by Nejmi Mohammed
The fact is that my friend si‘ Smit’, er, Smeeth’s America and his “Old Atlantic West” ARE deeply involved in the bitter occupation of Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan.
Many wish this was not so, especially in view of the sufferings of the wounded and dying soldiers — and bystanders.
What is worse is that on the face of it America rushed to war for a tangle of motives that no one seemingly saw clearly in their entirety. Nor could they have seen, just because of their natures as unregenerated athough “well-educated” human beings who also happen to have gotten ahold of political although not actual moral power. There is the oil business, for example, and the tragedy of Israel.
So there are many reasons for outrage at all of this — but the question really is what is new about any of it all in history, about any of this unconsciousness of the operators? They are simply the people through whom unwitting progress so often happens and are sometimes called the “useful idiots.”
Resistance in any case is useless if only because they have so much they just need to get out of their systems.
And yet we know from a close study of human myth and fantasy and the nature of the mind that our unconsciousness, and the wild behavior resulting from it, is also the ONLY way ahead.
Most of the immediate “realistic” reasons for invading Iraq were greedy or else contaminated with too much rationalising emotion, and so they were all by definition shortsighted, mainly based on fear, of going without fuel, of another holocaust and so on.
Be that as it may, now the West IS objectively immersed in an atmosphere where many still-unperceived cultural treasures also are available.
Also in the Muslim lands it is needful that a certain entrenched body of anger-ridden “religious” opinion, which has brought down many of these troubles on the heads of all Muslims, now must be beaten aside. So the present misery can be seen to be bringing also a renewal of Islam as well as of our tired postmodern civilization.
At stake are sometimes literally magical brand new cultural inputs to insure that in the truly longterm all is proceeding exactly as it should.
It will go forward one soldier at a time too, as this or that American or European young man or woman sees something more to their situation there in Baghdad or the Helmand province, and so becomes either Muslim or otherwise informed about some inner aspect or other of Islamic civilization.
Not many admittedly may be open to any of that given the nature of contemporary high-energy popular culture, but even a few will do.
That characteristic “fewness” in fact is the decisive nature after all of the authentic individual role in history.
For after all history is now turning away from the West, and even the most inexperienced dervishes among the Sufis can see for themselves that all of the typical wild American and European activity of today marks a deep unappeased hunger across all of the generations now languishing, for something really new in life.
It is a matter above all of new IN-FORMATION for the West that is needed, for more individuals in the generations to come — and so our panicky instinctive reaction to terrorism in 2001 and 2003 may well be seen in time to have been just the needed thing, the natural healthy drive to live, the frantic forcing open of the door.
It is a kind of loud rock-and-roll ignorant taking of Heaven by storm — that in the end actually just might work out after all!
[Emmett R Smith
[all transcription-rights reserved
[19 April 2008]
Try telling this rubbish to the ridiculous numbers of people doing the actual suffering, on all sides. It is as much beyond your pseudo-spiritual rationalisation as any actual compassion, and this stuff of yours is another load of whistling in the shithouse when the lights blink out. More anodyne swill, I’m afraid. And, on top of that, you claim furthermore that Iraq was invaded on basis of a ‘tangle of motives’. Bloody brainless indifference is more like it, and those asses Blair and Bush made their throw of the dice on advice of senior civil servants who brought no more to it, at least in most cases, than whether to run up another hire-purchase on the internet!
“Calving to beat Hell,” but NOT me! Sixty-three little guys though, gotta go now! I’ll write later about how a mama cow dragged Holt around the ranch a little yesterday!
No, EIGHTY-THREE I mean!
The comment by selfiswill is absolutely to the point on behalf of all who suffer misery at the hands of others acting without enough information and indulging sometimes in disgusting cruelty. This problem highlights the difficulty also of talking and writing overmuch about certain topics in a careless way that neglects the reality of suffering.
It is cold and sunny around here (Monday) and I was going to write about Holt and surfing behind the old cow but have to go out riding again. The neat thing about it is working with my dad and Holt and everybody, it’s good to be home again, later, Ferret!
I see that Hillary is out to prove she is a real woman by bombing Iran for Israel’s sake. Why are we so stuck in the mud with these awful people on all sides? That’s a pretty huge giveaway and I sure think we should be getting something back — like equal rights for all people in Israel or Palestine, or whatever you finally want to call it. Nobody can blame the Israelis for saying “never again” about the holocaust, but it’s too much living in the past to make policy that way today, and it’s pretty hopeless too, because sooner or later we all will have to take our chances together on this earth.
At so many points in the run-up to WW II, the democracies failed the victims of Nazi persecution, and the results were as horrible as well-known.
Now there are all of these miserable people behind walls in Gaza.
It seems to me that all people of actual good will can only agree, there is certainly an authentic emotional drive in this direction (“we have a history of bad experiences!”)
But still there must be an end of unending support of “exceptionalist” states.
And it is not only a question of avoiding President Washington’s famous proscription of longterm alliances.
It may as well be the only way yet not-tried, of breaking the trance of heritable vendetta and repeated mass murders.
This sort of emotionalism of course is perhaps more-easily catered to by Mr Bobbitt’s postmodern “market states” — markets as a matter of prestige-value exclude — but it is a load of murder as far constitutions are concerned.
There may be a place for trading to my own advantage in the miseries of my ancestors, but let it be onstage and not in governance.