A forking of history is the time of instability. It is the time when even a puny effort of a lone man can change things.
On the green lawns of Hyde Park an old tramp walks about and carries a scruffy cardboard poster, ‘The End is Nigh’. He has done it for years, if he is still the same tramp I spotted some thirty years ago. But a broken clock will sooner or later show the right time. Could it be that this ominous moment has arrived? The magic pentagram has been broken and Tower of Babel had collapsed on 9/11. Jews lord over the Holy land. Dollar is high, but the creativity of Christendom reached its nadir; its shops are full but the churches are empty; there are many dealers, wheelers and brokers, but no new artists, poets, saints. Floods and draughts, summer snows and winter heat, poisoned rivers and dried-up lakes remind us that our Mother Earth is very, very ill. The Apocalypse is now, many people felt vividly during last months.
Justin Raimondo wrote last week of a piece in the Weekly World News, “that ludicrously lurid tabloid no one will admit to reading on the supermarket check-out line, and its oddly prescient story: "Face of Satan Photographed Over US Capitol!" There was even a picture that oozed sheer malevolence: a thin, mocking face that peered out of a black swirling cloud, manic eyes ablaze and the mouth twisted into a satanic sneer. The Weekly quotes "one unidentified veteran CIA operative" as saying: "The image is a portrait of terror unlike anything we've ever seen in this country. Is it something supernatural? Is it some kind of life form? Is it - and hell yes, I'll ask the question - is it Satan himself?"
This feeling, once a sole preserve of highly imaginative and sensitive persons, or devoted readers of the Weekly World News, now splashes across the social checkerboard. In Moscow and New York, Jerusalem and Baghdad, Paris and Berlin, secular and practical people greet each other with the question, ‘Is it the end of the world?’
- Yes, it is, - replied to this question an important American philosopher, Immanuel Wallerstein, but added a careful caveat in the title of the aptly named book, The End of the World as We Know It [ii]. He came to the conclusion that a very long period of human history has reached now an unpredictable end. The world as we, or our parents and grandparents, know it is about to end, indeed.
Wallerstein thinks ‘the world as we know it’ came into being some 500 years ago in the Western Europe and has come to its crescendo in the United States of America. It is characterised by a specific aberration of human development, called ‘Progress’. Wallerstein bravely refused to accept the axiom of ‘unavoidable positive development’, and stated, it wasn’t a necessary process, but a negative development. In plain words, this development is a celebration of unlimited greed and domination drive, a denial of God and Man.
This development caused the great destruction of nature and society, has ran its course and brought us to the brink of the abyss. Probably we would have arrived there long ago, under the Iron Heel of the oligarchy, as Jack London felt in 1910, but the Russian Revolution of 1917 shook the world and offered an alternative, writes Wallerstein. That is why peoples of the Western Europe and North America had a chance to form their welfare society with prominent middle class and rather content workers, while the Third World got a respite from punitive actions and colonial conquests. Before 1917, England did not hesitate to shell a Japanese city of Shimonoseki as a revenge for assassination of the British diplomat. Before 1917, social differences in the European society were as big as those in the modern Third World. After the collapse of the socialist system in 1991, this great respite of history was over. We are back at 1914, according to Wallerstein.
It is possible to view the world events in a rather different light. With all respect due to the Russian revolution, there was an additional powerful player who meanwhile changed sides. In the beginning of 20th century, a new social and spiritual force came into being. In an article of mine [iii], I called it ‘the Mammonites’, the worshippers of Mammon. The Mammonites fought against the old elites across the checkerboard of the entire world. In Russia, they exterminated and sent to exile the traditional Russian elites. In England and Scandinavia, the old elites lost their power due to advent of social democracy. Germany and Italy had their elites destroyed in the WWII. As long as the old elites still existed, the Mammonites were promoting a pro-equality agenda, and transfer of resources from the old elites to people in general.
That was the time of great hope. The great force of Mammonite wealth and networking assisted the forces of equality, and not too many people gave a thought what are the true plans of the powerful allies. As long as the New York bankers, lawyers and media owners supported the humanist agenda, one could ignore their deeper thoughts.
