Extremism is no longer restricted to the Far Right. It is alive and well amongst the “normal” Conservative Party rank and file.
I am deeply ashamed to admit that I know some of these people.
I try and avoid discussions with those whose views I find distasteful, but somehow I got drawn in recently.
Apparently all two million inhabitants of Gaza are terrorists, and genocide is a perfectly reasonable reaction to the recent slaughter of Israeli citizens led by Hamas.
The endless bombardment of Lebanon by the IDF is fully justified self defense. Asked whether the Sabra and Chatila massacres were also justified, I was met by bewilderment.
The US is entirely right to bomb Iran and slaughter its leaders and military as well as thousands of innocent civilians.
Israeli military operations, escalating settler violence, and the extensive expropriation of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians and widespread displacement. Once again, this is all perfectly acceptable to the local Tory politician I was speaking to.
Talk, negotiation and the barest human decency has, apparently, never worked and never will.
A vicious and bigoted Dark Age Theocracy? A bunch of murdering thugs in the Likud Party? The Hesbollox religious nutters? The delightful Houthis? Or perhaps the Ginger Pygmy and his ill educated rednecks?
Let’s face it, it’s not much of a choice. The similarities are more striking than the differences and god help us if the November mid terms are high jacked by the moron in the orange toupee.
So much for the War to End All Wars. So much for the UN and all the rest of the useless related paraphernalia.
So much for the equally absurd religions of the US Christian Right, the insane Jewish extremists (whose god promised them dominion over the entire Middle East) and the Arabs. Hilarious to think they all worship the same god, and all believe god is with them in their murderous endeavours.
Equally amusing to realise the Jews of Israel and the Arabs of the Middle East are of the same racial stock.
I was at evensong last night, listening to Numbers 21. Guess what, the Jews kicked the shit out of King Og of Bashan – a Syrian gent.
“And they turned and went up by the way of Bashan: and Og the king of Bashan went out against them, he, and all his people, to the battle at Edrei. And the LORD said unto Moses, Fear him not: for I have delivered him into thy hand, and all his people, and his land; and thou shalt do to him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at Heshbon. So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was none left him alive: and they possessed his land.”
Nice bloke old Yahweh, innit. Trouble is he’s playing a double game. Whose side is he on? God knows (no pun intended). The US and the Jews? Or the equally pleasantly behaved Mohammedans?
It’s anyone’s guess really, and always has been. Some god eh? The treacherous swine.
How sadly pathetic that the past is endlessly repeated. How sick and evil our species is.
Endless wars over endless thousands of years and all over the same petty human concerns.
Lasting peace can never be achieved through violence.
Having bombed, maimed and murdered its way through Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran the US has the gullible stupidity to claim that it has acted for peace.
Not that the Arabs, Koreans or Vietnamese are any better. Not that any society is.
Trump is proud of his “achievements” it seems but then the man is a vain fool. As are his followers. His recent comments on Hiroshima emphasise the depths of the man’s crass ignorance and witless stupidity.
But of course he is merely the latest incarnation of man’s venal foolishness.
Remember 9/11? The Arab world has reason enough to hate the US, and yet our neighbours over the pond continue to make the same sad mistakes and were affronted and surprised when the people they had mistreated for decades blew up a couple of skyscrapers in New York.
And the Israelis – still living their Old Testament dreams it seems.
What a swine Yahweh was:
“Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
“God, isn’t god a shit” – as Randolph Churchill once said.
And now the whole world seems set on war, once again. How tedious. Build up your stock of deadly toys, recruit more cannon fodder. Invade and commit unspeakable horror everywhere you can. Take over Taiwan. Nuke the Russians. Crush the evil Chinese. Invade Canada, take over Greenland by force. Eradicate the Ukraine.
There are no good people in all this, just bloodthirsty baddies who haven’t worked out the lessons of the past. Perhaps these thugs are aiming for an afterlife in Valhalla. Who knows the depths of their depraved ignorance.
