[lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot
- From: joerg benesch <jgruel@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:45:14 +0100
Eric Yost schrieb:
Joerg: I did say your language resounded exactly the worst Nazi
jargon, and I hoped to get an explanation or even some sign of
uneasiness from you - is it really ok for you to sound like a Nazi?
Eric: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a
German of your generation, aggressive national self-defense may always
smell like the Brown Shirts.
Do CIA "crimes" bother me? Not as much as CIA ineptitude. The old joke
during the 1990s was that you could tell a CIA assassination bombing
because everyone except the intended target was killed. Syrian and
Iranian intelligence forces are much more competent at bombing and
assassination, for example. (...)
Well Eric, you seem to suggest that your toolbox were better equipped
than mine; so let me ask you again to share your wisdom with me und
instruct me on the difference between the Nazi Weltanschauung and what
you call your world-view. To my naive nose, they smell alike. Could it
be that sometimes a nail is just a nail? "aggressive national
self-defense" is a smart one, though, and deserves admiration
My point was not geopolitics, I siimply wanted to know whether you
really backed the large-scale atrocities committed in your name; you
resort to silly jokes. I have to take it as it is: over here, someone
with your "world-view" would easily qualify as a neo-Nazi, and be banned
from public life: that's not a "clash of cultures", it's just drawing
the line between civilisation and barbarianism.
Nor do I mean to deal with your particular version of petty cultural
darwinism; don't envy you the elevating feeling to look down on all
those naive moral ants creeping along deep down below, while the
schrammels play the Harry Lime theme. just allow me one remark, namely,
that, while you mock those "moral naifs" of your own making, and
pontificate on wisdoms like the "unchanging nature of statecraft", it
may be you who's enlisted as an immoral naif, or useful goofed, in the
"essentially amoral attempts" of those in real power.
joerg
from melancholy Suebia
p. s.: "War" was Bismarck's nightmare: When he was urged to do
something about "Weltpolitik", he'd point to the map:"This is France,
this Russia, and we are in between: that's my map of Africa.". He knew
that a country so exposed needed peace in the first place as a matter of
existence. Had the Second Reich's leaders kept Bismarck's line of
defensive self-defence (wow! feels great to say things like that!) and,
instead of "statescraft", developed the art of Peace & Diplomacy so
urgently needed, this planet would be a far better place by now. War was
not a fate, wrought by some eternal rules of being, it was brought about
by those to whom it meant extra profits, and by the same breed of
ideologic warmongers as today.
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