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| QUOTATIONS 1380-1391 |
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| 1380. Why do people need miracles? Why do they follow and worship miracle workers? It is because miracles defy reality - the oppressive, the fear-inspiring, the overpowering force against which endless manifestation men most of the time are powerless. But the miracles show that this omnipotent, cruel reality can be defeated and conquered. And unless one is capable of performing a miracle he is one of us - week and defenseless. So, why should we follow him? For he can no more save us from the reality than we can save ourselves. Thus anyone who aspire to be a leader of men has to perform a miracle, or at least to convince his followers that he will do it in the nearest future. In the times of great desperation and need even a promise often suffice. But not for too long. It has to be fulfilled, and better sooner than later. Otherwise the failed miracle worker is dismissed, sometimes not very politely, and the new one is appointed. For there is never a shortage of the new would be deliverers from human misery, waiting to replace the old disappointing one. 1381. And now, my Jewish brothers, tell me honestly, what good this 3000 years old stern exhortation (or desperate plea): "You must love your neighbor as yourself"(Lv.19:18) has ever done to you? I know, I know, you hoped (and apparently still do despite 3000 years of disappointment ) that your neighbors, out of sense of gratitude, or simply fairness, will love you in return. They who always hated you. Oh, how naive you were, and still are, my Jewish brothers. For your neighbors are the wild beast of pray. Their law is not your law. Your law is the law of the week and kind, theirs - of the strong and cruel. You offer them love, but they want your blood. For they covet your house, and your wife, and your ox, and your donkey - everything that is yours. Oh, my brothers, do not waste your love and kindness, your hope and trust. Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls in front of pigs, or they will trample them and then turn on you and tear you to pieces. Your only salvation is to become like them - the bloodthirsty and heartless beast. For they will never try to be like you. Even the best of them are only the wolves in sheep skin. But alas, I know you can't. For you are the sheep and the wolf's skin would never fit you. 1382. Ever since I was a small child music was one of my greatest pleasures, even obsessions. For as long as i remember myself I was singing. I believe I begun to sing before I begun to speak. By the time i was six I knew many songs by heart. Some of them were the folk songs of the zeks - the prisoners of Soviet concentration camps and I remember performing them in our local park in front of the older boys who probably taught me these song in the first place and then found it's amusing to listen to the six-years old to sing about life and death, love and hate, the loneliness and camaraderie of the camp's existence. Toward the adolescence I developed , almost imperceptibly, the deep baritone, which was quite unusual for the boy of my age. By then my musical taste changed and I used to sing arias which I memorized by listening endlessly to the opera records. Some of the operas I literally learned in their entirety. Some of the people around me were saying that I have enough potentials to become a professional singer. But, alas, it was destined to remain just that, a potential, and never came to anything else. I was also an avid reader since I learned to read. I used to literally devour books of any sorts as I was growing up. Eventually, I tried to write myself, and was told again that I have the potentials of becoming a writer myself. But as with singing, it came to nought. Instead, I got a degree in civil engineering, married, had a family, and lived a life of an ordinary working man, with all that implied in that. But I could never totally forget the early promises I made and for years wondered why none of them have ever been fulfilled. Usually I blamed my working middle-class parents for putting much more emphases on the necessity for a man to learn a marketable trade to be able, when he starts his own family (for this was always taken for granted) to earn an honest and decent living. Judging by such standards the arts were definitely too uncertain to rely upon. I also blamed the Soviet system of education with its overwhelming bias toward science and technology at the expense of the liberal arts. And finally, on the top of everything, was this typical Jewish thing, perfected through the millennia of persecution and elevated to the status of the First Principle - to be a Jew is to be first and foremost concerned with the survival - the rest is but the frills. But now I am beginning to think that as valid and as real these obstacles to my artistic inclinations were, the main reason for failing to realize them was my subconscious fear of "going all the way" in pursuit of my abilities and then to discover that though I have some artistic gifts I didn't have the real talent to make it in the highly competitive world of professional artists. The very idea of competition in any thing, for some reason, was always abhorrent to me, and I used to flatter myself that such noble sentiments were inspired by my high ethical standards. But perhaps the fear of "losing" played not a small part as well. I still do not have the definite answer how and why so much at the beginning came to so little at the end. But I suspect that no definite answer is possible neither for me nor for thousands and thousands through human history who found themselves in the similar predicaments. 1383. The sure sign of a man's maturity is when he begin to worry more about the size of his prostate gland than about the size of his penis. 1384. To be a popular and successful leader in any field, be it political, economical, artistic or scientific, etc. one has to be slightly ahead , as far as his abilities are concerned, of his followers, but not by too wide a margin. For this will make him too removed from the average person to the point of not being able to truly comprehend the world of ideas and wants of the common men. That's why the true genius can never become a leader of men. He has to be essentially one of them, just a little more capable than the rest. 1385. No matter how lofty the ideals which inspire liberation movements of any sort, no matter how just is the cause of the struggle, after the first blood is spilt (and there seems to be no way to avoid it) it is quickly reduced to the revenge, when all other considerations become secondary to the most rudimentary one - an eye for an eye. Then the body count begins, the settling of scores, the arithmetic of murder. An idealist becomes a killer., the liberation becomes retribution. 