10 posts tagged “world civilizations ii”

“not what they want but what is good for them.”
Remark by Oliver Cromwell.

Tonight's movie was To Kill a King. It is the story of the Roundhead's victory over the armies of King Charles in one of England's more interesting revolutions. It's about an inspired movement to dethrone a tyrant without having a clear plan for what sort of regime will replace it. It is about how even leaders of revolutions come to find out that their brothers-in-arms have different visions. And it is about how easily wealth can purchase power out from under idealism as long as there is a table to make deals under. I found myself asking "Am I watching a movie about King Chalres, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, the Tower of London, and England? or am I watching a movie about Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Colin Powell, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraq?"

Soon after the Roundhead armies defeat the armies of the monarchists, King Charles goes about bribing parliament to vote to keep him in power. Oliver Cromwell wants to see him tried and beheaded. Lord Thomas Fairfax sees a more moderate approach to change in view, seeing only a need to get Charles to sign a new Constitution limiting his power. Unfortunately for him, he is caught in the middle. His family's privileges have their origins in the Monarchical system whereby families are rewarded with special treatment for serving and defending the crown. The inequalities that he enjoys are founded on a belief in the divine right of kings so ... how can he kill the king?

Eventually, he determines to kill his friend Cromwell instead. It is only King Charles who is not conflicted by second guesses in this portrayal of regime change and personal loyalty. Fairfax's loyalty to his wife, to his children, to his family, to tradition cannot take him on as long a leap as Oliver Cromwell takes. Cromwell seeks not a reformed old order but a completely reformatted new order.

... And yet, a few years into his new regime, Cromwell has to consider that the idea of a king might have its advantages. The following comes from an article by Patrick Little in History Today; Feb2007, Vol. 57 Issue 2, p24-31,

"If his highness can be moved to accept of it [the crown], the services he hath done the nations have abundantly deserved it; but if he who hath so much merited it do judge it fit to continue his refusal of it, the contempt of a crown -- which can not proceed but from an extraordinary virtue -- will render him, in the esteem of all whose opinion is to be valued, more honourable than any that wear it.

WHEN THE AMBASSADOR to France, Sir William Lockhart, wrote this in April 1657, it had been nearly two months since the first formal offer by Parliament to make Oliver Cromwell king, and in England people were waiting anxiously for the Lord Protector to make up his mind. Would he choose to become King Oliver or not?"

Ultimately, Cromwell went with his convictions and insisted that regardless of the pragmatics, it would be a sin to resurrect the idea of monarchy.

"Truly the providence of God has laid this title aside providentially … I would not seek to set up that that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again."

His reference to rebuilding Jericho is from a passage in Joshua where God instructs that the city of Jericho, once razed, should never be rebuilt.

Again, the parallels to Iraq are interesting. Should Iraq have been completly deBaathified? should the Iraqi army have been dismissed entirely? How much change was possible in Iraq in such a short period of time?  Should America have ever started using "Cromwellian methods" to achieve what may have been idealistic objectives?

“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”
Cromwell on personal fortunes.

Question for Comment: How are you affected when you feel that a cause you have dedicated yourself to has been taken over by someone who is using it for their own purposes? 

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

The following quotes come from the 1995 introduction to Edward Said's book, written 15 years earlier, Covering Islam. I think they reflect the mission of Edward Said to defend Islam, Palestinians, and Arabs in general from ignorant stereotyping.

“Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, other Orientals, or Asians.” P. xii

“A massive United Nations effort at humanitarian relief in Bosnia was a novelty, given that everywhere else Muslims were seen and treated as aggressors for whom the best treatment was abusive talk, threats, sanctions, quarantines, and, on occasion, airstrikes.” P. xiv

“Islam” defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers a billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and, of course, an infinite number of different experiences.  It is simply false to try to trace all of this back to something called Islam, no matter how vociferously polemical Orientalists, many active in the United States, Britain, and Israel -- insisted that Islam regulates Islamic societies from top to bottom, that dar al Islam is a single, coherent entity, that church and state are really one in Islam, and so forth.” P. xvi

“The deliberately created associations between Islam and fundamentalism ensure that the average reader comes to see Islam and fundamentalism as essentially the same thing.” P. xvi

“in short, fundamentalism equals Islam equals everything we must now fight against, as we did with communism during the Cold War.” P. xix

“I am not saying that Muslims have not attacked and injured Israelis and Westerners in the name of Islam.  But I am saying that much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression as coming from Islam because that is what “Islam is”. Local and concrete circumstances are thus obliterated.  In other words, covering Islam is a one-sided activity that obscures what “we” do, and highlights instead what Muslims and Arabs by their very flawed nature are.” P. xxii

“At the very least, one should say that in the contest between the Islamists and the overwhelming majority of Muslims, the former have by and large lost the battle.” P. xxvii

The world, it seems is always interested in simplifying things ... and thus conflating things. The content of what one learns is being driven by the need for efficiency in learning. There is too much to learn and therefore we do not feel we can afford the luxury of accuracy or complexity. And thus expediency drives the curriculum. I think maybe the world needs to slow down and rebuild its knowledge base ... one member of one sub-community at a time.

