Lexhere

Permanent business, with one emergency following another, gives the security of a full life or a ‘successful career’, sole proofs of self-assertion in a world from which all references to the ‘beyond’ are absent, and where existence, with its finitude, is the only certainty…When they take actions people think short-term – of things to be done immediately or in the very near future…All too often, action is only an escape from the self, a remedy from the anguish.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Commodity logic has become generalized and today governs not only labour processes and material products, but the whole of culture, sexuality, and human relations, including even fantasies and individual drives.

Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society. Such a society does not yet exist; progress toward it is perhaps more than before arrested by violence and suppression on a global scale. As deterrents against nuclear war, as police action against subversion, as technical aid in the fight against imperialism and communism, as methods of pacification in neo-colonial massacres, violence and suppression are promulgated, practiced; and defended by democratic and authoritarian governments alike, and the people subjected to these governments are educated to sustain such practices as necessary for the preservation of the status quo.

Marx believed that the working class was the most alienated class…. [He] did not foresee the extent to which alienation was to become the fate of the vast majority of people…. If anything, the clerk, the salesman, the executive, are even more alienated today than the skilled manual worker. The latter’s functioning still depends on the expression of certain personal qualities like skill, reliability, etc., and he is not forced to sell his “personality”, his smile, his opinions in the bargain.

The anti-war left’s attachment to the anti-Assad narrative is based in a colonial mentality which presumes that Westerners have the right to determine the destinies of peoples residing in what was formerly known as the Third World. It is the same mentality that drives the criminalization of Black America, reducing mass incarceration and police murder to products of the innate criminality of Black people.

The capitalist media swoons in ecstatic adulation to bombing campaigns for the same reason that authoritarian personality types, as a general rule, go round heeled for militarist Sturm und Drang. The enclosed nature of the authoritarian psyche creates a sense of insatiable emptiness, wherein the phenomenon of sensation serves as a palliative. Astonishing as the fact is, media elites find beauty in violent death, or as archetypal psychologist James Hillman termed the phenomenon, “a terrible love of war.” Being over-coffered Renfield's to vampiric empire, they are intoxicated by the sight and smell of blood. Finally, the thunder of detonating bombs is the song of money…the addiction to which of their media oligarch bosses translates to veritable vampirism i.e., subsisting on a diet of blood. The imagery of blood and thunder acts as an intoxicant. But only for those whose heart has been reduced to dust. Away from Big Media soundstages, far from their soul-bereft, ersatz verities, mothers and widows grieve, men pound the blood sodden earth in lamentation. Yet vampires are not troubled by the fate of their victims nor the suffering of those who survive them. The remedy: Sunlight and wooden stakes. Translation: Seeing a vampire for what it is and the penetration of the monster’s dead heart by the world itself.

We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in comparison with the mass of the lukewarm and the misguided. And those who have an interest in keeping the machinery of war going are a very powerful body; they will stop at nothing to make public opinion subservient to their murderous ends.

The Guest House

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.