In many cases, choosing not to speak is more powerful than choosing to speak. Take for example an unexpected verbal assault launched by either a stranger or a person you know and trust. The first instinct for many Americans is to go on the defensive and respond in kind, using violent or aggressive words. Such a response, however, feeds power to the attacker; it shows him that his target will dance to his tune and respond to injury with injury.
One method for retaining personal power in such a situation is to stay silent. Even a brief pause - taken to gather the wits - is likely to throw off the offender. Nine times out of ten he will make a fool of himself should his anger sit out there in the aether, unanswered. His one-sided aggressive energy will soon sour, leading to visible changes in his physical appearance such as bulging eyes, a reddened face, and balled-up fists.
Most of the world’s major religious teachings encourage their followers to requite injury with kindness, to steer clear of wrong, to turn the other cheek. In his book Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl reiterates this point. A victim of injustice perpetrated by the Nazis, he reminds his readers that though they may wallow under the harshest of imaginable conditions, in order to remain human they should stick to kindness, mercy, and nonviolence. Though this suggestion may fly in the face of the social standards of many Western industrial societies, I urge you, dear reader, to give it a try. Aho, mahalo, and om swastiastu!
americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑
Showing posts with label nazi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nazi. Show all posts
08 March 2017
22 February 2013
on discussing religion
In the 1950s, America was gearing up for a war that never turned hot. One potent weapon lurking in the federal arsenal was propaganda, a tool with which the Nazis before them had enslave an entire people to murderous ends. That it had been employed to ill effect in Europe was of little concern to the policy-makers in Washington, D.C. – they required every measure at their disposal to hoodwink the American people into allowing them to spend tens of trillions of dollars on a 40 year-long struggle of the wills. The Red Scare is over, and the Iron Curtain is down, but one aspect of the Cold War continues to harm millions of Americans, even unto this day: the frequent invocation of the Christian god Yahweh.
From the pledge of allegiance to the words spoken by new presidents, one phrase has contaminated the speech of officialdom such as few others before it: “under God”. This foul credo even stains our currency, every dollar we print saying IN GOD WE TRUST. Why did the fear mongers and panic sellers of sixty years ago tether our once fine and secular nation to the tenets of one religion in particular? Did they tarnish the sacrifice made by our Founding Persons and the bygone Sons of Liberty merely to justify their hatred for godless, heathen communists? Did they shit on this republic's chest out of a wan sense of patriotism or were they simply oblivious to the lessons of history? For whatever reason, our money now promotes one religion to the exclusion of all others, and our children are now tricked into worshiping bloodthirsty, genocidal Yahweh before class, each day. When millions of Americans believe that a bearded old White man sits in the sky judging their every action and that a red-skinned pervert with hoofed feet is filling their brains with evil thoughts, we see just how badly those Cold War policy makers fucked up; when candidates running for public office have to curry the favor of wild-eyed, bible-thumping, chest-pounding fanatics or risk losing the election, we see just how dangerous it is to link religion to government.
It is important to discuss the topic of racism with other people, regardless of their skin tone, mindset, belief system, needs, wants, or fears. Americans of color lament that too few of their Caucasian countrymen speak about racism regularly, openly, and without compunction. As people who have been marginalized and despised for centuries, minorities recognize that ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to death; they have learned firsthand the dangers that silence brings. Similar to racism, religion must be discussed regularly, openly, and without compunction in order to keep the individual from backsliding into a mindset calcified by relentless exposure to his shaman's fire-branded, unchallenged vituperation. In the words of our first president, George Washington, and his successor, John Adams (from the Treaty of Tripoli): “America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” It is as vital to the survival of our basic Constitutional rights to discuss the risks of our own state-sanctioned religious fanaticism as it is to combat the foreign-born fanatics who seek to do us harm. So, next time you manage to tear yourself from in front of the television, strike up a conversation with someone about religion. Please don't forget, though, that the faithful rarely enjoy talking about their beliefs unless they are being praised for them. Sic semper tyrannis.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥
From the pledge of allegiance to the words spoken by new presidents, one phrase has contaminated the speech of officialdom such as few others before it: “under God”. This foul credo even stains our currency, every dollar we print saying IN GOD WE TRUST. Why did the fear mongers and panic sellers of sixty years ago tether our once fine and secular nation to the tenets of one religion in particular? Did they tarnish the sacrifice made by our Founding Persons and the bygone Sons of Liberty merely to justify their hatred for godless, heathen communists? Did they shit on this republic's chest out of a wan sense of patriotism or were they simply oblivious to the lessons of history? For whatever reason, our money now promotes one religion to the exclusion of all others, and our children are now tricked into worshiping bloodthirsty, genocidal Yahweh before class, each day. When millions of Americans believe that a bearded old White man sits in the sky judging their every action and that a red-skinned pervert with hoofed feet is filling their brains with evil thoughts, we see just how badly those Cold War policy makers fucked up; when candidates running for public office have to curry the favor of wild-eyed, bible-thumping, chest-pounding fanatics or risk losing the election, we see just how dangerous it is to link religion to government.
