= = 
=
= 
=
= 
= = 
|
Annotated Fifth Edition of Edward FitzGerald's version of THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM POETRY i
am and am not: dispatches from the war against the world french poems in honour of jean genet gloss on rilke's ninth duino elegy jewels and shit: poems by rimbaud villon's dialogue with his heart vasko
popa: genrikh sapgir: an ironic mystic
TRANSLATIONS
BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE nice men and vacuum of desire: the most terrible event in history
SHORT STORIES
ESSAYS londons
of the mind a muezzin from the tower of darkness satan
in the groin shoplifting
a
holy dog
field guide to megalithic ireland
"The only way to comprehend
what mathematicians mean by Infinity is to contemplate the extent
of human stupidity."
«As
an American, I gently regard Europeans as The people who stayed
- KennethFDecker1@aol.com
All politicians are corrupt, because their trade depends on the perversion of language and the corruption of meaning. And,
as for the lengths that the greedy rich will go to become richer,
remember that President Clinton offered accommodation in Lincoln's
bed in the White House for $50,000 a night.
No wonder that the Algerian Saláfist (extreme fundamentalist) sect is so popular amongst the unemployed males who populate these soulless ghettoes !
More Americans are killed by doctors than by Terrorists.
The ad hoc holocausts by Europeans of Americans native for 15,000 years were as great as the mechanised holocausts of Stalin. In North America the US Government infected Indians' horses with brucellosis, the plains buffalo (bison) with anthrax and the Indians themselves with smallpox and measles - quite apart from accidentally-introduced diseases, notably tuberculosis, and, of course, insanely ruthless Government military action. Three thousand was less than one thousandth of the sum of Americans killed in the Genocidal Terror (a.k.a. The Indian Wars) launched from Washington. It is an obscene irony that one of the Militarist-State's modern weapons of terror around the world - the helicopter-gunship, is named APACHE. And this is to make no mention of the appalling Slave Trade which (though no worse than the Arab and Ottoman slave trades) made first Britain and then the United States the richest countries on Earth.
At the first small threat to "liberal democracy" and "the free world", laws are immediately brought in whereby anyone in the United States of Occupied North America can be held (outside the US, in Guantanamo Bay) in solitary confinement indefinitely without charge, trial or visitors. A 'suspect' (who needs only to be Muslim to be arrested) has as few rights in the United States of Occupied North America (The Land of Genocide and the Home of the Paranoid Greedy) as in Syria or Honduras. Thus, habeas corpus does not extend to those people whose racial appearance arouses dislike or distrust - as in Nazi Germany and also, traditionally, in the 'Deep South' of the USA - where democracy arrived only in the 1970s, thanks to Lyndon B. Johnson. The hard-won rights of the individual to be protected against the state evaporate so easily because Western 'Liberal Democracy' is based not on the model of Athens or the Icelandic Althing, but on a new model of self-interest and -betterment derived largely from the hedonistic philosophy of Utilitarianism. Democracy (which did away with Socrates, and which Borges interestingly regarded as a superstition) is a concept as blurred as Happiness - which does away with shame. Happiness now means comfort and money and the means to ensure them - and democracy has now come to mean universal (adult) suffrage - a very different thing from the Athenian or the Icelandic - or indeed the original American concept. With universal suffrage has come the tabloid press and television, which, in effect, mould the minds of the majority of people. Universal suffrage thus is in effect rule by the television and tabloid formers of opinion - and would be even more destructive than it is without a Bill of Rights and the means to enforce it against government, tabloid and television rule. Much more important than this democracy-by-numbers is an independent judicial system which people (more or less) trust. Even then, Universal Suffrage (only achieved in the US within the last 40 years) has merely legitimised the pillaging of the world and the abjection of the disadvantaged. Universal adult suffrage is as powerful a tool as governments themselves in the hands of the rapers and destroyers of the planet. DEMOCRACY:
Sven Lindqvist's fine trilogy of books on European imperialist expansion (A History of Bombing; Exterminate all the Brutes; Desert Divers) reveals the near-Nazi approach to other peoples shown in particular by the English. While at the Berlin Conference to carve up Africa, all the new colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and Italy) actually expected the whole population of the continent to disappear in due course, so that they could pillage the continent at their pleasure and leisure, the English reading public was enjoying a plethora of pulp-fiction about bombing all or selected other peoples off the face of the planet. Not only was the Chinese Yellow Peril to be "dealt with" by plague-bombs, but the Germans and the French were also targets. And not just pulp-fiction, either: the Hungarian-born Baroness Orczy had great success (continuing to this day) with her anti-French Scarlet Pimpernel, and the ever-popular Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are unashamedly anti-German. The English, having subdued all the "Lesser Breeds" would then welcome back the United States into the British Empire! This simply genocidal fin-de-siècle Zeitgeist led directly to the First World War. Now the countries of the Lesser Breeds (re-named People Without Democracy etc.) are being pillaged, impoverished and pacified by the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank and the powerful capitalist interests which they serve. The AIDS epidemic in Africa would have been viewed with glee by Europeans in the 1890s, and one suspects that, outside Africa, present regret is hollow or at least shallow.
