HONING TERROR’S DIALECTIC: PROFESSOR EUGENE NARRET
Honing Terror’s Dialectic
http://israelendtimes.com/blog/2010/10/15/honing-terrors-dialectic.htm
The dialectic of managed terror, attrition and threats of major conflict is growing in the Middle East. The client states in the region now are grouped into two clearly identifiable blocks one of which is escalating rhetoric and armaments at an alarming rate. One may lose oneself in everyday concerns and their imperatives and/or feel, at least at the edges of consciousness a heightening of terror. When violence occurs, the major media, mouth pieces of the powers will urge salvation through regional solutions arranged by the Quartet and United Nations.
Threats and tensions have reached such a high level that a series of explosions at Iran’s main underground base, near Khorramabad in the western Iranian province of Lorestan, for the Shehab – 3 ballistic missile, though “a devastating blow” to Iran’s offensive plans and pretensions is the least newsworthy of current events [1]. One could say that the non-coverage of this major event is in inverse portion to the posturing and hatred of those most effected.
During his two-day visit to Beirut, an advertisement for the continuing absorption of Syria and Lebanon by Iran, Ahmadinejad “announced the formation of a new anti-Israel Eastern Front encompassing Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians and Iraq.” Amid the ranting against “the Zionist entity as the embodiment of the deception of the capitalist world order and [its] materialistic ideas,” [2] a phrase that could have been written in Moscow or London, the Persian chieftain sketched two groupings that reflect the dialectic conflict that indicate the shape of already extant counters and future fighting. A map shows that Ahmadinejad denotes a northern Middle Eastern grouping that is unstable and also a result of Anglo-American diplomatic maneuvers. Readers of Memri.org know that since 2003 the US State Department has driven Turkey toward Islamic – centered powers, alienating it from the Western coalition and facilitating its continued exclusion from the EU. Turkey’s recent receipt of SU -27 and Mig-29 fighters from China [3], arriving just as the Persian spree in the Lebanon occurred accentuates this northern grouping and obscures the instability of any arrangement between Syria and Turkey except that based on oppressing the Kurds, semi-autonomous in Northern Iraq.
Given the thorough integration of the Chinese and American economies, and thus of their sustainability, this military posturing is mainly about heightening dialectic tensions in the Middle East; it more reflects Chinese-NATO collaboration than tensions. The same could be said regarding Russia who consults with the State Department about the ways in which to encourage and disable Iran or at least to pretend to do so.
If Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and the ‘Palestinians’ constitute one grouping, their antithesis consists of Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and Egypt. Russia, China and their dependencies, like North Korea whose missiles are shipped to and adapted by Iran back the north, more or less openly while NATO backs the south and the EU frets around the middle, lost in the corruption and spectacular egoism that attends the corruption of tradition, the growth of superstition and hyper-individualism [4].
The fact that most of the States in both groupings are artificial, constructed by the great powers, principally Britain in the last century heightens the ability of the powers to manipulate the conflict through financial and other emoluments to their clients; the intrinsic volatility of the situation lacking, as it does, integrity on almost every level; and attests to the egomania within Esau’s monomaniacal re-structuring of the world to suit his grand games. Every time you hear a great power diplomat, politician or their client with a pronouncement just recall the phrase, “game was in his mouth” (Genesis 25:28). “Esau, he is Edom.”
While these events occurred at the northern border of Israel, one of the few genuine nations in the region and the one whose principle of shlaimut foregrounds integrity and wholeness its political handlers, instructed not by the wisdom of Torah but by the masters in London and Washington said little and did less. Torah stipulates what today are called “preemptive strikes” on States like Iran, Syria and Hezbollah-Lebanon; but with the actor who is its antithesis practically at the border it did nothing. Their inactivity was compared to the ostensible lameness of Chamberlain in delivering Europe to Hitler’s Germany [5]. The analogy is apt but not for the reasons routinely assumed and interminably repeated.
