amadeus absconditus
August 7th, 2006, search relatedRelated posts :: amadeus absconditus :: amadeus absconditus :: amadeus absconditus :: amadeus absconditus
—–Oorspronkelijk bericht—–
Van: heidegger-bounces at soca.ecu.edu.au [mailto:heidegger-bounces@soca.ecu.edu.au]Namens Malcolm Riddoch
Verzonden: maandag 7 augustus 2006 8:53
Aan: Discussions pertaining to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger
Onderwerp: Re: amadeus absconditus
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.
At least there was a threat - ongoing conspiration
The US brought ww2 without being threatened from the outside.
The inner threat - civil war - was always there, and became acute during
the thirties. It is now time to redirect all Hitler moral automatism to Roosevelt
(both 1933-1945), AND take into account what i say above. As long as you
follow the allied propaganda and their slander on Germany, you remain allied
neo-con, like Bob Scheetz, no matter what you say. I have to say it a bit clearer
now, Malcolm. Jud shows it the clearest: sying i love you, and what are the others
bad, but one can see that it just means nothing: words, neomishconmash
The real background is mechanized agriculture and the flight of Mnemosyne.
astonishingly, i have argued enough, and from now on will sing, play and dance.
everybody is invited and will be there
Rene
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
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Dr Malcolm Riddoch
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Web: http://an-archos.com