1386. If it is true that those who suffered themselves have more empathy with the similar misfortunes of the others, it is no less true that they are also more eager to inflict the suffering than those who did not experience it. Blacks and gays are the most recent example of this "kick the dog" syndrom, which is not having enough courage to pay back to those who insult them (because they are stronger) but instead to inflict the same pain on even more vulnerable minorities like Jews (because they are weaker). But while everyone, by now, is familiar with black antisemitism, few are aware of the growing gay racism directed toward Jews. 1387. What the intelligent and sophisticated contemporaries dismissed and scorned as the frivolous bric-a-brac, their no less intelligent and no less sophisticated descendants venerate, when these artifacts of the past become rare and end up in museums, as the exquisite specimens of this past's glorious art. 1388. The terrible fate awaiting every Canadian intellectual is that whether they start as historians, or philosophers, or sociologist, or literary critics, etc., etc., they all, as if subjected to some peculiar Canadian curse, end up acting as constitutional lawyers. 1389. Viewed in the strictly religious terms Capitalism, both as a socio-economic system and as a politico-moral ideology, by catering to any conceivable whim of human nature is essentially pagan, while Communism in its relentless and futile attempts to suppress its animalistic side is unmistakably Judeo-Christian. 1390. Old habits die hard Whether the New religion is imposed by force or willingly embraced (or combination of both) the Old one never goes completely away, but continue to manifest itself through somewhat modified old rituals, renamed gods, transformed festivals, traditional dances and music and familiar sacred objects and places. It happened (and still continue to happen) so often in history and the examples of this amazing flexibility and survivability of the old religions, sometimes against the overwhelming odds, are so numerous and obvious that no one can deny it. When pagan Greeks and Romans had to accept Christianity under Emperor's decree they retained certain elements of paganism which became the components of their brand of Christianity. Similar things happened in Ireland in 5th century and in Russia in 10th . That is why Christianity in different cultures have the national flavor, produced by the pre-Christian past. (Another famous example of this phenomenon, were the so-called "convertos" in 15th century Spain - the Jews who, though outwardly accepting Christianity under the threat of exile or death, continued secretly practice certain dietary laws and rituals.) The same dynamics of interaction between old and new religions could be easily observed in the countries converted to Buddhism or Islam as well. Now, after establishing this phenomenon of "religious recidivism" as a general and universal trend among the recipients of a new religion, let's ask a following question: "Is it possible that the reason the ancient Israelites of the Old Testament had so often abandoned Yahweh, the one and only true God of Israel, and reverted to paganism again and again throughout the O.T., was that in their majority they were not Israelites per se, but the conquered Canaanites (this term is used here as the collective generic name for all inhabitants of this area before the invasion of Israelites) who simply continued practice their old native religion, albeit under the duress, long after the victorious true nomadic Israelites imposed on them by force their own tribal deity Yahweh Sabaoth?" For how else can one explain century after century of whoring after the false gods, making of the graven images, worshiping handmade idols, trees, high places -all these abhorrent things which prophet after prophet accused them of doing - on a part of such uncompromising monotheists as the biblical Jews presented themselves to be? And especially after what Yahweh had done for them - freeing them from Egyptian slavery, performing wonderful miracles to save them from total annihilation at the hands of their numerous and by far stronger adversaries, bringing them to the land of milk and honey. giving them a land where they never toiled, towns they never built, food and wine from vineyards and olive groves they never planted - after all that how could they continue worship Baal? For thousand of years, in the thousand of pages of relentless accusations and self-flagellation, which is what the Old Testament is mainly about, the answer to these "why and how could they" is never given. Moreover, the question is never asked. But we, the beneficiaries of 3000 years of accumulated knowledge, can ask the question and should give the answer: they couldn't help it. For the majority of the so-called Israelites described in the books of Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, etc., of the Israelites accused of unfaithfulness by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah , etc. were, in all probability, the Canaanites converted by force into the new religion and who persisted, like all such people, in practicing, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, the old one, regardless of the consequences. Consider, for instance, what king of Judah, Ahaz, has been doing, which is fairly typical description of such a relapse to paganism: He (Ahaz) did not do what is pleasing to Yahweh his God, as his ancestor David had done.He followed the example of the kings of Israel, even causing his son to pass through fire, copying the shameful practices of the nations which Yahweh has dispossessed for the sons of Israel. He offered sacrifices and incense on the high places, on the hills and under every spreading tree.