It is a truism of those who cite historical precedents that the administration of Neville Chamberlain was obtuse, cowardly and passive. On the contrary, its relentless drive toward its goal, a Europe dominated by Germany that could be used to terrify America into an enduring servitude to ‘the mother country’ and entice the Soviet Union into an otherwise implausible alliance as part of merging the two systems (as argued by Wells, Julian Huxley, Churchill and many others [6]) was eminently successful. It also encouraged and enabled German-led Europeans to slaughter the Jews thus ‘proving’ Esau’s god and deforming a Jewish State that might have interfered with Britain’s plans for a regional Arab dependency “with its front door on the Mediterranean,” as longtime Round Table editor John Dove wrote. Through a managed dialectic conflict precisely such a regional dependency is being established. The Jews who fought in the “Underground” set back the British plan but, cramped by the client regime of the establishment Yishuv they could not destroy it by establishing a fully sovereign and integral Israel [7].
To see the geographic core of Britain’s dependency look at the contiguity and shape of the artificial States Iraq, Jordan and the truncated integral nation of Israel. The British drew and joined the panhandles of the first two states, one taken from the Jewish nation for whose establishment Britain was given a mandate (after Jewish volunteers enabled it to defeat the Turks after many failed efforts) [8]; they equipped, trained and led Arab armies that punched into Israel’s heartland and nearly reached the sea. When Israel regained the western part of its heartland, the Anglo-American media led in denoting them, “occupied territories” whose ‘return’ is the basis for the “peace process” and dialectic today. Thus, the southern half of the current dialectic is ancillary to its core area. The conflict smolders in Iraq because it is the center of the relentless disorder arising from British management, disorder that justifies regional realignments and “the peace of the wicked” who “speak loftily about oppression”; while professing compassion “their tongue struts on earth” [9].
So the falsity of the historical cliché, its inversion of history and geopolitical purpose keeps people asleep today. As the explosions at Khorramabad showed, as did the ‘virus’ in the Persian nuclear computer systems, the Persian dictator readily could have been killed and the northern threat neutralized in many ways but that would hamper the dialectic synthesis the blocs have been formed to accomplish. Yes, the analogy to what Britain did with the Sudetenland (and before that regarding Austria when Italy and France were ready to act) and Czechoslovakia is apt. Consumers of mainstream ‘news’ are like the Sleepwalkers in Broch’s great novel [10]; the precedent invites one to argue that Iran and its implausible bloc is being set up for a pounding as Nazi Germany was invited to be itself and become the grounds over which the “Cold War” was built, with the synthesis in the Balkans preparing the “War on Terror” about which there is so much heat and so little light today. The obsession of Esau with imagery and design makes terror.
There are many ways the powers can arrange the denouement to the dialectic they have fostered: all of them will be massaged to give them greater control of a region in the name of “peace.” New and ever more “security” measures and technology, much of it developed by Siemens, a leader in the field who also designs much of Iran’s nuclear technology will be applied not only or mainly to “the region” but to the home countries of the West where the spirit of Esau and his desire to ‘finish’ his projects rules most purely. It is in the backwash of enlightenment, in times of corruption and cultural exhaustion that individualism attains its most extreme powers, becoming a cult, a superstition. The ultimate image or eidolon of Edom is the grand game, a unified world system that is like the fragile glass ball the monkeys roll in “the Witch’s Kitchen” [11]. A world security State is the precipitate of such times when “morals decay” and “tyrants emerge…precocious harbingers of individualism” in its most posturing forms. “Caesar always appears” and rules by promising external peace to people consumed with inner turmoil and desires, by a lack of boundaries: people desiring to create their own world and image-ideal identity. “In these days, bribery and treason reach their peak” because nothing is true but power. Thus, “there hardly is any secure future left and one lives for today… which makes the game easy for all seducers” [12] like those forever selling the latest “peace in our time” deal. Caesar understands and encourages the excesses of egotism and its image formation, its idealizations of identity on the personal and cultural levels. This is what characterizes the world in the end of days: global Caesarism (fascism), a world in which, as Kafka knew, “lying is a universal principle” [13]. Just as “the Cathedral” is the ante-chamber to Walpurgis Night in Faust and decapitation of the image-ideal; just as the Cathedral precedes the stifling end of The Trial in a world from which truth and clarity have fled into hiding: so in our world when the dominion of Edom climaxes in the new Church of security and peace dialectics upon which the old church will put her imprimatur. Like the monkey that shatters the world in a riotous carouse while the epitome of the West stares at his ideal “form divine” in a mirror, the gamers cry over the fragments, “Alive am I!” The eidolon and death wait for the image worshipers and those trapped in the designs of their imperial egotism, the spiritual and political state in which the virtual and fictive becomes real, when the fictive persona displaces the human.