There are those who seem to like war and violence. The armies themselves. The dictators like Trump and Putin. The psychopaths and nutters. Make America Great Again. And Russia, China, Germany, North Korea….and so on as infinitum. Grab your neighbour’s minerals, water, gold and metals, precious earth. Erect tariff barriers, cripple them all, those beyond your gates, the barbarians at your doorstep.
What happened to the little Indian chap in the loincloth? A true hero, old Gandhi.
Surely we need more of those? Peaceniks, ban the bombers, tree-huggers, refuseniks, passive resisters.
More who will turn cheeks, smite motes, espouse modesty and reason.
We live in Puzzle’s Stable and regardless of what we are told or read or experience, we can not recognize the paradise which surrounds us. Or did, once upon a time.
We have plundered and ravaged the planet we live on. We have cut down the forests and plants we need to produce the very air we breathe. We have decimated most of the species which once roamed the earth, and we treat the meek of our own kind as fodder for our canons forcing them into killing fields at worst , and at best force feeding them worthless goods at inflated prices. Regardless of the fact that this same consumer worked, often for a pittance, to produce those same objects of useless vanity.
We have covered the planet with brute ugliness, we have poisoned its skies and its waters with deadly chemicals and industrial rubble. We have created weapons capable of destroying worlds and we use them with glee.
If we treat our home and its fauna and flora in this way, we reserve worse for our own kind. Those who have tooth and nail slash and burn their way to the top and kill and maim to remain there. Such people seize the planet’s resources, relegating the rest of us to impoverished peasants with no land of our own to feed off.
Such people force us to fight their battles to our own death. In the name of greed and power and lust. The plutocracy build temples to their own glory, they buy super yachts and private jets. Their friend the tyrant does the same through different means with the same end result. The church of technocracy has come to replace the robber barons. They pretend to be saving the world with robots and AI and phallic moon rockets, but they are the mere successors to the same violent thugs who came before them.
So what of Puzzle’s Stable?
The dwarves sat in darkness, they could not see the light. They sat in paradise but could smell only the ordure of a stable, they could taste only straw. They were greedy, stupid, arrogant, selfish, cruel, disloyal. The dwarves are for the dwarves. Their world had an infinitely benign creator, but it was beyond even his power to make them see the wonderful place they had arrived at as it really was.
And so it is with our world, whether you believe in a creator or not. We have taken paradise and created Gehenna.
I have spoken much recently of “revelation”. I am embarrassed to use the word in some contexts, much as I am loathe to speak of love. And yet there are senses in which it can be employed so as to give no offence to today’s Church of Science, to today’s believers in a sad physicalist universe.
For those who do not choose to believe in anything they can not prod or measure or melt in a crucible, it may be defined as “something revealed or disclosed, especially a striking disclosure, as of something not before realized”. Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Einstein had such revelations. As have so many other men in white coats, or outfits more suited to their era.
To those who may feel that reality comprises something greater than mere matter or energy, revelation may serve the same purpose but the “revealing” may be disclosed elsewhere than in a laboratory or a particle accelerator.
A friend asked me the other day why I always express doubt. Have I seen reality or not? Has revelation convinced me that something or someone is out there, beyond the fields of force which we are told builds our world?
I answered that I express doubt for different reasons but that in fact I felt none. Doubt makes me sound less eccentric, less a part of the awful pattern of religion which has and continues to cause such dreadful carnage in our world.
I feel and have always felt drawn to what some would consider the divine. Although I prefer to use the term loosely. Non materialistic causation of some sort. A force or power behind all that we see with agency of its own.
From childhood I have worshipped the god of Narnia. In adulthood I have included other interpretations, representations of the divine.
All this I have documented elsewhere on these interminable pages.
Throughout my life I have sought divine agency, evidence of it. Of a reality other than what we see in our day to day existence.
I have been at home only in mystery, in the must of ancient churches, in the hypnotic music of chant.
And so yes, I do believe, I have no doubt that reality is assuredly not just quarks and photons, weak and strong nuclear or electro magnetic forces.
And it has come to the point that I couldn’t give a damn what people think of me or my eccentricity. And so I will be unequivocal.