(2K.16: 3-4) So, when the first Christian martyr Stephen said: "You stubborn people, with your pagan hearts and pagan ears," he didn't even know how right he was, not in metaphorical but in actual sense. For they were in the majority the descendants of pagan Canaanites and they did continue worship the gods of their fathers, whenever the opportunity presented itself. P.C. Of course, it would be unrealistic to assume that the newcomers, the "original" Israelites remained totally immune to the lure of paganism. To begin with, they were strangers in a strange land and despite being as a conquerors military stronger they had a lot to learn from the locals in order to survive economically. Along with the practical knowledge of settled agriculture they undoubtedly absorbed some religious practices connected with the land, its seasons, fertility rites, harvest festivities, invocations for rain and other "useful" for agriculturalists rituals. Besides, paganism being more attune to the complexity of human nature ( with all these numerous gods catering to multiplicity of human needs and desires) is intrinsically more attractive than the austere monotheism which tries to subdue and suppress it. So, it shouldn't surprise us that even the originators of Yahweh worship strayed occasionally from its purity. Nevertheless, they had vested interests to maintain it, in order to remain in power, while the half-assimilated Canaanites used their old religion as a weapon to free themselves from it. Alas, there is nothing new under the sun. 1391. The rich and free? The poor and not? Nobody can dispute the fact that the rich industrialized countries have at present much better human rights record than the poor underdeveloped ones. What is not absolutely clear is whether they are rich because they respect human rights or they respect human rights because they are rich. I, personally, would argue for the second possibility. If we accept, as a given, that the distribution of wealth is ultimately at the root of all political and social relations, then it is clear that the rich countries, by generating enough wealth to satisfy the basic economic needs of the poor, while making the rich even richer, significantly weaken the main cause of social discontent and unrest. For to demand the greater share of societal wealth would require the lower classes to engage in a struggle which will inevitably lead not only to the greater hardship than they experience now (in the 20th century Proletariat of the rich industrialized countries has more to lose than its chains), but eventually to the destruction and death which such struggle always brings, since never in human history have the rich surrendered their wealth without resistance. Considering the fact that both the army and police are the tools of the rulers, who are comprised of and supported by the upper classes, it is the lower ones who would suffer the most in such conflicts. And history had shown us that, human nature being what it is, unless people are desperately hungry and unbearably oppressed they would never risk their lives or even the most meager existence for the uncertainty of a remote chance to some improvement . As a result, most of the times, the poor would accept, however reluctantly, the status quo. And that's all the rich care about. Therefore, they will ostensibly promote freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of associations (labor union are excluded) and all other liberal democratic freedoms, knowing well that those freedoms serve a useful purpose of a safety valve, as long as their wealth and privileges are not threatened. The situation in the poor countries of the so-called Third World, where the majority of human rights violations occur is quite different. These countries do not generate enough wealth to pacify the lower classes. The poverty there, unlike in the rich countries, is absolute , not relative. People die from starvation and disease in large numbers. Even the slightest attempts on the part of the poor to improve their lot is met with increased oppression and often brutal persecution. The rich rule the poor with an iron fist. And they couldn't do it otherwise. For to satisfy even the minimum demands of the poor they would have to share their wealth and surrender some of their privileges. It is unreasonable to expect them to do it voluntarily. Furthermore, since for the poor the basic human rights like freedom of speech, freedom of associations, etc., are the necessary preconditions to achieve their goal, and since their ultimate goal is to get some portion of national wealth from the rich, those basic human rights are steadfastly denied to them by the powers that be , i.e. the rich. In addition, though those rights are psychologically valuable to people who want to exercise them (which realistically is a small minority, for the overwhelming majority of population in every country, rich or poor, is concerned with the bread and butter issues) they are useless against the most fundamental right of them all - the right of private property. And whenever the political and social rights threaten the Right of Private Property they are quickly curtailed or totally annulled by the protectors of this Right - the Government. When the landless peasants of South America demand the redistribution of land, which can only be done by confiscating the land of big landowners, when, faced with refusal by Government to do so, they try to occupy it by force, they are met with bullets. And, in our free and democratic country, if the assembly workers of a Ford plant will demand a share of ownership of this plant and try to occupy it, they would ultimately face the same fate. The police would be sent in, and if it couldn't do the job, then the army would be called. It has happened before (the example are too numerous to be listed here), and, under similar circumstances, it can happen again. For in the world today the Right of Private Property is sacred and not only overrides all other rights, but makes them essentially meaningless. Therefore, the people of the rich countries are free, as long as they do not demand, and, if refused, try to do anything which can threaten the status quo. For if they do, those freedoms would be taken away in no time - the persecution of trade unionists and communists throughout the 19th and 20th centuries is testimony to it. The whole governing machine of the state - the justice system, the police, the army - is designed for this. So, what all these vaunted freedom are amount to is this: you can talk, but you can't touch. And even talking about touching would bring down on your head the whole weight of the huge apparatus of media and academe, those lackeys of bourgeoisie in the words of Lenin. And if despite the warnings and the threats you do try to touch, all those terrible violations of human rights in the Third World, which seem so unthinkable in our prosperous and free society, could happen to you. |
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