In the very first page of his book, Thucydides (c. 460 – 400 BCE), in the last lines of the very first paragraph, with Hellenism’s typical ego-centrism, especially prevalent in Athens, Thucydides demolishes his own claims for historical knowledge and consciousness.

“For though I have found it impossible, because of its remoteness in time, to acquire a really precise knowledge of the distant past or even of the history preceding our own period, yet, after looking back into it as far as I can, all the evidence leads me to conclude that these periods were not great periods either in warfare or in anything else.” [1]

The translator’s claim that the worldview of Classical Athens “stimulated an inquiry into the past”[2] is disproved at the outset by Thucydides’ own clam admission of one might term self-centered a-historicism. Note some of the world-shaping events that occurred only a few hundred miles from the spots where Thucydides, an Athenian General, wrote in the decades and centuries before his birth. The Persian Empire was extensively engaged in the latter stages of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE when the Spartans pulled down the great walls of Athens); yet the author says almost nothing of the great Persian invasions only decades before his birth and that ended in the battles of Marathon (490) and Salamis (479 BCE), the latter of which led to Athenian hegemony over Hellas. Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians who died when Thucydides was a boy, wrote a great work (The Persians) about the effect of the Athenian victory on the court in Mesopotamia. Moreover, on his tomb Aeschylus had inscribed that he was a soldier at Marathon, a fact of which he was prouder than his numerous triumphs in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.

One might think it essential for Thucydides to treat, at least in summary form of the rise of Persia and the massive political, ideological and military struggles of the Middle East that preceded it. But he has nothing on the Persians defeat of Babylon, the ancient people and military juggernaut that after a century of struggle threw off the hegemony of the Second Assyrian Empire and demolished it at the battle of Carchemish in 613 BCE, one of the decisive battles of history. It was while hastening to aid the Assyrians at this battle that Pharaoh Neco (“Shishak”) met King Josiah of Judah (at a ‘peace meeting’ perhaps) and killed him. Shishak’s intervention and the subsequent Babylonian descent south through Israel, Judah and into Egypt resulted in the vassal kings, sons of Josiah whose eventual resistance, under Tzidkiyahu (“Zedekiah”) led to Babylon’s invasion of Judah and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Ancient Israel and Judah, whose history and Tanakh are verified by numerous Assyrian and Persian records is invisible in Thucydides and in the works of the Greek tragedians despite the obvious Hebrew source of the names and place names of some of the most prominent Greek characters (like Kadmos, “the one from the east, from Sidon” founder of the most ancient Greek city, Thebes, and whose name, without its Greek suffix derives from K-D-M, the root that means “the one from the east, from the origins).*

Similarly glaring in its absence are the presence of the Persians in Israel and Egypt during Thucydides own lifetime. While the Peloponnesian War was raging, Jews were guarding the northeastern and southern approaches to Egypt, — indeed, they had been doing this for Pharaoh since the reign of King Menasha of Judah (c. 685-630 BCE). On the isle of Elephantine, now submerged, a Jewish Temple housed the garrison and was used to offer sacrifices and for prayer because of the distance from Jerusalem. This was a source of constant friction between Jews and Egyptians that was adjudicated by the Persians and the Jewish governor of Egypt in Jerusalem. [3]. An historian in our sense could hardly ignore such geopolitically powerful events occurring at the same time and only a few hundred miles from the theatre of action he purports to cover accurately.
One could go on but the point is that Thucydides’ own words from the outset of his account declare his limited, a-historic Hellenist-centric frame of reference. Despite this, for centuries his account of what indeed was a conflict of great importance to Western pre-history was presented to students as the first history in the world. Spengler glances at the reasons of tone and style that may account for this gross distortion noting that “Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the Persian Wars…what is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective”[4]. But the main reason probably yet another example of Hellenized ‘scholarship’ in its Christian and post-Christian displacement of abundantly verifiable Jewish history and Judaism’s uniquely historic consciousness. As has been recognized in many texts over the centuries, the Hebrew’s sense that the world has been designed by a Designer for a specific purpose, providence, is the ground from which the uniquely historical consciousness derived from Judaism in time tried to permeate the West. Scholars like Johannes Reuchlin, John Selden, William Bradford and Isaac Newton once understood this but the glare of the ‘Enlightenment’ obscured the truth in a new ‘scholarly’ kind of Judaeophobia. The failure of Ezra Stiles to get Hebrew taught as a required course at Yale in the 1780s may be taken as a watershed in American life of the burial of the Hebraic content of the West and, thus, of the West’s accelerating suicide now recognizable in many fields from finance and economy, to pop culture to geopolitics.

