"To have integrity as an individual is to be the same sort of person you are at home as when you’re in public. To treat everyone with the same amount of kindness and respect regardless..."I absolutely agree with this post of yours even more than usual. Problem is that it is sometimes really difficult to be standing at a silent vigil with a sign that says "Save Gaza" and some people walking by say "save them from what" or another person says "go fuck yourselves". Or to be at a demo supporting cutting ties with Israel and have some person come up and declare that he "is a Zionist and he has killed fuckers like you and he is going to go back and kill some more". It is really difficult not to feel hatred for those people or at least disgust. Oh, I don't allow that hatred to grow and take over, but I am always afraid that it could.
Personally, I'd wanna find Zionist pop stars like Pink, and then tie 'em up and beat them until they promise to support Palestine and denounce the existence of Israel.
Remember: the end ALWAYS justifies the means when it comes to fighting Zionism.
I cannot support beating anyone. I think it would be better to make them watch videos of Zionist Israeli soldiers shooting babies and children over and over; make them watch videos of their Zionist compatriots raping Palestinian prisoners and torturing flotilla people. Make them watch all the atrocities that are the IOF is committing until they cannot eat or drink any more because they feel too sick. And keep telling them over and over that what they are watching is what they believe in until they start screaming that they don't want to be a Zionist any more.
US and European so called leaders that are only capable of producing war rhetoric crap, talk bullshit and then wipe their ass with taxpayer money and flush it all down the toilet. They are vacuous idiots not worth the air they breath. While their stupidity and arrogance results in nothing but death and destruction. They even make democracy seem like a mistake. When will humanity be rid of this toilet plague?
No truer words ever printed. It's time to jettison the frauds and the phonies and concentrate on making amends and reparations to all we've harmed, pledging not to harm anyone anymore.
We have alot of work to do to achieve these goals, both individually and as a nation. I see it only getting worse but for a great awakening. Hypocrisy reigns.
The root of integrity, "integrare" in Italian from the Latin, goes beyond integration to completion. Integrity completes the individual and individuals of integrity complete the society. The implicit meaning is also to complement. Individuals of integrity naturally complement one another in structuring the society.
There is no such thing as Western Civilization; it is a concept that masks a battle ground and the proof of that is the violence between Western nations.....WWII?
We are not Western Civiization, not the violence, not the lack of integrity, based on opposing the violence of the European-based nations. We are free to decouple our idenity and our lives from nationalism, patriotism, all that bullshit. We are free to identify and live as citizens of the world.
It is not just this facade of Western Civilization; civilization itself is based on replacing the shared commons of equality with private property and the resulting conflicting world of haves and have-nots. We are free to reject the concept of a monolith culture and take up the struggles of the have nots not to replace the haves but to replace a concept of civilization based on the divisive concept of private property and its effects of inequality, hierarchy, centralized top down rule, religion, and war, all invented together to cement the power of the haves. We are free to rejec that and work for a world of reclaiming the shared commons during which for 300,000 yrs there was no lethal group conflict. We are free to rebel and work to replace the world of violence, which is not only Western civilization but all civiizations, and create a world free of inequality and thus free of the motives for crime and war. In that rebellion, we reclaim our own integrity as a process of working together to dismantle the existing concept of civilization and create a new one of shared prosperity among equals. And only in that freedom will we find others who are also in rebellion and thus feel the existential freedom to be ourselves, which is only possible with those we trust, with those who share our rejection of a world of haves and have-nots and the desire to reclaim oru evolutionary legacy as equals sharing the world as comrades.
The kind of change you are talking about, Caitlin is not going to happen slowly or organically...it is going to take an explosion from the part of the population that wants to live in a peaceful State actually governed by the people...Which means the US will break up, with those that prefer the current corrupt tyranny separating from those who abhor it....
Caitlin — I share a lot of the anger, disgust, and effrontery with the U.S./Western Empire that you express here (as you likely know by now). Especially watching what's happening in Gaza (and the rest of the world) right now, "empire of frauds" seems apt to me.