I feel and see things which others of a more prosaic mindset do not. I have always had that shiver running up my spine when I listen to Mozart’s Vespers or stare at Poussin or Giotto. When I see a kite wheel in a leaden sky or watch an Atlantic wave crash mercilessly on a remote rocky beach.
Beauty is real and can not be explained by mathematics or placed over a Bunsen Burner. Well, unless you are a Jesuit and consider witches deserve it.
I have never felt such a very strong pull until quite recently. It has become almost overwhelming. Age perhaps, a step further towards death and the ultimate truth have hastened my quest.
In any event I refuse to apologise for it and am perfectly happy with what daily and deep internal searching is telling me.
Just as muscle gains strength with use, so it seems with contemplation.
When I began this post I became waylaid in a sadness for this world I thought I had contained. What use are such tirades again injustice and human bestiality.
Over supper I regained my composure and took up my pen in a more useful frame of mind.
Humanity has very probably dealt itself out of the equation and if so, I will not mourn it’s demise. There is more than humanity and if we do survive I hope we are severely cut down to size and are persuaded to change our ways.
But I do not believe in an anthropocentric reality. However much I appreciate the culture of the Abrahamic myth, I do not agree with their basic premise. God did not create man at the centre of the universe. To hold sway over all else. Man created his own idea of a god who in turn created man. And some have been incestuously worshipping that concept for a long time.
Reality is stranger and more compelling, kinder and better than the human clones we have worshipped for generations.
My footing becomes surer as I tread my path. I will continue to beat my drum. I will stray further and more often into realms most think do not exist.
In the featured image, Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitler’s car during the 1934 rally in Nuremberg. Note the eerie order in the street, the crowd carefully controlled in the gutters to express their awe of the military behemoth.
Earlier, in 1927, Fritz Lang had produced the unsettling film Metropolis, where wealthy industrialists and business magnates and their top employees reign from high-rise towers, while underground-dwelling workers toil to operate the great machines that power the city. And lo, a few years later……
It struck me today while travelling from Zurich to London by air, that the way our society is now organised lays us wide open to dystopia in the not too distant future.
Airports, airplanes and their employees seem to be closely related to the prison services. The secret police. We are dehumanized and humiliated while in their clutches. We are frogmarched, searched and sometimes seized and stripped. We become numbers; lumps of meat. Our society has created monsters in the wings waiting to enchain and enslave us when commanded so to do by the Hitler or Stalin of the modern age.
Faceless men and woman roam at will with guns. They keep us in line, push us shuffling towards what today might laughingly be called “transport” but could tomorrow so easily become the gas chamber. Hundreds if not thousands of faceless officials are in support of those toting guns. Humor is strictly discouraged and a minor infraction of some petty rule will have you marched, arm twisted behind your back, to a dark guardroom and interrogation.
If you attempt modern air travel, you will so easily understand why Hitler’s Germany was run by clerks. Ordinary people who became institutionalized into monsters. The station masters and train guards who transported the victims to the camps. The police who rounded up Jews and dissidents. The ordinary people, you and me, our neighbors who gave rise to the phrase “the banality of evil”: we are turning ourselves into Hitler’s railway clerks. His Blackshirts. His Gestapo.
The descent into totalitarianism is made so easy by modern technology. What would Hitler have given for CCTV. For a digitised society where our every move can be traced and tracked and minuted by automated software and replayed at whim whenever we are caught in some infidelity towards the hydra state.
Am I exaggerating? Am I just feeling particularly down after a hateful day? I think not. The monolith I witnessed today could so easily be pressed into more sinister service. The common response of the common man after the Second World War was that there was nothing he could have done to stop the terror.
And how right was that common man. Picture a group of strong men in control of modern media, the army, transport, banking. Our societies are so centralized, our freedoms so restricted that a gang of half determined thugs could walk all over us and we, the common men, could do nothing to resist them.
Good on Gillette: it would be hard to deny that male aggression has played a vast and malignant role in our history.
With a few notable exceptions, women are absent from the long list of torturers and tyrants who have blighted our society through the ages.