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[1] Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (NY 1972; Rex Warner trans 1954; I. M. Finley Introduction 1972), 35
[2] Rex Warner, translator’s introduction, ibid. 14
[3] Peter Shaffer, Judaeophobia: Attitudes toward Jews in the Ancient World (Harvard University Press 1995); c.f. the Amarna Tablets, obelisk of Shalmaneser II, the relief sculpture regarding Sennarcherib, etc
[4] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (NY 1996, Alan Helps one-volume abridgement from the English translation of Charles Atkinson), 8-9. Spengler comments that the writers of the Classical period “lose their sureness of eye from the moment when he, looking backward encounters motive forces [outside] his practical experience,” outside the present of the writer.
*This may be found in the very last Greek Tragedy, The Bacchae of Euripides (c. 402 bce)

The Postmodern era is one in which images consume and displace life. The phrase ‘virtual reality’ is used to denote and trivialize this process which grows more extreme with each advance of digital technology. “Technology” means the science of weaving or, more literally, “weaving words” the deceitful magic we call ‘spin.’ I have created the term, magike tekne, image-weaving to define contemporary poiesis which is the murderous and suicidal cultural project of idealized identity and image worship. Worshiping an idealized self produces fascism in politics (the State is the Idol) and crises of identity, especially for males as ancient Greek myths of transfiguration show.

This process can be observed and described operating at many levels of the social and global macrocosm and in all fields from finance to economics, to sports, fashion and geopolitics. These all demonstrate increasing artifice, inflation and inflated claims, language hollowed into ever emptier slogans and the devaluation or suppression of history, memory and what is genuine. Image-making expresses itself through the media as a distraction machine dissembling its own managerial purposes (the managers of the fiction use it to control other human beings) and blurring all distinctions, not least the distinction between reality and fiction. Today with have culturetainment that embraces and consumes ever more areas of life. The derivative, ersatz, fabricated and the lie outright displace the original and true as Esau strains to displace and bury Israel. This is a story as ancient as the formation of the West, the primary idyll being the lie that the Church is the ‘real’ Israel> From this grew all the idylls, romance and epics of the West. This lie leads to numerous apocalypses and the sustained elegiac cultural phase of giantism and decadence we try to endure.

The process of idealization leads from its promise of self-transfiguration into beauty to horror as the image confronts the self with its allure and claims for good and sovereignty and the generating individual or culture experiences alienation and growing uncertainty. It is a Narcissus process that evinces a weak, betrayed or destroyed father, a dearth father (‘Darth Vader’) at its core. It seems like an Oedipus scenario but is more like the birth of Aphrodite from the severed genitals of Ouranos.

The splitting and deterioration that inheres in image work may be explicated by Kabala, particularly the structure of double letters, letters that may be pronounced hard or soft (depending on whether they have the dagesh vowel within them). These seven letters form the phrase begged k’prat and include spatial, temporal, moral and qualitative dimensions that include every dimension of existence from the weather to finance to socio-political structure. Most importantly, their double nature emphasizes the dual, antithetical potential within each moment and presents a development model of history moving from disguise to fruitfulness (ripening and disclosure). In the inscriptive Hebrew model of history, the truth will out. It is, however, not deterministic but liable at any period to inversion and corruption such as we witness in our lives and is epitomized in the denaturing and revaluations of Postmodernism.