Question for Comment: What is a group that you think you know? Who do you actually know from that group?

Today, the boys and I were talking about Oscar Wilde's book The Picture of Dorian Gray 
and the following passage in particular: 

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be."

 I thought I might share a few selections from a textbook I used to use when teaching Western Civilizations to illustrate Lord Henry's attitude toward religion and reason. The authors' opinions are fairly evident in their treatment of the text and I thought it might serve as an interesting example of how history and contemporary bias interact. As you read, ask yourself, "are these historians telling students what happened in the past or are they just using their interpretation of history to argue for a philosophical position they hold in the present?" Here are the selections:

From Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics & Society, 3rd ed., p.137.

“During the second century AD., Greco-Roman civilization lost its creative energies, and the values of classical humanism were challenged by mythic-religious movements. No longer regarding reason as a satisfying guide to life, the educated elite subordinated the intellect to feelings and an unregulated imagination. . . . The application of reason to nature and society, as we have seen, was the great achievement of the Greek mind. But despite its many triumphs, Greek rationalism never entirely subdued the mythic religious mentality, which draws its strength from human emotion. The masses of peasants and slaves remained attracted to religious forms. Ritual, mystery, magic, and ecstasy never lost their hold on the ancient world – nor indeed have they in our own technological and scientific society. During the Hellenistic age the tide of rationalism gradually receded, and the non-rational, an ever present undercurrent, showed renewed vigor.

. . . Seeing themselves as isolated souls wandering aimlessly in a social desert, people sought refuge in religion. Reason had been found wanting. The time for faith and salvation was at hand.  . . . A spiritual malaise had descended upon the Greco-Roman world. Among the upper classes, the philosophic and scientific spirit withered; rational and secular values were in retreat. . . . Stressing the intellect and self reliance, Greco Roman thought did not provide for the emotional needs of people. Christianity addressed itself to this defect in the Greco Roman outlook

. . . The triumph of Christianity was related to a corresponding decline in the vitality of Hellenism and a shift in cultural emphasis – a movement from reason to emotion and revelation. Offering comfortable solutions to the existential problems of life and death, religion demonstrated a greater capability to stir human hearts than reason did. Hellenism had invented the tools of rational thought, but the power of mythical thought was never entirely subdued. By the late Roman Empire, science and philosophy were unable to compete with mysticism and myth. . . . Christian truth ultimately rested on faith not reason.”

Clearly, Secular people reason and therefore are never wrong and will never believe something just because it comforts them or serves a psychological need. Religious people refuse to reason and therefore are never right and are susceptible to believing things because they make them feel good.

I have been reading Edward Said's book Covering Islam  recently, and it is his contention that this sort of patronizing bias is reserved for Muslims, but I tend to think it is directed toward all people who make use of faith somewhere in their epistemological systems.

Question for Comment: Is it ever reasonable to have faith? Is it ever irrational not to?

"Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?"

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view."

"Why?"

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be."

"But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us."

Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

OK ... Here is the problem. If I were to do EXACTLY what I feel like doing right now, I would go exact a pleasant revenge on someone I know who has it coming. Would this  provide me with a "fresh impulse of joy"? I don;t even know. I can't even say because I have never tried it. Never allowed myself to try it. I am effectively suppressed you might say.  Is that to my advantage or disadvantage I ask you?

Question for Comment: Is Lord Henry right? Are we poisoned by our refusals?

A controversial new anti-Koranic video was recently produced and banned in Holland. It demonstrates the problem that Islamic people are having everywhere.  It is called FITNA. I will let you go find it if you want. It essentially superimposes specific verses from the Koran advocating violence against unbelievers with images and sound files of Islamic extremists advocating the same in contemporary society.

Interestingly, the film was mentioned by a student in the Netherlands who is taking one of my online classes right now. This week, we are studying McCarthyism.You can, I think, see the connection:

"Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!" Geert Wiliders.

This guy so reminds me of Dr. Pfander in my Masters Thesis:

"AMSTERDAM – Faction leader for the Freedom Party Geert Wilders is not considering making any apology to Saudi Arabia for his recent comments on the Koran. He said this on Sunday in response to a report in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, which wrote that the Islamic country has complained to the Dutch government about the comments.

A spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs in The Hague said on Sunday that the Saudi ambassador had in fact done so “informally.” There has not been any official complaint however, he said.

The newspaper claims that the Saudi embassy in The Hague demanded that Wilders recant his comments and apologize to Muslims. The MP said he would not even consider it.

