Subject: Re: ontical history
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 21:17:31 +0000


Paul Murphy wrote:

>do you really think it is surprising that a Soviet appeared in Muenchen?
>You seem to depict that city as a bastion of reaction.  In fact, many
>artists and intellectuals were attracted to the city, thus giving the 
>Soviet
>an intriguing basis.
>The causes of WW1 was a general collpase of diplomacy and the checks and
>balances that held up the status quo.  The status quo was undermined by
>Germany's aggressive desire for an overseas empire, a place in the sun.  
>But
>all the other W European countries had expanded globally, Germany's
>insistence flew in the face of British interests, as did the arms race that
>preceded the war.  I don't think we can attribute guilt.  Everyone was
>guilty, in fact the notion of guilt, a legalistic term, I believe to be
>irrelevant, or of marginal relevance (and this applies to recent events
>too).

Do you think that Hitler's guilt for the deliberate deaths of millions of 
Jews is merely ... "legalistic"?

>The system that had been in place collapsed, because it was only a
>temporary solution.  Cut and paste solutions, such as Israel and Ulster - 
>in
>essence, ahistorical states, and Yugoslavia can be named as another one,
>remember Gavrio Princip, the member of the Black Hand terrorist 
>organisation
>that assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, was Serbian, and thus
>another terrorist from one of these marginal 'ahistorical' states - hold an
>uneasy truce, but are never permanent solutions.  They were never meant to
>be.  All the purported 'solutions' to the problems in these regions, were
>later exposed to be as phoney as the brokers who 'solved' them.  If
>diplomacy has broken down again, it is because the uneasy truce established
>in these ahistorical states has once again broken down, and this break 
>down,
>as profound as anoraexia or a psychotic episode,  threatens the hegemony of
>the main powers, or of the superpower.  The schizophrenic relationship of
>the Imperialist to the Colonised, a relationship of inverted, unreal
>'dependency', has to be addressed, and cured, but not in the sense that any
>physical or mental illness is 'cured', ie with drug therapy, the stages of
>recovery, the final cure.  No, in reality the Imperialist and the colonised
>have formed a symbiosis, one with the other, an inverted dependency,
>algebraic equation, and deeply, intrinsically suicidal for both parties.
>The illness, because that is a better term than 'guilt' which establishes a
>clear dichotomy, guilt/innocence hence leaving no middle ground, of course,
>because the middle ground is where most life is - and its deepest
>presumptions and assumptions, have to be questioned at an absolute level,
>and then ameliorated by tactics of disguise, flight and, possible
>labyrinthine strategems, on the part of the colonised, to displace and
>ridicule the Imperialist, not perhaps by crashing jets into tall buildings,
>a possibly understandable act in regard to other events both nihilistic and
>barbaric, only leading to another uneasy cut and paste solution.

"Barbaric"? Getting dangerously close to assigning "guilt" there, Paul. 
Wouldn't want to be just "legalistic" here, would we?

Anthony Crifasi


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