A small Invective criticized

[Michel Ryckx]

Dear Saurio,

Having read your small invective, I cannot do otherwise than giving you some remarks for I think an invective (and I read a few in Latin at school) is a very funny, though difficult genre that has to be written without emotions getting in the way.

The first 'industrial war' as you call it was when the first automatic guns were used.  This was a major invention and produced in large factories.  That war was the American Civil War, half a century before WW I.  The Crimean War saw the first trenches.  And the Boer War at the turn of the century introduced concentration camps, a British invention (by the way, Baden Powell played a major role in that one). The difference with WW I is the scale.  But, as Marx already pointed out, (if I remember well) is that quantity can change into quality.  The year 1917, when the US entered the war, is crucial in that way.  Capitalism had, by the way, showed its real face from 1848 on by smashing down several revolutions all over Europe.
It's a very strange idea (though wide-spread) that gas chambers are the ultimate form of rationalism, thus condemning rationalism as wrong.  Rationalism in itself has no value, it is just a way of using it that makes it right or wrong.  It is not because I fell off my bike three weeks ago that I will never again step on it.  The ambiguity of things, and not 'good things turning into evil' is, I think, one of the main themes in mr. Pynchon's work: a thing is neutral, its use not.
Enlightment is an ensemble of ideas that is seldom well understood and even considered to be out of date.  I am raised on the ideas of the Enlightment, and its 20th century European (Belgium-France-Italy) version of humanism, a non-religious, tolerant and critical way of thinking.  Freemasonry in my country is deeply rooted in the Enlightment and is a way of looking for non-religious ethics in a complicated world.  Rev.  Cherrycoke is to me a beautiful illustration of that.


	Michel Ryckx