Mass Movement

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves -and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

Hoffer, Eric
(p. 41) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

I began to keep a list of things that I heard about but didn't understand. Manchuria was the first thing on that list back in 2003. The list is the reason that I know a lot of things. There's nothing rigorous about this project, I've been meaning to look up Gottfried Leibniz for years but something always seems to come up. If you keep a list, I would add Eric Hoffer to it. I'm reading The True Believer and I'm impressed. He's also interesting because he's not your typical academic.

We've Got to Show Respect for the Dead

The words of Robert Fisk:
(Conversations with History. Text. Video.)

We desemanticize and make war more lethal in the same way as television, for example, will not show you the worst scenes that we see. I remember once a crew coming back from Basra in the Iraqi/American war, not embedded -- they were on the Iraqi side of the line -- and they came back to Baghdad with terrible pictures. A kid had its hand blown off, a woman is shrieking with shrapnel sticking out of her stomach, and they sent these pictures across to London, to the Reuters bureau, and I remember this haughty voice coming back, "We can't show these pictures. Don't even bother to send anymore." You know: "We're going to have people puking at breakfast time. We -- we -- this is pornography!" You see? And then the worst quote of all. He said -- and I remember his words, I read about it from Baghdad during the war -- he said, "You know, we've got to show respect for the dead." And I thought, "You bloody well don't show any respect for them when they're alive, but when they're in bits we've got to respect their bodies." Heaven spare me.

I always say to people -- on the road, Basra in '91, I saw women, as well as soldiers and civilians, old men, torn apart by British bombs as well as American. And dogs were tearing them to pieces to eat, it was lunchtime in the desert. I tell you, if you saw what I saw you'd never support a war again. But you won't show that on television. And by not showing that on television we present the world with a bloodless sand pit. We pretend war is not that bad. It's "surgical," always "surgical strikes." Surgery's a place where you're cured in the hospital, not where you're murdered or killed or torn apart. Thus, we make it easier for our leaders -- our generals, our prime ministers, our presidents -- to sell us war, and for us to buy into war and go along with that. That makes us lethally culpable and potentially war criminals in a very moral sense of the word -- or immoral sense, I should say.

Really, would anyone support war if they saw it?

Is it immoral to look away?

(the image is from the Vietnam War '68 -not Basra in '91)

try not to die or you lose all your weapons

When we were younger and I was starting the study of history my brother asked me the two great historical questions.
1) Why didn't all of the slaves revolt (specifically in the Southern US)?

2) Why did so many soldiers volunteer to fight in war (specifically the European Wars)?

I know the common answers.
1) Why didn't all of the slaves revolt (specifically in the Southern US)?
-most people cannot move against the current of their culture
-slaves did revolt in small pockets, lacking the resources to unite their struggles

2) Why did so many soldiers volunteer to fight in war (specifically the European Wars)?
-Romantic perceptions of war
-conscription

I still don't find them satisfactory.

Why Not Kill Yourself?

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.

-Albert Camus

I've long paraphrased this statement by saying:
"Camus' only question for philosophy is: why not kill yourself?"
He poses and answers this question in The Myth of Sisyphus.

You are what you pretend to be

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

-Kurt Vonnegut

During yesterday's book club for Mother Night I realized how much I enjoy this line by Kurt Vonnegut. The book is a fictional account of an American playwright in Germany during World War II. He's a member of the Nazi party. But he's a spy. But his radio show successfully promotes the Nazis. That's only one of the myriad of masks in the novel.

Vonnegut died last year. I was shocked by this distasteful obituary on FOX News. I want to punch that voice in the face. It seems like something out of a Vonnegut novel: a news station has become so absurd that it is impossible to undermine with satire. It's terrifying for me to think that the empty-eyed anchors at FOX News aren't aware that their slogan, "fair and balanced", is a punchline.