The Prophet Mohamed said that we should be in the world, but not of it.
|
Click
here to read about
the US's government-sponsored Institute in the state of Georgia for turning
psychopaths into 'regular' terrorists
and torturers...
|
An empire without
a grown-up culture can only implode.
The United States is too ill-educated to understand that you cannot be powerful and not be evil - for power is evil.
The constant and mindless repetition of the word 'freedom' in American discourse obscures the fact that there is very little freedom in that country or world-dominating culture from ambition, greed, money and the totalitarian, stultifying work-ethic.
Every
minute of every day in the United States a coyote is killed. This war on the coyote and nature echoes exactly the self-defeating wars on drugs, the 'war on terror', and so on. This is Western Civilisation.
The purpose of Capitalism
is not to fulfil our needs, nor even to satisfy our wants. America promises everyone everything: but all that it really offers is Need for Money.
Hollywood
is a paradigm of the United States. This product stupefies its audiences, 'brainwashing' the world with sickly, corrosive Cola. (There are notable exceptions, however. Tootsie, as Steven Pinker points out, is a far better drama than any of Shakespeare's dreary cross-dressing comedies; and Midnight Cowboy was possibly as good as the book. Then there was the earnest Koyaanisqatsi...)
"We
have no more right to consume happiness without creating it - George Bernard Shaw
Very little capitalism is investment in bright ideas ('venture capitalism'). Mostly it is investment in established enterprises (and trading in those investments) simply to make money make money.
Few
understand that
The most virulently anti-Western régimes are enamoured not only of Western weapons but of Western uniforms: the hegemony of envy is sartorial, too!
And,
talking of uniforms, pacifist liberal lefties like my parasitic
self are always , as Kipling so memorably put it:
"The
people should support the government, - U.S. President Grover Cleveland, 1877 |
What many Americans want above all in their self-righteous neoteny is to be noticed, to be reckoned with. From this comes their obsessive-compulsive desire for global adulation and global control.
THIS SORRY SCHEME OF THINGSreflections
on "I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard I.
David Landes'
On the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) - a superb but
curiously one-dimensional study of material culture and its empires
- shows how exploitation of material and human resources widens
and deepens with the mean intelligence of greed applied to opportunity.
This book stands at the opposite side of literature and thought
to (for example) the Japanese haiku.
In The West we live in a powerful miasma of Will and Desire (with the freedom to realise them at almost whatever cost) – and, "too conscious of too many things", to borrow Wallace Stevens' concise remark, now Complexity and Information Overload.
One of the deeply-underlying problems of Western Civilisation (which is 98% smash-and-grab and 2% art) is that it has moved, through notions of Freedom and Will, from a mediæval culture of obedience and rôle in which obedience could be a very wide or catholic concept (whose strictures were easily escapable by flight or pilgrimage), to a culture of greed and success in which success is only fame and money acquired through processes set up or sanctioned by a quasi-democratic state. In the Leninist-Stalinist countries there was a mediæval culture of rather narrow obedience to inescapable absolutism, which, soon after its collapse, erupted into a culture of smash-and-grab success, wherein the former apparatchiks continued to do very well. Fame and money are connected in various important ways to power, because political success depends on them; and because money, by creating absolute and relative poverty, is the most accessible tool for power. In a culture of obedience to rôle everyone can be included, but a culture of envy, ambition, continuous gain and success (which will not tolerate either a court jester or a Feast of Fools) requires a large majority of losers, usually the materially poor in an environment of accelerating philosophical impoverishment. This is why capitaIism will ultimately fail: the losers will cease to have faith in a "system without a philosophy", and the erstwhile winners will lose faith in the bubble of mere marketing success. The moral restraints on capitalism are not inherent, but forced on it by governments which subscribe to some kind of ethical mish-mash foisted upon them. Capitalism smashes the bottle of every culture - which has finally released the Genie: Osama bin Laden. Once the bubble of mass-illusion bursts, capitalism will be seen not to have a centre that can hold. Socialism (not Marxism-Leninism) was at least ‘a sort of’ philosophy which attempted to create a social structure around, and a control of, money. The transnational capitalism which temporarily rules (and destroys) the world is a mere ‘cult’ - of money; a kind of Secular Fundamentalism preaching subservience to a many-headed Leviathan: The National Interest, consumption, ambition. Cults hate philosophy or any kind of intelligent awareness, and so the food and arms and pharmaceutical industries of ‘the West’ - make war on the planet, in an attempt to exterminate any recrudescence of philosophy, especially the most basic philosophical questions raised by the Greeks: "how best to live" - and for Camus ‘the only true philosophical question’ - whether to live at all. This