It is important to discuss the topic of racism with other people, regardless of their skin tone, mindset, belief system, needs, wants, or fears. Americans of color lament that too few of their Caucasian countrymen speak about racism regularly, openly, and without compunction. As people who have been marginalized and despised for centuries, minorities recognize that ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to death; they have learned firsthand the dangers that silence brings. Similar to racism, religion must be discussed regularly, openly, and without compunction in order to keep the individual from backsliding into a mindset calcified by relentless exposure to his shaman's fire-branded, unchallenged vituperation. In the words of our first president, George Washington, and his successor, John Adams (from the Treaty of Tripoli): “America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” It is as vital to the survival of our basic Constitutional rights to discuss the risks of our own state-sanctioned religious fanaticism as it is to combat the foreign-born fanatics who seek to do us harm. So, next time you manage to tear yourself from in front of the television, strike up a conversation with someone about religion. Please don't forget, though, that the faithful rarely enjoy talking about their beliefs unless they are being praised for them. Sic semper tyrannis.
mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥
07 November 2012
America fails, again
America's media outlets fail her People. So widespread is their deceit, and so brazen is their obfuscation, that the 3rd party presidential candidates' debate of 05 November 2012 streamed live only on rt.com, the website for Russia Today. No indigenous source for news – not FOX, ABC, NBC, not even fucking NPR! – has mentioned the name of a 3rd party presidential candidate in the last few weeks, and none of them – not even fucking NPR! – agreed to air Monday night's debate, let alone to acknowledge the existence of candidates besides Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, person such as governor Gary Johnson or Dr. Jill Stein. So deeply entrenched are these media giants – even fucking NPR! – and so fully have they been bought and paid for by the faceless corporations that now control the hearts and minds of millions of once-free ynki, that it is safe to say that this grand experiment of ours has failed. Now, we are following a trajectory similar to that of the Weimar Republic (see truthout.org: “History's Magic Mirror: America’s Economic Crisis and the Weimar Republic of Pre-Nazi Germany”) or the French Third Republic (see truthout.org: “How democracies die”); now, our down-spiral into widespread fascism and state-sanctioned religious extremism is not merely food for thought – it is as certain as death from an Obama drone-strike.
For most of my adult life I have been told that this land's news media is the fourth pillar of government, after, of course, the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; we have seen over the last weeks, however, the true extent of the news-media's sinister power, standing by in silent and docile witness as it corrupted democracy and deliberately destroyed equality and free speech, the very essence of this fragile republic. In that sense, the title of this piece is wrong – it is not America that has failed us, rather we the People who have failed her. I have tried to write about these matters, and I have tried to sound the warning klaxons repeatedly and with growing vigor, but, according to my new slogan: “I write because no one listens.” I could, perhaps, stand out in the cold again holding a sign in protest of or support for this idea or that policy, this notion or that cause, but my efforts would be for naught; just as one can lead a horse to water but not make it drink, so one can lead one's fellow citizens to knowledge but not make them think.
Where does this path we have chosen lead? To the jackbooted and willful destruction of diversity, life, honor, and Truth. This same path is the path taken in the early part of the last century by the people of Germany, who signed away their consciouses for the fleeting security of a chicken in every pot. So vast has our failure become, so readily have we given up our most precious ideals in pursuit of an artificial peace-of-mind and self-enslavement to our material possessions, that we no longer deserve to call ourselves patriots, let alone Americans; real Americans would fight for liberty and not give an inch to petty tyrants ruling from behind the black gates of White Houses; real Americans would demand that all voices be given equal air-time, that all candidates for the presidency be thrown into a room together without make up or polish, prepping or preening, polling or punditry; real Americans would take to the streets in the thousands in order to defend the rights of gays and women instead of shutting off their minds with a click of the television remote. Dear reader, we might have saved a bit of skin by not electing Mitt Romney to the presidency, but our struggle is far from over; indeed, it has just begun. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
For most of my adult life I have been told that this land's news media is the fourth pillar of government, after, of course, the legislative, judicial, and executive branches; we have seen over the last weeks, however, the true extent of the news-media's sinister power, standing by in silent and docile witness as it corrupted democracy and deliberately destroyed equality and free speech, the very essence of this fragile republic. In that sense, the title of this piece is wrong – it is not America that has failed us, rather we the People who have failed her. I have tried to write about these matters, and I have tried to sound the warning klaxons repeatedly and with growing vigor, but, according to my new slogan: “I write because no one listens.” I could, perhaps, stand out in the cold again holding a sign in protest of or support for this idea or that policy, this notion or that cause, but my efforts would be for naught; just as one can lead a horse to water but not make it drink, so one can lead one's fellow citizens to knowledge but not make them think.