There is a balance in each day or period of the ‘week’ of history by which its alternative potential ‘runs and returns’ to its center; it is hard and then soft, like lightning and thunder, like a wave breaking on a beach and then hissing softly down into the sea again. The entire week may be laid out like a Menorah and read right to left. Beginning in wisdom and kindness, the process should achieve perfection in a kingdom of grace as the holy seed of letters is articulated by the mouth speaking peace to the far and near. But what we see is a new era of barbarism and State-sadism and deceit in which claims of peace enshroud a fog of perennial ‘low-level’ wars of contrived dialectic attrition and grace is perverted into horror masquerading as beauty, the essence of our screen world.

The dominion of imagery over life is the last stage of the corruption of all forms and values that is the signature of the modern period whose origin was in Britain about 1850. This period has seen numerous and increasingly frequent inflation, devaluation, and depression as economies are destroyed by finance and government gigantism and authoritarian control of life, lately disguised as compassion, therapies and enshrined in the terms “Welfare State” and ‘government programs’ funded by taxpayers who must feed government first. This primary but hidden welfare is a form of the image or fiction displacing and consuming its creator. The fiction that governments are created to serve men, rather than themselves and the power of a very few men and women is one of the enduring lies of the enlightenment. So wealth and reward (gimmel) becomes impoverishment in every facet of modern-postmodern life. Thus the stage-dimension of seed, the gift of Jacob (also known as splendor or glory, tiferet) is displaced by its negation, the modern dogma of sterility, contraception, abortion and the many forms of euthanasia, the goal of those who control the major foundations whose war on humanity is revealed by their goals of population control and reduction. Since Jacob has a direct line to Joseph (Genesis 37:2) his beloved son, the war on seed results in the destruction of peace in the name of peace and various ‘peace processes’ all of which reveal themselves to be a war process, a managed attrition which attacks the foundation of generativity, plenty and of language and thought themselves. The “wars of the era of world peace” are indeed more terrible than those of the nation state for they are “formless” and directed by oligarchies with an ambiguous, not clearly bounded relation to governments. The attack on the foundation, genitals and males in particular is seen in the corruption of sexuality into endless chatter and images of sex while the reality becomes a field of sterility and terror.

The line of Jacob-Joseph is a particular target of Esau as is the corruption of peace into endless war such as Orwell described. (It is pertinent that on September 30, 2011 that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that brilliantly and fiercely satirizes the ‘eugenic,’ totally managed world sought by his brother, Sir Julian Huxley was banned by the American Library Association): when the lie becomes truth the truth must be hidden. Thus, Esau (the Church) makes Joseph the redeemer of a corrupt late Classical culture and cuts him off from his Jewish origins; their fiction is used to bury the truth. The false peace of Esau is a kerua-shalom, a torn or broken peace, a false peace in simple language that hides the origin of true peace in shaleim, the quality of Jacob (Genesis 33:18). The only true peace is one that emerges in the line or vav (6) from Jacob to Joseph. This is the generative line and the unbroken transmission of tradition and dignity by the male; respect for the male, exactly what the postmodern elites of Edom have banished.

The wars of “the era of world-peace,” a rhetorical or false (kerua) peace that reflects “the peace of high policies,” diplomatic processes meant to obscure the attrition wars that are its method of coercion and historical revision. “Esau he is Edom,” the West is relentless in its drive for this revision. This era also is the time “when ‘the spindle side’ [the female] rules again” as can be demonstrated from the Hellenic basis of idealization or image-work. The idyllic emotional –cultural phase when an ideal identity is imagined was for the Greeks symbolized by male birth of an invincible female goddess, as in Athena emerging fully grown and armed from Zeus’s head. She alone can wield his army and carry the terror shield or aegis. A similar gender transposition and subsuming of the father or male occurs in the castration of Ouranos, the sky, by his wife-mother (Gaia – Earth) and son (Kronos – time) with his genitals being transfigured in the “lovely” female goddess and omnipotent sexual power, Aphrodite. The breaking of male gender is akin to the apocalyptic identity shift when the idealized image displaces its host and generator, demanding veneration as an idol. Idealization is the basis of idol worship; Israel is unique in proscribing it and correspondingly unique in the hatred of the peoples for it and their obsessive drive to bury it with an image. The collapse of all public coherence, integrity, tradition and wholeness that characterizes Postmodernism whose tenet is the absence of truth is part of the ‘privatization’ or relativism of “all histories, destinies, ambitions and troubles.” In the absence of tradition and the possibility of consensus or a center (“the center cannot hold”), there is “a return to the thorough formlessness” that typifies dominance of ‘the spindle side’ and the triumph of the image over life. After the petrifaction of the image in the icon during the apocalyptic phase comes the even greater rigidity and then the formless emotionalism of the elegiac phase, the “era of world peace” when lack of certainty yields to a desire, by most, to avoid conflict at all costs as inner conflict and stress indicate the collapse of individual self under mesmerizing and fragmenting images.

