War Without End Redux

WAR CRIMINALS WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE?


"Myths are public dreams, and dreams are private myths ... "
-Joseph Campbell


An Imaginary Discussion thread composed of verbatim
statements of two well known experts on the subject:

AH: On the Crucible of the Day -
Who says I am not under the special protection of God?

GO: There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

AH: HMMMMMM ...

GO: Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

AH: HMMMMMM ...

GO: In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

AH: From the Church of Professional Sports -
The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn't separate, but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. He also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That's why the Olympic Flame should never die.

GO: Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

AH: From the Ministry of Devolution -
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.

GO: A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him. We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose. One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

AH: From the Ministry of Persuasion -
The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. Words build bridges into unexplored regions. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category. The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

GO: If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

AH: HMMMMMM ...

GO: Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

AH: From the (now) Defunct Ministry of Truth:
What luck for rulers, that men do not think. What good fortune for governments that the people do not think. The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. The efficacy of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of the people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it.

GO: Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war. We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.


MODERATOR: You've been listening to verbatim (pasted) transcriptions (sans the "HMMMMMMs") to the long (yet short) time ago documented words of two folks, named "AH" (Adolf Hitler) and "GO" (George Orwell).


LIGHTNING EMPIRICIST: The only things that separates the world of today from their world some 60 years ago exist as a recognition, as well as a reduction to practice, of due caution in our conceptual individuations of perceived enemies and others, lest our "doctrine" (be) "nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed" with but new human fodder to be slung in psychotic fantasies of providential dominance enforced by fear - the fear that we own, the fear that is our own.

Shall we (can we) "give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety", and would we (should we), as a result of such folly, then "deserve [either] liberty [or] safety" ?


"Learning, the destroyer of arrogance, begets arrogance
in fools; even as light, that illuminates the eye,
makes owls blind."
- Panchatantra

"To be proud of knowledge is to be blind with light."
- Benjamin Franklin

"The greater our knowledge increases,
the greater our ignorance unfolds."
- John F. Kennedy

"Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know."
- Montaigne

"The utmost abstractions are the true weapons
with which to control our thought of concrete fact."
- Alfred North Whitehead

"Under all that we think, lives all we believe,
like the ultimate veil of our spirits."
- Antonio Machado