But your article got me stuck on a question I don't have an answer to, and I'm curious whether you do. You write that we're "as incongruent with our theoretical values as any civilization could possibly be" — and I keep turning that over. Every empire I can think of — Rome, the Ottomans, Qing China, the USSR, Imperial Japan — told itself a story where its domination was earned or moral, not just imposed, while its actual conduct violated that story badly. So when you say "Western civilization" specifically has this fraudulence, I can't tell if you mean something structural (this is just what empire does, and the West is the current example) or something about magnitude (the West's version of this gap is worse than the others). Those feel like different claims to me, and I don't know which one you're making, or how I'd even measure/judge it for myself.
What I've realized/learned about Empires is that - every sufficiently large and powerful political entity in history has this gap between "humanitarian values and actual conduct" — because stating high-minded legitimating values while pursuing power and material interest through coercive means is close to a structural feature of how large states maintain domestic and international legitimacy, not a peculiarly Western pathology.
I'd likely be one of the last people to defend the U.S./Western Empire, or any empire for that matter. But looking across the long arc of history, I genuinely don't know where to place it on that spectrum relative to others. Part of what makes this hard for me is I'm not even sure how to define "Western civilization" in the current context — the current US-led order specifically, or something continuous going back centuries? The comparison looks different depending on which one I mean.
So while I loathe and abhor the current U.S./Western Empire, I'm not entirely sure how to morally, emotionally, and structurally evaluate and compare it to empires of the past.
None of this is to deny that the current U.S. Empire needs to be drastically altered or reconfigured, capitalism included. But in our present globalized world, I'm having trouble identifying the boundaries between the impacts of Western civilization/empire specifically, and those of the global system of capitalism more broadly — is it "the West" doing this, or is "the West" just where global capital currently happens to be centered?
I continue to ponder this (and am not sure if I'll ever be able resolve this for myself)...
"To have integrity as an individual is to be the same sort of person you are at home as when you’re in public. To treat everyone with the same amount of kindness and respect regardless..."I absolutely agree with this post of yours even more than usual. Problem is that it is sometimes really difficult to be standing at a silent vigil with a sign that says "Save Gaza" and some people walking by say "save them from what" or another person says "go fuck yourselves". Or to be at a demo supporting cutting ties with Israel and have some person come up and declare that he "is a Zionist and he has killed fuckers like you and he is going to go back and kill some more". It is really difficult not to feel hatred for those people or at least disgust. Oh, I don't allow that hatred to grow and take over, but I am always afraid that it could.
zionists are bottom-feeding parasites, prone to warped visions of their false grandeur....the "chosen ones". Really! As if.
Personally, I'd wanna find Zionist pop stars like Pink, and then tie 'em up and beat them until they promise to support Palestine and denounce the existence of Israel.
Remember: the end ALWAYS justifies the means when it comes to fighting Zionism.
I cannot support beating anyone. I think it would be better to make them watch videos of Zionist Israeli soldiers shooting babies and children over and over; make them watch videos of their Zionist compatriots raping Palestinian prisoners and torturing flotilla people. Make them watch all the atrocities that are the IOF is committing until they cannot eat or drink any more because they feel too sick. And keep telling them over and over that what they are watching is what they believe in until they start screaming that they don't want to be a Zionist any more.
The "west" is full of phony fucking liars at every level of our societies. We’re going to need a bigger mop to clean this mess.
I have a feeling that it will be like the dark ending of the Randall Jarrell poem. "...with a hose."
THE DEFINITIVE WASTE
US and European so called leaders that are only capable of producing war rhetoric crap, talk bullshit and then wipe their ass with taxpayer money and flush it all down the toilet. They are vacuous idiots not worth the air they breath. While their stupidity and arrogance results in nothing but death and destruction. They even make democracy seem like a mistake. When will humanity be rid of this toilet plague?
It’s time for the masses to flush that toilet .
"We are an empire of frauds."
No truer words ever printed. It's time to jettison the frauds and the phonies and concentrate on making amends and reparations to all we've harmed, pledging not to harm anyone anymore.
We have alot of work to do to achieve these goals, both individually and as a nation. I see it only getting worse but for a great awakening. Hypocrisy reigns.
