Ukraine

[Joseph Tracy]

you really believe this crap?

On Dec 29, 2014, at 1:53 PM, alice malice wrote:

> 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

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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l