Because your position is so grounded in an established narrative (a set of talking-points from a Neoconservative list as I say) and because you have limited experience (in fact zero experience) with the entire situation of Israel; the origin of Zionism; Zionist collaboration with National Socialism; the declared intention to ethnic cleanse clearly expressed by Zionist Israeli leaders; the entire convoluted history which stands behind the creation of the Israeli state; and you lack any well-rounded grasp of the American Neoconservative influence and pro-Israel activism to create wars and justify them; you would need to go through a decompression or something like a deprograming in order to get to a place where you could accurately see what is going on.
The reason you interest me, and remember we are doing here what we should be doing as concerned citizens and also people interested in philosophic analysis, is because you exhibit how blatant blind-spots distort our seeing and our perception. It should be obvious that all of our views are shaped, to one degree or other, by the contrived narratives that come to us through media systems. It should also be obvious that it is our very selves which are fought over in order to gain our assent. So saying this
therefore indicates that we can take steps back from any narrative and, if we set our will to it, examine the source of the narratives and through that discern who creates the narrative and for what purpose. The question then is
cui bono.
Notice that by speaking of 'stepping back' and examining the narratives that are presented I am working with the paradigm or the metaphor of Plato's Cave. I am interested, philosophically perhaps, in the question of
complicity. What I notice in this time of immense conflict and clash between workviews and ideals is how it happens that the person invests in certain narratives and these narratives are then melded with the personality structure. If you question the Narrative, if you ask them to examine it or challenge it, the
personality becomes incensed. Basically, my *question* if you will has to do with another, larger question: Why do we believe the things we believe? Ultimately, it is a
metaphysical question since there must have been established, in our own fore-structures, a set of tenets and presuppositions about Life, Meaning, Value.
And you are aware that for about a year (!) there was a long, on-going conversation on the Christianity thread where essential metaphysical orientations and presuppositions were explored. All of this, in my own case, I am holding in my mind in everything that I am personally interested in and what I write on this forum. So I am certainly within proper and acceptable bounds. In my view I am doing what should be done by thoughtful people.
You seem to resent and react against a *probing* of the structure of your views. Your personality, in my view, has been wedded to a set of interpretive perceptions and you seem to be fighting those *dread Marxists* that run amok and ruin things for the Good People. But saying this, in this ironic way, does not mean that I am pro-Marxist or incapable of a critical posture of Marxism, Wokism, Critical Theory, and a new, competing metaphysics -- or anti-metaphysics or metaphysical revisionism -- that is sweeping through our culture. Indeed our world.
It is not that I am not on your side, it is that I see you, and here again I refer to the Cave metaphor,
as being transfixed by what is projected for you to view. But even saying that does not,
not necessarily, mean that I disagree with aspects of what is projected in those given narratives.
This is why I have mentioned 9/11 as a deep projection; as a reigning and dominating narrative; as a model for perception set in motion which, as I have come to understand it, is an extremely good example of the metaphor of Plato's Cave. For this reason I present back to you, against your Dread Marxist rehearsal, that a Neoconservative elite fabricated and set in motion the events we describe as 9/11 and through this perceptual paradigm control how people think and feel, but also set in motion drastic and alarmingly immoral policy choices.
Therefore I present to you, or rub in your face, that it is possible to challenge your Levin-styles narrative and its structure with what amounts to a counter-narrative about what the Levin Neoconservatives have done to the country and to the world. You refuse to take it in. You refuse to see that my effort is not adversarial and destructive but creative and productive. Immediately, because you seek enemies, yo attach that label to me and for you I am now "evil". Your personality reacts and gets inflamed with *righteous indignation*. Toss me out one of those devastating memes, Bro, that will knock me back on my indoctrinated ass! Set me straight! The reason you do this is because you are deeply, and emotionally (apparently), involved in
The Grand Rehearsal in which we all participate, in one degree or another.
Walker wrote: ↑Sat Oct 28, 2023 8:34 am“But it (Democrat) is a party that is built on the demands and propaganda of revolutionaries, demagogues, and malcontents, and has a horrifying history of supporting the most contemptible causes, including slavery, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, eugenics, and even lynchings. Indeed, almost from the start, the Democrat Party rejected the principles and values of the American experiment. And today it is the home of another anti-American movement, American Marxism, with its various ideological appendages. The Democrat Party ruling class, elites, and activists are united in this revolution."
-- Mark Levin,
The Democrat Party Hates America
There are a number of problems with Levin's assertions and I will make an effort to point them out.
One, though slavery is a contemptible institution, and proved inalterably problematic, and is a creature of the South, and the Democrat Party has deep roots in the South, the real fact of the matter is that African Americans were treated with greater abomination in the North. In a sense a far more virulent racism took shape in the North than existed in the South. The South had a complex
paternalized relationship with its Negro underclass that is largely incomprehensible to Northerners or something that they refuse to see and understand. See for example
North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States: 1790 – 1860 [Leon Litwack, University of Chicago Press, 1965].
