Heidegger

On 07/08/2006, at 6:24 PM, Bakker, R.B.M. de wrote:

> 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.

Sure, as in FDR’s complicity in the Pearl Harbor attack while Wall
Street led by the Rockefeller Standard Oil (now Exxon/Mobil) and
Dupont helped finance both the Nazi war machine/death camps and
develop Soviet oil. And so on it goes but as I’ve been saying all
along - what does morality have to do with any of this? What do
humanist/’Christian’ moral imperatives have to do with power? As far
as I can see morality is merely an impediment to power where all
moral concerns become a leadership exercize in propaganda management
of mass beliefs. Mass murder of civilians becomes ‘collateral damage’
or righteous defence of the nation whether that’s Truman justifying
the slaughter of Hiroshima or Goebbels justifying the necessity of
Vernichtungskrieg and total war in the east. All the leaders are
reduced to the banality of their reciprocal, shared relations of power.

> 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.

Which brings us back to technological power and the practical
necessity of the will to will - back to Heidegger’s question about
how power defines our modern epoch. Beyond truth as mere
justification, or propaganda, beyond justice as merely the self-
righteous justification of the victorious, and beyond human being as
merely breeding material and labour locked into the planning and
calculation of nations amid the ongoing planetary struggle for
resources. As for neomishconmash I think they’re just the latest
fruit of global power, a symptom of the self-reflexivity of global
power relations that define them and give them purpose in the ongoing
consummation of the meaninglessness of leadership. I still hope the
better angels of US nature triumph, and Israel’s for that matter, but
their polemical hawks are dragging us all into a grotesque tragedy of
Wagnerian proportions. You want a moral equivalence between Hitler
and FDR, or US/Israel/Syria/Iran? We’re already there, all the
leaders are taken up into the same global play of amoral power,
change the names and geography and it will play out the same, that’s
the conundrum of technology. Humanity as a whole and irrespective of
cultural/ethnic differences is not in control of its destiny, there’s
no guarantee it will ever be, but now we’re truly planetary and
there’s nowhere left to go but the intensifying escalation.

> astonishingly, i have argued enough, and from now on will sing,
> play and dance.
> everybody is invited and will be there

I still want to persevere and try to clarify what power is, if only
for myself. How does power define my concrete existence, how does it
set up the historical situation of my everyday life, constrain my
beliefs and understanding, project future possibilities for being and
grant me the potential to be who I am in this time? It’s an academic
concern I guess, and utterly pointless in many ways as it certainly
doesn’t pay my rising cost of living, but it’s the only truly
meaningful act I can think of doing, making sense of life.

Cheers,

Malcolm

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

Posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
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