Mind and Matter

There is a world very like our own, or at least there might be, where human consciousness is involved as an active agent in the world of externality, that the laws of science take effect when man discovers them. Here a brilliant scientist akin to our Einstein discovered that gravity is not ultimately a law after all, but itself a product of human imagining; a manifestation of a stage of development of man's spiritual nature where he is excessively wedded and embedded within the world of matter and externality.
With this mathematically proven discovery, gravity ceased to apply and the world was thrown into unexpected chaos. A more tenacious less easily bored writer than myself might enjoy the ensuing progression of events, but here we just move to the unhappy but inevitable outcome(given the intent of the author), that this scientist was disposed of by the agents of the world state, as were his findings and two academic colleagues who had read his aesthetically pleasing and most perfect proofs.

One student who had read the material was allowed live on the basis that all this went over his not particularly bright head. The proof of the wisdom of this was that with the deaths of the three mentioned- the sole mental knowers and guardians of this new truth- that gravity took effect again and the world re-settled into an equilibrium little damaged by the chaos that had momentarily afflicted itself. There is the very real possibility that a period of extended mental and spiritual stagnation set in as the authorities attempted to strictly curb the scope of intellectual investigation into the Way of Things, for fear of dreadful unforeseen consequences.

Leonardo

What a shame Leonardo wasted so much of his artistic genius, leaving behind a mere handful of works, some because of ill-judged scientific pioneering, ruined, like The Last Supper. There is a divinity to Leonardo's work that is of an order perhaps beyond all others, an aristocratic spiritual essence which makes his concern with producing fighting machines and the like somewhat puzzling. Which reminds me of Tarkovsky's final film, The Sacrifice, where another of Leonardo's unfinished masterworks plays a prominent supporting role- The Adoration of the Magi below, and a lead character, a strange mystic postman, says he has always been terrified of Leonardo. Perhaps there is something at times bordering on the repulsive, the fallen angel in his most mysterious creations,p. The occasional hint or sense of beauty threatening to spill over into decadence, such as his John the Baptist below- not a work I'm particularly gone on.

  Like Michelangelo, Leonardo's beings are also not of this world, archetypes who aspire to embody the mystery of being in its elusive fullness, but unlike Michelangelo's 'larger than life' creations who are in truth less than life, Leonardo's are 'alive', autonomous beings set free from their origin as mere two-dimensional illusions. Incidentally if I was to have one Leonardo image, it would probably be the uppermost image, the Saint Anne, Virgin and child and Saint John , unfinished as it typically is.

Incarnation of Truth Foretold

As prophetically divined, there have been no intervening posts between the last and the next, being this.

A Tearful Post of Much Humanity

It seems it is the inevitable duty of anyone who begins a blog to make some form of statement as to why they will not be blogging so much or not at all in the uncharted realms of future continuity, and so in an effort to appease the gods- which ones I have to concede my utter ignorance- if pressed the literary ones- so to the business at hand being the declaration of why I may not be blogging, regardless of whether I in fact have the slightest intention of doing or not doing of said so...I regret to say that my desire to colonise the farthest reaches of our solar system are not compatible with the temporal demands demanded of me by the administration of this blog apparatus, & so I regret to say, as already regretfully said, that something or other may or may not happen, or at least may happen less frequently, or perhaps may continue as before, but whichever or either of the many above ways may unfold, comrades, in this earthly existence of much joy and sadness, I would like to thank any readers for reading the words which have appeared here by virtue of my will-power and literacy.
And so it is with great sadness that I admit that until the next post, there will be no intervening posts.

The reader should know that the above literary article originally contained many more words which the editor considered of an excessively inflammatory nature, though these words may be obtained by private correspondence. Please include a self-addressed envelope and a cheque for twenty seven Euros, payable to the recipient.

Military Draft as Statement of Logic

You are not the ultimate possessor of yourself. You are the property of the State.
There are obviously many such statements, it is just that this is a particularly fine and clear demonstration of the fact.

Literary News

The world of words that is the literary world has been thrown into paroxysms of paralysis by the discovery of a batch of letters by James Joyce in which he admits that his most famous work, Ulysees, was "mostly made up."
"This places things in an entirely new light," said an ashen-faced Joycean academic expert.
"We look like fools," admitted another more forthright Joyceophilean colleague.

The Digestive Tract

Words cast form the table of the wise(and not so wise) to be poured over, devoured, regurgitated, poured over again, devoured again, shat out, sifted, etc.

