Ukraine

[alice malice]

That politics makes strange bedfellows is a testament to its
complexity, and to the fact that those who seek to reduce it to simple
terms will find themselves in bed with ideas they would rather murder
than make love to. Here, Kissinger seems to defend Putin, but he
doesn't defend Putin; he defends his own way of reading history.
Chomsky would rather see Kissinger in prison than in his bed, but he
too is guilty, as is Cohen, and countless other pundits of the New
Cold War, of sleeping with Kissinger and with Putin. Strange because
all three men reject Machiavelli's use of history, his claim that a
Prince is man, and a man, his desires, his passions, his in all
Republics, are fixed, are unyielding, as steady as Earth, as constant
as the Sun.

Putin may believe this, but the others don't. Putin spouts Machiavelli
and he plays the part.

The others simply don't accept what has happened. We are not as we
were. We are not men of an old or a new world order, of passions that
we inherited from history, form our ancients.

A new generation of humanity is not ignorant of history, and it is not
as Fukuyama argued, or as Neo-Cons have, at the end of it, but it is
clear that something is happening, something economic and
technological, something we don't quite understand, that has made the
squabbling of political bedfellows quite beside the point. Machiavelli
looked back and see the ignorance of the day, but now we know that his
ideas are fundamentally flawed because they can not account for us.

We are not living an old or new world order, an old or new cold war,
we are unique and bound to history and the ancients. We are freere
than we have ever been and freedom is not a passion the ancients gave
us or that history taught us. We are buying it with our labor in the
market and the force of the market is the American Empire. Its demise
called for predicted and declared, it marches on, pivoting east and
west and all around the world. Accuse me of nationalism or jingoism,
but I have no country, no nation, no flag.

Today
I worship the hammer & the Dollar.

from Discourses of NM

When we consider the general respect for antiquity, and how often – to
say nothing of other examples – a great price is paid for some
fragments of an antique statue, which we are anxious to possess to
ornament our houses with, or to give to artists who strive to imitate
them in their own works; and when we see, on the other hand, the
wonderful examples which the history of ancient kingdoms and republics
presents to us, the prodigies of virtue and of wisdom displayed by the
kings, captains, citizens, and legislators who have sacrificed
themselves for their country, – when we see these, I say, more admired
than imitated, or so much neglected that not the least trace of this
ancient virtue remains, we cannot but be at the same time as much
surprised as afflicted. The more so as in the differences which arise
between citizens, or in the maladies to which they are subjected, we
see these same people have recourse to the judgments and the remedies
prescribed by the ancients. The civil laws are in fact nothing but
decisions given by their jurisconsults, and which, reduced to a
system, direct our modern jurists in their decisions. And what is the
science of medicine, but the experience of ancient physicians, which
their successors have taken for their guide? And yet to found a
republic, maintain states, to govern a kingdom, organize an army,
conduct a war, dispense justice, and extend empires, you will find
neither prince, nor republic, nor captain, nor citizen, who has
recourse to the examples of antiquity! This neglect, I am persuaded,
is due less to the weakness to which the vices of our education have
reduced the world, than to the evils caused by the proud indolence
which prevails in most of the Christian states, and to the lack of
real knowledge of history, the true sense of which is not known, or
the spirit of which they do not comprehend. Thus the majority of those
who read it take pleasure only in the variety of the events which
history relates, without ever thinking of imitating the noble actions,
deeming that not only difficult, but impossible; as though heaven, the
sun, the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and
power, and were different from what they were in ancient times.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l