2012-12-31

THE COGNITIVE WAR AGAINST ISRAEL IN THE SETTLEMENT DEBATE by Richard L Cravatts

http://www.think-israel.org/cravatts.cognitivewar.html

THE COGNITIVE WAR AGAINST ISRAEL IN THE SETTLEMENT DEBATE

by Richard L. Cravatts

No sooner had retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy issued an 89-page legal opinion that seemed to confirm the legality of West Bank settlements, than the Obama administration chimed in with a well-worn criticism of the report's findings, the long-held view that the presence of Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria violates international law. Levy's committee had found that "Israel does not meet the criteria of 'military occupation' as defined under international law" in the West Bank, and that claims that they exist in violation of international law are baseless.

But Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's office wanted no part of the report's findings. "We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts," said her spokesman, Patrick Ventrell. And, he added, the State Department was "concerned about it, obviously."

The problem with this defective diplomacy, as is often the case when Israel is concerned, is that operates in what Melanie Phillips has called "a world turned upside down," where the perennial victim status of the long-suffering Palestinians trumps any sovereign rights of Israel regarding its borders, security, and even its survival in a sea of jihadist foes who yearn for its destruction. The settlement debate has also been hijacked by the Arab world and its Western apologists who, willingly blind to history, international law, and fact, continue to assign the blame for the absence of peace on the perceived offenses of occupation and Israeli truculence. Thus, Secretary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, have both referred to the nuisance Israel causes by letting Jews live in the West Bank, against the wishes of the Palestinians who view that territory as once and forever theirs, as "unhelpful" in seeking a viable solution to Palestinian statehood.

What is truly "unhelpful," however, are the repeated references to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as East Jerusalem, as "Arab" land, the putative Palestinian state in waiting, encumbered only by Israeli oppression, the dreaded occupation, and those pesky settlers. This widely held notion that European Jews, with no connection to historic Palestine, colonized Arab land and displaced the indigenous Palestinian population, of course, is a key part of what Professor Richard Landes of Boston University defines as the "cognitive war" against Israel; it serves the perverse purpose of validating Arab territorial rights to the West Bank and Gaza, and, more importantly, casts Israelis as squatters who have unlawfully expropriated land that is not — and never was — theirs.

That is a convenient fable, as is the fictive people that the Palestinians have been conjured up to be: an indigenous nation that had sovereignty, a coherent society, leadership, and some form of continuous government — none of which, obviously, have ever existed. More to the point, it is "unhelpful" to overlook the fact that not only all of the land that is current-day Israel, but also Gaza and the West Bank, is part of the land granted to the Jews as part of the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, which recognized the right of the Jewish people to "close settlement" in a portion of those territories gained after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

According to Eugene V. Rostow, the late legal scholar and one of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 written after the 1967 war to outline peace negotiations, "the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors," something which Israel's intransigent Arab neighbors have never seemed prepared to do.

Moreover, Rostow contended, "The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the Mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem before the State of Israel was created," and "the Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there."

The Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel recaptured Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, resulted in Israel being cast in another perfidious role—in addition to colonial usurper of Arab land, the Jewish state became a brutal "occupier" of Arab Palestine, lands to which the Jews presumably had no right and now occupied, in the opinion of many in the international community, illegally. But that "unhelpful" view again presumes that parts of the territory that may someday comprise a Palestinian state is already Palestinian land, that the borders of the putative Palestinian state are precise and agreed to, and that Jews living anywhere on those lands are now violating international law.

When did the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem become Palestinian land? The answer is: never. In fact, when Israel acquired the West Bank and Gaza and other territory in the defensive war 1967 after being attacked by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the Jewish state gained legally-recognized title to those areas. In Israel's 1948 war of independence, Egypt, it will be recalled, illegally annexed Gaza at the same time Jordan illegally annexed the West Bank—actions that were not recognized by most of the international community as legitimate in establishing their respective sovereignties. Israel's recapture of those territories in 1967, noted Professor Stephen Schwebel, State Department legal advisor and later the President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, made the Jewish state what is referred to as the High Contracting Party of those territories, both because they were acquired in a defensive, not aggressive, war, and because they were part of the original Mandate and not previously under the sovereignty of any other High Contracting Party. "Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully," Schwebel wrote, referring to Jordan and Egypt, "the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

