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recalcitrant america

In spite of their efficiency and dedication to order they were unable to keep up with the clean disposal of the bodies. When I was a child I saw in a documentary what remained to be taken care of by the liberating forces. Bulldozers had to be employed to move the haphazard piles of stiffened, shrunken corpses. The horror of those images would henceforth be with me, asking, if this is man? (Primo Levi).  As W. G. Sebald (German author and academic) wrote, 'no serious person ever thinks about anything else.' Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust while at school in Obertsdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen.

To allow the darkness, that is within each of us, to be off leash. To elect a leader who believes in his own hero fantasy, himself the crusader who liberates those who are willing and able from the restraints put upon them by those who believe that the means matters just as much the ends. This can lead only to utter destruction. 

Those who are like weathervanes and turn with whatever is current are spruiking this sickness as a new world order. But it isn't new. History is full of men becoming carried away with themselves and upsetting the orderly lives of the subjugated. Perhaps they call themselves pragmatists. Like those who are deeply embedded in the capitalism that largely succeeded in infiltrating the tenets of corporatism into everyday life and culture. So that now it seems that everything needs to be handed over to those who already have. Everything must become exclusive. Excluding as many people as possible so that the few can have more.

Hegel (German philosopher and theologian (1770–1831)) had argued that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states. 

In February 2022 Russia's invasion of Ukraine plummeted humanity back into a dark age. In November 2024 Americans voted to make Donald Trump president deepening the rift with destiny. 

 

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