Saturday reading...pass the tea...please...
Friday, 23. October 2009, 22:52:31
Dear Readers,
The following is from an interview on Radio Open Source(link is provided)I have excerpted the transcription.
tkm
http://www.radioopensource.org/chris-hedges-requiem-for-the-republic/
Chris Hedges: Requiem for the Reading Republic
October 19th, 2009
Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion, pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who’s trained himself also in the long view:
..."To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That’s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn’t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology — these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states.
We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back… We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world. What you’ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal."...
[this system is being used for the past 50 years in many regions of the world including Ayvaland. tkm]
-------------------------------------------------------
(Please click on the link bellow to read the article(s)in full. Thank you. tkm)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122104.html
Haaretz Newspaper - Israel
Dovish Jews? They love Israel? Excommunicate them
By Bradley Burston
We don't need them. They'll never see things our way, no matter what. Let them go.
It's a new Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you need to know. No modifications necessary. Stay the course. Concede nothing. Ease no siege. Give no ground. Ever.
It is a radical redefinition of Postmodern Zionism, this time from the right. Over the past weeks, it's been test-run in our relations with Turkey, with the Goldstone Commission, with Mahmoud Abbas - and with consistent results.
----------------------------------------------------
[The same goes for Ayvaland - tkm]
The following is from an interview on Radio Open Source(link is provided)I have excerpted the transcription.
tkm
http://www.radioopensource.org/chris-hedges-requiem-for-the-republic/
Chris Hedges: Requiem for the Reading Republic
October 19th, 2009
Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion, pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who’s trained himself also in the long view:
..."To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That’s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn’t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology — these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states.
We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back… We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world. What you’ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal."...
[this system is being used for the past 50 years in many regions of the world including Ayvaland. tkm]
-------------------------------------------------------
(Please click on the link bellow to read the article(s)in full. Thank you. tkm)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1122104.html
Haaretz Newspaper - Israel
Dovish Jews? They love Israel? Excommunicate them
By Bradley Burston
We don't need them. They'll never see things our way, no matter what. Let them go.
It's a new Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you need to know. No modifications necessary. Stay the course. Concede nothing. Ease no siege. Give no ground. Ever.
It is a radical redefinition of Postmodern Zionism, this time from the right. Over the past weeks, it's been test-run in our relations with Turkey, with the Goldstone Commission, with Mahmoud Abbas - and with consistent results.
----------------------------------------------------
[The same goes for Ayvaland - tkm]
WIDGETIZE
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