problem arose before, in a smaller way of course, in late-mediæval Europe, when the obedience-culture of Christendom and the papacy were breaking down. And before that, in Syria when a great and noble Arabic tradition of dissent that few Westerners know about blossomed into the 10th century blind Syrian poet Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri – an intellectual, pessimist ascetic in the tradition of Diogenes of Sinope, who despised most other poets because he considered them empty and frivolous or fawning. A century later, in Iran/Afghanistan, the great Sufi mathematician Omar Khayyám (1048-1131) said that the seeker-after-truth would find more substance in the grape than in the teachings of the mullahs and imams, or even of the Prophets. Since we are clay and return to clay, he pointed out, we are ideally suited to contain liquids (and each other) rather than gas. Contrary to what his scholastic and religious detractors still claim, he was not, of course, a libertine suggesting a return to the rites of Dionysos, but a latter-day Diogenes pointing out that while wine might make you incapable, teachers will render you senseless. You will wake up from a drunken stupor, but not from an educational (or a religious) one. He also, heretically, suggested that God, if He existed, had a lot to answer for, and that suicide is less of a crime than procreation: "Best not have come or be, but to go." In FitzGerald's expansive translation: Better, oh better
cancel from the scroll Omar Khayyám here echoes the early Greek philosopher Theognis, who was echoed by Sophocles, Calderón and Schopenhauer, amongst others:..El mayor delito del hombre, Es haber nacido".[cf.. Lao-tzu, Tao Te-Ching II, 181a: ‘Wisdom consists in knowing that you have no use for life.’] Such a sentiment is anathema to all revealed religions, but not to Hinduism or (in theory at least) to atheistic Buddhism - nor to certain Sufi sects such as the Bektashi. Living in Eastern Iran, Khayyám must have been exposed to various Indian, as well as Chinese, philosophies. Christian (Pauline) and Jewish ideas also came, not so much from Europe, as from within Iran, and from Armenia, Georgia and Syria. Iran's own native religion, Zoroastrianism, would not actually have endorsed Khayyám's ruba'i, but the Parsi funerary "Towers of Silence" on which fresh corpses were laid out for the vultures to pick, would seem to followers of burial-religions to be as outrageous as (and hardly distinguishable from) a Diogenean endorsement of suicide. It is with Diogenes of Sinope (on the Black Sea coast, died 320 BCE), founder and most famous of the Cynics, that Khayyám seems closest. Diogenes reportedly believed that virtue (the goal of most Greek philosophers but an irrelevance to consumer-societies) could be attained only by fighting hypocrisy, greed and corruption - i.e. conventional morality. He is famously said to have gone around Athens with a lantern by day, vainly looking for an honest man. He would have agreed with Khayyám that society is merely knots of people on puppet-strings of systems of belief. It is likely that he disdained to write any of his ideas down. In any event, all our information comes (like our information on Jesus of Galilee) second-hand at best. The Cynics were a very strong influence in the Hellenistic culture of the Eastern Mediterranean just before the arrival of Jesus, and the original teachings that survive in the "Q-Gospel" suggest that Jesus - who regarded the staff and knapsack as too much property - was one of many successors of Diogenes who were teaching and practising in Hellenised Syria, and in Galilee which had only recently come under Jewish control. (Ironically, the staff and knapsack later became emblems of the pilgrimage to Compostela.) There is an anti-hypocritical, that is more or less to say anti-religious, line connecting Diogenes of Sinope with Jesus of Nazareth, Abu al-‘Ala al-Ma‘arri of Syria, and Khayyám of Nishapúr (who was educated at Balkh where Ibn Sina or Avicenna was born in 981) - a line which, very significantly, does not connect with Muhammad or with the moulders of 'Christianity', Peter and Paul, who were inventing and marketing a myth. Khayyám (a tent-maker very different from St Paul) was roughly contemporary with heretical movements in the West which sprung up (like the Crusades) following the first Millennium, and which died out, were suppressed, or - as in the last of them, led by St Francis and St Clare - were quickly institutionalised and absorbed into hypocritical orthodoxy. Others included the Waldensians, and the Beghards who gave us the word beggar. The Sufi and dissident Khayyám, however, is different from the others in his almost obsessive use of the metaphor of wine. Drunkenness for Sufis (who in Diogenean tradition also refer to themselves as 'dogs') is a code-word for Awareness and the abandonment of Normality. Underlying the various Sufi (philsophical) groups is a recognition that orthodox Islam is essentially an authoritarian patriarchal morality for the mindless. Sufis try to square the circle and make Islam mindful, eclectic, profound and subtle - often by turning conventional Islamic teaching and thought upside down in the manner of revolutionary Zen. Needless to say, Khayyám got up the noses of the mullahs and ayatollahs. A hundred years before Khayyám, Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna) claimed that both wine and sex were aids to understanding, while many Sunni Turks, chief amongst them Sultan Selim the Sot, have over the centuries endorsed his enthusiasm for it, Khayyám's