It is also "unhelpful," not to mention morally repellent, for those arguing on the Palestinian side, that the West Bank, like Gaza, eventually be made Judenrein, totally absent of Jews, that, as Mahmoud Abbas has loudly announced on more than one occasion, the future Palestinian state would not have one Jew living within its borders. Putting aside the fact that it is Israel that is continually derided for being racist and exclusionary (despite having 1 million Arab citizens), only in a world turned upside down would diplomats uphold a principle that Jews—and only Jews—not be allowed to live in certain territories, and particularly those areas to which they have irrevocable and inalterable biblical, historic, and legal claims.

In fact, Professor Emeritus Jerold Auerbach of Wellesley College has written that, protests from the State Department and many in the West aside, "Israeli settlement throughout the West Bank is explicitly protected by international agreements dating from the World War I era, subsequently reaffirmed after World War II, and never revoked since . . . The [Mandate for Palestine] recognized 'the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine' and 'the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country' . . . This was not framed as a gift to the Jewish people; rather, based on recognition of historical rights reaching back into antiquity, it was their entitlement."

While those seeking Palestinian statehood conveniently overlook the legal rights Jews still enjoy to occupy all areas of historic Palestine, they have also used another oft-cited, but defective, argument in accusing Israel of violating international law by maintaining settlements in the West Bank: that since the Six Day War, Israel has conducted a "belligerent occupation."

But as Professor Julius Stone discussed in his book, Israel and Palestine, the fact that the West Bank and Gaza were acquired by Israel in a "sovereignty vacuum," that is, that there was an absence of High Contracting Party with legal claim to the areas, means that, in this instance, the definition of a belligerent occupant in invalid. "There are solid grounds in international law for denying any sovereign title to Jordan in the West Bank," Stone wrote, "and therefore any rights as reversioner state under the law of belligerent occupation." So, significantly, the absence of any sovereignty on territories acquired in a defensive war—as was the case in the Six Day War of 1967—means the absence of what can legally be called an occupation by Israel of the West Bank, belligerent or otherwise. "Insofar as the West Bank at present held by Israel does not belong to any other State," Stone concluded, "the Convention would not seem to apply to it at all. This is a technical, though rather decisive, legal point."


 

THE MATTER OF ISRAEL VIOLATING ARTICLE 49 OF THE FOURTH GENEVA CONVENTION is one that has also been used promiscuously, and disingenuously, as part of the cognitive war by those wishing to criminalize the settlement of Jews in the West Bank and demonize Israel for behavior in violation of international law; it asserts that in allowing its citizens to move into occupied territories Israel is violating Article 49, which stipulates that "The occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territory it occupies."

The use of the this particular Geneva convention seems particularly grotesque in the case of Israel, since it was crafted after World War II specifically to prevent a repetition of the actions of the Nazis in cleansing Germany of its own Jewish citizens and deporting them to Nazi-occupied countries for slave labor or extermination. Clearly, the intent of the Convention was to prevent belligerents from forcibly moving their citizens to other territories, for malignant purposes—something completely different than the Israel government allowing its citizens to willingly relocate and settle in territories without any current sovereignty, to which Jews have long-standing legal claim, and, whether or not the area may become a future Palestinian state, should certainly be a place where a person could live, even if he or she is a Jew.

In fact, Professor Stone observed that those enemies of Israel who point to the Fourth Geneva Convention as evidence of Israel's abuse of international law and wish to use it to end the settlements are not only legally incorrect, but morally incoherent and racist. Stone suggested that in order to recognize the validity of using the Fourth Convention against Israel, one "would have to say that the effect of Article . . . is to impose an obligation on the state of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein. Irony would thus be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that [the Fourth Convention], designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants."