The Order- Bush & Kerry

In case any real, imaginary, hypothetical readers are wondering if The Order, aka Skull and Bones, aka The Brotherhood of Death is an extraordinarily elaborate figment of the collective mind, here Bush and Kerry admit membership but refuse outright to talk about the order.
As Charles Dickens wrote in Our Mutual Friend, "Invisible insects of diabolical activity swarm in this place."

Sutton, Hegel & The Order

A sizeable but somewhat haphazardly gathered extraction from Hoover Institite historian Anthony Sutton's America's Secret Establishment, earlier posted about here. As a brief reminder Sutton wrote, "Back in 1968 my Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development was published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In three substantial volumes I detailed how the West had built the Soviet Union. However, the work generated a seemingly insoluble puzzle - why have we done this? Why did we build the Soviet Union, while we also transferred technology to Hitler's Germany? Why does Washington want to conceal these facts? Why have we boosted Soviet military power? And simultaneously boosted our own? In subsequent books, the Wall Street series, I added more questions - but no answers."

How can there exist a common objective when members are apparently acting in opposition to one another?
Probably the most difficult task in this work will be to get across to the reader what is really an elementary observation: that the objective of The Order is neither "left" nor "right." "Left" and "right" are artificial devices to bring about change, and the extremes of political left and political right are vital elements in a process of controlled change.
The answer to this seeming political puzzle lies in Hegelian logic. Remember that both Marx and Hitler, the extremes of "left" and "right" presented as textbook enemies, evolved out of the same philosophical system: Hegelianism. That brings screams of intellectual anguish from Marxists and Nazis, but is well known to any student of political systems. The dialectical process did not originate with Marx as Marxists claim, but with Fichte and Hegel in late 18th and early 19th century Germany. In the dialectical process a clash of opposites brings about a synthesis.
For example, a clash of political left and political right brings about another political system, a synthesis of the two, neither left nor right. This conflict of opposites is essential to bring about change. Today this process can be identified in the literature of the Trilateral Commission where "change" is promoted and "conflict management" is termed the means to bring about this change.
In the Hegelian system conflict is essential. Furthermore, for Hegel and systems based on Hegel, the State is absolute. The State requires complete obedience from the individual citizen. An individual does not exist for himself in these so-called organic systems but only to perform a role in the operation of the State. He
finds freedom only in obedience to the State. There was no freedom in Hitler's Germany, there is no freedom for the individual under Marxism, neither will there be in the New World Order. And if it sounds like George Orwell's 1984 - it is.
In brief, the State is supreme and conflict is used to bring about the ideal society. Individuals find freedom in obedience to the rulers.

In this process change requires conflict, and conflict requires the clash of opposites. You can't just have a "right," you must have a "right" and a "left." You can't have just a pro-Vietnam War
policy, you must also have an anti-Vietnam War policy. Else the dialectical process won't bring about change. In 1960 William Bundy, member of the Order, while still at CIA, became Staff Director for the newly formed Presidential Commission on National Goals. Such a commission, even in its title, assumes conscious direction. If you have goals, you logically need a device to achieve these goals. In a society like the U.S. it should be a superfluous sort of commission unless there is some "guiding hand," something more than the voting booth and the market place at work.
The Report of this Commission came up with some quotes which are almost pure Hegelianism:
(a) "a role of government is to stimulate changes of attitude"
(b) "in the 1960s every American is summoned to extraordinary personal responsibility, sustained effort,
and sacrifice"
(c) "The American citizen in the years ahead ought to devote a larger portion of his time and energy directly to solution of the nation's problems ... many ways are open for citizens to participate in the attainment of national goals."
Now the basic set of rules governing our society is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There is nothing in these constitutional documents to support any of these demands. What the demands imply is that an American citizen has a DUTY to advance the will of the State. But such an assumption is definitely NOT implicit in the philosophy under which the United States was founded and presumably operates today.