It is noteworthy that kerua, shalom, and Esau all have the same numeric value in Hebrew (376; all Hebrew letters also are a number) which is twice that of Ya’akov (188), Jacob. This hints that the peace of Esau is a fake representation, a reflection, mirror image, process or game of peace, it is broken, and that Esau is a shadow, representation or phantom of Jacob his twin but antithesis in character to the “whole” or “perfect” (shaleim) man living in tents (tradition). Esau is the phantom or image that seeks to consume and displace the genuine article. It has been so from the beginning and now, at the end of days, is intensely so, the process of displacement and idealization that produces horror pervading all aspects of life with terror as sovereignty of person and nation yields to subjugation of the human by the image and of the individual by the State. The Culture of Death is a Culture of Terror and the insane assault by Federal SWAT teams on Gibson Guitar works in Nashville Tennessee was an epitome of a State whose arbitrary and unpredictable application of lethal force reduces law to mockery, precisely the claim about law of the original cult of Esau that professed to come in the name of love and compassion. This is the ‘line’ of the Nanny State, the therapeutic State whose official bias and arbitrary preferences have made lawless law (my coinage) a pervasive social fact. That is, the lie has become truth. As to the ‘cruel’ dominance of law, contrast the six hundred and thirteen laws of Torah to the scores of thousands of punitive and regulatory statues of every State in the Union, and the hundreds of thousands of Federal laws. It is Esau who is punitive and relentless in trying to ‘finish’ and complete its control and displacement of all phases of life by its images of beneficence and protection. Thus it brings us the age of terror (adumbrated in Romantic literature) and its culture of terror as foretold in Tehillim 73: “they will be consumed in bewildering terrors.”

1.Beit-Gimmel-Dalet-Kaf-Peh-Resh-Tav are the Hebrew letters spelled out above. Each Hebrew letter when pronounced sounds a word and this adds layers of significance to the articulation of the sefirot and all the letters in the myriad forms of existence. See Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (Boston 1997), chapter 4
2. Already in 1853 Matthew Arnold wrote in “The Scholar Gypsy” of “this strange disease of modern life” filled with anxiety, doubt, fatigue and half-heartedness.
3. Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (1962) is the signature satiric novel for this death wish of the image masters. The denaturing gender reversals they promote are key to the de-population agenda.
4. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (NY 1962; 2006, one-volume English edition, Alan Helps from the translation by Charles Atkinson), 378-80, sub-section “Caesarism” in “State and History”
5. George Orwell, 1984, chapter 7, “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” I often have quoted this summation of the method of the “Ministry of Newspeak” (the media) in revising and perverting history as the succinct description of what the elites of the West, including Russia (also descended from Edom) have been doing in displacing Israel by the fiction-lie, ‘Palestine’ and the non-existent ‘Palestinians.’
6. Hesiod, Theogony (University of Michigan Press, Richmond Lattimore translation), 140-210
7. Spengler, op. cit
8. http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/News/gibson-0825-2011/

Eldad was a master stylist. Since 2008, those who read well only in English have been able to appreciate how deep was his understanding of modern Jewish and Israeli dilemmas and how prescient was his analysis of the Jewish people in exile (both outside and within Israel) and, more briefly for it is not his main concern, of Western civilization.
Consider the following analysis of the choice confronting Jews by late 1939:

“The choice was now between being dragged along in the British game of Arab ‘riots’ and ‘outbreaks’ [oh yes, the intifadas, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, etc] or crossing to the front, to war with the British regime [and its perennial client regime, still ruling in the Land]. The Jewish Agency wished with all its soul to continue the game, with more Round Table conferences, renewed bargaining, new MacDonald letters – anything to avoid the waters of the Rubicon for which their entire spiritual, mental and organizational structure was unprepared. The White Paper [1939] afforded the Irgun Zvai Leumi great potential.

