Caspar David Friedrich

Cross in the Mountains 1805-06

Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight 1825-30

Evening Landscape with Two Men 1830-35

Caspar David Friedrich

Avatar 3D

I was supposed to write something deep and meaningful about Avatar, but found that Gilad Atzmon, one of my favourite writers/musicians/activists, already had done so, and way better than I will ever be able to.

However, I might as well tell you this: At first, I was a huge sceptic.
I'm a pretentious asshole when it comes to movies, music, philosophy, literature, pretty much everything – and I like it that way. I was only interested in the technical aspects of the movie, and imagined the plot would be embarrasing. It was embarrasing as hell, worthy the mindset of a five year old, but I can deal with that this time, since the overall experience was completely mindblowing. You must see this in 3D in a good venue, anything else is a crime. It was a jaw-dropping experience, and so damned far away from the 3D experience I had back in the 80's. The 3D stuff is certainly not a gimmick. I'd rate it 10/10 for being a true milestone in film art, but a mediocre 1/10 when it comes to the plot. 
Also, the movie is interesting on so many different levels, other than the technical. The politically correct have been talking about Avatar as being racist against Africans, while the politically defect have been saying that Avatar is anti-white. I find both of their conclusions quite hilarious!

Gilad Atzmon:

 Avatar may well be the biggest anti War film of all time. It stands against everything the West is identified with. It is against greed and capitalism, it is against interventionalism, it is against colonialism and imperialism, it is against technological orientation, it is against America and Britain. It puts Wolfowitz, Blair and Bush on trial without even mentioning their names. It enlightens the true meaning of ethics as a dynamic judgmental process rather than fixed moral guidelines (such as the Ten Commandments or the 1948 Human Rights Declaration). It throws a very dark light on our murderous tendencies towards other people, their belief and rituals. But it doesn’t just stop there. In the same breath, very much like German Leben philosophers (Generally speaking the Leben Philosophers stood for paying philosophical attention to life as it is lived ‘from the inside’, as opposed to Kantian abstractions, scientific reductions, positivism and naturalism.), it praises the power of nature and the attempt to bond in harmony with soil, the forest and the wildlife. It advises us all to integrate with our surrounding reality rather than impose ourselves on it. Very much like German Idealists and early Romanticists, it raises questions to do with essence, existence and the absolute. It celebrates the true meaning of life and livelihood.

It is pretty astonishing and cheering to discover Hollywood paving the way to the victorious return of German philosophical thought.

[...]

One of the reasons that America is defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan is the obvious fact that many Iraqis and Afghanis had been educated in American universities and are familiar with the American way, yet, not many within the American elite or military command understand Islam. Not many amongst the American or British leadership are graduates of Kabul or Baghdad universities.

However, as in the case of Avatar, by the time America and Britain will start to train its forces to understand Islam, it may as well be ready for its new enlightened soldiers to change sides once they arrive on the battlefield.

I would maintain that to stand up against your own people for an ethical cause is the real meaning of humanism and liberty. Yet, it is pretty astonishing that such an inspiring message is delivered by Hollywood. We may have to admit, once again, that it is the artist and creative mind (rather than the politician) who is there to shape our reality and present a prospect of a better amicable future by the means of aesthetics.

Read the whole review here.

Gilad Atzmon related post:
Taking Elder Peres Apart

The Ghost Village Project

The transformation of a Scottish ghost town

 

 

 

 

Agents of Change

Collapse

Collapse is one man sitting in the basement of an abandoned meatpacking plant in downtown Los Angeles, smoking a cigarette and explaining why human civilization in its present form is doomed. The ambience, the music (a Philip Glass-styled score) and the way he is portrayed – like a prisoner in a cell, or like a monk in confession – makes me think of The X-Files. However, this is not fiction.

Michael Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer and investigative journalist, is probably most known for dealing with conspiracy theories. However, I'd rather say he's in tune with reality and facts, because he has learned how to connect the dots. He was one of the first to talk openly about CIA dealing drugs in America, as well as starting the very influental newsletter From The Wilderness, which exposes governmental corruption.
Before you dismiss Ruppert's "conspiracy theory" as the brainchild of an old tin foil hat, we need to understand what a conspiracy theory really is. I wrote about what Noam Chomsky had to say on the subject of conspiracy theories here. Please read that article as well.

In Collapse, Ruppert talks about peak oil (”People have felt what a 145 dollar a barrell of oil feels like”, ”In the case of oil or any other substance like that, no matter how much money you throw at it, you're never gonna be able to increase oil production above where it was at peak”) and the war against time that the United States are waging in their desperate pursuit to find and exploit more oil. This war has been going on since the mid 1970's, as shown by declassified CIA documents from that era. They were perfectly aware of peak oil even back then.

From here on, he goes on for 80 minutes speaking about electricity, energy, food, the CIA's drug dealing business, economics, money, population growth, the law of the crash, local food production, moving out of the city, communities and tribes... It's pretty much Oswald Spengler and Overshoot rolled into one. I love it.

However, I do not agree with everything Ruppert says. ”There is no such thing as clean coal, and there never ever will be” – he makes a lot of these statements. We don't know what will be invented in the future. Things might change to the better. Even though I personally believe that it's way too late for science to save us from doom, one cannot be certain that it's not gonna happen. We might just be saved by the bell in the very last nanosecond.