The Order's control of history, through foundations and the American Historical Association, has been effective. Not so much because of outright censorship, although that is an important element, but more because of the gullibility of the American "educated public:'
From time to time their plans go awry. The bubbling pot of political manipulation - it's called conflict management on the inside - threatens to spill over into public view. It is extraordinary how newspaper editors, columnists, TV and radio commentators, and publishers either lack insight to see beyond the superficial or are
scared witless to do so. Even worse, the educated public, the 30-40 million degree holders, lets these opinion molders get away with it.
Outright censorship has not been too effective. There has certainly been a campaign to suppress revisionist interpretations of history. Witness Harry Elmer Barnes in The Struggle Against The Historical Blackout:
"It may be said, with great restraint, that, never since the Dark and Middle Ages, have there been so many powerful forces organized and alerted against the assertion and acceptance of historical truth as are active today to prevent the facts about the responsibility for the second World War and its results from being made generally accessible to the American public. Even the great Rockefeller Foundation frankly admits (Annual Report, 1946, p. 188) the subsidizing of a corps of historians to anticipate and frustrate the development of any neo-Revisionism in our time. And the only difference between this Foundation and several others is that it has been more candid and forthright about its politics."

This author's personal experience of attempted outright censorship was at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, when the Director attempted to suppress publication of my then forthcoming National Suicide: Military Aid To The Soviet Union. The facts weren't in question. Unfortunately, the book offended the Nixon-Kissinger program to aid the Soviets while they were aiding the North Vietnamese - so in effect, Americans were being killed by our own technology. In this case neither author nor publisher was in a mood to listen, and the Establishment put tail between legs and called it a day.
More effective than outright censorship is use of the left-right political spectrum to neutralize unwelcome facts and ideas or just condition citizens to think along certain lines. The "left" leaning segment of the press can always be relied upon to automatically assault ideas and information from the "right" and vice
versa. In fact, media outlets have been artificially set up just for this purpose: both Nation and New Republic on the "left" were financed by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney (The Order) funds. On the "right" National Review published by William Buckley (The Order) runs a perpetual deficit. presumably made up by
Buckley. Neither the independent right nor the independent left sees the trap. They are so busy firing at each other they've mostly forgotten to look behind the scenes. And The Order smugly claims control of the "moderate" center. A neat game, and it's worked like a charm. But the establishment has a problem . . .

In Fact, It Has Several Problems
They are on the inside looking out. We are on the outside looking in. They may call us "peasants" but we have the advantage of knowing about the real world and its infinite diversity. Their global objectives are dreams based on skewed information. Dangerous dreams, but still dreams.
(1) The Order Lives In A Cultural Straightjacket
All the power in the world is useless without accurate information. If you meet these people as this author has more or less casually over 30 years, one impression comes to the forefront - they are charming but with a limited perception of the world. They may have global ambitions, they may act politically like miniature power houses, but their knowledge of the world comes from an in-group and those who play
along with the in-group. And the in-group lacks morality and diversity. It's a kind of jet Set Politburo.
Charming, power-hungry and myopic simultaneously.
All it can offer to the outsider is an invitation, almost an ultimatum, "You are part of the establishment."

In conclusion we must emphasize one point. An understanding of The Order
and its modus operandi is impossible unless the reader holds in mind the Hegelian
roots of the game plan. Hegelianism is alien to grass roots America. The national
character is straightforward and to the point, not devious and tortuous. The grass
roots are still closer to the American Revolution, the Jeffersonian Democrats, the
classical liberal school of Cobden and Bright in England, and the Austrian School
of Economics where Ludwig von Mises is the undisputed leader.

A Statist system is the objective of The Order. But in spite of constant prattling about "change" by zombie supporters - such a system is foreign to deeply held beliefs in this country. Above all the reader must - at least temporarily while reading this work - put to one side the descriptive clichés of left and right, liberal and conservative, communist and fascist, even republican and democrat. These
terms may be important for self recognition, they do provide a certain reassurance, but they are confusing in our context unless seen as essential elements in a game plan. You will never understand The Order if you try to label it right or left.
A Robert Taft and a William Buckley on the right are just as important to the forward motion of society, the fundamental change desired by The Order, as a William Sloan Coffin and a Harry Payne Whitney (who financed the left). Their conflict is essential for change.

(Sutton mentions what is termed a British counterpart of The Order- the Group, written about in detail by sympathetic Georgetown University historian, Carrol Quigley in his book, Tragedy and Hope. Whether Quigley was a very naive idealist of sorts, or roughly an insider I have no idea, but one interesting detail is that that in his inaugural Presidential address, Bill Clinton spoke of Quigley as his personal mentor.)