allusions to it are not necessarily to be taken literally. Nor is wine a metaphor for [the means to] salvation or redemption, as it is in the 'Christian' (Pauline) use of the Wine and the Host. At the same time, Khayyám seems to be saying that with wine "what you taste is what you get": there is no bullshit. Wine is of now, and what follows may be only a hangover; what follows life is better: the welcome release back into the nothingness from which we came: Khayyám did not believe in the Last Judgement, nor in divine intervention. Wine might be a metaphor for grace with a small g, for the Sufis place great emphasis on the graceful (which is the opposite of the worldly) life. The business of capitalism, on the other hand, is to ensure that modern life is all worldliness, all paid-for entertainment, all product, producer and consumer. And it is bound to fail, like all tyrannies - including the tyranny of evolution itself. Khayyám's full name was Giyas ad-Din Abu-l-Futkh Omar ibn Ibrahim [Khayyám Nishapúri = descendant of a tent-maker from Nishapúr]. His father was a successful doctor. Nishapúr was an important trading and cultural center of Khorasan/Qurasan (ancient region of north-east of Iran/western Afghanistan, and before it was sacked by the Mongols, it was famous for its medrese (college) and library. After he finished his studies at the medrese of Nishapúr, he continued his education in Avicenna's Balkh, Samarkand and Bukhara, studying mathematics, physics, history, philosophy, medicine, philology, theory of music, and the works of ancient Greek thinkers in Arabic translation. He worked at the Observatory in Isfahan where his mathematical work (especially on the Calendar) made him famous. He wrote an influential Treatise in 1070, which laid down the principles of algebra. Some time during the 1090s he made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Despised by the mullahs as Hellenistic, Khayyám was almost the last of the true philosophers in the Greek tradition. After Socrates, philosophy gradually declined to academicism on the one hand, and, on the other, moral apology for the ‘status quo’: Diogenes was expected to endorse Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, rather as Christian saints were expected to endorse the hierarchical structures of mediæval society, in flagrant opposition to Jesus of Nazareth. The words of Khayyám, on the other hand, are echoed by monastery-renouncing Buddhist mendicants right up to the present day, especially in Japan. These haiku by the now-celebrated beggar-monk Santoka (1883-1940) - whose chief solace was rice-wine - could almost have been written by the Persian or by the adopted Athenian: If I could sell
my rags
Khayyám would not have had a lot of time for Nietzsche, but he certainly would have concurred with the proclamation of the death of God - though the Twilight of Idols is, alas, turning to a bloody new dawn. He saw the totalitarian nature of monotheisms, and how they appeal both to absolute rulers and to to priestly demagogues. He could not, of course, attack the Seljuq monarch, and, being a philosopher rather than a reformer, he attacked the totalitarianism rather than the mullahs.
This is more remarkable than it seems at first sight, for (apart from the gentle observations of Montaigne) in the West no such attack occurred until Nietzsche, nearly 800 years after Khayyám. In the West, the foundations of modern totalitarianism were laid by Constantine I, who successfully (as it transpired) killed the Gods and severed man's connection with not just the vine, but the whole of Nature. With the survival of 'Christianity' (which, as previously pointed out, should really be called 'Paulinism', since just about all the doctrine derives from Paul and not from Jesus) through the "Dark Ages", the bogus "Donation of Constantine", the rise of the great monastic orders, and, consequently, the papacy, the foundations of capitalism (rather than mere mercantilism) were laid, so that Nature could be ruled by Man as Man was alleged to be - despite the evidence - ruled by God. The difference between capitalism and mercantilism (apart from the raising of capital from often-unknown shareholders) is that the former strives continually towards vicious monopolies. This is what links it so directly to monotheism. More than that, capitalism with its economic apologists and populist democracies of the greedy, has itself become a monopoly, the sole model of world society, so that no-one dare call it malign or even wrong. Dissidents don't need to be suppressed, they are simply marginalised to the lunatic fringe. The principles of capitalism and Christianity (Paulinism) are the same: to create an overwhelming feeling of need which only the product or the religion can supply. Spirituality is, of course, the Sufic opposite, being the physical and psychic self-sufficiency and adaptability which have no need to resort to myths, magic, faith, miracles - or products. The moral strength of Islam resides at least partly in the fact that it has few manufactured myths, and partly in its fascinating, body-hating puritanism Islam (the State of Peace or Obedience) and 'Christianity' (the Creed of Socially-structured Love) trod different totalitarian paths: one accommodated to Oriental despotism (modified almost to Philosopher-Kingdoms in Spain), the other (after several hundred years) led to despotism of the Will, which brought Protestantism and its quasi-democracies whose lofty claims remain largely unchallenged by philosophers. The truer democracy in Athens (albeit only of free arms-bearing or warrior