The problem is that we are way too many who don't know or care about what's going on. Sure, if you're a passive nihilist or an egotistical misanthrope who don't even care about your own blood, so be it, but most of us have kids, most of us know people that we care about – or for that matter, animals and nature. It's quite stunning how passive we are. Here lies the greatest problem of mankind – we do not understand or care about the most basic equations of life and death. We are living with the dying.
Right now the focus on the dying is in Haiti. When that kind of death hits us here in the West, only then will we know that it's too late – and again, that's our greatest problem: Deep inside, we know. Yet we never act. We've always walked away from the real problems, and I see no change to that, and that's why we deserve this collapse. It's already happening all around us.
But it's nothing strange about that, really. In the mindframe of Spengler:
Every civilisation in history has collapsed. Why should ours be any different?

Derrick Jensen: Endgame

I just started reading Derrick Jensen's Endgame (thanks to Pierre) after having read bits and parts in A Language Older Than Words and The Culture of Make Believe. Here are the twenty premises of Endgame.

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

Nietzsche: Ny moral

 'I haven hört, att det var sagt de gamle: Du skall ej röva, du skall ej dräpa. Men jag frågor eder: var på jorden fanns det någonsin värre rövare och dråpare än just sådana heliga ord?' Dessa Nietzsches ord har i kälkborgarens ögon en djupt omoralisk klang, fastän de blott säga, att den, som vigt sitt liv åt ett stort och ädelt mål, ej får låta sin handlingskraft söndersmulas av de tusen hänsyn, som trycka den kortsynta och egoistiska vardagsmänniskan ned i gruset. En sådan idealism är allt annat än immoralisk; den ställer tvärtom betydligt högre och hårdare krav på sin man än de kristna husdjursdygderna, och den smutsas aldrig ner av tankar på tack och vedergällning.
Bengt Lidforss, 16 december 1902

The Israel Lobby - The Great Benefactor

Jews must be treated like everyone else. Israel must be treated as a normal and legitimate country. It is nothing odd with Pro-Israel organizations acting for the sake of Israel's good. Hence Jews, Israel and Pro-Israel organizations must be praised when acting well and criticized when not. It's as simple as that. Here lies no double standard, no conspiracy theory.
So let's continue our treatment of the Israel Lobby.

Related posts:
An introductory video (featuring additional links to previous posts of interest)
The Israel Lobby - What it is
The Cash
A letter from John Mearsheimer
The Israel Lobby 2009
The Israel Lobby 2009 - Part Two

We've seen how Israel benefits from economical aid which is ”beyond compare in modern history” (Yitzhak Rabin). Now let's check out the diplomatic and military support provided by the United States.

Between 1972 and 2006, Washington vetoed forty-two UN Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel. That's more than the combined total of all the vetoes cast by all other Security Council members for the same period and amounts to more than half of all American vetoes during these years.
A typical example: Among the many nations (114) supporting the resolution ”Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People” were Japan, Germany, France, China, and Great Britain. The resolution passed by a vote of 149-7 (with 22 abstaining and 13 nonvoting). The six countries that joined the United States to oppose the resolution were Israel, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau... That pretty much says it all.

Every year Arab countries try to raise the issue of Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal within the International Atomic Energy Agency, but due to Washington's influence on the board the matter is constantly prevented from being placed on its agenda.

As for military assistance, there is no doubt that Israel is the military supremacist in the Middle East. The United States has provided Israel with nearly three billion dollars to develop weapons like the Lavi aircraft, the Merkava tank, and the Arrow missile. The Israelis have access to top notch U.S.-weaponry such as the F-15 and F-16 aircraft, Blackhawk helicopters, cluster munitions, smart bombs, etc., and they are also linked to the U.S. defense and intelligence establishments through formal agreements, making Israel's armed forces one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world. Please compare that to the weaponry of Hamas, for example the homemade Qassam rockets...
Here is an article about Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. Human rights groups obviously condemn these attacks as war crimes, which they also do with Israeli attacks, especially the ones launched in the 2008-2009 Gaza war. In September, the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict determined that both Israel and Hamas had committed serious violations of the laws of war, some amounting to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Read more about that here.

This photo allegedly shows the use of internationally proscribed white phosphorous weaponry.

America has been stockpiling weapons in Israel for many years (by 2008, the economic aid for stockpiling U.S. military supplies in Israel was 400 million dollars). This policy has been justified as a way to enhance the Pentagon's ability to respond quickly to a regional crisis. However, Israel only permits the storage of materiel that may also be used in an emergency by Israeli forces. In this way, the Pentagon can never be sure if their arms and ammunition will be available in a crisis – it may already be in use by the Israeli forces...
And yes, the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported in December 2006 that ”a great portion of the American equipment stored in Israel... was used for combat in the summer [2006] war in Lebanon.”

U.S. support in favor of Israel during wartime comes down to an endless list of death, suffering and tragedy that I won't even be able to summarize. Please, read the ”The Great Benefactor” chapter in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
This support (economic aid, diplomatic protection and military assistance) has accomplished one positive end: it has helped Israel prosper. On the other hand, according to a 2003 poll, twenty out of twenty-one countries – including close U.S. allies like Britain, France, Canada, and Australia – found that a majority of the population believes that U.S. Middle East policy ”favors Israel too much”.
It is also perfectly clear that the United States has given far more than it has gained.

Is this generosity understandable?
What do the people of the United States say?

Paradise - Disease and death and the rotting of the flesh

 But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what  is always beyond reach: it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - only if we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us - if only we were worthy of it.
Now when I write of paradise I mean Paradise, not the banal Heaven of the saints. When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanos and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of the flesh.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitarie (1968)