Thank you! 💐
The root of integrity, "integrare" in Italian from the Latin, goes beyond integration to completion. Integrity completes the individual and individuals of integrity complete the society. The implicit meaning is also to complement. Individuals of integrity naturally complement one another in structuring the society.
Such an apt analogy. And our western societies produce so many phonies.
There is no such thing as Western Civilization; it is a concept that masks a battle ground and the proof of that is the violence between Western nations.....WWII?
We are not Western Civiization, not the violence, not the lack of integrity, based on opposing the violence of the European-based nations. We are free to decouple our idenity and our lives from nationalism, patriotism, all that bullshit. We are free to identify and live as citizens of the world.
It is not just this facade of Western Civilization; civilization itself is based on replacing the shared commons of equality with private property and the resulting conflicting world of haves and have-nots. We are free to reject the concept of a monolith culture and take up the struggles of the have nots not to replace the haves but to replace a concept of civilization based on the divisive concept of private property and its effects of inequality, hierarchy, centralized top down rule, religion, and war, all invented together to cement the power of the haves. We are free to rejec that and work for a world of reclaiming the shared commons during which for 300,000 yrs there was no lethal group conflict. We are free to rebel and work to replace the world of violence, which is not only Western civilization but all civiizations, and create a world free of inequality and thus free of the motives for crime and war. In that rebellion, we reclaim our own integrity as a process of working together to dismantle the existing concept of civilization and create a new one of shared prosperity among equals. And only in that freedom will we find others who are also in rebellion and thus feel the existential freedom to be ourselves, which is only possible with those we trust, with those who share our rejection of a world of haves and have-nots and the desire to reclaim oru evolutionary legacy as equals sharing the world as comrades.
The kind of change you are talking about, Caitlin is not going to happen slowly or organically...it is going to take an explosion from the part of the population that wants to live in a peaceful State actually governed by the people...Which means the US will break up, with those that prefer the current corrupt tyranny separating from those who abhor it....
Caitlin — I share a lot of the anger, disgust, and effrontery with the U.S./Western Empire that you express here (as you likely know by now). Especially watching what's happening in Gaza (and the rest of the world) right now, "empire of frauds" seems apt to me.
But your article got me stuck on a question I don't have an answer to, and I'm curious whether you do. You write that we're "as incongruent with our theoretical values as any civilization could possibly be" — and I keep turning that over. Every empire I can think of — Rome, the Ottomans, Qing China, the USSR, Imperial Japan — told itself a story where its domination was earned or moral, not just imposed, while its actual conduct violated that story badly. So when you say "Western civilization" specifically has this fraudulence, I can't tell if you mean something structural (this is just what empire does, and the West is the current example) or something about magnitude (the West's version of this gap is worse than the others). Those feel like different claims to me, and I don't know which one you're making, or how I'd even measure/judge it for myself.
What I've realized/learned about Empires is that - every sufficiently large and powerful political entity in history has this gap between "humanitarian values and actual conduct" — because stating high-minded legitimating values while pursuing power and material interest through coercive means is close to a structural feature of how large states maintain domestic and international legitimacy, not a peculiarly Western pathology.
I'd likely be one of the last people to defend the U.S./Western Empire, or any empire for that matter. But looking across the long arc of history, I genuinely don't know where to place it on that spectrum relative to others. Part of what makes this hard for me is I'm not even sure how to define "Western civilization" in the current context — the current US-led order specifically, or something continuous going back centuries? The comparison looks different depending on which one I mean.
So while I loathe and abhor the current U.S./Western Empire, I'm not entirely sure how to morally, emotionally, and structurally evaluate and compare it to empires of the past.
None of this is to deny that the current U.S. Empire needs to be drastically altered or reconfigured, capitalism included. But in our present globalized world, I'm having trouble identifying the boundaries between the impacts of Western civilization/empire specifically, and those of the global system of capitalism more broadly — is it "the West" doing this, or is "the West" just where global capital currently happens to be centered?
I continue to ponder this (and am not sure if I'll ever be able resolve this for myself)...
facilis desencis averni
Watching the footy on the weekend, I saw in slomo a footballer kick a goal, officially it was a point , but I could see the officials were wrong.
Captain Cook had a map.
Magellan had a map.
Officials have got it wrong.