Anyone for Pale Riders? Chaps.

Weblog 15 July 2006 Jozi:
Now that we are in a gap between the World Cup, Wimbledon and the Tri Nations it's time for a quick burst of warfare in some well known volatile place and its back to the game again. Reality can only be invariably allowed to disrupt the main agenda-which is the The game of diversion Nero once played. Perhaps we could be going into a penalty shoot out -oh dear: a sporting metaphor to lighten the horror that must be Gaza today.

Prediction: Within months someone takes the Iranian nuclear plant out of the International equation. Syria degenerates towards a fundamentalist regime and the army takes over. Lebanon returns to civil war and the State of Israel is engaged in all- out war backed by a revitalised Uncle Dubya. But this conflict into which Israel is stumbling is no 6 Day wonder with all the pulverised people retreating to the sidelines: this is Iraq on steroids.

Would that the rampaging universe ignores these words and sends us a rugby victory instead-

Where to next?
Is the train leaving the station?
Are the passengers on board?
And will the journey take us into unknown territory?

Fool. Every journey takes us into unknown territory.

Have we reached the climax towards which we have hurtled for two thousand years
The moment adored by those who profess
This
Or
That creed?

Or is this simply an evasive tactic to distract us from the non-goings on at the G8+4
In the resurgent and increasingly authoritarian Russia.

Are we being distracted from
Or led towards
The global rise and rise of authoritarianism:
Aristocrats and anally rich wannabee main persons are gathering in
Comfortable places and deciding on the doling of the world. Or are they simply practicing smugness.

Either way it seems to be that we are reaching a climax of sorts.

Israel reacts with full apparent awareness of the need to act instantly. Planned reaction.

The first real 'people's government' in Israel has taken what many see as a step too far. Invading bombing and generally throwing a mass of toys out of the cot.

Is that is what our ancestors meant
When they said that
When good people stand by evil triumphs.
And when the good stand by out of despair the outcome is the same.

Perhaps there are no good people.

All reason appears to have been thrown from the window
By the Israelis
Mr Putin the new rising Csar of the lesser Russias calls it a 'disproportionate' response to the alleged abduction of a gawky young
Corporal and subsequently two other unidentified soldiers.

He is right. We all know he is right.
So why does the leader of a people who have given the world so much over so long decided to embark on what is virtually a tit for tat suicide mission.

Some years ago just prior to Bush's invasion of Iraq I blogged about how we were in an era between the generally conciliatory based philosophy of so-called Liberalism and the retributive philosophy of what is now termed Neo-conservatism.

My sense is that retribution is slowly coming to the boil. Our liberal spring is over and 'the winter of our discontent' looms large on our globalising horizons.

The forces of so-called Irrationalism driven by dysfunctional humans with deluded alternate visions for our intrinsic bubble reality have pushed us to the edge of catastrophe. Have possibly pushed us to abandon the Liberal ethic and turn to our dark sides.

Our entire system and its hope for humanity is under threat from forces that believe there can be an alternative way to run our planet than this free [ish] market that will give us all a better life. If our human story were a scientific experiment then we have long since proven that human development is best nurtured under conditions of democratic meritocracy and that the only things that grows from the fanatics visions are the painful shriekings of broken lives.

At the very worst humans do not need vast amounts of freedom to flourish. Without freedom though societies wither and it is frequently argued by the retributionists [aka neo-cons] that an excess of freedom generates a state of anarchy.

Now a state of anarchy also occurs when two people who live next door refuse to acknowledge the rights that either have or simply deny the right of each other to exist.

When a conditional right exists on one party [in this case Israel] and no right exists from the other party [in this case Hamas and its backers -the absentees in Syria, Lebanon and Iran and perhaps elsewhere]then the result is absolute.

Someone always loses.

We forget because we have all lived in this era of human rights for so long that the so-called Liberal philosophy with its founding ethic of social responsibility, rule of law, and self-reliance balanced to the Aristotelian mean, is wafer thin.

We are a species that has bestrode this planet for at least 180 millenia and to the best of our knowledge this wafer thin philosophy has held sway for perhaps 1 of them. We should beware that we are not reverting to the ideals that held us at bay from our destiny for the other 170.

There are many who see the 'war on terror' as a set up: a conspiracy of neo-cons, and who knows maybe it is. I put it on the same level of probability or conjecture as I place the even more unprovable existence of god.