Consider whether the following list sounds likely:
Polly Pot
Adolfe Hitler
Karen Khan
The Noreen Conquest.
Fine, so we have had the occasional Lizzie Borden. And there were some pretty unattractive female guards in the Nazi concentration camps. But by and large violence and aggression is a male characteristic and it isn’t his fault. It’s in his genes. It’s called “evolution” and anyone with even a passing interest in the biological origins of animal behavior, should watch all the way through the superb lectures of Robert Sapolsky, Stanford Professor of Neurology and of Neurosurgery.
I consider the Gillette Advertisement meet and right because unless we acknowledge and recognize the problem we can not deal with it. Once we accept that this sort of behavior has been foisted on us by nature, the next task is to agree, as a society, and as individuals, that it is wrong. It is not just about bullying women (although that of course, as well as the question of female equality, needs addressing rapidly).
The problem is far more basic. We need to acknowledge that aggression is wrong, whoever the victim is. Animal, vegetable or mineral. Or female. Once we (both men and women) universally condemn violence the next stage is to combat it. Laws are all well and good but psychological acceptance is equally if not more important. As individuals we must first accept such behavior as wrong and then stop it, in ourselves and in others.
In the distant future it seems highly likely that we will be able to edit violence out of our genes. And in my opinion we should. If we accept we want to get rid of it we should start now. At present its always going to be touch and go. Not everyone will accept that violence is wrong. But as violence becomes socially outlawed by education and other means such as the Gillette initiative, like smoking it should gradually die out. And should we ever be able to alter our genes, well then, perhaps we will all agree that we should.
In general I am deeply skeptical of the capitalist economic model, even though I have no ideas as to how or with what we can replace it. I do not like nine tenths of the planet being owned by Jeff Bezos but while it is, I applaud this effort by Gillette to reach towards a better world. Being cynical I suppose they just want our dollars, but if so, then in my book they are at least asking for them in the right way.
The Noble Savage was probably simply a figment of 18th Century imagination but it is pleasant to imagine that there was a day in the distant past where people did not live in Grenfell Tower and didn’t have to look at Trump’s haircut in the media.
It is easy to imagine the life of the savage as a rural idyll. He is a hunter gatherer: he gets up in the morning, picks a date or two off the tree and goes out in search of brunch. Perhaps he ambles along the sea shore and eats a few raw mussels; perhaps he picks up a crab or two and takes them home to brew up over an open fire.
Not bothered much about housework or paying his taxes he strolls off in the afternoon in search of dinner. A small pig to roast perhaps? A wild foul to pluck and grill?
Perhaps he takes his eldest son with him while his wife and daughter sweep out the mud hut. Back from the hunt he reclines in his stone age deck chair for a snooze in the sun while the wife picks the wild pheasant and stuffs it with a few cloves of garlic for the evening repast.
They may not have had much of a concept of tomorrow or yesterday. Perhaps they lived in an eternal now. It is a pleasant figment to imagine the Noble Savage was indeed a Happy Bunny. No existential angst, no deep thoughts other than stoking the fire and turning the spit.
Eat, sleep, fornicate and repeat. Mend the hut. Chuck out the chicken bones. Burn the rubbish.
Sadly I suspect it’s all hogwash. Of course if I really believed my hypothesis I could always put a bone through my nose and shack up with the natives, deep in some rainforest or tropical island. And many is the time I have felt like doing so.
Sadly, Hobbes probably got it right. ” During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called warre; and such a warre as is of every man against every man”.
The savage, noble or otherwise was no better than modern man. We still live “in that condition which is called warre.”
Christians versus muslims versus jews. America and Britain bombing desert tyrants to protect their own economic interests.
It is business as usual. Self interest, hatred, suspicion, violence and greed. Everyone else is always wrong, our opinion is always right. Whoever “we” are.
It does not have to be this way. We do not have to give in to our baser impulses. We do not have to force our own way, our own interests at all costs. We have a choice. We can, could, should choose to co-operate and help rather than to compete. Rather than endlessly do battle.
All human life is about battle, fight, conflict. Me, mine. My religion, my garden, my views, my politics my business, my money. Its my land so get out, get off.