“Are they completely mad? It is scandalous that a country that does not recognize freedom of speech is telling me what to do. They had better learn that as an MP here you are allowed to say what you want.”

Wilders said earlier this week in an interview with newspaper De Pers that Muslims should tear out and discard half the Koran if they want to live in the Netherlands."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787609/posts

Would the Dutch tolerate the forced censoring of large portions of the Christian Bible in the Netherlands? W hat is the difference? I suspect that Christians have, whether they admit it or not, come to the place where they no longer think that King  David's conception of God was entirely accurate. Muslims are still, apparently having that argument. I suspect that it is very unfair to produce a video that pretends that they are not and FITNA may be that video.

Questions for Comment: have you ever read the Qur'an for yourself? How does one balance its advocacy for jihad with its advocacy for peace? Is it in a different category altogether from the scriptures that Christians appeal to?

Tonight's movie was Goya's Ghosts. I will just say with a critic at Rotten Tomatoes that it is a movie that should have been "put to the question" before being released. The sets are cool. The art is cool. The inquisition reminds one of the bumper sticker "Mean People Suck", and the moral of the story may well be, unlike Goya's art, too obvious to be artistic: Karma works only once in a while but if you find it working on you, the effect can be quite arresting. You just never know when that wheel of fortune will turn.

I also learned that Goya, when he did portraits, could be "visually undiplomatic" - In short, sometimes he painted powerful people somewhat too much as they are for his own good.

All criticisms aside, one cannot watch this movie without an awareness that it is a movie that is about more than a period and place in time. It is about Nazi Germany and it is about Abu Ghraib. It is as much about Guantanamo as it is about Madrid. It is as much about the Patriot Act as it is about the Inquisition and the French invasion of Spain under the guise of liberte'. The opening scene  shows us the Inquisition determining that "desperate times demand desperate measures" so to speak ... and it is a reminder that anyone who is going to be the sort to take a job torturing people, is going to be the sort of person that is not going to care about the morality of going beyond what is permitted.

For all sorts of reasons, torture and brutality in the cause of some sort of "good" is just a bad idea and artists like Goya (and no doubt this film director) did the right thing when they exposed it in all its ugliness.

"Goya's causes for discouragement were not confined to personal misfortunes [He had lost his wife and his hearing]. In 1808 his beloved country was overrun by the hordes of what was possibly the most ruthless invading army of modern history. He has left notes in letters, and in his works, of the scenes of which he was an eye-witness-murder, and rape, and cruelty to children. "I saw this," he writes on the margin of his sketches. He saw his fellow citizens shot down, unarmed, without trial-by platoons, one crowd after another. He saw the mutilation of the dead. He saw the heroic and desperate resistance of his people, "ferocious and admirable," beyond all telling, where women fought as savagely as men and died resisting. And his soul was filled with despair, and pity, and with horrible, demoniac laughter at the senselessness of war-and of mankind."

A Self-Portrait by Goya

Alfred Vance Churchill
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 13, No. 1. (Mar., 1931), pp. 4-11

Question for Comment: Why is it that some movies simply do not fool you - that that you see actors playing parts - not characters when you watch them?

Tonight, the boys and I watched some episodes from E2, a series of documentary videos about architects and how they makes use of environmental studies to create sustainable building designs.

It is an important reminder of how knowledge can so often be, but shouldn't be, disconnected from problems solving, and even more, service to a community. knowledge was never intended to be known to pass a test. it is there to be used as a tool of service and it was refreshing to see creative, intelligent, well-educated people using their assets for the good of communities, some, as in the first episode are some of the world's wealthiest. Some, as in the second episode are among the world's poorest.

That word, SUSTAINABILITY is gaining traction everywhere. It implies that a paradigm shift is occurring whose principle feature is a change from thinking twelve months out to twelve decades out.

Sustainability may be understood by referring to a set of five core principles:

Respecting life and natural processes. Sustainability commits us to explicit considerationof the effects of our decisions and actions on the health and wellbeing of the entire community of life.

Living within limits. Sustainabilityinvolves an awareness that natural resourcesare finite endowmentsto be used with care and prudence at a rate consonant with their capacity for regeneration.

Valuing the local. Sustainabilitycommitsus to show respect for the natural components of our neighborhoods and bioregions;to preservation, restoration,and use of local knowledge; and to creation of strong, selfreliant
local economies.

Accounting for full costs. Sustainabilityrequires that we become aware of the costs generated by our products from "source to sink-to the environment and society. Product prices must reflect this awareness.

Sharing power. Sustainability demands we recognize that we are all interconnected-people, biota, and physical elements. Problems are solved by each individual assuming a share of the responsibility.

