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| QUOTATIONS 387-414 |
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| 387. The horrific, unprecedented in history persecution of the Jews by the German fascists had its roots not only in the Nazi ideology but also, and perhaps primarily, in the German imperialism. As Germany was preparing for a second time in the 20th century to seize the lands belonging to her neighbours, it had to find ostensible justification for such a predatory behaviour (for humans, having conscience, always have to justify the injustice they do to others). In this particular case the German imperialism used the claim of German racial superiority - the corner stone of German fascist ideology - as a justification of its expansionist policy. But what is inherently unjust can never be fully justified, not for a long time, anyway. There are always some "little" exceptions which destroy the seemingly "perfect" argument. The Jews were such an exception to the German claim of the racial superiority, for there was too much Jewish blood in the German veins after more than a thousand years of coexistence on the same territory. What if all this alleged German intellectual, artistic, scientific, industrial, etc. superiority was the product of the Semitic genetic material? The very possibility of such a conclusion, considering the fanatical belief the German fascists had in the racial determinism, must have horrified them. The German imperialists could not accept such an interpretation either, for it would have deprived them of the legitimization of the imperialistic conquest. If the German race were not superior, what rights did it have to grab somebody else's territory? Thus, both the German fascists and German imperialists (which was not always the same) had to uphold the myth of the German racial superiority. Seeing the Jews as the main obstacle to such a claim, they had solved this particular "Jewish Problem" in a very simple, even primitive but very effective way. The Jews had been declared to be an inferior race. As such, of course, it was proclaimed that not only the Jews could not have improved the German race, but just the opposite - they had contaminated it. Using the familiar and convenient dichotomy of Good and Evil, the first coming from God, the second - from Satan, all the positive qualities of the German people were attributed to the German Aryan blood, and all the negative - to the poisoning by the Jewish Semitic blood. For the German Fascists who prided themselves on being men of action and despised those who, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were always complaining about the Jews but never did anything about them, the next "logical" step was to cleanse the German blood from the Jewish poison to make the Germans pure again and thus to show the world that nobody but the German Aryan race is responsible for Germany's greatness. The rest is history, the bloody and horrible one, the name of which is the Holocaust. 388. To give a man a goal, a dream and then to withhold from him the means of its fulfilment is the supreme act of cruelty. 389. For the duration of the Cold War, which was "officially" declared dead recently, America and American were, to a large extent, defined as the opposite to the Soviet Union and Communist. This created, in a strange twist of irony, the situation when the Cold War became one of the major causes for moral degradation of the American society in the post- Second World War period. The reason, given to the American people for the Cold War, was the defence of Freedom. The Soviet Communism was presented as a system ruled by the ruthless, totalitarian regime, denying its people the basic liberties. And so, if the Soviet citizens had their freedom severely curtailed by the Communist state, the Unites States of America - the beacon of freedom in the world - had to allow its citizens to have as much freedom as humanly possible (political freedom, in the full sense of the word, was of course excluded - McCarthyism took care of that). This carte blanche license to personal freedom had opened the flood gates and led to the greatest moral abuses in history since Sodom and Gomorrah. It has manifested itself as the unlimited sexual freedom, freedom of practically unrestricted pornography, drugs freedom, crimes freedom, etc. and any time anybody tried to do something about it he would be immediately accused of acting like "a communist" and of turning America into the Soviet Union. But now, as it had to be expected, though some may find it ironic, when the Soviet Union has collapsed, the American government, not being afraid, evidently, anymore of being accused of acting like "communists", has begun tightening the limits of the permissible, as far as public morality is concerned. This new trend has already found its expression, for example, in a stricter supervision of grants by the National Endowment for Humanities, specifically concerning the type of art which is considered by the general public to be immoral or pornographic. More, of course, is to come. Thus, in a certain sense, the demise of the Soviet Communism may, in the long run, be very beneficial to the state of the American morals. 390. The internal stability of every political system is based on the contradiction between what it does and what it preaches. Profoundly materialistic societies of the capitalist West, which are catering to any wish and whimsy of the so-called "human nature", are ostensibly professing the idealistic beliefs in spirituality and God. At the same time, just as thoroughly idealistic societies of the communist East, whose whole way of life was an attempt to give a body to the purely intellectual ideology, proclaimed themselves to be materialistic. And so, on the one hand, we saw in the West the materialistic life in an idealistic "drag", while on the other hand, in the East the idealistic life was covered by a materialistic "make-up". Of course, both system could be accused, with some justification, of hypocrisy. But it is this half-acknowledged and tacitly accepted by the majority hypocrisy that keep society together. And it is the rejection by the same majority of this hypocrisy that eventually had destroyed the Communist East. The mixture of outright lies and ambiguous half-truth is the mortar that keeps the building of society together. But the absolute Truth is a dynamite that would blow it up to pieces. Thus, it is not the truth but, as paradoxically as it may sound, the inconsistencies and contradictions that produce the state of equilibrium, albeit of various degree of stability. On the other hand, contrary to the popular expectations, a society that tries to harmonize what it does with what it preaches, embarks, unknowingly, on the path of self-destruction. For the forces unleashed by such a desire create a phenomenon somewhat similar to the resonance effect in mechanical structures when the rapidly accelerating excitation of a system by a continual application of forces at its natural frequency causes the exponential increase of amplitude of the oscillation which quickly leads to the disintegration of the system. 