The most disturbing thing…
This video is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen since pictures of people jumping out of the windows of the World Trade Center.
Watch it and then tell me that Palestinian culture doesn’t consider the slaughter of innocent Jews a religious sacrament. Tell me they don’t prefer murder to peace.
The truth is far beyond acceptable polite discourse, but it is still the truth.
What I find so disturbing is that I see death to come in the words of those children and those preachers. Many deaths coming, much suffering. All of those idiots in their religious stupors, planing to slaughter generations to come… All of it completely pointless.
I’m reminded of this scene from Robert Anton Wilson’s play “Wilhelm Reich in Hell”:
OUSPENSKY
Gurdjieff meant that as long as people think they are free, they will not work on the techniques to become free. He said it was hard work and that nobody would really try it until they became aware that none of us are free at present. The horror of the situation is that we think we are free and we therefore go on acting mechanically.
REICH
When did you become convinced Gurdjieff was correct about the horror of the situation?
OUSPENSKY
It was after the war started. I saw a lorry…
REICH
This was in Moscow?
OUSPENSKY
Yes.
REICH
You saw a lorry. What sort of lorry?
OUSPENSKY
It was a lorry full of artificial legs. Wooden legs, in those days. It was headed for the front lines.
REICH
A lorry full of wooden legs. And this convinced you of the horror of the situation?
OUSPENSKY
The fighting had hardly started. Those wooden legs were for men whose real legs had not yet been blown off.
REICH
Men whose legs had not been blown off but would be blown off?
OUSPENSKY
Yes. As a mathematician, I had studied a great deal of statistical analysis. I knew the principles the War Office had used in calculating how many wooden legs they would need at the front in the next few weeks. Such mathematical predictions are exact, but only if people behave as they are expected to behave. Only if people are predictable.
REICH
Only if people are armored and mechanical…
OUSPENSKY
Precisely. In that moment, looking at that lorry, I understood the horror of the situation, I understood that two hundred real legs would be blown off, on schedule, and two hundred wooden legs would arrive to replace them, and it was all mathematically certain… Because there was no real consciousness in any of it, just robot reactions. And yet everybody involved had the illusion that they were free and they they were making rational choices. They literally could not see what they were doing or what was going on around them. They had literally taken leave of their senses.
Update:
If Palestine is the willing host to the most inhumane and intransigent ideology of religious hatred, violence and intolerance, Lebanon is the society with the greatest will to end that sort of hatred. Not that they’re successfully ending Hezbollah. But at least they’re openly resisting its ideology.
May 20th, 2006 at 7:02 am
You are blaming the victims.
Robotic victims, yes. But these are the people who have the fewest resources to find new solutions, and you’re blaming them for the trap they’re in.