'If anyone out there is nostalgic about the hope for a better world, act to reinstate Athens in our midst. Listen to your enemy, love your foe, almost as much as you hate yourself.'
By ex-Jew Gilad Atzmon: Three hate crimes: a slaughter in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, a massacre in Sri Lanka and a shooting in a synagogue in San Diego; what do they have in common? The three attacks fit neatly within the Neocon vision of our emerging dystopia. We are set to hate each other. Conflict, hostility, terror - rivers of blood- keep the immoral interventionist agenda afloat.
But there is a deeper meaning in these recent events and the many others that preceded them. Terror, as we should know by now, is a message. Terror has a lethal rationale which is delivered by means of fear and destruction. Perhaps if we start to be attentive to the message of terror we may find this to be the best strategy to dilute its venom.
Many are convinced that terror must be met with fierce retaliation, an ‘eye for an eye’ is what the Israelites called it in their Old Testament. Thousands of eyes for an eye is how their Israeli ‘offspring’ interpret their religious text. This brutal genocidal approach has now been adopted by Israel’s most subservient English speaking colonies (The USA and Britain). I assume that being vengeful and merciless on a mass scale must be a satisfying experience for some, and exciting for others, but it hardly offers a prospect of a better future let alone the possibility of harmony and reconciliation.
Vindictiveness reduces the victim into the perpetrator of another crime. That which presents itself as defiance is, in practice, a total surrender to terror. If we really want to eliminate terror we had better learn to listen and even find forgiveness. We better invest our energy in understanding our enemies and attempting to decipher their plight. We must dig into the logus that drives hostility, intolerance, hatred, racism and even genocidal inclinations. We must ask what is it that which brings about blood thirstiness towards Muslims (Christchurch), What is it that some Muslims hate about us the so called ‘West’ (Sri Lanka)? The above also apply to Jews. The people who claim to be subject to suffering, discrimination and hatred throughout their history should be able to wonder why. Unlike the so called progressives who attribute reactionary ‘phobia’ (homophobia, Islamophobia, Judeophobia etc.) to that which they oppose, I contend that the path towards progress is to search for the rationale.
To eliminate terror and defuse its poison, we have to reinstate our true Western philosophical ethos. We should seek truth and apply the rule of reason. In the hopeful world I grew up in, hostile debate and crude controversy were a source of inspiration. In the world in which we are living, intellectual polarity has been squashed by a tyranny of correctness. When people are silenced and suppressed they revert to violence. When people realise they are losing their elementary freedoms they become dangerous to themselves and their surroundings. If anyone out there is nostalgic about the hope for a better world, act to reinstate Athens in our midst. Listen to your enemy, love your foe, almost as much as you hate yourself.
If the above sounds familiar or even spiritual it is only because the political is dead in the water. What used to be known as a battle between socialism and capitalism, Left and Right, has reemerged as clash between greed and grace…
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