Where does this path we have chosen lead? To the jackbooted and willful destruction of diversity, life, honor, and Truth. This same path is the path taken in the early part of the last century by the people of Germany, who signed away their consciouses for the fleeting security of a chicken in every pot. So vast has our failure become, so readily have we given up our most precious ideals in pursuit of an artificial peace-of-mind and self-enslavement to our material possessions, that we no longer deserve to call ourselves patriots, let alone Americans; real Americans would fight for liberty and not give an inch to petty tyrants ruling from behind the black gates of White Houses; real Americans would demand that all voices be given equal air-time, that all candidates for the presidency be thrown into a room together without make up or polish, prepping or preening, polling or punditry; real Americans would take to the streets in the thousands in order to defend the rights of gays and women instead of shutting off their minds with a click of the television remote. Dear reader, we might have saved a bit of skin by not electing Mitt Romney to the presidency, but our struggle is far from over; indeed, it has just begun. Mahalo.
© mentiri factorem fecit (場黑麥)
19 September 2012
dangerous self-seclusion
During the period when America's news outlets still reported on this country's ongoing occupation of the sovereign Republic of Afghanistan, they often spoke about the dangerous seclusion of much of the Afghani population. Living in rugged valleys so inaccessible that neighboring villages are sometimes wholly ignorant of one another, even though they live but a few miles apart, the television's talking-heads spoke long ago of the risks to Liberty, justice, and the rights of women that arise when people live in such seclusion, arguing that it granted their religious and societal leaders absolute power over their minds and bodies.
As things stand in America today, however, religious extremism similar to that practiced by close-minded, militant, and misogynistic Islamic leaders in al-Qaida and Hezbollah has infected the minds of even highly-placed officials in the Republican party, rotting the souls of America's Christian extremists, persons who call themselves dominionists. Just as the threat of religious terrorism that we once thought came from without now comes from within, the American people are secluding ourselves into walled-off little worlds whose borders are defined by the edges of our flat-screen television sets, the rims of our hand-held tablet computers, and the invisibly-reaching tendrils of our Wi-Fi transceivers. This home-grown technological self-seclusion is as great a threat to democracy and freedom as the threat posed by Afghani mullahs instilling hatred-of-all-things-unknown in the minds of children living in distant and dusty valleys. Whereas in Afghanistan many villagers only hear and see and are exposed to a limited and selective view of the world – one they receive from often poorly-educated and ill-informed religious leaders – we in America who choose to spend our lives riveted to self-illuminated talking boxes expose ourselves to a limited and selective view of the world, one we receive from often ill-informed religious and societal leaders who exploit fear-of-the-unknown and the power of oft-repeated lies (as per Goebbels) to corrupt the minds of erstwhile free-thinking and self-respecting citizens.
Many other authors and I have rung the warning-bell previously, altering others to the brainwashing and heart-hardening upon which America's mass-media preys, which it perpetuates at all cost, and which it does with such pervasive effectiveness that its methods were copied by the Nazis themselves – all no no avail; it seems that a majority of us Americans do not care that we have become docile sheep, that our minds are owned by vulture-capitalist billionaires, that our hearts are weighted down by pettiness and greed, or that we allow our views to be shaped by small-minded idiots who squawk at cameras with make-up-caked faces. It is not hard, however, to free our minds from enslavement to television or to allow our opinions to grow out of hubris and humility; the healing begins when we turn off our TVs, toss aside our tablets, switch off our radios, and leave our houses to have a nice walk, driving Fear from our minds with gradual surety and loving effort. President Franklin D. Roosevelt got it right when, in 1933, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear festers in the minds of people who shut their ears to differing opinions, who close their hearts to the shades of truth found in dissenting voices, who allow themselves to be caught up in religious fervor and nationalistic self-righteousness. Please, friend, remember to doubt everything that you hear, to question all that you are told, and to fight the urge to live in the manner of a secluded villager who believes everything his mullah tells him. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
As things stand in America today, however, religious extremism similar to that practiced by close-minded, militant, and misogynistic Islamic leaders in al-Qaida and Hezbollah has infected the minds of even highly-placed officials in the Republican party, rotting the souls of America's Christian extremists, persons who call themselves dominionists. Just as the threat of religious terrorism that we once thought came from without now comes from within, the American people are secluding ourselves into walled-off little worlds whose borders are defined by the edges of our flat-screen television sets, the rims of our hand-held tablet computers, and the invisibly-reaching tendrils of our Wi-Fi transceivers. This home-grown technological self-seclusion is as great a threat to democracy and freedom as the threat posed by Afghani mullahs instilling hatred-of-all-things-unknown in the minds of children living in distant and dusty valleys. Whereas in Afghanistan many villagers only hear and see and are exposed to a limited and selective view of the world – one they receive from often poorly-educated and ill-informed religious leaders – we in America who choose to spend our lives riveted to self-illuminated talking boxes expose ourselves to a limited and selective view of the world, one we receive from often ill-informed religious and societal leaders who exploit fear-of-the-unknown and the power of oft-repeated lies (as per Goebbels) to corrupt the minds of erstwhile free-thinking and self-respecting citizens.