391. The American mass media, i.e. films, television, magazines, visual art, popular music, and, especially, omnipresent advertising are so thoroughly permeated by sexual imagery that it seems they all conspire to keep American public in a state of, to use a modern sexological term, perpetual foreplay. 392. In the beginning there was Sin, and Sin was fun for quite a while, but then sin turned into routine - the Boredom has arrived. 393. Here is the Law of no return, otherwise known as the Irreversibility: - water spilled on the ground cannot be gathered back into a glass; - a burnt tree cannot be restored out of its ashes. 394. Moses - an outsider as a liberator. A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. (Mark 6.4) We think the way we live. Both a slave and a slave owner (even such an intellectual giant as Aristotle) if they are born at a time of established slavery see their relations as "natural". For any social relations, no matter how abhorrent they are, which existed for an extended period of time (two, three generations minimum) are regarded by the overwhelming majority of population as natural and for at least two reasons. First, their very existence proves every day their viability, second, the people living in these conditions do not know any other. So, it is an outsider, for whom such conditions are unnatural, who becomes an instigator of change. But in order to revolt against the existing order of things this outsider has to be subjected himself to such unusual for him social relations, and, of course, not as an oppressor but as an oppressed. Moses, the Egyptian prince, who had experienced the oppression for the first time in his life when he spontaneously identified with and defended a Hebrew slave from the violence of his fellow Egyptian, is a classic example of such an outsider. And yet, at the same time, by virtue of his origin he is also a part of the persecuted group, though because of the environment he was brought up in, of the way he looks and behaves, etc. he feels and is perceived by this group as a stranger. Even under the best of circumstances people occasionally display some ugly sides of human nature. But under the harsh conditions, especially when their very survival is at stake, most of us quickly dispense with any pretence of civility. Persecution, as a rule, doesn't make anybody better, only worse. And then, of course, the persecutors find themselves fully justified in how they treat the persecuted by pointing out their obvious faults. Moreover, eventually the persecuted themselves accept more or less their fate as the deserved one for what they are. Consequently, the Liberator is usually the one who is a member (otherwise he wouldn't be trusted) of the persecuted group only nominally. Since he, personally, has never been persecuted before, he hasn't developed these negative traits of self-loathing in his character, for he has never perceived himself to be a member of the persecuted group to begin with. And yet, he is suddenly treated as one of them, simply because by virtue of his origin he is, and that is more than enough of a reason for the persecutors. But while his nominal brethren bear the burden of their fate unconsciously, resigned and unquestioning, he perceives it first as a personal injustice directed against him and then as the collective one against the group of which he has become an involuntary member. This turns him into a rebel, for the strongest is the perception of injustice the greatest is the motivation for the rebellion, and because he perceives it stronger than anybody else in the oppressed group he becomes its leader. Sometimes the slaves are so accustomed to their plight that "an outsider" has to do a lot of the preliminary "eye opening" before convincing them to challenge the oppressors. Strangely enough, it is also because he is perceived as an outsider that the Liberator accepted as a leader. For he is white Negro - Adam Powell, the first really influential American black politician who, because of light skin often, while a student used to pass as "white" at will; he is Theodor Herzl, completely assimilated European Jew, the founder of modern Zionism; he is Moses, an Egyptian prince and yet Hebrew, etc. He is us like them. He is Jesus the Jew - the God of the Gentiles. 395. When we are young, and small, and weak, it's truth and justice that we seek. But when we're grown big and strong, we act as if there's no right or wrong. The weak need justice to protect them from the strong. A child is weak, therefore he depends on justice. When he grows up and becomes a strong adult he relies primarily on his strength to get what he wants. But he cannot erase completely from his psyche the belief in the absolute necessity of Justice which was so crucial to his survival as a child. So, though he achieves now his goals by means of power, nevertheless, he always tries to find justification for his actions to satisfy the deeply ingrained in him notion of Justice. It also explains why the perception of injustice is one of the main motivations for human action. 396. Justice, in its simplest form is based on an assumption of equality of all, despite the obvious differences, be they in strength, wealth, beauty, wisdom, skills, etc. It is usually viewed as a mode of social interaction but it originates in the biological necessity for humans to survive as a species. The survival of the human species, like that of any other living organisms, depends on the survival of its young. The human child in order to survive the long period of childhood (the actual number of years depends on the complexity of civilization) during which he/she is too weak, both physically and socially, to fend for itself, has nothing to rely upon but on the just treatment by the members of its family and by strangers. Thus we can say, that as far as humans are concerned, the justice is the basis of life, i.e. if not for justice there would be no human life at all. 397. Once I was a wise child, today I'm an old man, and in between transpired life of the gone wrong plans Of hopes that came to nothing, of dreams never fulfilled And what about a child? His spirit and mind were killed. 