“If the organized Yishuv [Jewish community in the Land of Israel] does not declare war, the historical initiative will pass to the non-establishment IZL [which eventually decayed into the Likud bloc of parties led by Menachem Begin, war time leader of IZL]. Had that happened, all the developments which began in the years 5702-03 [1942-3] could have begun then, in 5699 (1939): the split – then a united rebellion – then the point of no retreat – and finally, victory. This process, had it only been started a few years earlier” could have drawn on “millions of Polish Jews and the only possible result would have been a shining Hebrew Kingdom in the entire homeland instead of pieces of a people in pieces of a land in a shadow of a state…” [1]

“…the ‘first Hebrew city.’ Sometimes the sound of this description of Tel Aviv makes me sick, as if I were watching some kitsch at the theatre. Such a cheap joke… Three other cities can compete among themselves for this title: Hebron, Shchem and Beersheba [it is no coincidence that the client regime has alienated itself from the first two, the two oldest Hebrew settlements]. But Tel Aviv? Would not a more historical truth be to call it the ‘last Hebrew city as of now?’ With what terms are we defining ‘first’? With what historical proportions?

“I eventually learned that rather than being a single, isolated instance, the phraseology is a symptom. Lack of historical perspective is the root of the poison and the wormwood prevalent in the field of our literature as well as our politics. Anyone who can say ‘the first Hebrew city’ [regarding Tel Aviv] with such ease will also be able to tolerate the main street of that city being named for some English general (Allenby), and will also agree, despite circumstances favorable to us to an internationalized Jerusalem. And he will similarly be able to refer to Trans Jordan as a neighboring state. This is the root of a-historical Zionism.” [2]

We see that both the general principle about the cowardice within gross lack of historical knowledge and the specifics of the results are precise.

This most beautifully written and most essential of books about the Jewish war for independence from Britain is filled with similar and even more startling insights and prophecies. Here is just one more:
Writing of the idea needed to sustain a truly Hebrew Revolution and resulting national sovereignty, Eldad recounts, “this Idea was the cynosure of the spirit of Israel in all generations past and its expression is the messiah. [For the human nature of the messiah see Maimonides, The Ways of Kings and Their Battles, 11-12] [3]… The Idea is the messianic idea, the idea of the rise of a Hebrew Kingdom at a continental intersection [also the center of the world’s entire land mass] and rising, historically, at this period of crisis for that is called Western culture, and Communism which may be the finale of all these cultures.”
Eldad was right about that: communism was the end. What follows it, West and East is postmodernism, “the state that follows history” [4].
“The idea is that out of the ruins of this world we must climb again to the spiritual heights of Mt Sinai and the physical peaks of David and the Hasmoneans.” [5]
The world is even more in ruins, the West more degenerate and Israel more embattled and divided and oppressed than when he wrote in a very dark time. His closing point about the Jewish idea is even more pressing than when he began articulating it in the 1940s. His leitmotif that the essential evil is not the external enemy, the Nazis or jihad, but within one’s own side also has grown more pertinent as the decades have passed: will it take a total disaster and collapse, the kind of apocalypse for which the West is structured for his point to be taken to heart and put into action?
1. Israel Eldad, The First Tithe (Hebrew 1950; 1st English edition Tel Aviv 2008, translation and introduction by Zev Golan), 77
2. Ibid. 79
3. This work is known in Hebrew, in short, as Hilkhot Melachim and the author as Rambam, the acronym of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon. It is time that Jews stopped using Greco-Roman terms to discuss themselves, their leaders, scholars and history. My apologies to those to whom this all is common knowledge. See the Moznaim edition with facing Hebrew-English pages translated by Rabbi Eliahu Touger.
4. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1975 in Czech; 1996 second English translation by Aaron Asher) Parts I and VI
5. Eldad, op. cit. 121-2