Heidegger

On 04/06/2006, at 11:52 AM, That Pete wrote:

>> In regards to this question then what about American anti-American
>> speech?
>
> I think it is fine for Americans to burn their own flag, as a symbol
> of some aspect of America they don’t like. I don’t think that’s
> anti-americanism.
>
> On the other hand I’ve never seen Americans in the streets seething
> with rage and burning the flags of other countries. So when I see
> peoples in other lands burning American flags, that is anti-
> americanism.

Ok, so as a Canadian resident of America you approve of Americans
“burning the US flag” (metaphorically or otherwise) in response to
their executive elite burning other countries to the ground but you
proscribe non-Americans as anti-Americans for “burning the US flag”
while the US is bombing their country to the ground, occupying it or
supporting other national powers in what they consider to be illegal
and murderous occupations of their country? Or are they also
justified in your foreign Canadian view and only non-American
citizens of nations not presently under attack or sanction by the US
who burn the US flag are anti-American?

What about your Canadian compatriot and 40 year resident of the US
Neil Young and his new album? It’s vintage Young and the single
“Impeach the President” is killer. I guess from your perspective he
is a foreign anti-American and should therefore be proscribed?

 http://www.myspace.com/neilyoung

But back to the 911 protagonists, Anthony claims that “The right to
free speech is not a prohibition on paranoid idiocy” which I take to
mean a possible yes to the notion that they are all anti-American
Americans consumed by paranoid delusions but protected by their
constitutional right to free speech. Does this American’s view mean
for you as a non-American that their views should also be proscribed
and should not appear in pro-American (or rather anti anti-American)
and therefore “neutral” discussions, at least according to Anthony’s
definition of neutrality?

For instance, take the “paranoid idiot” Paul Craig Roberts, a paragon
of the Republican old guard, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
Economic Policy under Reagan in the early 80’s and one of the
founding fathers of Reaganomics, a French Legion of Honor, syndicated
columnist, academic fellow at Stanford U and so on … is this
distinguished American an anti-American when he states that the US
executive is “evil”?

“The U.S. government has spent the past half century interfering in
the internal affairs of other countries, overthrowing or
assassinating their chosen leaders and imposing its puppets on
foreign peoples. To what country has Iran done this, or Iraq, or
North Korea? Americans think that they are the salt of the earth. The
hubris that comes from this self-righteous belief makes Americans
blind to the evil of their leaders. How can American leaders be evil
when Americans are so good and so wonderful? … Gentle reader, do
you believe that the Bush Regime will not shoot you down in the
streets if you have a rebellion?”
Paul Craig Roberts: http://antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=90…

And is he also an anti-American American when he not only supports
the Scholars for 911 Truth in declaring the controlled demolition
theory but also feeds speculation that the “evil” US executive under
Bush could be preparing for a nuclear 9112B attack on its citizenry?

“One of the more extraordinary suggestions is that a low yield,
perhaps tactical, nuclear weapon will be exploded some distance out
from a US port. Death and destruction will be minimized, but fear and
hysteria will be maximized. Americans will be told that the ship
bearing the weapon was discovered and intercepted just in time,
thanks to Bush’s illegal spying program, and that Iran is to blame. A
more powerful wave of fear and outrage will again bind the American
people to Bush, and the US media will not report the rest of the
world’s doubts of the explanation”.
Paul Craig Roberts:  http://antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=87…

You can find his archives here to dig up further anti-Americanisms
for me if you like:

 http://www.vdare.com/roberts/
 http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/rober…

Biography:

 http://www.vdare.com/roberts/bio.htm

Then of course there’s the US psychiatrists debate about diagnosing
GW Bush. The main proponent here claims that such expert psychiatric
profiling is used by the US State Department amongst others so he
sees no reason why the US public shouldn’t have the benefit of
profiling their own leaders. So is Dr. Frank an anti-American
American when he states that in his clinical opinion Bush “fits the
profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but
not treated” and that he also fits the clinical description of a
“paranoid megalomaniac” as well as “a sadist”?

 http://willthomas.net/Convergence/Weekly…

Now as a non-American Australian if I say, for example, that:

1. The success and vitality of the US nation is perhaps the only
realistic hope we have for global leadership on issues such as the
illegality of war and terror in response to the global energy crisis
of peak oil and its coming transformation of our economic and social
relations and our declining ability to ameliorate the accelerating
destruction of the biosphere.