...the Group operates in a series of concentric circles and like The Order consists of old line families allied with private merchant bankers, known in the U.S. as investment bankers. Bearing in mind the proven existence of The Group, the operations of The Order and the kind of penetration it has achieved cannot be explained by mere chance. By examining The Order's operations we can generate a picture of its objectives without access to any internal constitution or statement of objectives even if such exists. It may only be word of mouth.
By contrast. The Group's objective is recorded in Cecil Rhodes' will. It was:
The extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom and of colonization by British subjects of all lands wherein the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labor and enterprise ... and the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an
integral part of the British Empire.
This objective is, of course, ridiculous and somewhat immature, but no less ridiculous and immature than the New World order objective of The Order. Yet The Group has controlled British policy for a hundred years and still does.
Both The Group and The Order have been created by Anglophiles who want to pattern the world on a Hegelian-Anglo hybrid culture. Both secret organizations
overlook, and there is a philosophic basis for this neglect, the natural right of any ethnic group, be it white, black or yellow, English, Slavic or Latin, to develop its own culture without coercion.
Unlike this author, Quigley sympathizes with the ends of The Group, although he terms their methods despicable. Both The Group and The Order are unwilling or unable to bring about a global society by voluntary means, so they opted for coercion. To do this they have created wars and revolutions, they have ransacked public treasuries, they have oppressed, they have pillaged, they have lied - even to their own countrymen.
How have they done this?
Modus Operandi Of The Order
The activities of The Order are directed towards changing our society, -hanging the world, to bring about a New World Order. This will be a planned order with heavily restricted individual freedom, without Constitutional protection, without national boundaries or cultural distinction. We deduce this objective by examining and then summing up the actions of individual members: there has been a consistent pattern of activity over one hundred years. Part of this activity has been in cooperation with The Group, with its parallel and recorded objectives.
Now if, for example, we found that the dominant interest of members was raising ducks, that they wrote articles about ducks, bred ducks, sold ducks, formed duck-studying councils, developed a philosophy of ducks, then it would be reasonable to conclude that they had an objective concerning ducks, that this is not mere random activity.
Historically, operations of The Order have concentrated on society, now to change society in a specific manner towards a specific goal: a New World Order. We know the elements in society that will have to be changed in order to bring about this New World order, we can then examine The Order's actions in this
context. More or less these elements would have to be:

Education - how the population of the future will behave,
Money - the means of holding wealth and exchanging goods,
Law - the authority to enforce the will of the state, a world law and a world court is needed for a world state,
Politics - the direction of the State, Economy - the creation of wealth,
History - what people believe happened in the past,
Psychology - the means of controlling how people think,
Philanthropy - so that people think well of the controllers,
Medicine - the power over health, life and death,
Religion - people's spiritual beliefs, the spur to action for many, Media - what people know and learn about current events,
Continuity - the power to appoint who follows in your footsteps.


Sutton wrote hs book in the early 1980s, and of course the term New World Order has become ever more prominent in the intervening years. A few examples being:
We have before us the opportunity to forge a New World Order. When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance of this New World Order." "It's more than one small country. It is a big idea; a New World Order."
Now we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a New World Order." All by George H.W. Bush
"There is a chance the President can use this disaster to bring about the New World Order." Gary Hart- US Commission on National Security the day after 911.
At the time of the election, there will just be 1,000 days to the new millennium - 1,000 days to prepare for 1,000 years, a moment of destiny for us." Tony Blair
"I want to lead Britain to what I believe is our destiny of success in this New World Order." Gordon Brown
"The New World Order will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...but in the end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old fashioned frontal assault." CFR member Richard Gardner, writing in the April l974 issue of the CFR's journal, Foreign Affairs.
"A colossal event is upon us, the birth of a New World Order." Brent Scowcroft, George Bush's National Security Advisor, said on the eve of the Gulf War.
Or Henry Kissinger speaks of being "a student of the future", and that "There is a need for a New World Order", here. A student of the future being exactly how the self-fulfilling Hegelian method works, or at least is intended to work. One envisages a desired future of the absolute State- in this case a global all-encompassing one- and one then embarks on processes designed to produce this future, while the great unwashed perceive the historical events unfolding as nigh on random events.