males, as in mediæval Iceland, but chosen by lot) was denounced as a sham by Diogenes. Athenian society was based on the labour of castrated slaves (one third of the population), was the first recorded society to force women to veil their faces, particularly their eyes, and was almost continually attacking its neighbours. The real challengers of the Western quasi-democracies are not philosophers, but corruption by Big Business, demagogues, dictators and disillusionment. In the sixteen hundred years since the sack of Rome, the West has not produced one writer to match Khayyám, whose writings (in Persian under the despotism of ‘The Shepherd Kings’) are considered more dangerous in modern Iran (where he was born and flourished) and Afghanistan (where he was educated) than television, the most pernicious narcotic ever offered by rulers to the ruled - or the plethoric World Wide Web, on which, of course, his writings must appear! It is not, however, democracy (itself a looking-glass Leviathan) that matters - but the accountability and removability of rulers and bureaucrats, and the 'rule of law ensuring the security of ordinary people. Most 'democracies' elect 'representative' politicians who are only theoretically accountable (and often under the control of powerful military and/or economic interests), and are run by bureaucracies who try to ensure that they are never called from outside the oligarchy to account for themselves. In the United States, where accountability is real, extreme secrecy is one means of avoiding it. The other, since 1919, has been the consumerism which was deliberately encouraged, by Edward Bernays, nephew of and propagandist for Freud, and adviser to Presidents, big companies, trans-national corporations, the CIA and so on, to make the stroppy masses docile. It was he who made sure that any chance of a humane society in Guatemala was crushed in the early fifites. He understood that freedom and capitalism are opposing forces, so he harnessed the insights of Freud to make sure that capitalism became the turbo-capitalism we know today while making people think that they lived in a society over which they had some measure of control. He saw the wonderful power of television to render its entire audience passive and unthinking - by daily creating and seeming to assuage desires. Television and the computer monitor are like sugar, one of the few addictive products which people immediately like. Money is another. Like any drug, money does not really liberate those who have it. On the contrary, it tends to narrow their consciousness to thoughts of saving or making more money. The rich are not conspicuously happy, and usually spend their money on self-indulgences as banal as their greed. Like Diogenes, Khayyám was a kind of transcendental anti-nihilist, and it was this which appealed to Edward FitzGerald and his fin-de-siècle readers so much that he compiled no fewer than five versions of his translation and arrangement of selected ruba'iyat - just over 100 out of the 235 at that time ascribed to Khayyám, of which perhaps almost a third were composed by imitators. The Kurdish journalist Hazhir Teimourian is of the opinion that Omar's quatrains, when arranged just so, form a kind of philosophical diary. This is an attractive idea contained in a fine biography in which, sadly, Teimourian's tone-deaf versions illustrate his point. Both Diogenes and Khayyám would have welcomed the leaving of this vicious world of men, their gratuitous cruelty - and Malthusian overabundance - for utter nothingness. Like all spiritual people they felt that there is too much ‘thingness' around. Here is something of the flavour of Khayyám's message - more sardonic than what emerges from the superb translations of Fitz›Gerald - in a quatrain not translated by the Victorian: Those who live
in lonely love of Self The twentieth fin-de-siècle
was quite different from the nineteenth - and from the tenth (when
Western Europe was not yet free from external threat) . Because
capitalism has made all of us strangers to ourselves, conviviality,
our natures and to Nature, the last century's end is shot through
with Utopian irrationalism and anti-rationalism - whether of the
inane New Age variety, or, more dangerously, of the anti-philosophical
weirdness of human cloning and other "mad scientist" projects which
appeal hugely to the large trans-national corporations who will
benefit from them. Everything has now been commoditised - including
marketable (that is to say false) ‘spirituality’ - in the interests
of a Thousand-Year Reign of capitalism whose basic currency of thought
is the belief that everything is purchasable, and everyone is judged
on their purchasability and their purchasing power. Its few opponents
declare, on the other hand, that the only thing worth having - worth
dying with - is integrity. True spirituality (like true love and unlike sexual love) is not marketable, for it cannot be a commodity but a state diametrically different from the nation state. Thus it has almost died out, like poetry, which has become an anorak-offshoot of the entertainment industry (perhaps a replacement for stand-up joke-spinning). Contemporary poets worthy of the name - at least in English - are well-hidden or well-suppressed by the entertainment industry. (Poetry often flourishes under despotism and/or socio-intellectual flux, as both Khayyám and the Elizabethan poets illustrate.) Nearly two thousand years after the announcement of his death, Pan, though not yet dead, is whimpering in a cage, while philosophy has withered away as the Marxist state was supposed to.