Many other authors and I have rung the warning-bell previously, altering others to the brainwashing and heart-hardening upon which America's mass-media preys, which it perpetuates at all cost, and which it does with such pervasive effectiveness that its methods were copied by the Nazis themselves – all no no avail; it seems that a majority of us Americans do not care that we have become docile sheep, that our minds are owned by vulture-capitalist billionaires, that our hearts are weighted down by pettiness and greed, or that we allow our views to be shaped by small-minded idiots who squawk at cameras with make-up-caked faces. It is not hard, however, to free our minds from enslavement to television or to allow our opinions to grow out of hubris and humility; the healing begins when we turn off our TVs, toss aside our tablets, switch off our radios, and leave our houses to have a nice walk, driving Fear from our minds with gradual surety and loving effort. President Franklin D. Roosevelt got it right when, in 1933, he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear festers in the minds of people who shut their ears to differing opinions, who close their hearts to the shades of truth found in dissenting voices, who allow themselves to be caught up in religious fervor and nationalistic self-righteousness. Please, friend, remember to doubt everything that you hear, to question all that you are told, and to fight the urge to live in the manner of a secluded villager who believes everything his mullah tells him. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
12 September 2012
a Declarational pledge
In the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, that legal document that lies at the heart of this American nation, our founding persons – and, by extension, all American citizens living or dead – declare that, “[A]ll Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness[.]” (Since starting this piece, I have read that the federal government does not consider the Declaration an active legal document because it was ratified before the Constitution by merely thirteen states, not after this republic's official establishment by the number of states we have now; so long as even a single American yearns for Liberty and the right to Pursue his Happiness as he sees best fit, however, the Declaration grants him – and us all – the right to alter and abolish our government until it creates Safety and Happiness for all, equally.) Long have our political and social leaders hewn to this pledge, laboring tirelessly to ensure that we are all blessed with freedom and justice; now, however, the Republican Party plans to destroy the essence of the Declaration of Independence by amending its sister-text, the Constitution, with a sentence defining marriage according to the Christian bible, just one of hundreds of different religious texts we turn to in this country, each and every day.
To restrict a person's right to marry whomever he should please is to rob him of his ability to Pursue Happiness; it says to him that he is worth less than others, that he was created less than equal, that his Liberty is less important than the Liberty of persons with a taste for heterosexual liaisons. Anyone with even the slightest shred of intelligence will look at the quote given above and immediately join our ranks as we fight the Republican Party's plans to abolish the rule of law and to supplant it with the rule of the church. (Which church or which faith is irrelevant; organized religion, with its fear-based indoctrination tactics, brainwashing of young people, and rigid, unyielding structure, poses among the greatest of conceivable threats to the Safety and Happiness of free-thinking, Liberty-loving individuals everywhere.)
This author finds it curious that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan prefer lies and hatred to Honor and Truth, and that they care so little for the opinions of the American people that they dare to stand up and say, Fuck everyone who isn't a hardcore Christian, fuck everyone who likes to sleep with persons of the same sex, and fuck everyone poorer than our corporate cronies and slave-masters. More shocking, however, is that roughly half of the American voting population – some seventy million (70,000,000) people – seem to agree with the vile nonsense spewing from the Republican Party, its members and representatives; when tens of millions of people abandon critical thinking and stop doubting the bullshit that is being shoveled down their throats we get things such as the Nazi's Holocaust, the Soviets' gulags, and Bush's Patriot Act; when tens of millions of people sit idly by as their leaders rack up record debts and wage wars of aggression against sovereign foreign nations, we can honestly say that America has fallen from grace, that the pledge of equality once made in the Declaration of Independence is null and void, and that our attempt to create a just and peaceful society comprised of self-reliant and self-respecting individuals who mind their own business has been trampled under the jackboots of mindless, Me-First automatons blindly adhering to poorly-formed notions and vacuous party-lines.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
To restrict a person's right to marry whomever he should please is to rob him of his ability to Pursue Happiness; it says to him that he is worth less than others, that he was created less than equal, that his Liberty is less important than the Liberty of persons with a taste for heterosexual liaisons. Anyone with even the slightest shred of intelligence will look at the quote given above and immediately join our ranks as we fight the Republican Party's plans to abolish the rule of law and to supplant it with the rule of the church. (Which church or which faith is irrelevant; organized religion, with its fear-based indoctrination tactics, brainwashing of young people, and rigid, unyielding structure, poses among the greatest of conceivable threats to the Safety and Happiness of free-thinking, Liberty-loving individuals everywhere.)
