Dear All,
A few items of interest. A black American poet reads
his poetry, filled with apparent pains, about the West's collective ritual of
exterminating babies and children.
As ruthless as they were the Mongolians, the most powerful
destroyer of a large part of what later came to be invented as
"Europe" had an infamous practice of taking away children by the
thousands to remake their identities as something else and use them for
whatever political and commercial ends, for instance, in present day Poland,
Hungary, Russia, Ukraine etc.
That historical knowledge was what led Raphel Lemkin, who
briefly attended university in Krakow in the early 1920's, to specifically
include as an act of genocide the transfer of children en masse into the
genocidaires' communities, a practice that was pursued by Christian European
settlers of Canada, USA and Australia.
Enter "residential schools". A
brief tangential detour: Britain's infamous "Imperial
Education" project developed in the mid-19th century by the Oxford
historian Thomas McCaulay was in that vein: creating litle useful second
or third class British subjects, out of Indians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists,
what have you. Tories in the UK excel in this project: We have
Little Rishi Sunak, Little Priti Patel, Little Shebana Mahmood and a long list
- all processed through Oxbridge. (Some individuals whose
identities are already formed outside this imperialist mental culture overcame
this sausage making, for instance, Tariq Ali, from Lahore).
The other ignoble Western tradition vis-a-vis the Mongolian
conquistadors' genocidal practice is the textbook Nazi practice of sending
children, and pregnant women straight off the trains to the gas chambers or
simply injecting poison into the infants. I sat and meditated on
the exact spot under dim light of the lamp posts where the SS doctors made this
baby-killing decision at Auschwitz a few years ago, until the mosquitoes bit me
unbearably.
Israeli and American policy makers and Zionist propaganda
class in USA continue with this Nazi tradition, and some are concerned that too
many young Americans are exposed to TikTok and social media images of
baby-slaughter.
Thou shall NOT see the genocide your own government is
subsidizing and protecting.
In sharp contrast, this black American poet allowed himself
to be fully humans: he fought back tears as he read his poetry here.
Finally, one other item which rightly argued, with Tolstoy
character, that rage and expression of rage are good for: It is
imperative that we get angry at the inhumanity of our oppressors, tormentors
and systems.
For today's oppressors and their systems are far more savage
than Hamurabi's "an eye for an eye" code for justice or law:
They want wholesale destruction of an entire society for a jail break of 7
October 2023. And more. They are hellbent on crushing all of
us in "liberal democracies" who scream foul of the Master's genocide.
I am for a Revolution of Humans against Savagery, come hell
or high water.
I will admit that I am a charlatan when it comes to Tolstoy,
and in no position to quote the great man. For I have only his
novella The Death of Ivan Illich,
Full
Text – "The Death of Ivan Ilich": An Electronic Study Edition of the
Russian Text
I grew up with a communist uncle by marriage to my paternal
aunty. He was born into a Muslim family in Mandalay, and became a
leftist student leader at my alma mater in the late 1950s' and early
1960's. I would browse and leaf through a small collection of various
books that my parents and he kept. His were in a wooden box because to be
an openly communist in a military dictatorship with the veneer of socialism -
faux socialism, really - was not a good idea. As a high schooler,
I saw Tolstoy's books including Anna Karenina. I
took it out, just as i took out War and Peace. They were heavy and
very dense. I was struggling to read English newspapers with a small
English to English dictionary. I opted out of reading them
properly.
Zarni
https://x.com/LetsStopC9/status/2006260282247856261
===================================================================
Legitimacy,
anger and Tolstoy
And literature as a teacher
A few months ago I
finally got round to reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy,
and while I don’t think it challenges my view of Madame
Bovary as the most perfect novel ever written, or my
enduring fondness for the intensity of Dostoevsky over the majesty of
Tolstoy, it is of course a fantastic work of literature. Many moments and lines
stood out at me in the book, though none so much as the above brief sentence
on anger, as a betrayed husband finally encounters his rage: “Under the influence of anger he
apparently regained complete possession of all his faculties.” The sentence reads
perfectly in its balance and succinctness, but most simply in what it says.