The Kingdom

Two figures in earnest discussion. One with the wind-swept features of the Hero, his every inch a standing reproach to the errors of lamentable humanity. The other with less self-assuredness, but eyes blazing and moistened with the liquid fires of idealism. The aged one speaks.
"Can you swear on the sacred book of rationality- allowing for the non-existence of the sacred, and of such a book- that you are one of us, dedicated to the triumph over humiliating superstition which has kept us in fetters through the centuries, and accumulated centuries comprising of that awe inspiring word, Millennia?"
"I have abandoned falsehood, and am but an instrument in the hands of Pure Reason."
"Hands!? Pure Reason doesn't have hands. Are you trying to make us look like utter fools?"
"I'm sorry. I didn't think."
"Not thinking is the greatest calumny on our faith- though it is of course no faith but the unwavering path of Absolute Logic. Rid yourself of metaphor, else your mind- which is the simple and inevitable product of impersonal matter- its processes can be explained exactly thus- be deposited back amongst the irrational hordes. Build your house upon the rock of reason, and you will be delivered. But everyone who hears these rational words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
The younger gazed with joyful awe at his master, and vowed himself to reason, and reason to himself .

Masolino(c. 1383 – 1447)

Some paintings by Masolino da Panicale; one of the most interesting examples of a painter at the cusp of two cultural epochs, worldviews, etc. Where an sense of life suffused with a religious, spiritual understanding is meeting a new or re-awakened scientific interest in life, most obviously shown in the fascination with perspective. Masolino's spiritual sense is clearly a living one, far beyond a matter of belief, while one can sense the excitement to the mind of the vistas being opened up by the increased passion for the material universe. An already profound self is being deepened, made richer.
In time, as the 'scientific era' is more entered into, it is the spiritual sense that will typically have atrophied, and it will be the work of people like Van Gogh to re-awaken that sensibility, having passed through an excessive immersion in the material at the unnecessary expense of the inner world. Though as Masolino perhaps understood, all we have is life: these inner and outer worlds are a descent into mental artificiality.

Vaguerancy

It is a peculiarity of mine to enjoy the conversation of a type of person who could be described as the vagrant philosopher or intellectual tramp. One such vagrant I knew had forgotten his name and past to the point where he wasn't sure if he'd ever had one to forget in the first place. I suggested he award himself some new name, but he felt this would be an act of intellectual pretentiousness and desisted. He was a man of depth, honour and alcoholism and spoke of his life and hopes thus:

My life is the holiest of art forms. Out of the vertiginous infinity of the possible, I attempt to achieve the solidification of life's multi-dimensional kinetic energies within the purest, simplest form of the actual. In the modern chaos of swarming humanity, unreality and reality mingle fatally; the physical actuality of human action is directed by worlds of mental perversion.
A senseless chaos reigns. On the throne of existence sits a demented demiurge of more than dubious intent. Actions exist in this kingdom of the unwell, but the thoughts behind these actions are fabrications of deviant idiocy. Salvation is needed, and I must make of myself a vessel of truth into whom truth will flow in its undiluted purity, from which will flow healing waters of divine reality on unhappy and misled mankind. I must become a still point of authenticity in the sea of teeming madness.

His redeeming mission was a constant, but the details of its form evolved. He told me that his ultimate artistic wish was to perform an ongoing succession of identical days: of sleeping in the same burnt out car, rising at the same astronomical time(relating to day-night ratios rather than "the artificial abstraction of Newtonian mechanical time"), eating the same foodstuffs daily, reading the same passages of the same books( the Gospel of John and Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' were mentioned). Also walking the same pathways, drinking the same type alcohol- here he spoke quickly and aggressively as if ashamed, but also as if daring one to the criticise and censure.

Some time later I met him, and while he had suffered setbacks with his mission, yet he spoke with the fervour unique to the inspired or insane. He had managed to replicate to nigh on perfection the physical details of his days, but these he now saw were the mere details of the automaton. The inner world of his thoughts also needed to be enmeshed in this sacrifice of recurrence, but they thwarted his ambitions, refused to obey his conscious will, and darted in a million devious directions as if taunting him.
When lying in a drunken despair, pondering a watery death, the answer came to him. He had been thinking as a mere element of time, a point in a historical progression. What was needed to attain the ideal form was the the purest revolution of absolute silence, the complete absence of words and thought. This in turn would necessitate the total avoidance of all human contact which would otherwise certainly destabilise the ritualistic performance. He must go somewhere where solitude would be certain. He he was under no illusions as to the difficulty of his task- "man's greatest and most arduous achievement" as he described it- but he hoped it would be helped by his isolation. That through lack of human contact and refinement of the inner world, the very faculty of language would atrophy and depart his mind.