But what Americans mean by Liberty has similarly been corrupted. It is now merely the freedom for Americans to shop till they drop, and American corporations as proxies for them to overrun the planet, and for the American government to be an instrument of economic terror abroad - just as the English did more blatantly with their "Pax Britannica". The Americans and the British were early national subscribers to the idea of continuous war (religious-cultural, socio-mercantile or explosive), just as Marxist-Leninists-Trotskyists talked of continuous revolution. Europe-as-Christendom has waged an unholy war against the rest of the world since the end of the first millennium - when, to its surprise and relief, the world did not end. This war (no war can be holy) reached its apogee with the Anglo-saxon empires. Britain’s was more malign in its perniciousness than any that went before. It and its values spanned the globe and turned a great deal of it into a distorted mirror of its cold psychopathology of hypocritical greed that is spiritual as well as venal. A rich, natural variety of cultures were hacked and dismembered by an idea-system based on property, the nation-state, work, mines, resources, money and money-economics, mean-mindednes, shopping, and democracy of the greedy (ruled or manipulated usually by the greediest) on top of the crude hypocrisies of the Imperial 'Christian' value-system initiated by Constantine. Its successor across the Atlantic has made a cult of individualism - which has all the personality of a hamburger or a polystyrene cup.
The extremely enlightened and noble George Washington and Thomas Jefferson could also be seen as hypocritical, liberal, white, liberty-obsessed slave-owners who considered that democracy was mob-rule by and through greed in the name of 'rights'. (They would have been as utterly horrified by the thought of universal suffrage as by the blasphemous "In God we Trust" motto on dollar bills.) They earnestly sought to keep party-political democracy out of the United States, but talked and wrote at length about Liberty - a word which might never have passed the lips of the khans and pashas of the Seljuq Sultan who ruled Qurasan (Khorasan, where Haji Bektash Veli came from) in Khayyám's day. The present-day United States is such a greedy and corrupt travesty of their original uplifting anti-colonial vision that recent American presidents (whose election campaigns cost more than all elections within the European Union added together) have much more in common with the English King George III than the cultivated, tree-loving George Washington. The Bill of Rights declares the right (for Euro-Americans only - for Jefferson was the first to affirm that some people are more equal than others) to pursue happiness as if it were a hapless hare - or Amerindian. Americans confuse democracy with rights and with justice, just as eagerly as they contrast 'security' with 'freedom'. Many of us also confuse Freedom of Will and Freedom of Speech with the very different and ever-diminishing Freedom of Thought - thus demonstrating our lack of freedom of thought as well as our ignorance of the satisfaction of Thoreauesque subsistence living. Freedom of choice tends to exclude the freedom to refuse. Khayyám in 12th century Persia might have had greater freedom, not just of expression, but of philosophical discussion than (for example) people in the monoglot, monocultural, federal empire of the U.S.A. where most people believe what people in authority tell them (or else, on principle, the very opposite); where close on 90% of the population in a supposedly secular society believe in the Judæo-Pauline god, 45% believe in demonic possession, and close on 100% subscribe to the new sub-cult of success and fame (within the larger cult of sheer greed), in which quality is as nothing compared with quantity, and simplicity is run over at high speed by (to use Yeats' phrase) "mere complexity". And mere complexity (symbolised by the golden, mechanical Byzantine bird) ends, Yeats implied, in "complexity of mire and blood". Other depressing statistics indicate that in a country where almost everyone watches television news broadcasts, over half the population believes in personal angels, that less than a quarter know which country is the United States' southern neighbour, and that over three-quarters cannot locate Afghanistan or Iraq >> on a map of the world. Famously, Cavafy wrote about the stultified wealthy of the late Roman Empire enjoying the frisson of waiting for the wonderful, exotic Barbarians. Now, however (and perhaps even then, too), there are only slightly-different and equally-stultified civilisers, and distorted, faint folk-memories.
SOME
QUATRAINS BY OMAR KHAYYÁM
* Evil
prospers. The heart is pain. * He
who each
day has vegetables and bread * Mighty
God excels in all the arts * The
sea of consciousness has come from naught:
"I am anti-American and damned proud of it - but of I can't say it!" H.R.H. the Prince Philip of Greece, Duke of Edinburgh (overheard If liberty means anything at all, it means
the right to tell people George Orwell Human beings are perhaps never more frightening
Laurens van der Post Winning is great - but it is not funny. Charles Schultz During times of universal deceit, telling the
truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The profoundest oppression is aspiration, the
most destructive emotion ambition.
States have don't have friends - they have
only interests. Talleyrand (quoted by de Gaulle)
Conscience exists only to justify one's goals.
Mao Zhe-dong
II.