And does anyone doubt that once the Palestinians, aided and abetted by mendacious Western elites, diplomats, and an anti-Israel international community of supporters, have purged Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem of all Jews, that new calls will then arise accusing Jews of "occupying" more "Arab" lands in Tel Aviv, Netanya, Tiberias, or Haifa? Professor Rostow himself saw through the disingenuous talk about legal rights when it came to the issue of the settlements. The discussion was not, in his mind, "about legal rights but about the political will to override legal rights." In fact, the settlement debate is part of the decades-old narrative created by the Palestinians and their Western enablers to write a false historical account that legitimizes Palestinian claims while air brushing away Jewish history. "Throughout Israel's occupation," Rostow observed, "the Arab countries, helped by the United States, have pushed to keep Jews out of the territories, so that at a convenient moment, or in a peace negotiation, the claim that the West Bank is 'Arab' territory could be made more plausible."

In the cognitive war against Israel, that "convenient moment" may well have arrived.



Richard L Cravatts, PhD, is the author of 'Genocidal Liberalism: The University's Jihad Against Israel &: Jews,' and president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. This article appeared July 13, 2012 in the Time of Israel website and is archived at
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-cognitive-war-against-israel-in-the-settlement-debate/.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

2012-12-26

WHY ISRAEL DOESN'T NEED U.S. "AID"


Contrary to popular opinion and US propaganda, Israel does not need US "aid".

Tourism income in 2012 was $4.6 billion. 

US military "aid" to Israel in 2012 was about $2.5 billion.

US "aid" comes with many conditions, the most important being that Israel must spend approximately 75% of the money by only purchasing from US companies. 

This means that the "aid" is actually a subsidy of US businesses, usually of products inferior to what Israeli companies could produce. 

US "aid" harms Israel's economy.

Additionally, US "aid" serves to strengthen US military presence in Israel by using Israel's sea and aviation ports, housing and training US military personnel, and stockpiling munitions and weapons systems the US might need in other operational theaters. 

If the US were to pay fair market value for all the services and privileges it receives from Israel, the fee would be much higher.

US "aid" includes loan guarantees - not grants. To date, Israel has never defalted on any loans and has usually paid them ahead of the deadline. As with all loans, interest is paid.

Contrast this "aid" with the direct grants to the Jew hating Palestinian Authority and the NGOs that support and defend them

The US trains, supplies, and maintains "police" forces that are actually military combat units intended for future use against Israel when the US and NATO enter the final stage of their plan to create a Jew-free Islamic state within Israel's historical and legal borders.

REFERENCES
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/conflicts/u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-2012-congressional-report

MILITARY AID
http://jrnetsolserver.shorensteincente.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Military-Aid-to-Israel.pdf
In 2007, the Bush Administration and the Israeli government agreed to a 10-year, $30 billion military aid package that gradually will raise Israel’s annual Foreign Military Financing grant from a baseline of nearly $2.55 billion in FY2009 to approximately $3.1 billion for FY2013 through FY2018. For FY2013, the Obama Administration is requesting $3.1 billion in FMF to Israel. 

TOURISM
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/163480
Revenue from incoming tourism in 2012 (including the income of the Israeli aviation companies from inbound tourism) totals about NIS 17.8 billion ($4.6 billion). Revenue from domestic tourism in 2012 totals about NIS 10.3 billion (3% more than in 2011). Total revenue from tourism in 2012 is estimated at about NIS 36 billion, 4% more than in 2011.


2012-11-21

Israel didn't create Hamas, but acts as enabler to their crimes

November 21, 2012

Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood creation.
In a "scholarly" work published in The Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 1993), pp. 5-19 titled Hamas: A Historical and Political Background, author Ziad Abu-Amr admits that the Muslim Broterhood created Hamas during the First Intifada "from its own ranks" ... " expressly for the purpose" of "[playing] an active role in the resistance for the first time."

Babnet, a pro-Islam website, provides details on Hamas in an article titled Hamas: History and present. Babnet writes:

"According to the semi-official biography 'Truth and Resistance'...[the Muslim Brotherhood] evolved through four main stages"...constructing its operations in Gaza from 1967 to 1977 and finally "founding Hamas as the combatant arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine and the launching of continuing jihad" in 1987. In Judea and Samaria (wrongly called "The West Bank"), Hamas applied a different strategy - infiltrating or creating "public institutions" (meaning NGOs, education, and social services). The Judea and Samaria operations were "an integral part of the Jordanian Islamic movement" and "represented a higher socio-economic profile consisting of merchants, land owners, and middle-class professionals and officials. By the mid-1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood held a significant portion of positions in ... religious institutions." 


t

2012-10-12

Three Perspectives on Luddites: Pynchon, Byron, & Conniff



                Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?