It is not easy to listen to Bishop Michael Curry let alone take any notice or put his theories into practice:
Treat others as you would have them treat you.
In its simplicity this message ends all our problems at a stroke but few will listen and fewer will take action.
To take action is not easy. How can we turn the other cheek when those around us are out to swindle and rob us? And we them.
I recently read about the Abolitionist Project and realised there are some decent people in the world (along with the Bishop). What a magnificent manifesto. And these guys – I applaud their efforts.
And yet I am doing nothing. So many of us do nothing. Worse, so many of us not only do no good, we do actual harm. Are there any good guys out there? Who not only preach but act?
How about Amnesty? Are they good people? I must find out. There must be many good people and many good organisations out there. I suppose they must be heavily outnumbered by the violent and venal and greedy.
I do not read the news because it is repetitive, dispiriting, boring and irrelevant.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
This quote is profound to my mind and sums up the very reason I have never, ever been interested in current affairs or politics.
According to an article in Wikipedia “The subjects of Ecclesiastes are the pain and frustration engendered by observing and meditating on the distortions and inequities pervading the world, the uselessness of human deeds, and the limitations of wisdom and righteousness.”
Well said whoever wrote those words.
Here is an abbreviated list of world news headlines from the BBC for today:
NY’s top lawyer quits amid assault claims.
Belgian singer dies days after comeback.
Pope Rihanna dazzles at Met Gala 2018.
Revolutionary leader win Armenia PM vote.
Melania Trump faces new plagiarism row.
Here is what I would rather read about, although I will have to look beyond the media to find anything of interest or relevance:
How to improve human behaviour.
How to abolish poverty, hunger and disease.
How to increase happiness.
How to further knowledge.
How to transcend the limits of human consciousness.
Cheerful news as to the progress by anyone in any of the above!
And then there are a few who by luck or design have managed to jump off the hamster wheel of mundanity and have the good fortune and luxury to seek answers.
Who is it then that reads newspapers and watches CNN? It can’t be those struggling for basic physical survival. It must be the unconscious ones.
Some of the unconscious ones must have good motives for what they do. Some politicians must (one hopes) be genuinely interested in the good of others. Some businessmen must be genuinely interested in improving mankind’s lot by producing fairly priced goods or services.
There is a good argument to be made that the unconscious improve all our lives by their very busy unconsciousness.
By pursuing their dreams of world domination in business or politics perhaps such people create the wealth necessary for research and development.
And yet I have a nagging thought at the back of my mind that all is not well with the world. That a better order is possible, that loftier goals should be sought.
How has it come to pass that a tiny handful “own” the vast majority of this tiny spaceship we call the Earth?
We live on a rock rotating at 1,000 miles an hour on its axis and circling a nuclear furnace we call the sun at around the same speed. We have no means to escape to another planet (even assuming we could find something suitable) and we are bunched up like 7 billion rats in a cage cutting each other’s throats for food, light, shelter and water.
It is reckoned that two acres of land would suffice for self sufficiency and there are estimated to be 16 billion acres of habitable land on earth.
So given that spaceship earth has to provide sustenance for us all how come we have let a small minority own the vast majority of land on earth? Is private ownership of our very means of survival a defensible proposition?
And how about water? And energy? How come the means of production and supply are in private ownership? How does it make any sense at all that the few should hold the many to ransome?
Well I guess it is all about ethnic cleansing across the millennia. “They” have what “you” want and so you exterminate them. In the old days extermination was free for all and quite the way to go: the Norman Conquest, the indigenous North and South American Indian and on and on…….
Nowadays we in the West tend to frown on actual extermination (at least in our own back yard) but we allow death by commerce instead. Amazon destroys the little guy with a corner shop, factory farming screws the peasant, oil and timber companies evict the natives in the rain forest. So its business as usual.
What will happen when we conquer space and find some green and pleasant land in the sky? The same old thing of course: the Robber Barons will own Mars and every other planet.
Down with greed and violence (physical and commercial). It is time to reform and re-organise our society.