An individual who has been wronged is incomplete until he has encountered the
anger that the injustice visited upon him warrants. Anger is a hard emotion
to process, all the more from inside a society that teaches capitalism,
consumerism or a heavily-vetted democratic process and “rules-based order” as
the only redress to social problems often caused by the very things posited
as the solutions. In Tolstoy’s sentence,
Alexei Karenin’s anger is the pathway not to erratic behaviour but to
balance; this is the contrary to what gatekeepers and bourgeois opinion in
polite society conventionally teach. The sentence makes a persuasive case
that it is a feeling of the need to suppress a rightful cause for anger that
is more likely to induce erraticism. As is often so, social stigma placed on
valid emotion is the cause of the harm, not the emotion itself. I also loved the sentence
because, in its eloquence, it to my mind demonstrates the value of
literature. Amia Srinivasan, now something of an academic rockstar, reached
similar conclusions to Tolstoy in her early essay The Aptness of Anger.
Tolstoy making the point in a single supreme sentence, told within a story,
to my mind embodies the value of literature as an art that — at its best —
packages complex ideas and emotions into stories and simple forms that are
easier for society to absorb. Anger has always followed
understanding of my writing, or at least it did in my earliest years as a
known writer. When in my twenties I broke a world record for a
circumnavigation by bicycle (Life Cycles still
available from all good book shops!), motivated to beat a record newly-set by
a banal, corporate-backed and adventureless husk, and I returned home and
said exactly that, the generally middle-of-the-road community of touring
cyclists roundly rejected my views as those of “an angry young man”. I just re-read the guest blog I was
invited to write at the time on an adventure community website; it has some
nice lines and many points I feel still hold true. In the words I can feel a
mood I remember being in so intensely at the time. I also feel that — as U.S.
liberals were obliged to see the true face of their country in elections and
false dawns since my 2009 circumnavigation, and as their British equivalents
got dragged out of the European Union — the anger that I always had for so
many glaring injustices became more fashionable anyway, albeit with the
tendency of polite society to get angry at symptoms of anger rather than
causes. This also reveals an instance of hierarchy in who gets the right to
be angry, and my focus on Anglosphere examples of decline is a reminder that
these woes or grievances are not a universal phenomenon and it’s harmful to
think of them as such. It is impossible to think
of anger in this way without tracing across to the idea of armed resistance
to violence; be that in Palestine with Palestinians facing decades of Israeli
savagery, or Iran facing the constant bellicosity of the US-israeli menace.
Not only does a person repeatedly slapped gain the right to slap their bully
back, and a duty to if it might stop the battery, it is a perversion to
establish a moral straitjacket in which the wronged party becomes the
wrongdoer should they respond in kind to their treatment. Fealty to this
structure, and excessive obedience to politicised “terror” designations,
remain among the most harmful and even dehumanising element of US-European
attitudes on Palestine. The habit is prominent even in many communities
notionally supportive of Palestine, and consenting to leave Palestinian armed
resistance under a stigma is — as with Karenin — removing possession of
faculties, with the associated denial of a psychological equilibrium. Ceding
that right is also the first point on a spectrum that has incrementally
criminalised also non-violent direct action, and now censors even very
mainstream speech. Facing the very many and
entrenched problems that we do as a society, there is obviously no one
emotion that will fix all of them. Humans are however beings requiring
balance, and yet living a frightfully ill-balanced society. How we rectify
that situation is a process in which we cannot afford to place off-limits
some of our most core human emotions. If we observe the path of history and
progress, it is seldom the act of destruction or anger that won through
alone, but rather the moral architecture that supported its legitimacy, or
refused to condemn its role in a greater struggle. Köprü is a reader-supported publication.
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