After the failed revolution of 1968, the Mammonites obtained their goals and integrated with the old elites. Afterwards, they scraped the nice talk of equality and civil rights; instead, they adopted a new agenda, the enslavement of man. In a similar way, the bourgeois utilised the power and anger of the low classes in the French revolution of 1789. The workers and peasants removed the old aristocratic elites, and then the new bourgeois elites gave them the push and took the power by using the military genius of Napoleon. After 1968, the relentless History began its new turn.
The Mammonites do not need democracy or welfare state anymore. Now they need a Napoleon, to entrench their rule. That is why, after 9/11, the forces of oligarchy are erasing the Bill of Rights, democratic freedoms, the UN Charter and international agreements, and create a new world of few millionaires, a squeezed middle class, pauperised workers, a powerful army and police. They plan to emerge unassailable at the end of the turmoil. But this darkest hour is also a time of hope.
Tomorrow is hidden from our eyes for a good reason. We have reached now the great bifurcation of history, says Wallerstein, a historic crossroads, one of those that happens once in a millennium. By definition, forking is the time of instability. That is the time when even a puny effort of a lone man can change things. In the periods of stability, even huge efforts do not change much. For a few hundred years, people believed in the predestined and unavoidable outcome of history: the Marxist dream or Welfare state or Second Coming. This time of certainty is over. We could fall into the New Dark Ages, into one of the bleak anti-Utopias, and our children will not forgive us for our passivity. We still could pull and push, and hope for the best.
A Jewish joke tells of two men who failed to move a trunk as they pushed and pulled in the opposite directions. Certainly one has to know where and when to push and pull, otherwise the trunk will stay put. That is why the following outline is a proposal for constructive thought and action. The US bombing of al-Jazeera TV station, coming so soon after their bombing of a Serb TV, is added proof that words are important. Once, Karl Marx described human history as a history of class struggle over ownership of the means of production. I would describe it as a war of ideas.
We can imagine two great protagonists, familiar to us from the Book of Job, playing with new ideas on the big checkerboard. Satan could pervert every idea of God; God could turn every idea of Satan into a wonderful thing, i.e. love to the land of Christ caused murderous Crusades, but materialist Communism brought great uplifting of hearts. The players have no hands, and it is our, human task to make moves, to make right choices, to help God to win the game. Conceited warriors of yore used to say `God’s with us’. Humble thinkers of the present, we should say, we are with God.
II
Wallerstein made a heroic effort, not altogether successful, to describe the end of the world in materialistic terms. I am not sure whether it is possible. Our world in general evades such description. Moreover, I do not think it desirable, for the reasons stated below. We are conditioned to accept materialistic reasoning only, and reject explanations that defer to forces of a different plane. It is an important part of the aberration that people came to reject the spiritual component of the world. Until the Aberration the very idea of a totally materialistic world, explainable by sheer materialistic laws, would have been an oddity. Man’s vision of the world varied with time and place, but it never was so purely materialistic.
The ancient thinkers saw the world as a spiritual-material, multi-layered continuum where forces of Good and Evil, Virtues and Sins, Nations and Ideas have their own semi-independent existence. Sometimes, these forces were described as gods, or angels, or demons. The New Testament speaks of the Prince of the World and other forces that confront Man. St Paul was aware of troubles to come, as ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ [iv].
Their vision seems to me to be better adapted to reality. It is easier to explain calamities and salvation, catastrophes and prosperity by interaction of different Higher forces, than by purely material factors or by God’s changes of mood. It is easier to explain why the Trojan War lasted ten long years by the struggle of pro-Trojan Gods with pro-Greek ones, allowing for the pretexts of Helene’s beauty or commercial interests. The Cold War could be seen as the struggle of the Russian Communal Spirit with the American Mammon. The forthcoming WWIII against peoples of the Third World can be spoken of by a religious mind as ‘Armageddon’.
Serge Averintsev, the prominent modern Russian thinker, reminds us of the paradox of Biblical faith and asks: ‘How could the omnipresent, transcendental and spiritual God bless by His Presence a specific place, be it the Holy of the Holies, or Mary’s womb, body of Jesus the Man or bread and wine of Eucharist?’ He points out that it is one of tenets of faith, ‘I will dwell among the Israelites’ [v], said God of the Old Testament, and the same verb is used again in Gospels: ‘the Word became Flesh and has dwelt among us [vi]’. Averintsev reveals a God-inspired thought: ‘The Prince of the World [vii], that is, the force hostile to God’s Presence, attempts to separate Transcendent and Immanent, to close the doors of Creation in face of Creator, and in this way, to cleanse Nature from all that is Super-natural. He is supported by an unwilling ally: that is zealot theologian rationalism who strives to remove all traces of popular beliefs or esoteric plurality and to reach pure transcendentalism [viii]’. It is a deep thought: Satan supports (or generates) ideas that exclude God’s Grace from our life.