THE WAR-CULTURE OF THE WELL-OILED HYPOCRITES
Since the time of Omar Khayyám (see above) - partly as a result of the Mongol invasions - Balkh, one of the glories of the Silk Road, and Qurasan/Khorasan have declined in importance. The Sufi poet Rumi (known as Jalaluddin Balkhi) fled the town around the age of 10 before the invading Mongols - the Americans of their day. In the last century Islam has turned in on itself as a result of the triumph of the Western Empires of Greed and Destruction, the Sufi influence now almost negligible in the face of the opposite kind of 'heresy': Wah'habi and Islamic Jihad fundamentalism. Omar was well acquainted with tyrants and with narrow Muslim meanness - but he would probably be surprised by the sheer power of the empire of greed and by the sheer desperation of Islamic populations in the Middle and Near East, and by the epic clash of the two in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001.
In one way, the world did not change all that much on the 11th September, 2001. The plight of the starving and the homeless and the tortured remains the same. The armaments and reconstruction industries are gleeful. What has changed is the Americans' (and their allies') dangerous perception of their privileged and seemingly-invulnerable status. The vengeance subsequently wreaked upon the innocent party, mujaheddin-hating Saddam Hussain, will destroy Iraq which may split into its constituent and rival parts: Kurdistan, the Shia lands to the East and the Sunni lands to the West. Doubtless there will be "ethnic cleansing" like that visited by Greece upon Turkey in 1922. The kamikaze destruction of a tiny piece of New York should have had the effect of halting or slowing the progressive self-infantilisation of the people of the United States and its closest allies, but infantilisation is fostered at the highest level and is evidenced by America's predilection for attacking small and impoverished countries: Grenada, Nicaragua, Guatemala - and, of course, Cuba and North Vietnam, where it also bit off more than it could chew - and Afghanistan (with cluster-bombs and peanut butter!). Since then the United States has become (numerically) the most hated military empire of all time, and not just in the Muslim and Arab world. What really did change - specifically after President Bush's "with us or against us" speech and the iniquitous 'Patriot Act' - was that Muslims in non-Muslim societies became ghettoised and victimised, and, as a result turned to the mosques and the imams in desperation. This polarisation was al-Qaïda's triumph, and partners in fundamentalism, Christian and Muslim, entered into a struggle in which the chief victims are the tolerant, the liberal and the 'multi-cultural'. A few people (among them John Kaminski) claim to produce astounding, mind-boggling evidence that the Pentagon and Twin-Tower attacks were a put-up job, that the towers could not have fallen as they did had they merely been hit by passenger jets (which they were built to withstand). This would make the events of the eleventh of September the most amazing and heinous government conspiracy of all time - with 'The American People' as the real target because they had to be duped into collusion with a criminal executive. Whatever the truth about the attack, the 'realpolitikal' truth is that American political, military and economic hegemony was hugely enhanced by the event - which was the necessary pretext for the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. (And, given the ingrained culture of secrecy and cover-up in the UK it would never be known how much British Prime Minister 'Phony Tony' Blair was implicated.)
America did not "lose its innocence". Such a phrase is a sick joke. Civilisation itself is the opposite of innocence - and where there is obsessive consciousness of self, innocence, like humility, is spectacularly absent. The obscurantist confusion of innocence and ignorance is as obscene as the events of the eleventh of September - which might be seen as the hitherto greatest piece of epic theatre, or as an atrocity against a nation which (like most nations) is built upon atrocity and lies. (Some would say that the atrocity was committed by that nation's government against that nation and three thousand individuals.) As far as ignorance is concerned, people tend want to know everything except what they need to know, and governments are anxious to misinform them as much as they can get away with. Be this a conspiracy theory or not, a country whose colonial past is almost as shameful as that of any European country never had any innocence. The foundation and development of the United States are bedizened with myth. The decisive victory at Yorktown in the War of Independence was made by the French fleet temporarily breaking the British blockade, not by Washington's tropps. The trigger for the War of Independence was the imposition of Stamp Duty;(the 'Boston Tea-Party' riots resulted from the monopolist British reducing the tax on tea, thus putting Massachusetts smugglers out of business). The myths obscure the fact the basic unit of American democracy remains the empowering gun - whereas Ireland (for example, which parades its own republican lies such that the English Republic's 'Protector' Cromwell's slaughter' at Drogheda) fought desperately for independence, and on achieving it, disarmed its police force, and made it constitutionally illegal for it to go to war unless attacked, or to join any military pact or grouping (e.g. NATO). In fact, the American War of Independence was the beginning of the Civil War, in which a large number of colonists, alongwith the majority of African slaves and indigenous Indians, supported the British - mainly because they feared the consequences that actually came about: rule by a hypocritical oligarchy, entrenchment of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. Thousands of colonists fled north to Nova Scotia, and east to Bermuda. French support for the rebels (in their continuing 900-year power-struggle with the English) bankrupted the state, leading directly to the Revolution which destroyed an absolute monarchy and changed the world. The history of American slaughter, interference and puppet-government in the Philippines alone in the last hundred years makes terrible reading - and is a foretaste of the future for Iraq. For the Americans colonise without a Civil Service to do so, and with no concern for or interest in the people and the country they are colonising. In the Philippines a century ago there was a swift military victory, followed by an ever-collapsing 'peace'. The best that can be said about the US yo-yo colonisation there is that the Americans did not treat the Philippines worse than did the Spanish. When the Americans (having dumped Afghanistan in order to pursue vainglory in Iraq) set up their military government in Baghdad, they had just three Arabic-speakers in their ranks. Not for them the British eccentricities of cuneiform-readers and Arabists, for the Americans, with their heads stuck up the rectum of their own anomic technology, are uninterested in RoW (the Rest of the World). They regard 'democracy', like everything else, as product - spiritual Coca-Cola - and believe it can just be donated or transferred, rather than taking decades at the very least to establish by fits and starts as it is doing in Iran - an Islamic Republic whose mosques are empty. As the power behind the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation, they believe that 'democracy' can be imposed by force: by an an army of dehumanised zombies modelled on the Israeli military, without more than a parody of the Rule of Law. Is it any wonder that most people in the Middle East regard the the Second World War as a tragedy, no victory over Fascism but its triumph in various guises - a democracy of domination in Israël, a kingdom in the grip of religious fanatics in Sa'udi Arabia, and republics of repression everywhere else ?