This author finds it curious that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan prefer lies and hatred to Honor and Truth, and that they care so little for the opinions of the American people that they dare to stand up and say, Fuck everyone who isn't a hardcore Christian, fuck everyone who likes to sleep with persons of the same sex, and fuck everyone poorer than our corporate cronies and slave-masters. More shocking, however, is that roughly half of the American voting population – some seventy million (70,000,000) people – seem to agree with the vile nonsense spewing from the Republican Party, its members and representatives; when tens of millions of people abandon critical thinking and stop doubting the bullshit that is being shoveled down their throats we get things such as the Nazi's Holocaust, the Soviets' gulags, and Bush's Patriot Act; when tens of millions of people sit idly by as their leaders rack up record debts and wage wars of aggression against sovereign foreign nations, we can honestly say that America has fallen from grace, that the pledge of equality once made in the Declaration of Independence is null and void, and that our attempt to create a just and peaceful society comprised of self-reliant and self-respecting individuals who mind their own business has been trampled under the jackboots of mindless, Me-First automatons blindly adhering to poorly-formed notions and vacuous party-lines.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
17 August 2012
perspective - it matters
Time, age, tiredness, joy, sadness, loss, gain – these hard-to-define concepts are aspects of the human condition, not iron-clad rules of law but rather matters of perspective that change with one's outlook on life. What is to one person a grave insult is to another as a joyous and welcome gift. A few days ago, a family friend was telling me about growing up Jewish in a Christian town, and how the other kids would throw pennies at her and call her a penny-pinching kike, and other bad names, and how she would pick up those pennies and use them to buy herself cartons of milk and boxes of cookies, which cost about five cents a-piece. And then there is my longtime partner-in-crime, Mr. P, a friend from my childhood in Germany, who makes over a hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars a year, who lives in the new W residences near the World Trade Center site in New York City, and who is so upset with his former boss in Thailand for that man firing him and forcing him to leave that country that his heart has become swamped with hatred, keeping him from seeing his life as blessed, the kind of life that people kill for.
I spoke with Mr. P a fortnight ago, trying to help him see things from a different perspective so that he might come to enjoy his time Stateside and not be so miserable and mopey all the time, but changes in perspective are achieved only by each person individually and are not easily forced, or coerced. So subtle is perspective, and at once so powerful, that entire industries exist to shape and to mold the views of persons who consume media (which accounts for any person who has ever watched TV or listened to the radio). Even as far back as the 1930s, American advertising was so effective and so quick to control and to shape the perspectives of millions of far-flung and unrelated citizens that the National Socialists in Germany, the Nazis, adopted Yankee-pioneered advertising and propaganda techniques and used them to brainwash tens of millions of good, honest Teutons into acquiescing to the invasion of sovereign foreign nations and the eradication of train-loads of men, women, and children. The power of the American advertising machine persists – so great is it that an imbecile such as the political puppet Sarah Palin can be packaged and sold in such cunning fashion that otherwise intelligent individuals come to see her as a desirable candidate for the second-highest office in the land.
You may be asking yourself right about now, “Well then, oh-so-clever LyeSmythe, how can I avoid being brainwashed, and how can I craft for myself a pure and honest view of the world?” Persons who change their perspectives begin by turning off and throwing out their television sets, they refuse to watch junk-TV (think reality- and talk-shows), they get news from sources located in different countries around the world, and they read news in languages other than English. In this manner, self-respecting people avoid the snare of America's propaganda juggernaut, giving their minds enough unique views of news-worthy events that their opinions are not shaped or dominated by just one brand of crazy.
