I disliked reading Anne's 'This is the way a society dies'. As a Briton I find these things so shameful that I avert my eyes. I thought that America would stay self-reliant, then came Obama. Truth is stranger than fiction. The standard model of politics is that the pendulum will swing back, but this time liberals may engineer prolonged power. Let's face it, Obama's domestic agenda is mostly Bush's compassionate conservatism on steroids + disdain for unborn children.
'1984' hit the zeitgeist in 1948, still in the age of Hitler and Stalin, but the negative utopia of 'Brave New World' better describes present trends: hatcheries, conditioning, vaccination-workers, embryo-workers, psychotherapists, counsellors and so on. Were distopian Islamism prematurely to pursue total war before the West has hollowed itself out, then the West would be forced to a moral re-armament. Liberals realize that war breeds virility. Virility + American history = live free or die....soooo 18th century. The deep, sometimes subconscious motive for hating the Iraq war wasn't hatred of war, but fear of the politics of martial virtue. Hence both liberals and subtle Islamists will avoid all-out war, but rely on the ease with which a pacified, passified, dependent society can be switched from Brave New World to 1984 and Big Brother may be an Ayatollah. It's not a conspiracy, it's a co-incidence of interests.
So where's hope? Where's change? Well, events, dear boy, events.
2 comments:
Boy Mark-
Does anyone read your blog? This is pretty sick, pathetic stuff.
How about some chess? Martial virtue, huh? Have you ever had bombs fall on your head? Well, maybe you have.
What does virility have to do with dropping bombs from three miles up on defenseless countries? Mark, you war hero, you should be quite happy that Obama seems to be willing to dump more American soldiers into Afghanistan, where we've annihilated so many civilians lately the people have actually managed to sympathize with your useful enemies, the Taliban. Remember them?
Since your knowledge of history doesn't extend beyond the first wikipedia page you google, I suggest a few books: Taliban, by Rashid. Ghost Wars, by Coll. And Paris, 1919 by MacMillan, but just read the chapters on the creation of the modern Middle East by, in part, your country, which knows a thing or two about mass murder and fall of empire.
-Bobby Fischer.
No comment on your comment except that this blog is an archive of my posts from anatreptic.com (previously uncorrelated.com) which is a group blog with a decent readership.
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