Abe Lincoln, for example, was religiously and virulently opposed to the slavery of man, any man, but was absolutely and thoroughly opposed to any commingling or integration of the African race with the white European race. In fact he spent years working behind the scenes to establish a place where African slaves could be relocated in a massive forced immigration. There is an absolute irony, a very strange twisting of truth and reality, that Abe Lincoln has a massive monument and has been enshrined there as a demi-god of America's civil religion.
The other issue is as follows: the North provoked a war with the South for (sound from its perspective) geo-political reasons. That war became a model for many other northern-instigated wars such as the Spanish-American War (Cuba, The Philippines) and set the stage as well for the hegemonic domination of the Caribbean Basin: the underpinning of the American Empire. The provoked Civil War, was not
necessarily either inevitable nor 'moral', though it is now established as a 'moral necessity' and as such is a mythology that undergirds the American
civil religion. Here, a narrative serves a unifying function even though its core tenets or not
necessarily true.
But my actual point is to offer a comment about Levin's chief boogie-man: the Klan. Let me quickly and abruptly make a comparison between Hamas and the Klan. What I discovered in reviewing a *truer* version of the real events of the War Between the States, is that the war against the South, and the Occupation of the South, resulted in the destruction of valid institutions and indeed an *established social fabric*. The South had its own abolitionists and was said to have been in a processes of internal revolution in respect to the slavery issue. But the war and the conquest by the North -- a geo-political strategy to destroy a powerful rival -- produced reaction, resistance, opposition, and a will to stand against and oppose the Northern invaders through, let's say, guerrilla tactics.
Now examine
César Sandino of Nicaragua to get a sense of a moralized, articulate stance against conquest and occupation. Once one has done that, then examine the US neo-imperial war n Indochina, or the invasion and occupation of Iraq. My point? That these events themselves produce and in a sense invoke
reaction. The South reacted against the Northern invasion and used guerrilla-style tools against the occupying force. And the Klan itself was born out of that. Pathological opposition? Yes. But it is these things that must be understood when examining human affairs. The Klan -- general opposition to the occupation -- is in that sense a child born out of the North's
unjustified aggression. If I say
unjustified it is not without validity. Yet for the North -- again I refer to a narrative that is part of the North's established civil religion -- the war was painted as an act of Norther righteousness. But anyone who studies the conflict (fairly) sees that it was not and in fact the issue is far more complex.
Now let's examine "the demands and propaganda" and "revolutionaries, demagogues, and malcontents" and why not throw in "horrifying history of supporting the most contemptible causes" but when those terms are turned to examine Northern intentions, certainly in the War Between the States, but in the succeeding neo-imperial wars such as in Cuba, The Philippines, the Caribbean Basin, and for all phases of American history up to and including the present! Are you getting my point?
Narratives are cobbled-together and are designed and structured to support power-systems. What a power-system says about itself is always quite different from what it actually
does.
If I have done
nothing else it is only to have attempted to point out the
deep contradictions that are part-and-parcel of America.
the Democrat Party rejected the principles and values of the American experiment.
Hold your horses, Levin. As I indicate it was the North that initiated a war against the South. This has to be seen raw and in realpolitikal terms, not through the tarted-up civil religious narrative. The South held to and believed in Constitutional Principles and its right to secession is unquestionable. Therefore, the assertion here
can be challenged.
The notion of *the American experiment* -- a multi-faceted metaphor -- implies that it is carried out in someone's laboratory. But there exists the possibility that someone, or some people, may not desire to be experimented on. You catch my drift? If America is defined as an "experiment" then it stands to reason that those interests that create or control the laboratory will determine what creature rises from said experiment.
The North became the political and ideological center that transformed original America (centered say around Virginia and the Founders) from being a nation of peoples and regions with autonomy and self-determining power, into an 'experiment' and also to a Lincolnian *propositional nation*.
[Here is an interesting
essay taking a determined stand against the notion of America as *propositional nation*. I do recognize that American Renaissance is a site dealing in
thoughtcrime. But you must, and we all must, understand that not all of us hold the same opinions, values, ideas and ideals. We make different
interpretations.]
So let's now examine 'the rejection of principles' in the light of what I present here. Who are the real 'malcontents' and 'revolutionaries'? What it the upshot here, Walker? It is simple: power grabs narratives, sculpts them, sets them in motion, insists on them, establishes them in a structure of civil religion and mythology.
My suggestion? Stand back from these things and examine them with more discernment. My reference is of course to Our Present and what is going on around us.