Immediately after the 11th September 2001, 'The Land of the Free' (where I know from recent immigrants that it is very difficult to be a dissident) jailed several hundreds of 'suspects' - mostly illegal immigrants - without charge, without telling their families of their whereabouts. The same country, of course, showed no concern for the plight of the starving and bombed in Afghanistan, nor the thousands of refugees prevented from swelling the two million already in Pakistan. That country, with a horrific stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was much more absorbed in its own hysteria about the minuscule threat from anthrax.
The leader
of the 'free' and pseudo-democratic world is, of course, doing next
to nothing to help the poor and downtrodden anywhere in the world
- not even in America. One third of the victims of the obscene 'Death
Row' system are mentally handicapped. The world SuperPower is, almost
as part of the job-description, doing the down-treading through
what it whitewashes by the name of Globalisation: creating poverty
by undermining co-operative agriculture and convivial societies
everywhere - even the rich countries of Europe - and thus herding
people into gruesome cities where they can be easily controlled
- and subjected to state or other terrorism. Subsistence economies
are anathema to secular-fundamentalist capitalism, which exists
to make people dependent on goods which they never dreamed that
they wanted. Capitalist globalisation abhors conviviality because
its whole raison d'être is to selling alienating substitutes
for conviviality: to create wants that quickly are perceived as
needs which only goods and services only-acquirable by money or
indentured labour can satisfy. Except that there is no satisfaction
- only complaint, ennui, and continuing desire which turns into
need.
It was the Sa'ud family who empowered the Wah'habis - as a particularly virulent kind of secret police - to do their dirty control-work in the Arabian peninsula. At the same time the Sa'ud family set about destroying shrines and traditional places and customs throughout Arabia, replacing them with a modern pseudo-traditionalism which spawned bin-Laden amongst hundreds of thousands of truly heretical anti-Islamists. (Nowhere in the Qu'ran is the veil, chador or burkha mentioned: the enforced wrapping of women in black robes was a borrowing from the Byzantine Empire !)More recently this dynasty (which makes every small reform in the teeth of Wah'habi disapproval) has set about destroying Mecca and Medina with high-rise buildings which dwarf the Ka'aba more and more every year. Truly, in its claim to be true protector of the Holy Places, Sa'udi Arabia is the most anti-Islamic place on earth ! But Wah'habi fundamentalism is not the only ingredient in militant islamism. The other, perhaps more important element is bin Laden's political teacher, Ayman al-Zawahari, founder of Islamic Jihad, slayer of Egyptian banker-loving president Anwar Sadat, who in turn was the pupil of Sayyid Qutb, a founder member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was hounded, imprisoned, tortured and finally executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser for his anti-materialist, anti-secular (and, it must be said, non-Islamic) philosophy. Qutb identified Jahili'ya - the state of wilful self-indulgence (very akin to the mediæval concept of Luxuria) - as the worm in the apple of Western 'liberal' pseudo-democracy. Everyone in the world is confronted with the problem of how to cope with the effects of greed-driven turbo-capitalism and the low-level liberalism which feeds it. It is not just affronted Muslim societies who constantly have constantly-shifting and hypocritical 'Western Values' shoved up their noses, and into their eyes through television, but the people of Europe as well - people who, themselves, like the North Americans, are getting richer on the wealth bled out of Africa and South America. We are all invaded and threatened by greed-consumerism. The liberalism/libertarianism that it promotes is of the lowest kind, and deliberately designed to ap |
Directory
doesn't
mean he's entirely wrong