Coming back to our two protagonists over the checkerboard, we could say: Satan wins (God save us!) when all traces of Divine Presence are eliminated from our world. However, Averintsev missed a point. Nature is a source of divine inspiration, and God, Who dwelt in the tents of Israelites and in Mary’s womb, also dwells in a spring below mountain shrine in the Highlands, as well. It makes the task of Satan even more formidable, but he does not shrink from the challenge. He has two options, to destroy Nature, or to destroy Man’s capacity to communicate with Nature, and he tries both.
In order to understand the events and the outcome, we have to make a daring step, one that we were taught not to make, ever. For 500 years, the material research and spiritual quest were separated, and we were indoctrinated in keeping them separate. This proposed treatment of reality is not the dualistic Manichean approach now peddled by the proponents of the Apocalyptic WWIII. There are more shades of grey than a simple Black and White picture. Let us try and integrate these two lines, of Immanent and of Transcendent, and achieve a whole picture of the world.
We shall discover, to our amazement that the two lines run parallel, as two different languages describing one reality. For instance, modern re-discovered love of nature, called by the long word ‘environmentalism’ or by colour-code ‘green’ could be translated by Christian society as ‘love of the Virgin Mary’. Indeed, Dostoyevsky identified Our Mother Earth with the Mother of God. Destruction of nature could be connected with rejection of the Virgin. Averintsev’s ‘all traces of popular beliefs or esoteric plurality’ point to the local spirits still worshipped by the less materialistic part of the mankind.
The New World Order is, in religious terms, the beginning of the Kingdom of Anti-Christ, based on removal of all spiritual elements from our life. In practical terms, it is an ambitious attempt of total enslavement of Man.
III
It is not as easy as it seems. A man is connected by four ties to this world: he has roots in the native soil, he belongs to his family, his territorial community, and to God. While the ties survive, a man can not be enslaved. These four pivotal points represent the ancient figure of Cross, as it was depicted by ancestors of modern Palestinians on the rocks and walls. Long before it served as a tool of execution, Cross was a great mystic sign of old, hidden from the laymen. It was known to Moses, who put a sign of cross on forehead of his people while the angel of death roamed outside. The cross is found in the oldest levels of Palestinian and Egyptian digs.
In the Chalcolithic Age, over five thousand years before Christ, ancient Palestinians, cave dwellers of Tel Abu Matar near Beersheba laid the sign of the Cross with small pebbles, each one of them also carried a sign of the Cross. ‘The cruciform mark was intended as a sign to avert evil and give protection’, wrote the noted archaeologist Jack Finnegan [ix]. In the days of the Bible, it was called ‘tau’, while Greeks named it ‘chi’. King David made a sign of the Cross (tau) while in danger [x] . Prophet Ezekiel [xi] promised salvation to good people who would lament over injustices committed (by Sharon and Olmert?) in Jerusalem. These good men will have their forehead marked with the saving sign of Cross (it is still done nowadays by Egyptian and Ethiopian Christians).
The Essenes of the Damascus Covenant quoted these lines of Ezekiel, as apparently they knew of this ‘sign of protection, deliverance and salvation’ [xii]. Thus it was understood by the Church Fathers, Origen and Tertullian, who could ask their Palestinian contemporaries. Priests of Jerusalem Temple were anointed by drawing Cross on their foreheads by pure olive oil [xiii] , as if the name of Christ (X) was written on them. The choice of the Cross for the execution of Christ was, therefore, meaningful: his enemies wanted to disprove and undermine the idea of salvation. But followers of Christ accepted the challenge and made this secret sign public. They drew it on their foreheads: ‘It is a tradition from the Apostles’, said the Christian Palestinians of Jewish origin to Basil of Caesarea in AD 375. Gnostics preserved these ideas in their texts.
