“There is one road to peace / and that is truth which follow ye…” (more…)

Because of Milan Kundera’s emphasis on the embattled status of memory in a culture increasingly aimed at forgetting, at distraction of attention, dismantling standards, and even the idea of truth, at the reduction of language and thought; at the possession and displacement of reality by images, I often have quoted from his seminal work. [1] (more…)

Every week one can find examples of the Great Powers developing and manipulating new forms of contrived conflicts to keep their proxy-dependencies embroiled. Thus they become compliant parts of a world system that ‘requires’ management for ‘peace,’ a.k.a. global governance. A particularly vivid example occurred late in August that exemplifies the procedure and whose ramifications, as intended, will linger long. (more…)

More than six decades ago a wise and valiant man described the manic celebrations over the UN vote to partition Israel into a ‘Jewish’ State without Jerusalem. In doing so he quoted comments by Uri Zvi Greenberg, poet of the [truncated] War for Liberation: “Only once before has the nation experienced such a horror, such an abomination as the dancing of that night. The dancing around the golden calf must have looked the same.” (more…)

The Dominion of Edom is filled with crosses, burdens for the rest of us to bear; for its own people too, not only the consequences of the power games of their rulers who are the precipitate of its cultural principles but of its way of experiencing the world, its habits of thought and expression. As explained in other essays, the drive to idealize its identity and gloss over its hybrid and, in many respects, contrived, self-irritating nature leads Edom in every field of endeavor from idyllic dreams to apocalyptic fantasies and events and then to elegiac laments. It is a culture of aesthetics and a cult of bathos, glory and grand games; of fireworks, memorial displays and blissful bad faith; a culture of images served by the media distraction machine that helps keep Edom (the West) from seeing in itself the horror its surface beauties veil. The counterpart of the beautiful show of fashion pages, sports and preening politicians is horror films and a vast array of  social and political terrors. (more…)