The New York Times Book Review
28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.
Thomas R. Pynchon

As if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming polarized into "literary" and "scientific" factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people's attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever "beyond" the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one's own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of a long-ago high-table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, "If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution." Such "intellectuals," for the most part "literary," were supposed by Lord Snow, to be "natural Luddites."

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and think." Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

Historically, Luddites flourished In Britain from about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It Isn't clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C.P. Snow's use of the word was clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology. Luddites had, in this view, come to be imagined as the counter-revolutionaries of that "Industrial Revolution" which their modern versions have "never tried, wanted, or been able to understand."

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like the American and French Revolutions of about the same period, a violent struggle with a beginning, middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive, more like an accelerated passage in a long evolution. The phrase was first popularized a hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee, and has had its share of revisionist attention, lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here, in "Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution," Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of the steam engine (1765) may have been overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had already long been in place, having in fact been driven by water power since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial "revolution," in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in "Luddite" they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into a house and "in a fit of insane rage" destroyed two machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found sabotaged -- this had been going on, sez the Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 -- folks would respond with the catch phrase "Lud must have been here." By the time his name was taken up by the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname "King (or Captain) Ludd," and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick -- every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

But it's important to remember that the target even of the original assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had been around since 1589, when, according to the folklore, it was invented by the Rev. William Lee, out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love with a young woman who was more interested in her knitting than in him. He'd show up at her place. "Sorry, Rev, got some knitting." "What, again?" After a while, unable to deal with this kind of rejection, Lee, not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of insane rage, but let's imagine logically and coolly, vowed to invent a machine that would make the hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete, and so he did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted cleric's frame "was so perfect in its conception that it continued to be the only mechanical means of knitting for hundreds of years."

Now, given that kind of time span, it's just not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic crazy. No doubt what people admired and mythologized him for was the vigor and single-mindedness of his assault. But the words "fit of insane rage" are third-hand and at least 68 years after the event. And Ned Lud's anger was not directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure, the Badass. He is usually male, and while sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women, is almost universally admired by men for two basic virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work mischief on a large scale. What is important here is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening -- it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery -- especially when it's been around for a while -- not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work -- to be "worth" that many human souls. What gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass -- the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero -- who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead of their time, using the night, and their own solidarity and discipline, to achieve their multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron, whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812 compassionately argued against a bill proposing, among other repressive measures, to make frame-breaking punishable by death. "Are you not near the Luddites?" he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore. "By the Lord! if there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers -- the breakers of frames -- the Lutherans of politics -- the reformers?" He includes an "amiable chanson," which proves to be a Luddite hymn so inflammatory that it wasn't published until after the poet's death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron had spent the summer previous in Switzerland, cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they all told each other ghost stories. By that December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working on Chapter Four of her novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best. Victor Frankenstein's creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary Badass. "I resolved. . . ," Victor tells us, "to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large," which takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost: told to Victor in the first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of Victor's own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the arctic explorer Robert Walton. However much of Frankenstein's longevity is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who translated it to film, it remains today more than well worth reading, for all the reasons we read novels, as well as for the much more limited question of its Luddite value: that is, for its attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the details, but we're left with a procedure that seems to include surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that results is mechanical.

This is one of several interesting similarities between Frankenstein and an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, The Castle of Otranto (1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. For one thing, both authors, in presenting their books to the public, used voices not their own. Mary Shelley's preface was written by her husband, Percy, who was pretending to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction to Frankenstein in her own voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was a translation from medieval Italian. Only in his preface to the second edition did he admit authorship.

The novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being brought to life, the images arising in her mind "with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie." Walpole had been awakened from a dream, "of which, all I could remember was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle ... and that on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a gigantic hand in armour."