The spiritual meaning of the Cross, as we said, was a sign of four ties of a man. A man is tied to the earth, to his family, his folk and to god. As long as a man retains but one of these ties he will never be totally suborned, totally corrupted, totally enslaved. Still he needs all four, and in the right balance. If he cares about his family and forgets his community; if he loves God, but neglects the soil, and vice versa, he is doomed in the long run.
The new proponents of the ancient subjugation paradigm wish to do the Satan’s work and remove Divine Presence from our world. For this reason, they fight Faith, they destroy Nature, and they uproot Man by breaking his territorial, social and familial ties. They do it everywhere, from Vermont to Afghanistan. But Palestine is the pilot project for the new world order, as Spain in 1936 was the pilot project of rising fascism.
They do it in the Holy Land for a reason, as its native people are deeply rooted in its soil and daily witness God. Holiness of the land is not a historical coincidence, but a feature of its unique landscape and people. At this hill, by this spring, under that old tree, the Palestinian heroes Abraham, David and Jesus united with God. Villages of Palestinian Highlands are the anchors of mankind, and without them we shall be thrown on the reefs.
IV
Men fight the uprooting, but their measures are often ill-perceived and erroneous. Modern nationalism is a failed mechanical defence against uprooting. When the real thing – love of one’s community and soil – is gone, it is supplanted by a fiction of a nation. German nationalism offers us a case study.
While German society retained its roots, the Germans loved their towns and villages, their small kingdoms and duchies. They listened to Beethoven and Bach, ate their wurst mit sauerkraut, they were happily parochial and content. When the fabric of the society had been damaged, the Germans chose the phantom of German patriotism as a healing balsam. The Viennese painter, Adolf Hitler was an uprooted immigrant in Germany, a man who severed ties with his soil and his community, with his family and his Church. Even worse, he was not aware of his loss. His love of Germany and of German people excluded the landscape, the soil of Germany from his consideration. That is why he dreamt of conquest of Eastern Europe and Russia in order to create on these lands a new Aryan Master Race Empire, as Anglo-Saxons created the United States on the lands on the Native Americans. He did not understand that Germans removed from German soil would lose the qualities he admired. Expansion to the regions outside of the natural landscape of the people is a deadly trick.
His nationalistic ideas were borrowed from the vast arsenal of Jewish thought. The idea of racial superiority, of Master Race and Untermench could be found in many fervent Jewish religious teachings. Genocide is permitted, nay, ordered by the Old Testament, and the commandment ‘Exterminate the nation of Amalek’ still is listed as No. 604 out of 613 commandments of Orthodox Judaism. Recently the orthodox Bar Ilan University Rabbi published a concise treatise called The Commandment of Genocide in Torah, elucidating and elevating the concept of genocide to the level of positive commandment for believers. (We shall not enter now a separate question of praxis, practical applications of the theories).
As many copy-cats, Hitler failed to observe the difference [xiv]. The Jews are a non-territorial group, while Germans were formed and based on their territory. Territorial people do not have to expand beyond their natural limits; moreover, they can not exist outside of it. A proof of it was provided by descendents of Germans in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the US: they lost their ethnicity and became Americans.
One can understand his error. Hitler was horrified by Jewish success, by ‘the rise of the Jew’, and decided to emulate the Jewish strategy. His boycott of Jewish shops and enterprises was an emulation of boycott of Gentile enterprises and lockout of Gentile employees by the Zionist Jews in contemporary Palestine. His idea of mass expulsion of the Jews copied the concept of transfer of Palestinians, as envisaged by Zionists since Theodor Herzl and executed in 1948.
An American psychologist, Kevin McDonald, described the Nazi doctrine, ‘a mirror image of Judaic strategy’ and therefore the greatest threat to Jews. He predicted that in future, Gentile Europeans and Americans worried by ‘the rise of the Jew’ ‘will emulate aspects of Judaism by adopting group-serving, collectivist ideologies and social organisations [xv]’. McDonald was right in stating that ‘it will constitute a profound impact of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on the development of Western nations’. His conclusion is deeply pessimistic: the Judaic strategy is doomed to win, whether carried out by the Jews, or by the host nations.