Beyond the political sphere, however, one's perspective of something on the order to time itself – time-keeping via clock or watch, being on or off schedule, on time or off it, early or late – is shaped by society and by the consensual, Western hallucination that time is a rigid temporal plane extending in a straight line from the past into the future. Which is all well and good until one runs into the article entitled the Rebirth of a Sioux Nation in the August 2012 edition of National Geographic in which the author talks about the way the people of the Oglala Sioux view time – as a cyclical maelstrom in which past and present, life and death, and the spirit and waking worlds are shadows of one another, not strictly separate realms. Seeing the world from a point of view so foreign to the cookie-cutter, pre-packaged perception drilled endlessly into the heads of average Americans is a nice way to blow one's mind on a rainy Tuesday afternoon; such adventures into the curious minds of wise and ancient peoples are good ways to keep one's perspectives loose, and flexible. Therefore, on the next occasion that someone complains that you were not on time, you, dear reader, can claim to be changing your views on the nature of the universe, and that the clocks were wrong, not you. Give the gift of cognitive insecurity – change your mind frequently, adopt new points of view as often as you are able, and keep that dome-piece of a swivel. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
I spoke with Mr. P a fortnight ago, trying to help him see things from a different perspective so that he might come to enjoy his time Stateside and not be so miserable and mopey all the time, but changes in perspective are achieved only by each person individually and are not easily forced, or coerced. So subtle is perspective, and at once so powerful, that entire industries exist to shape and to mold the views of persons who consume media (which accounts for any person who has ever watched TV or listened to the radio). Even as far back as the 1930s, American advertising was so effective and so quick to control and to shape the perspectives of millions of far-flung and unrelated citizens that the National Socialists in Germany, the Nazis, adopted Yankee-pioneered advertising and propaganda techniques and used them to brainwash tens of millions of good, honest Teutons into acquiescing to the invasion of sovereign foreign nations and the eradication of train-loads of men, women, and children. The power of the American advertising machine persists – so great is it that an imbecile such as the political puppet Sarah Palin can be packaged and sold in such cunning fashion that otherwise intelligent individuals come to see her as a desirable candidate for the second-highest office in the land.
You may be asking yourself right about now, “Well then, oh-so-clever LyeSmythe, how can I avoid being brainwashed, and how can I craft for myself a pure and honest view of the world?” Persons who change their perspectives begin by turning off and throwing out their television sets, they refuse to watch junk-TV (think reality- and talk-shows), they get news from sources located in different countries around the world, and they read news in languages other than English. In this manner, self-respecting people avoid the snare of America's propaganda juggernaut, giving their minds enough unique views of news-worthy events that their opinions are not shaped or dominated by just one brand of crazy.
Beyond the political sphere, however, one's perspective of something on the order to time itself – time-keeping via clock or watch, being on or off schedule, on time or off it, early or late – is shaped by society and by the consensual, Western hallucination that time is a rigid temporal plane extending in a straight line from the past into the future. Which is all well and good until one runs into the article entitled the Rebirth of a Sioux Nation in the August 2012 edition of National Geographic in which the author talks about the way the people of the Oglala Sioux view time – as a cyclical maelstrom in which past and present, life and death, and the spirit and waking worlds are shadows of one another, not strictly separate realms. Seeing the world from a point of view so foreign to the cookie-cutter, pre-packaged perception drilled endlessly into the heads of average Americans is a nice way to blow one's mind on a rainy Tuesday afternoon; such adventures into the curious minds of wise and ancient peoples are good ways to keep one's perspectives loose, and flexible. Therefore, on the next occasion that someone complains that you were not on time, you, dear reader, can claim to be changing your views on the nature of the universe, and that the clocks were wrong, not you. Give the gift of cognitive insecurity – change your mind frequently, adopt new points of view as often as you are able, and keep that dome-piece of a swivel. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
27 June 2012
on Sallust
I have recently finished reading a Latin-to-English translation from 1920 of the War with Catiline, by Sallust. (I had purchased the book for one dollar during a visit to my alma mater's library.) Beyond the fact that the actual war which this work purports to cover consumed no more than the last few pages of the text (which is scores of pages long), the tale deals primarily with such political corruption, societal decay, and moral downfall as that seems to have set the stage for Catiline's failed rebellion. Moreover, the situations Sallust describes in this book – situations which Catiline appears to have tried to exploit to his own benefit – struck me as eerily similar to situations we face in America, today.
Sallust speaks of the founding of Rome, how the city came to wealth and great fortune, becoming the mother of an empire. But, soon enough, the principles upon which it was founded – industriousness, thriftiness, valor – were supplanted by avarice, sloth, and self-aggrandizement. And, soon enough, in its primary political body, the Senate, “instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway.” This, I believe, is the trap into which our own Congress and Senate have fallen. The politicians who fill these bodies, while campaigning for election or reelection, champion themselves as honest persons of incorruptible and modest moral fiber only to revert, once they have gained office, to shamelessly selling their time and influence to the highest bidder and to writing such laws as rape the very people they have sworn to protect of their Lives, Liberty, and Property. Sallust speaks that when Rome had grown “great through toil and the practice of justice… savage tribes and mighty people subdued by force of arms… and all the seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” This text almost perfectly describes the course America charted from its founding until now, in that this nation was born in perilous circumstances, becoming soon a country dedicated to the preservation of the rule of law, then wiping out whole populations of First People tribes, and finally conquering Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to leave land and sea our disposal, only to discover, as if we had but recently come to our senses, that our internal affairs were seriously – and perhaps irrevocably – out of alignment.