In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the castle's resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is assembled from pieces -- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, all of them, like the hand, quite oversized -- which fall from the sky or just materialize here and there about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return of the repressed. The activating agencies, again like those in Frankenstein, are non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude," is achieved through supernatural means: a family curse, and the intercession of Otranto's patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith, however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order that might or might not know what it was doing. "Gothic" became code for "medieval," and that has remained code for "miraculous," on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and comics, down to Star Wars and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.

To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes, "Well, the airplanes got him." "No. . . it was Beauty killed the Beast." In which we again encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only different, between the human and the technological.

But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature -- of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself -- then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way that adults have traditionally defined themselves against the confidently immortal children they must deal with. Looking back on Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, "I have affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart." The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a pretext for a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an irrational act. In science fiction, where entire worlds may be generated from simple sets of axioms, the constraints of our own everyday world are routinely transcended. In each of these cases we know better. We say, "But the world isn't like that." These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label "escapist fare."

This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies -- conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50's, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns -- exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions -- most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of "human" as particularly distinguished from "machine." Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age -- curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the "future in their bones." It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer's ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk -- realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.

The word "Luddite" continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come -- you heard it here first -- when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!

--Thomas Pynchon

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html


"Song for the Luddites"

Lord Byron
[sent in a letter to Thomas Moore, 24 Dec. 1816]
. . . Are you not near the Luddites? By the Lord! If there's a row, but I'll be among ye! How go on the weavers--the breakers of frames--the Lutherans of politics--the reformers?
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
     So we, boys, we
   Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!

When the web that we weave is complete,
And the shuttle exchanged for the sword,
   We will fling the winding-sheet
   O'er the despot at our feet,
And dye it deep in the gore he has pour'd.

Though black as his heart its hue,
Since his veins are corrupted to mud,
    Yet this is the dew
   Which the tree shall renew
Of Liberty, planted by Ludd!

There's an amiable chanson for you--all impromptu. I have written it principally to shock your neighbour * * , who is all clergy and loyalty--mirth and innocence--milk and water. . . .

http://orion.it.luc.edu/~sjones1/byr1.htm

The Luddite Revolution: Birth of a Brand

Posted by Richard Conniff on February 24, 2011

An early Luddite protester

This is a piece I wrote for the March issue of Smithsonian magazine:

In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the personal computer era—the novelist Thomas Pynchon wondered if it was “O.K. to be a Luddite,” meaning someone who opposes technological progress. A better question today is whether it’s even possible. Technology is everywhere, and a recent headline at an Internet humor site perfectly captured how difficult it is to resist: “Luddite invents machine to destroy technology quicker.”

Like all good satire, the mock headline comes perilously close to the truth. Modern Luddites do indeed invent “machines”—in the form of computer viruses, cyberworms and other malware—to disrupt the technologies that trouble them. (Recent targets of suspected sabotage include the London Stock Exchange and a nuclear power plant in Iran.) Even off-the-grid extremists find technology irresistible. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, attacked what he called the “industrial-technological system” with increasingly sophisticated mail bombs. Likewise, the cave-dwelling terrorist sometimes derided as “Osama bin Luddite” hijacked aviation technology to bring down skyscrapers.

For the rest of us, our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, “and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.”

That’s when he turns on his phone, too.

The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.

Blogger Amanda Cobra, for instance, worries about being “a drinking Luddite” because she hasn’t yet mastered “infused” drinks. (Sorry, Amanda, real Luddites were clueless when it came to steeping vanilla beans in vodka. They drank—and sang about—“good ale that’s brown.”) And on Twitter, Wolfwhistle Amy thinks she’s a Luddite because she “cannot deal with heel heights” given in centimeters instead of inches. (Hmm. Some of the original Luddites were cross-dressers—more about that later—so maybe they would empathize.) People use the word now even to describe someone who is merely clumsy or forgetful about technology. (A British woman locked outside her house tweets her husband: “You stupid Luddite, turn on your bloody phone, i can’t get in!”)

The word “Luddite” is simultaneously a declaration of ineptitude and a badge of honor. So you can hurl Luddite curses at your cellphone or your spouse, but you can also sip a wine named Luddite (which has its own Web site: www.luddite.co.za). You can buy a guitar named the Super Luddite, which is electric and costs $7,400. Meanwhile, back at Twitter, SupermanHotMale Tim is understandably puzzled; he grunts to ninatypewriter, “What is Luddite?”

