes

>This is not an exit

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“Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. Ensure a strong national defense, prevent the spread of communism in Central America, work for a Middle East peace settlement, prevent U.S. military involvement overseas. We have to ensure that America is a respected world power. Now that’s not to belittle our domestic problems, which are equally important, if not more. Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education, strengthen laws to crack down on crime and illegal drugs. We also have to ensure that college education is affordable for the middle class and protect Social Security for senior citizens plus conserve natural resources and wilderness areas and reduce the influence of political action committees.”
The table stares at me uncomfortably, even Stash, but I’m on a roll.
“But economically we’re still a mess. We have to find a way to hold down the inflation rate and reduce the deficit. We also need to provide training and jobs for the unemployed as well as protect existing American jobs from unfair foreign imports. We have to make America the leader in new technology. At the same time we need to promote economic growth and business expansion and hold the line against federal income taxes and hold down interest rates while promoting opportunities for small businesses and controlling mergers and big corporate takeovers.”
Price nearly spits up his Absolut after this comment but I try to make eye contact with each one of them, especially Vanden, who if she got rid of the green streak and the leather and got some color – maybe joined an aerobics class, slipped on a blouse, something by Laura Ashley – might be pretty. But why does she sleep with Stash? He’s lumpy and pale and has a bad cropped haircut and is at least ten pounds overweight; there’s no muscle tone beneath the black T-shirt.
“But we can’t ignore our social needs either. We have to stop people from abusing the welfare system. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women’s freedom of choice. We also have to control the influx of illegal immigrants. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values and curb graphic sex and violence on TV, in movies, in popular music, everywhere. Most importantly we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.”
I finish my drink. The table sits facing me in total silence.
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, 1991

I’m a huge fan of this novel. Not for the violence – that was what caught my attention when I was 15 and heard about it for the first time – but for its brilliant and clever take on satire. I think the above quote shows just that. Patrick Bateman (nice reference to Norman Bates in another famous novel: Psycho), a yuppie investment banker who is in fact a serial killer totally devoid of emotion – living next door to Tom Cruise (!) – explains how to save America from impending doom. Hilarious!
I still haven’t seen the movie. I hear it’s pretty good. I also hear that the novel is being turned into a stage musical on Broadway! Even more hilarious!

Abandon all hope ye who enter here…

links, politics, quotes

>With each grave…

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To listen and watch without hearing or seeing
allows the indifference, the ignorance and complicity to continue
and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

Just some links and quotes
from relevant articles about the war in Gaza.

Jennifer Loewenstein – If Hamas didn’t exist (zmag)
There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political environment. They are the result of something entirely different than what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you.

Rashid Khalidi – What You Don’t Know About Gaza (New York Times)
Nearly everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

Elaine C. Hagopian – Why Hamas is not the issue – History matters (counterpunch.org)
The picture changes when history matters. Treating Israeli war crimes as historically detached events, unrelated to its Zionist ideology and militaristic strategy to control all of Palestine, becomes more transparent each day.

Glenn Greenwald – Both parties cheerlead still more loudly for Israel’s war (salon.com)
At exactly the time that worldwide horror over this war is at its peak, the Democratic-led Congress steps up to announce to the world: “this is our war, too; we support whatever Israel does absolutely and without reservations.” We thus make Israel’s wars our wars; its enemies our enemies; its intractable disputes our disputes; and the hostility and anger it generates our own. And we embolden Israel to continue further.

Thalif Deen – Aid Groups Dispute Israeli Claims in Gaza (antiwar.com)
As the Israelis try to justify the massive loss of civilian life in Gaza, their arguments and counter-charges continue to be shot down either by the United Nations or by international human rights organizations.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on November 10, 1975 by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), “determine[d] that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.



literature, politics, quotes

>Jonathan Littell on Israel, the Holocaust and life

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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.”
[…]
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.

[…]
“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.”

music, quotes

>Music that matters: Amebix – Part One

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>One of my favourite bands of all time is without a doubt the almighty Amebix, formed in England 1978. The music, the lyrics, the artwork – everything is perfect. I will write a longer text about them further on, but for now I just want you to discover their fine malt lyrics in the shape of the opening lines to Nobody’s Driving from the Monolith (1987) album. This is real poetry to me, and the way it is sung is beyond artistry. But more about that later. Just dwell on these lines for a while. It’s not their best song (and certainly not their worst either, I love it!), but it displays the power, creativity and true independence of the band. No gods, no masters!

I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream
They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird
Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine
I screamed into the wind my goodbye to the world

Hell, I might just as well publish the lyrics in full.
Worship, on your knees, feeble bastards!

I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream
They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird
Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine
I screamed into the wind my goodbye to the world

It was dark in the desert so we walked through the night
The vessel was waiting where we had been led
An awesome machine to tear through the sky
The last exodus from the land of the dead

[Chorus:]
We are swimming in the lunar sea
Drowning in insanity
Look to the shore you will see
Your leaders were lying
Nobody’s driving!

Upon the horizon is the earth I once knew
Now a red ball of light suspended in space
So we erected a stone on the shore of the sea
As a grim epitaph to the lost human race

[Repeat first verse]

[Chorus:]
We are swimming in the lunar sea
Drowning in insanity
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
Our world is dying
And nobody’s driving!

philosophy, quotes

>Spengler: The morale of dawning "civilization"

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>This is a continuation of the quote in the previous post.

The Decline of The West, Chapter IX
Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
The morale of dawning “civilization”

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase ”transvaluation of all values” for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practices them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. […]
There was an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese desouling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full.
Culture and Civilization – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 – on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and ”facts”. […]
Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a ”natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men concieve of the State as an ”order of society” which not only can but must be altered – then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. […]
As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as man is put on to the artifical soil of great cities – which are intellectual worlds to themselves – and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem. […] One feels that there is something artifical, soulless, half-true in these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself.

philosophy, quotes

>Spengler: Morale as a life-feeling

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>I’ve started to read Oswald Spengler again, one of the most interesting minds I’ve ever encountered, and right now I’m working on an article about Man and Technics (1931). In the meantime I’ll publish some quotes from the abridged edition of The Decline of The West (1918/1923).

For a better understanding of these quotes (that is if you’re not familiar with Spengler, his definitions of Culture and Civilization, the Faustian soul and so forth) I recommend you read the previous posts first:
Oswald Spengler – The Decline of Cultures
Här finns inget varaktigt och allmängiltigt (Swedish)
Is world peace possible?

The Decline of The West, Chapter IX
Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism

Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say ”thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders are unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. […] You ”shall”, the State ”shall”, society ”shall” – this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element.
What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittlingly or no, Socialists. […]
It is quite wrong to associate Christianity with the morale imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity – and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The ”it” became the ”I”, the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted – nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. […]
There are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. Just as every painter and every musician has something in him which, by force of inward necessity, never emerges into consciousness but dominates a priori the form-language of his work and differentiates that work from the work of every other Culture, so every conception of Life held by a Culture-man possesses a priori (in the very strictest Kantian sense of the phrase) a constitution that is deeper than all momentary judgements and strivings and impresses the style of these with the hallmark of the particular Culture. […]
Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morale of humanity. A morale, like a sculpture, a music, a painting-art, is a self-contained form-world expressing a life-feeling; it is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity.

…to be continued.