He took to travelling the country in search of the right place to dwell, and while he told me he had found the spot he refused to say where, for fear I might descend uninvited and destroy the precise repetitions of the life-ritual. I have not seen him in some months.
I'm not making any grand claims for this man; he is a relatively typical example of the vagrant philosophers I have known over the years. Incidentally, he bore an uncanny resemblance to Manet's Absinthe Drinker below.

Disappointing

A check on the performance of my review of Camus' The Outsider at Amazon yields depressing results. Only 3 out of 15 responses found my piece Outside the Inside helpful.
In case any readers can't be arsed searching the link, my review below:

Outside the Inside
My gnomic title is much to ponder regarding this existential book. Existential means to do with existing and this book is to do with the existence of the lead character who is basically an outsider. Read it and think.

The thought of a certain type of person embracing his intellectual commonality with the author of the above suffuses my soul with warmth.

Amazed

Just because you don't believe you're lost in a maze doesn't mean you're not lost in a maze.
Just because you didn't intend to get lost in a maze doesn't mean you're not lost in a maze.
Just because you think you're lost in a maze doesn't mean there is any actual maze.
Demons
Upon my life the tracks have vanished,
We've lost our way, what shall we do?
It must be a demon's leading us
This way & that around the fields.
Pushkin

The Magical Art of Paul Klee(1879-1940)

Death and Fire, Carnival in the Mountains, Villa R.
We all possibly know the famous Orson Welles lines from The Third Man, regarding art and social circumstances: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love -- they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
He failed to mention, however, Paul Klee. Klee became associated with the Blaue Reiter group, who believed that they had a responsibility to "heal the gaping wound that separates man from his environment". Fittingly, in the world of fair is foul and foul is fair, Klee's work was denounced by the Nazi Party for producing "degenerate art" in 1933- "the work of a sick mind." And two aquatic examples of this degeneracy below, Fish Magic and The Golden Fish.

Vincent Van Gogh- Red Vineyard, Road With Cypress & Star

I'm reading Isaac Singer's excellent The Slave, and in it is quoted from the Simchath Torah liturgy:

Who was he? What was his name,
The old man who ascended the heights
And brought down the strength of confidence?

Which seems a kind of declaration of the role and importance of the artist. He proclaims to humanity the depth of their own nature, makes it visible, awakens it. Which is why the modern world pushes an artistic standard of inanity, Pop Idol, etc, and man sees, as he is intended to see, his nature in the light of these diminutive, artistic projections.
Unhappily for these strange souls a Vincent Van Gogh flings the cat out of the bag with his revelations of life as blazing infinity. An injection of truth into the medium of consciousness. For this reason of life being inseparable from such infusions, it is impossible to conceive of the present without certain figures like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, in recent times The Beatles. Life would be much poorer and less vivid for their absence, out of all proportion, one might imagine, to the biological existence of a few individual human beings in time.

The Weighing Scales of Justice

The My Lai Massacre was the murder of about five hundred unarmed citizens of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), mostly civilians and majority of them women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968. Before being killed some of the victims were raped and sexually molested, beaten, tortured, or maimed. Some of the dead bodies were also mutilated. The first army reports claimed that "128 Vietcong and 22 civilians" were killed in the village during a "fierce fire fight". General William C. Westmoreland, MACV commander, congratulated the unit on the "outstanding job." As related at the time by the Army's Stars and Stripes magazine, "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle." The awful truth surfaced in time, however, and full justice was served. One man, Second Lieutenant William Calley, served three and a half years of house arrest in his quarters at Fort Benninghouse, during which time he was allowed routine and unrestricted visits by his girl-friend. That was the sum total of punishment meted out to all involved. The laws of war that were set forth in the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals resulted in German and Japanese soldiers being executed for similar acts. To take another quick look at the events of that day, BBC News described it thus:: Soldiers went berserk, gunning down unarmed men, women, children and babies. Families which huddled together for safety in huts or bunkers were shown no mercy. Those who emerged with hands held high were murdered. ... Elsewhere in the village, other atrocities were in progress. Women were gang raped; Vietnamese who had bowed to greet the Americans were beaten with fists and tortured, clubbed with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Some victims were mutilated with the signature "C Company" carved into the chest. By late morning word had got back to higher authorities and a cease-fire was ordered. My Lai was in a state of carnage. Bodies were strewn through the village.