398. Do not look for apples in the cherry orchard. 399. A man can get used to all kinds of hardship and learn how to bear them stoically. But the unsatisfied vanity could never be fully extinguished. It will continue, for as long as one lives, to cause pain, which, as years pass by, can only grow stronger and stronger. 400. There are the positive and the negative aspects to living a long life. On the positive side - the availability of the extra time (not necessarily used productively) to change, if possible, what needs to be changed, and to rectify, if desirable, what can be rectified. On the negative side - having to spend much more time than one would wish to, otherwise, to grieve and to regret. 401. Sooner or later almost any disciple wants to become a teacher himself. For the more one learns, the more one wishes to impart this newly acquired knowledge to others (of course, the "upward mobility" drive is also partly responsible for such a desire). But in order to assume the position of a teacher the disciple has to leave his teacher and to find his own disciples, namely, the less knowledgeable than he is. One of the main attractions of becoming a missionary, besides the obvious religious motivation, has always been precisely such an opportunity. For the position of a missionary almost automatically provides one, who is in transition from being a disciple to becoming a teacher, with it. 402. It is always very difficult, no matter how hard one tries, to agree with someone who is in a disagreeable mood. Some people seem to be frozen in such a state permanently. 403. I look at people around me and I pity them. How vulnerable and essentially defenceless we all are, even the strongest, the most secured and self-assured ones. For each, in certain circumstances, can be easily abused and stripped of his dignity and humanity. All can be humiliated and degraded. Everyone is in danger, nobody is untouchable, none is invincible or indestructible. 404. The realization of the inevitability of death, what does it do to a man, to the way he continues to live after such a supposedly devastating discovery? In most cases surprisingly little. The life goes on as usual, and the horrible truth gets buried deep down into subconsciousness, unacknowledged almost till the moment of the last breath. 405. From Omar Khayyam Be happy! Unhappy ones lose their minds The stars are eternal, the darkness is blind. To know that men, after all, turns to dust How can one get used to the thought so unkind. 406. A Jew, no matter how ignorant he is, cannot afford to be a racist, at least not an open one. For he is always the first victim of racism. 407. A lie is both a manifestation and a tool of social and personal interactions, and with a slightest degree of exaggeration the lying can also be called a crime, albeit mostly of a psychological nature. For whenever the act of lying is committed there is a definite perpetrator - a liar, and a definite victim - one who is lied to. Furthermore, the relations between the former and the latter are similar to those that exist between the oppressor and the oppressed, one who inflict suffering and one who suffers, the abuser and the abused, the exploiter and the exploited, etc. Moreover, in all such types of relations, which are essentially criminal in nature, whether the law considers them as such or not, the lying is the ever present, the integral part of them all. But probably the most important role the lying plays in relations between people is how it affects their sense of equality or inequality - the two mutually exclusive states. For while the foundation of equality is the truth, the corner stone of inequality is a lie. 408. But what about self-deception? If truth is hard, why not to be beguiled by lies, by dreams, if only for a while? What likely damage, one may ask, it does since it's well known our dreams don't last? Even more so we need them to withstand the daily hardship which seems has no end. 409. I search my soul, I probe my mind I've lost my ways, I must be blind. I'm more than willing to confess, if proven wrong, and recognize my thoughts are but a wild guess and only accidentally wise. Yet no one choses to correct what I've said, or contradict. Instead I face a dead neglect, and silence is my edict. 410. The Western economists, with their blind faith in the miraculous, cure for all ills, attributes of the free enterprise, free market capitalist economy, and in their stubborn insistence on the worldwide implementation of it, had been proven so far to be as dogmatic as their Communist counterparts who had, until recently, stubbornly clung to the idea of a state controlled, centrally planned and regulated economy. And while the fact that the free enterprise, free market economy had worked , with the varying degree of success, only in a very small number of countries and in a relatively short , as far as human history is concerned , period of time and , also, that its future is far from certain, had no visible effect on its proponents, the Communists, after seventy years of tottering on the brink of the economic disaster, have been finally disabused of their faith in the planned economy. It seems now that both sides have fallen the victim of a very seductive but misleading notion that there is one universal cure for all diseases, one universal answer to all questions, which stems from almost religious belief in Unity, in universal Law, and in the unwavering defiance of the obvious diversity and infinite exceptions. 411. Ungratefulness, exhibited by almost everyone, at one time or another, is often nothing more than an outward manifestation of the subconscious desire to assert one's independence and to reject the claims of reciprocity. 412. One who has spent most of his life living for others, finds himself, when they do not need him any more, with noting to live for, since he does not know how to live for his own sake and, usually , has very little time left to learn it. 413. Emigration is an act of sacrificing the pioneering generation for the sake of the subsequent ones, whose future success however, can be by no means guaranteed. 414. As the world rejected me, so I too have rejected the world. |
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