Perhaps it is true that “nothing succeeds without a part of prankishness in it” [14]. The game of geopolitics includes much of this “play spirit” that European philosophers have told us is intrinsic to war [15]. The West, Edom, particularly Europe has known for decades that its cultic belief system was a prank, a passion play and imposition. A new game, geopolitics with management of human inventory has replaced it. The result of reducing human beings to resources is the same as the emotional result of idealizing the self in an image or game: the separation of the image from the cultural substrate brings terror as illusion consumes and displaces reality. These are the shadows that have enveloped Europe-Edom and from it spread over the world as its rulers self-consciously play god [16], the ultimate game of the mouth: “transgression’s speech to the wicked is in their hearts that there should be no dread of God before their eyes” for their god, having proved absurd, leaves them giddily contemplating and exercising their own ‘divinity.’ These shadows of media imagery and deceit are the actual correlative of the nightmare apocalypse and elegy of Lord of the Rings the last quest story that celebrates death, decay and flight from the world. This is the antithesis of the sanctification of the everyday for which derekh Yehudi provides and this is why the powers obsessively strive to bury Israel. Esau prefers the compelling and dispiriting fiction of disappearance into Elf-land where magic governs everything and children are unknown. The population control agenda also is intrinsic to Edom’s management of life; its Caesars have no use for Israel and its rejoicing in childbirth as the grace of the Eternal One: “He transforms the barren wife into a glad mother of children; hallelujah” [17].
Perhaps their management and control of this game is an obsession like that of Pharaoh’s; used to rule, they cannot stop themselves from fashioning the world after their own dreams. Perhaps they are, despite their consciously crafted menu of options they fulfill a discussion in the Zohar: “in the end of days, Esau will attack Ishmael, Ishmael will run to Persia, and Persia will attack the entire world.” Or perhaps, the cynical Caesars have had this text pointed out to them and follow it for ‘fun.’ In either case, the obsessive dialectic of world-making and management is plain to see: it defines our days and the wicked like a mirror that shows what they are and what their game is.
1. “Blasts Hit Secret Iranian Launching-Pads for US, Israeli Targets,” Debkafile 10-15-2010, http://www.debka.com/article/9087/
2.“High Military Alerts as Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad Call for Israel’s Destruction,” Debkafile 10-13-2010, http://www.debka.com/article/9079/
3.“Chinese Warplanes Make Mid-East Debut in Turkey and Iran,” Debkafile 10-12-2010, http://www.debka.com/article/9078/
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Frohliche Wissenschaft (1887), Book I, section 23
5. “By its Inaction, Israel Permits Iran’s Annexation of Lebanon,” Debkafile 10-14-2010, http://www.debka.com/article/9080/
6.H.G. Wells, The New World Order (NY 1940) which details his long held desire for “a socialist world collective” with a unified armed forces, a call echoed by Churchill in his speech at Westminster college in March 1946; Julian Huxley in his pamphlet, The Purpose of UNESCO (1946) called for an integration of the Communist and Capitalist systems “using the dialectic of Hegel as applied by Marx.”
7. The best discussion of this process is by Israel Eldad, The First Tithe (Hebrew 1950; English edition Tel Aviv 2008, trans. Zev Golan. See also the last few chapters of Samuel Katz’s Days of Fire (NY 1968)
8. Samuel Katz, The Aaronsohn Saga (Jerusalem 2007)
9.Tehillim (“Psalm”) 73
10. Herman Broch, The Sleepwalkers (1931; NY 1947, Muir translation)
11. Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 2902-10, passim; (NY 1965, Charles Passage translation)
12. Nietzsche op. cit. (NY 1974, Walter Kaufman translation), 96-8
13. Franz Kafka, The Trial (Schocken 1925; 1968, Muir translation), 220, “In the Cathedral,” chapter 9
14. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Preface (1888; NY 1954, Kaufman translation)
15. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938; 1946 revised by the author; Beacon 1955 English translation)
16. Nietzsche, Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, Book V, section 343 (1887)
17. Tehillim 112, cf 127
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