I am not the first to draw comparisons between the Roman and the American empires, and I am not the first to suggest the inevitability of an empire such as our own to fail, but I am delighted to have found an ancient work that so well supports these points. While there is much solid wisdom to be learned from past writers (I should like to suggest to persons in the Occupy and the Indignados movements to read the aforementioned book, and to prepare for a total lack of positive change), the primary lessons I gleaned from this interesting and worthwhile text are that life seems to follow certain paths inexorably, that politics are intolerably messy and best left alone, that money and influence always corrupt, that people should be trusted about as far as they can be thrown, and that elected officials will only reluctantly and with much kicking and screaming give up such power as to which they have become accustomed. So please, dear reader, fellow Second Sons of Liberty, comrades of the New Guards for our Future Security, please do not despair, for no matter how dark our times may seem, they are sure to get worse before they get better. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
work cited: Sallust, page 14, J. C. Rolfe, London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam's Sons, 1920
Sallust speaks of the founding of Rome, how the city came to wealth and great fortune, becoming the mother of an empire. But, soon enough, the principles upon which it was founded – industriousness, thriftiness, valor – were supplanted by avarice, sloth, and self-aggrandizement. And, soon enough, in its primary political body, the Senate, “instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway.” This, I believe, is the trap into which our own Congress and Senate have fallen. The politicians who fill these bodies, while campaigning for election or reelection, champion themselves as honest persons of incorruptible and modest moral fiber only to revert, once they have gained office, to shamelessly selling their time and influence to the highest bidder and to writing such laws as rape the very people they have sworn to protect of their Lives, Liberty, and Property. Sallust speaks that when Rome had grown “great through toil and the practice of justice… savage tribes and mighty people subdued by force of arms… and all the seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” This text almost perfectly describes the course America charted from its founding until now, in that this nation was born in perilous circumstances, becoming soon a country dedicated to the preservation of the rule of law, then wiping out whole populations of First People tribes, and finally conquering Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to leave land and sea our disposal, only to discover, as if we had but recently come to our senses, that our internal affairs were seriously – and perhaps irrevocably – out of alignment.
I am not the first to draw comparisons between the Roman and the American empires, and I am not the first to suggest the inevitability of an empire such as our own to fail, but I am delighted to have found an ancient work that so well supports these points. While there is much solid wisdom to be learned from past writers (I should like to suggest to persons in the Occupy and the Indignados movements to read the aforementioned book, and to prepare for a total lack of positive change), the primary lessons I gleaned from this interesting and worthwhile text are that life seems to follow certain paths inexorably, that politics are intolerably messy and best left alone, that money and influence always corrupt, that people should be trusted about as far as they can be thrown, and that elected officials will only reluctantly and with much kicking and screaming give up such power as to which they have become accustomed. So please, dear reader, fellow Second Sons of Liberty, comrades of the New Guards for our Future Security, please do not despair, for no matter how dark our times may seem, they are sure to get worse before they get better. Mahalo.
場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit
work cited: Sallust, page 14, J. C. Rolfe, London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam's Sons, 1920
25 April 2012
on our common Nazi heritage
(I had begun to write a piece lambasting Americans for our shameless and widespread use of technologies developed and perfected by the Nazis, until I realized that every person living in today's industrialized societies benefits from the murder, chaos, fear, and hatred perpetuated by those horrible people; this article has changed significantly since its inception.)
As persons living in this modern world, we benefit from and use a variety of methods and technologies that were discovered by persons known as Nazis. Many of the advances we so readily use and accept today would be impossible without the wars fought during the 20th century, wars fought specifically to counter the threat posed by the Nazis and their allies. Therefore, any individual using and otherwise benefiting from such things as highly mechanized production, the use of electric-hybrid batteries, the interstate highway system, and air-conditioning (without which neither jet-flight nor high-rise buildings would be feasible), such persons are accomplice to every atrocity and horrendous action (including the genocidal bombings at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden) that made that technology possible. Those people who jettison from their lives all vestiges of this modern world, who live, wear, and eat only such things as grow in Nature, or those who kill themselves outright, these people are free of the shameful burden of Nazism; the rest of us live with the blood of thousands of innocent people on our hands. I, the author, am just as guilty as the rest of mankind.