No. I believe the truth to be more prosaic. The concept of Chaos theory pretty well sums it up. People do what they do. Because people's behaviour is relatively predictable on a mass scale there are all sort of people with their own agendas to affect mass behaviour and profit in some way from the table droppings. Sometimes these agendas clash on a scale that forces an eviscerating response. Such a concatenation of events occurred in 1914, largely due to the holidays and the limitations of communications in that era.

The Israelis have no-where to. We have seen what ordinary humans who have chosen to arms themselves as human explosives and destroy their enemies can do. Every day somewhere on the planet someone blows up ten people and themselves [or so it seems].

What will it mean to us when an entire nation realises that it is facing a foe so implacable that nothing short of the destruction of the entire State will do. What will it mean for us when the day comes when that nation decides to act: 'To do or die.' And what if this is what we are witnessing here.

Mao taught us that in the war of the flea the flea wins. He never heard of dog dip.

We have forgotten the lessons Genghis Khan taught us. The Jews haven't. They know that there are implacable enemies who would exterminate them as Genghis Khan did the late empire of the Kwarazm-shah [circa 1220] the now forgotten place today known as Iran and obliterated all memory of those people from our race. The Nazis were neither the first nor the last to practice genocide. The Israelis know that if they fail to act decisively now that they may never again have the opportunity.

Sensible Israelis have undoubtedly read the message of the fate of the schmuck so-called 'white farmers' of the Zimbabwe soon-to-be-failed-State; arbitrarily relieved of their property decades after they negotiated a settlement that most obviously had a hidden agenda. That a similar agenda is in play in South Africa is rapidly dawning on the former Afrikaner rulers of the racist Apartheid State and there is nothing they can do to alter their destiny. The Jews are amongst the few 'comeback-kids' in history.

They took the path less travelled [eventually] and face what Yeats called 'quiet desperation' as their people are murdered daily, their icons demolished, and their place in society usurped. This can be said of the Welsh, the Afrikaner, tribes that have no names fighting for their destiny in the Niger delta against the forces of corrupt oil power or the latter day Jews.

History shows us nothing but ignominy there and they will either fight or gradually disperse to the four winds and reconstitute themselves in a new image and like the luckless Afrikaner those who remain will slowly vanish over the next two centuries notwithstanding Karen Zoid and the post Apartheid flowering of Afrikaner culture.

Over the past 180 millennia entire cultures have arisen existed been eradicated and vanished. But the Jews have fought against assimilation and now they face the truth. Perhaps this is the moment history has prepared us for two thousand years, that great moment in our common story represented by the 'Pale riders'-fuck-I hope not, there is nothing more despairing than living under conditions of perpetual conflict.

Can you imagine anything more destructive than an all out war escalating out of control because the Israeli's have encountered a people who are equally determined not to be eradicated and who intend to have back the territory that from their perspective was stolen from them. Take a person's soul and dignity and they were barter for a new soul and new dignity. Take away the land and you have an enemy for all of time. We know this here: two implacable foes, one piece of land.

Of course the newly democratically elected regime [if one may use that word] in Israel can choose to negotiate and swap prisoners for prisoners. There isn't really any alternative that the earnest democrat can accept. Unless the democrat is actually only faking it-and as the former G7 cosy up to a rising autocrat in Russia right now as you read this the democratic credentials of the former so-called 'free world' are beginning to look dodgy.

Should such a 'democrat' as Elmut Olmert [sic] perceive that the enemy is not just Israel's enemy but an enemy of all allegedly free people, then there is ultimately-when all else appears to have failed-.the mailed fist. Then the child must know that the parent was right and must go to wherever the enemy hides, even if this means that the parent must go to the places of those 'good' people amongst whom the enemy of the children swim. Then the failure of those good people to act when they could means the probability of their own destruction-there are no innocents in a State run by terror, and for those living in the shadow of Israel this is an avenging State deluxe.

Nonetheless this is the human condition and much of the next thousand years will be geared to constrain this but right now the cycle has been retarded: Violence flows. This cycle cannot be broken it can only be retarded and constrained and this may well need what Napoleon called: 'a whiff of grapeshot.'

Sensible people would recommend to their friends that they release the three hostages unharmed so there is no longer an excuse for this violence, unless of course they can't release the hostages or intend to execute them on Internet television. OF course it could be that no excuse was really needed: this is high noon and it's Show Time.

Cheers
NiK