Then follow this pro-Americanism with the statement that:

2. The US executive appears to have gone precisely in the opposite
direction away from global leadership and has instead embraced the
concept of full spectrum dominance in executing a mass murder of its
own citizens in order to embark on a global terror war for Lebensraum
starting in the Middle East that threatens every nation on earth.

Is that then foreign anti-American speech or “flag burning” and to be
proscribed by all pro-Americans on this list?

After all, it’s what a hell of a lot of Americans are more or less
saying on the net, and going by Bush and Cheney’s poll ratings
there’s a ground swell of “anti-Americanism” in America that
threatens to overwhelm not only the presidency but also the
Republican majority in congress. Even Republicans are saying he needs
another 911 to get him out of this mess and I’m sure there are any
number of terrorists, both domestic and foreign, in this increasingly
terrorized world who would willingly commit the mass murder to help
him out.

> And then there’s the Heidegger angle on this.
> “Americanism is something European.” Age of the World Picture.
> I’m not sure where that leaves anti-americanism. Anti-forgetfulness-
> of-being?

My own take on this whole problematic is coming out of a
phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s critique of will to power,
whether others recognize that or not is irrelevant to me though as
I’m only interested in following through on my own logic and have so
little time spare to do so, seemingly much like everyone else here.
But even the proposition that “Americanism is something European”
elides the fundamental problem of power that threads its way through
Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche/Nazism, of the will to will and
machination and on through to the question concerning technology and
our cybernetic reality today. That’s what I’m interested in following
through here with my apparently proscribed anti-Americanism. I could
care less about Bush himself as IMHO he’s not only a congenitally
deranged puppet of Cheney and the others but from the perspective of
Heidegger’s critique of will to will all the leaders themselves of
all the nations are puppets animated by the practical, pragmatic
relations of power that bind them altogether into one global community.

From the Zionist hawks of the Israeli executive elites to the Hamas
leadership, the leaders of the Iraqi resistance, both Shiite and
Sunni, the religious and secular leaders of Iran, both moderate and
fundamentalist, and our own elites who inhabit the institutions of
our industrially advanced democracies, we are all caught in a
polemical dance of terror, lies and death. My proposition, following
Heidegger, is that all leaders are bound by the historical, pragmatic
relations of power that constrain their choices and potential for
action in this world, and irrespective of the rationalizations or
self-justifications they or we might make after the fact. Power is
merely an amoral, practical fact of life and the world we live in,
its relations set up the historical situation we inhabit and our
future remains unclear so long as we remain oblivious, where the
willful oblivion of technologically constrained modernity seems to be
our present and future reality.

So if you want a world picture for today you might try painting the
technological relations of power that constrain us in an-archos,
where all is polemos essentially without leadership, either of our
selves or our national relations or our relation to nature. Polemos
an-archos is my theme and if this is to be proscibed by North
Americans on this list then so be it. I invite and encourage all
international list members on this globally distributed list to write
as they see fit even though all non-Americans apparently remain
outside the protections of the US constitution’s first amendment.

For those who might care I should however point out that the website
archive of this email list resides on a server in the heart of
Kentucky on the US backbone network and is of course subject to the
massive data mining sweep of their domestic internet being conducted
by the US Homeland Security and its intelligence forces. Apparently
the “no-fly” lists are compiled rather randomly and in the words of
one successful proponent of the willful use of power they do indeed
“go massive, sweep it all up. Things related and not”.

Regards,

Malcolm

**********************************
Dr Malcolm Riddoch
An-archos community networks
Web:  http://an-archos.com
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Posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
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Tags: 911 demolition» America» terror» will to power»