Without the Nazis, our modern world would not amount to much. (I applaud the efforts put forth by the brave and industrious women and men in America and her allied countries who worked on and mastered the methods and ideas – rocketry, the use of mass media in propaganda, diesel engines – pioneered by Germans during the 1930s and 40s; a spade, however, shall be called a spade.) American astronauts traveled to the moon on rockets designed and built by Werner Von Braun, who was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and a slave-master at Peenemünde. Without Nazis, the citizens of the world would not enjoy the privilege of traveling rapidly, and comfortably, in jet-powered aircraft, nor would we likely have developed radar or sonar technologies, without which air and naval travel become frightening and inefficient. If not for the Nazis, Albert Einstein's course in life would have been slightly altered, resulting in unknowable changes to the space-time-continuum (if, of course, one believes in such nonsense as the space-time-continuum), and he and his ideas may have benefited some country other than this, our own. And, to conclude this stress-inducing and poorly-argued piece, without the Nazis we would not likely have allowed nationalistic, fear-mongering, borderline-racist politicians such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin to gain such prominence on the national stage, and we would likely have found it far harder to neglect and to ignore our shared, common virtues of generosity, humility, and kindness, virtues that counter-act feelings of self-loathing, hatred, contempt, and dissatisfaction.
There is nothing more evil than hatred, and there are few dangers as great as to rely solely on mass media for one's daily news. Therefore, please turn off your TV, switch off your radio, burn your morning paper, and spend some time enjoying life's simple pleasures, such as breathing. If we are not careful, however, that too may soon join the growing list of Things Only Terrorists Do.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
As persons living in this modern world, we benefit from and use a variety of methods and technologies that were discovered by persons known as Nazis. Many of the advances we so readily use and accept today would be impossible without the wars fought during the 20th century, wars fought specifically to counter the threat posed by the Nazis and their allies. Therefore, any individual using and otherwise benefiting from such things as highly mechanized production, the use of electric-hybrid batteries, the interstate highway system, and air-conditioning (without which neither jet-flight nor high-rise buildings would be feasible), such persons are accomplice to every atrocity and horrendous action (including the genocidal bombings at Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Dresden) that made that technology possible. Those people who jettison from their lives all vestiges of this modern world, who live, wear, and eat only such things as grow in Nature, or those who kill themselves outright, these people are free of the shameful burden of Nazism; the rest of us live with the blood of thousands of innocent people on our hands. I, the author, am just as guilty as the rest of mankind.
Without the Nazis, our modern world would not amount to much. (I applaud the efforts put forth by the brave and industrious women and men in America and her allied countries who worked on and mastered the methods and ideas – rocketry, the use of mass media in propaganda, diesel engines – pioneered by Germans during the 1930s and 40s; a spade, however, shall be called a spade.) American astronauts traveled to the moon on rockets designed and built by Werner Von Braun, who was a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, and a slave-master at Peenemünde. Without Nazis, the citizens of the world would not enjoy the privilege of traveling rapidly, and comfortably, in jet-powered aircraft, nor would we likely have developed radar or sonar technologies, without which air and naval travel become frightening and inefficient. If not for the Nazis, Albert Einstein's course in life would have been slightly altered, resulting in unknowable changes to the space-time-continuum (if, of course, one believes in such nonsense as the space-time-continuum), and he and his ideas may have benefited some country other than this, our own. And, to conclude this stress-inducing and poorly-argued piece, without the Nazis we would not likely have allowed nationalistic, fear-mongering, borderline-racist politicians such as Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, or Sarah Palin to gain such prominence on the national stage, and we would likely have found it far harder to neglect and to ignore our shared, common virtues of generosity, humility, and kindness, virtues that counter-act feelings of self-loathing, hatred, contempt, and dissatisfaction.
There is nothing more evil than hatred, and there are few dangers as great as to rely solely on mass media for one's daily news. Therefore, please turn off your TV, switch off your radio, burn your morning paper, and spend some time enjoying life's simple pleasures, such as breathing. If we are not careful, however, that too may soon join the growing list of Things Only Terrorists Do.
場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit
19 March 2012
no better than Nazis
in
World War Two, we Americans fought bravely alongside Russians and
English and Chinese and Frenchmen to conquer the aggressiveness and
predatory nature of the Nazis and their allies. then, in the
aftermath of 11 September 2001, we became the aggressors, we became
the predators, and we invaded the sovereign nations of Iraq and
Afghanistan with a ferocity and a disdain for the laws of civility
that rivaled the ferocity and the disdain of the Nazis themselves. we
Americans started wars of aggression without having declared war on
these nations, thus robbing ourselves of the validity necessary to
see our actions through, thus violating and invalidating numerous
international treaties, thus sacrificing our precious honor for the
fleeting promise of safety. America delenda est.
場黑麥
ioanni
elymucampus fecit
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