For a white supremacist, this conclusion calls for speedy action of applying the Judaic strategy in the interests of the host nations. For a Jewish supremacist, the Judaic strategy should be applied by Jews only. But for us, non-racists, the Judaic strategy is bad per se, whether applied by Germans, Jews or WASPs. There is a possibility of totally different, non-Judaic response. While copy-cat strategy is self-defeating, there are other strategies, based on non-Judaic concepts of territory and local content.
Nationalism is the difference between real and perceived national content. A fully rooted Englishman has no need for English nationalism, as he breathes England. He is a vessel full of local content, with no place for ‘Englishness’. When an Englishman feels he has lost part of his ties, he tries to make it up by love of the English idea. Nationalism rises on ruins of local ties. When the ties of a man with Tuscany, Kent, Burgundy weaken, he needs the substitute of Italy, England, France. Eventually nationalism turns into chauvinism and forgets its real local content altogether.
American super-patriots, Neo-Cons, are totally devoid of American national content. Their jingoist flag-waving comes instead of love for the real America and of Americans. They support unlimited immigration into the US, as they do not care for their fellow-Americans. They do not care for the rest of mankind either, as they would nuke Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, for the sake of Israel. People justly repelled by the Cyclopean aggressiveness of this sect are being manoeuvred into an anti-nationalist, universal and cosmopolitan agenda. Could it be that we are doomed to make our choice between facelessness and jingoism?
There is a real alternative to both diseases, to Scylla of nationalism and to Charybdis of the ubiquitous rootlessness, and that is: love to specific region and village. Faulkner’s love to Yoknapatawpha and Barth’s to Maryland, Joyce’s obsession with Dublin, Rolland’s passion for Burgundy, the Florence-centred world of Dante and Botticelli, gave us the key to universal human nature, as local content verily exists, as opposed to abstract generalities.
Zionist leaders with their cheap sophistry used to claim, “there is no Palestinian People”. As every sophist, they spoke some truth, but not all the truth. Palestinians’ local content was so rich that they had no need for the uprooted man’s nationalism. Palestinians are the people of their villages, for them, their Jifna and Taiba, Nasra and Biram are irreplaceable. We get an inkling of this concept by recalling the plaque on the cross: ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.
That is one of the many things we can learn from Palestinians. Love of our territorial communities, villages and towns, and its people instead of a glorious idea of the nation and the state. In an American context it means giving priority to the rights of states vs. federal power, priority for county vs. state authorities, support of village vs. county. One can learn some good ideas from the Swiss: one can not immigrate into Switzerland unless one is accepted by one of the territorial communities. It is fair: if some rich liberals or Neo-Cons support immigration, let them take the immigrants into their neighbourhoods as their neighbours. I guess it would stop immigration almost completely.
Local content exists as opposed to the abstraction of the nation. It also provides a secure protection against the alienating and unifying plague of Globalisation. I agree with the critics of the nationalism and nation state: nationalism failed profoundly everywhere, from Italy to Japan, from Serbia to Israel. This 19th century invention produced rivers of blood, created mafia-like structures, oppressed liberties and caused strife. But what is the alternative? Is it a Mammonite universal super-state rising nowadays on the base of Pax Americana? Is it emulation of Jewish strategy of national uprooted groups in a multicultural society? No, it lies in unique character of our villages and cities. Power should be devolved down, to the level of local community. On this level, there will be no room for bureaucracy and manipulative ‘democracy’. It will save ordinary people from the dictatorship of clever experts and rich moguls [xvi]. We should learn from our Palestinian brothers to love our villages and cities, and to make them as unique as Jifna and Florence. One can not be a true patriot of one’s land unless one loves one’s town. Not in vain, Ulysses longed for his own Ithaca, rather than for Greece.
V
Many good men object to Zionism and compare it with colonial settler movements or with the German National Socialism. Certainly, its praxis despoiled the lovely land of Palestine and acted as a great concentrating tool in the hands of supremacist Jewish leadership in America and elsewhere. However, Zionism had its reason, alas, unmentionable in the age of Political Correctness. Let us dare and state it. Zionism and anti-Semitism have not only supported and nourished each other, as anti-Zionists are wont to say. Early Zionists thought that some peculiar Jewish qualities are bad, and should be eliminated, preferably by removing Jews into harsh environment of Palestine, or Uganda. Zionists called the traditional Jewish mindset, ‘Galutiyut’ (Diaspora features), but it was basically identical to the Jewishness, as seen by anti-Semites. |