Now to take a look at another roughly contemporary incident to offer a picture of a society- particularly the ruling establishment- and its sense of truth. MC5 was a hard rock band based mainly in Detroit in the late 60s and early 70s, probably best known for their song, Kick Out the Jams. Their manager, John Sinclair, was a kind of figurehead of the politically tinged youth movement of Detroit in the form of the interesting mix of absurdism and revolutionary politics of the White Panther party. He was managing the MC5 at the time of their free concert outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The band was the only group to perform before baton-wielding police broke up the massive anti-Vietnam war rally, calling it a riot. Sinclair was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1969 after giving two joints of marijuana to an undercover narcotics agent. Ten years for giving another adult two joints of a mild narcotic for personal pleasure. Rape and massacre of about five hundred civilians: three and a half years comfortable military house arrest for one man, everyone else unpunished. Enough, as the man said, said. Sinclair served two and a half years, and was released three days after a protest rally, thanks to focus and pressure gained by the performance of John Lennon there. Lennon's performance of his song, 'John Sinclair' can be seen here. And for a kind of update on how the relevant authorites are getting on, from Amnesty International, July 2006: US Govt Creating Climate of Torture "Although the US government continues to assert its condemnation of torture and ill-treatment, these statements contradict what is happening in practice," said Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director Of Amnesty International USA. "The US government is not only failing to take steps to eradicate torture it is actually creating a climate in which torture and other ill-treatment can flourish -- including by trying to narrow the definition of torture." The Amnesty International report describes how measures taken by the US government in response to widespread torture and ill-treatment of detainees held in US military custody in the context of the "war on terror" have been far from adequate. This is despite evidence that much of the ill-treatment stemmed directly from official policy and practice. The report reviews several cases where detainees held in US custody in Afghanistan and Iraq have died under torture. To this day, no US agent has been prosecuted for "torture" or "war crimes". "The heaviest sentence imposed on anyone to date for a torture-related death while in US custody is five months -- the same sentence that you might receive in the US for stealing a bicycle. In this case, the five-month sentence was for assaulting a 22-year-old taxi-driver who was hooded and chained to a ceiling while being kicked and beaten until he died," said Curt Goering. "While the government continues to try to claim that the abuse of detainees in US custody was mainly due to a few 'aberrant' soldiers, there is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of the torture and ill-treatment stemmed directly from officially sanctioned procedures and policies -- including interrogation techniques approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," said Javier Zuniga, Amnesty International's Americas Programme Director. http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR510702006

Andrei Tarkovsky on Science and Modernity

The Russian film-director is one of the artists of the modern era whose renown will undoubtedly last and grow in coming centuries, provided that human civilisation itself manages to not fall into utter collapse in the strange bewildering future. Ours is not an Egyptian or Chinese type civilisation which could look in all probability to a future in rough imitation of the past. Below some words uttered in his final film, The Sacrifice:

Man has constantly violated nature. The result is a civilisation built on force, fear, dependence. All our technical progress has only provided us with a comfort, a sort of standard. And instruments of violence to keep power. We use the microscope like a cudgel. As soon as we make a scientific breakthrough we put it to use in the service of evil. And as for our standard, a wise man said that sin is that which is unnecessary. If that is so, then our entire civilisation is built on sin from beginning to end. We have acquired a dreadful disharmony, an imbalance between our material and our spiritual development...Our culture is defective.

Tarkovsky would, of course, not be particularly intent on justifying the ways of Satan to man in the charming forms of weapons utilising depleted uranium, the chemical weapons like Agent Orange manufactured and sold to the Saddam Husseins of this world( who occasionally have the dastardly gall to then use these trophies of western intellectualism for the purposes for which they are made).
But in these times of philosophical truthlessness, naturally evil is said to no longer exist, except as a justification for enacting evil: "Someone else is very evil. Therefore I must commit evil. I stand higher on the ladder of moral truth, because I am not as evil." Though, at least it oculd be said that evil in the basically materialist philosophy of the moment has far more of a right to claim its existence than does truth. What passes for truth is to be measured in terms of gradations of evil, not as any kind of absolute living force. Much less beyond than beneath good and evil, or concepts thereof.
Is it any surprise Satan- or absolute evil incarnated in a personality- is described as the great dissembler, the father of lies, the corruptor through sophistry, that there is no truth in him? Truly the Prince of this world.

Pieter Brueghel- Mad Meg, The Triumph of Death, A Gloomy Day