Heidegger

On 07/08/2006, at 5:23 AM, Bob Guevara wrote:

> I took the time to checkout the urls that Malcolm provides and it
> is now more clear than ever that there is nothing but dug-in
> political heels here.

Hi Bob,

care to elucidate on that? Which of the three links display dug in
political heels for you?

The Yesha Rabbinical Council’s ruling is interesting for me because
its brutal honesty highlights a common characteristic of nationalist
power, and that is the divide between ‘Christian’ care for the other,
or social care for humanity as a whole, socialism/humanitarianism,
over against the amoral practicalities of the struggle for power.
Social care in this instance is reduced to care for one’s identified
community over against the community of the opposition. The socialism
as social care generally remains however, except perhaps in Stalin’s
totalitarian order, and this is especially evident in the democratic
socialism of the diverse Jewish communities as a whole with their
wonderful traditions of Rabbinical disputation and respect for fellow
Jews, but social care extended beyond the national community or Volk
via ‘Christian’ universalism is obviously an ideological impediment
during a time of nationalist struggle such as war.

‘Christianity’ here is merely a metaphor for universalized social
care, what Nietzsche called our castrated slave morality, and this
lovely ideal has rarely had much sway when national survival is at
stake. The Nazis for instance while playing up to the German peoples
traditional Christian values for political reasons, were at the same
time weeding out these values in the wider populace via institutions
such as the Hitler Jugend. War propaganda in general, including
British, Australian and North American, was aimed at demonizing and
dehumanizing the Hun, the Red and Yellow peril and so on, to the
point where 100 000 Japanese were slaughtered in the Tokyo fire
bombing and Curtis LeMay admits if he had been on the losing side he
would have been tried as a war criminal, but such is war.

That there are ‘no innocents of the enemy’ in time of war seems to me
to simply state what is structurally the case when nations go to war,
especially when that war is waged by modern industrialized nations.
If the enemy’s military power is derived from the national entity as
a whole, from its industrial and labour capacity, the unity of its
Volk and leadership, and the entire communications, transport, energy
and civil infrastructure that allows the nation to continue
functioning, then logically the entire nation becomes a legitimate
target especially where one’s own losses are to be minimized. This
logic is used to explain the British and US terror bombing campaigns
against German cities like Hamburg and Dresden, also with the nuclear
attacks on Japan, but you can also read its terrible logic throughout
the Old Testament such as in Moses’ conquest and destruction of
Bashan in the biblical creation of Israel:

And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon King of Heshbon,
utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city. But
all the cattle, and the spoil of the cities, we took for a prey to
ourselves.
(Deuteronomy 3:6-7)

The same amoral considerations are evident in the Palestinian suicide
bomber response to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine some 60 years
ago and the ongoing occupation and suppression of the Palestinians
today. The notion that there are ‘no innocents of the enemy’ does not
seem to be a culturally/ethnically specific belief but rather a
structural human concern in general when the existence, survival and
growth of one’s own identified community is at stake.

The German concept of Vernichtungskrieg is perhaps the purest modern
expression of this pragmatic amorality explicitly bereft of any
concern for the other and demonstrated in the Nazi aggression against
the Soviets. Much like Ben Gurion’s 1948 campaign against Palestinian
Arabs but on a far grander scale the end game was the cleansing of
large swathes of Ukraine, Byelorussia and much of the Russian
hinterland to be resettled by the German soldier-farmers in fortified
communities. In all of these conflicts it is Lebensraum that is at
stake, whether that is the dispossession of lands or the extension of
spheres of military and thus economic influence, and it all seems to
come down to resource management favouring one community over the
other with the power struggle rationalized by religious, ethnic or
cultural claims concerning justice. The rationalizations come after
the pragmatic facts of the necessity for Lebensraum and any
consideration of ‘Christian’ morality or social concern for the other
is a secondary concern at odds with that necessity.

What I find hopeful in the current global situation is that this
universal social concern for the other is still a powerful force on
the world stage, and ‘world public opinion’ seems to be the main
opponent of the hawks who have control of military/industrial power
in the US and our other western nations supporting the aggression in
the Middle East. My pessimism however is that the aggression is not
driven by mere imperial hubris on the part of Neconservative
ideologues and the notion of a Pax Americana but that it is
fundamentally driven by the gigantic historical changes being brought
about by the advent of peak oil. If Neoconservatism and western
militant extremism in general is driven by the necessity of
maintaining energy security through this long transition to a non-
hydrocarbon based civilization then I’m afraid that what awaits us
and the next couple of generations may indeed be a war that ‘will not
end in our lifetimes’. Your own heartfelt extremism would then be an
effect of this world historical change, and reflected in the polemics
that consumes this list. The structure of our own correspondence here
is itself a good demonstration of the problem at hand, which would be
very phenomenological of us if we could engender some sort of self-
reflexivity about our own polemics don’t you think?

Call it the will to power, or the struggle for survival, polemos as a
world historical struggle, human against human, community against
community, nation against nation, enabled by modern technology the
will to will the calculative securing and perdurance of everything is
now planetary and it threatens another cataclysm whose end logic is
the ultimate ethnic cleansing, the final solution to the human
problem in species extinction. What I find utterly unbelievable is
not the planetary madness we’re descending into but that you and the
others on this list still refuse to discuss any of these contentious
problems, and I genuinely don’t expect anyone to agree with me, but
instead of discussion you are driven to hide behind personal
invective and dismissal.

This whole problematic is a decidedly philosophical problem for me,
and I challenge anyone on this list who earnestly believes otherwise
to actually engage with any of the specific statements of mine, or
the wider problematic of amoral will to will and technological
thinking, and show me how it is non-philosophical. I’d also like to
point out that I’m entirely unconcerned by the sometimes vitriolic
reactions of some of you respondents, I understand that these are
increasingly nervous times for everyone and that the problematic
includes completely irreconcilable religious, ethnic, cultural and
political beliefs with deep historical roots. But as you so
reasonably state Bob, I also “simply ask if we are adults that can
know we have different political views and set them aside if not
totally then for the most part”, and not in order to agree with me
because I’m not sure myself what it is we’re arguing about, but
rather that we can perhaps begin to even ask the question of who and
where we are today from the perspective of Heidegger’s critique of
technological power.

Regards,

Malcolm

**********************************
Dr Malcolm Riddoch
An-archos community networks
Web: http://an-archos.com

Posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 6:55 am
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Tags: morality» power» will»