Green Destiny: Universities Leading the Way to a Sustainable Future
Christopher Uhl; Amy Anderson
BioScience, Vol. 51, No. 1. (Jan., 2001), pp. 36-42.

It makes me sit back and ask, "How will the teaching of history contribute to or inhibit the speed with which we convert to this new way of thinking? How have historians contributed to the lack of sustainability in the way we have been living? is there a historiography of sustainability yet?

The most interesting of the episodes in the series to me was about sustainable archetecture in China right now. See the trailer at: CHINA: FROM RED TO GREEN at PBS.

Question for Comment: How sustainable is your life at the moment? Is it a life that your children and grandchildren could continue living? Why or why not?

I would love to see Hitler and Stalin meet each other in hell. Here is what Adolf Hitler had to say about Stalinist Russia in Mein Kampf:

"The present rulers of Russia have no idea of honorably entering into an alliance, let alone observing one.
Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity which, favored by circumstances, overran a great state in a tragic hour, slaughtered and wiped out thousands of her leading intelligentsia in wild blood lust, and now for almost ten years have been carrying on the most cruel and tyrannical regime of all time. Furthermore, do not forget that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying, and which today more than ever is conscious of a mission to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world. [antisemitism deleted] . . .  And you do not make pacts with anyone whose sole interest is the destruction of his partner. Above all, you do not make them with elements to whom no pact would be sacred, since they do not live in this world as representatives of honor and sincerity, but as champions of deceit, lies, theft, plunder, and rapine. If a man believes that he can enter into profitable connections with parasites, he is like a tree trying to conclude for its own profit an agreement with a mistletoe." Mein Kampf

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It is no wonder that Hitler took the world by surprise in 1939 when he signed a non-aggression treaty with Stalin, freeing the Nazi army up entirely for its attacks into Poland and Western Europe. II find it impossible not to assume that Stalin's intention was to watch Hitler bleed himself to death in a war with England and France, and hopefully America while he bided his time and waited for the right moment to break the treaty. Did Hitler know that? Of course he did. His propaganda justification for the surprise attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) would have no doubt had some kernel of truth in it. But he absolutely knew that Stalin wasn't ready for a blow to the back of his trusting head. And he made SURE that Stalin was not as ready as he might have been.

"In preparation for the attack, Hitler moved 3.2 million German soldiers and about 1 million Axis soldiers to the Soviet border, launched many aerial surveillance missions over Soviet territory, and stockpiled materiel in the East. The Soviets were still taken by surprise, mostly due to Stalin's belief that the Third Reich was unlikely to attack only two years after signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet leader also believed that the Nazis would likely finish their war with Britain before opening a new front. He refused to believe repeated warnings from his intelligence services on the Nazi buildup, fearing the reports to be British misinformation designed to spark a war between the Nazis and the USSR. The German government also aided in this deception, telling Stalin that the troops were being moved to take them out of range of British bombers. The Germans also explained that they were trying to trick the British into thinking they were planning to attack the Soviet Union, while in fact the troops and supplies were being stockpiled for an invasion of Britain. As a result, Stalin's preparations against a possible German invasion in 1941 were half-hearted." Wikipedia article on Operation Barbarossa

The fact is that by this time, Hitler had elevated Machiavellianism and Nietzschism to religious creeds. All of this deception was sanctified by its ends in his mind, the Aryanization and Nazification of Eastern Europe. In short, ethnic cleansing as a religious duty to the Gods of Darwin and the thousand year Riech.

This is not the image of a man who does things that he suspects that he will have to apologize for someday.

The problem with secret surprise attacks of course is NOT that they don;t work. They do. The problem is that they do not work OFTEN. Indeed, they do not work well more than two or three times. Then people know you are capable of it and the capacity for doing it effectively decreases exponentially. One mistakes the original success for an attribute of the tactic. People who devise surprise attacks on other people should take note.

Question for comment: Have you ever been "Operation Barbarossa'ed"? How does one protect themselves? 

Today, I finally got to read the first chapter of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelego. I have been meaning to for some time and it seemed it as good a time as any since I will be teaching A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich later this week. Solzhenitsyn's first chapter on arresting proceedures and psychology in Stalin's Russia was ... well ... arresting. Have you, the reader ever been arrested? Falsely or otherwise? All I can say is that it seems like Solzhenitsyn gets it right.  As I was reading I found myself thinking about C.S. Lewis' comment about meeting someone who seems to be thinking with your brain.

"Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

The chapter discusses the psychology of those who allow the state to commit crimes against them that they would resist if they were to think of the "criminals" who were arresting them as such:

"Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?

The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest."

If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?

But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"

And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.

Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another. . .

And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but nonetheless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.

That's all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?"

That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.

That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.

Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"

Gulag Archipelego, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Question for Comment: Why does injustice, when it is done to us, surprise us so much? Should we watch more movies that end, like life, with injustices aplenty?