re Fathers & Leaders & Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac & War in GR, etc.

[pynchonoid]

from the PSYART list today:


I reproduce below a poem about World War I [...] 

What is going on here? What is this strange phenomenon
called war? On the one
hand, we have the attachment and submissiveness of the
sons, who die and kill
in the name of leaders and the causes they put forth.
Ruth Stein has
illuminated this brilliantly by demonstrating that
acts of terrorism were
undertaken in a spirit of love, equivalent to a
profoundly masochistic
attachment to god (the father).

Now (based on the poem that appears below), we see the
other side of the
coin: the brutal willingness of the fathers to assent
to the slaughter of the
sons (we hesitate to call this "sadism" because we
still want to believe that
our leaders or fathers love us).

Movies such as PATHS OF GLORY, which show soldiers
being forced to get out of
trenches and run into machine gun fire, make
abundantly clear what was going
on. Still, we wish to hold on to our conventional
perception of war and
believe that the GENERALS WERE ASPIRING TO VICTORY,
that death and body
mutilation were only a "by product" (collateral
damage) of the effort to
"win."

However, what if the fundamental meaning of World War
I was its function as a
gigantic SACRIFICIAL RITUAL (a kind of monumental
potlatch)? What if the
essential purpose of this war was to glorify or
valorize those omnipotent
objects that we wish to believe exist--gods that we
call France, Germany,
Russia and America.

Are we able to put our minds around this reality? Are
we able to look at the
profound psychopathology that lies at the core of
Twentieth Century?

Historians write about these things, record the
events, but they don't
actually understand what brought them into being.

Those with a knowledge of depth psychology must begin
to get out of their
shells and to encounter the manner in which
unconscious phantasies are PLAYED
OUT ON THE STAGE OF SOCIAL REALITY.

The work has only just begun. It's not like anyone
really knows anything.
People only pretend or imagine that they know
something because the STRANGE
AND BIZARRE AND EXTRAORDINARY HAS BEEN ACCEPTED AS THE
REAL. We desperately
cling to a delusion of rationality (perhaps the
Holocaust had an "economic"
motivation--to extract the gold from Jewish teeth).

We must begin to bracket or make problematic that
which we have tended to
view as the essence of "human history."

R. K.

Wilfred Owen: '"The Parable of the Old Man and the
Young."

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one. (. 42)

Howard Stein



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