Almost certainly not what you think, Tim.

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

The Luddite disturbances started in circumstances at least superficially similar to our own. British working families at the start of the 19th century were enduring economic upheaval and widespread unemployment. A seemingly endless war against Napoleon’s France had brought “the hard pinch of poverty,” wrote Yorkshire historian Frank Peel, to homes “where it had hitherto been a stranger.” Food was scarce and rapidly becoming more costly. Then, on March 11, 1811, in Nottingham, a textile manufacturing center, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters demanding more work and better wages.

That night, angry workers smashed textile machinery in a nearby village. Similar attacks occurred nightly at first, then sporadically, and then in waves, eventually spreading across a 70-mile swath of northern England from Loughborough in the south to Wakefield in the north. Fearing a national movement, the government soon positioned thousands of soldiers to defend factories. Parliament passed a measure to make machine-breaking a capital offense.

But the Luddites were neither as organized nor as dangerous as authorities believed. They set some factories on fire, but mainly they confined themselves to breaking machines. In truth, they inflicted less violence than they encountered. In one of the bloodiest incidents, in April 1812, some 2,000 protesters mobbed a mill near Manchester. The owner ordered his men to fire into the crowd, killing at least 3 and wounding 18. Soldiers killed at least 5 more the next day.

Earlier that month, a crowd of about 150 protesters had exchanged gunfire with the defenders of a mill in Yorkshire, and two Luddites died. Soon, Luddites there retaliated by killing a mill owner, who in the thick of the protests had supposedly boasted that he would ride up to his britches in Luddite blood. Three Luddites were hanged for the murder; other courts, often under political pressure, sent many more to the gallows or to exile in Australia before the last such disturbance, in 1816.

Smashing textile machinery

One technology the Luddites commonly attacked was the stocking frame, a knitting machine first developed more than 200 years earlier by an Englishman named William Lee. Right from the start, concern that it would displace traditional hand-knitters had led Queen Elizabeth I to deny Lee a patent. Lee’s invention, with gradual improvements, helped the textile industry grow—and created many new jobs. But labor disputes caused sporadic outbreaks of violent resistance. Episodes of machine-breaking occurred in Britain from the 1760s onward, and in France during the 1789 revolution.

As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

So if the Luddites weren’t attacking the technological foundations of industry, what made them so frightening to manufacturers? And what makes them so memorable even now? Credit on both counts goes largely to a phantom.

Ned Ludd, also known as Captain, General or even King Ludd, first turned up as part of a Nottingham protest in November 1811, and was soon on the move from one industrial center to the next. This elusive leader clearly inspired the protesters. And his apparent command of unseen armies, drilling by night, also spooked the forces of law and order. Government agents made finding him a consuming goal. In one case, a militiaman reported spotting the dreaded general with “a pike in his hand, like a serjeant’s halbert,” and a face that was a ghostly unnatural white.

In fact, no such person existed. Ludd was a fiction concocted from an incident that supposedly had taken place 22 years earlier in the city of Leicester. According to the story, a young apprentice named Ludd or Ludham was working at a stocking frame when a superior admonished him for knitting too loosely. Ordered to “square his needles,” the enraged apprentice instead grabbed a hammer and flattened the entire mechanism. The story eventually made its way to Nottingham, where protesters turned Ned Ludd into their symbolic leader.

The Luddites, as they soon became known, were dead serious about their protests. But they were also making fun, dispatching officious-sounding letters that began, “Whereas by the Charter”…and ended “Ned Lud’s Office, Sherwood Forest.” Invoking the sly banditry of Nottinghamshire’s own Robin Hood suited their sense of social justice. The taunting, world-turned-upside-down character of their protests also led them to march in women’s clothes as “General Ludd’s wives.”

They did not invent a machine to destroy technology, but they knew how to use one. In Yorkshire, they attacked frames with massive sledgehammers they called “Great Enoch,” after a local blacksmith who had manufactured both the hammers and many of the machines they intended to destroy. “Enoch made them,” they declared, “Enoch shall break them.”

This knack for expressing anger with style and even swagger gave their cause a personality. Luddism stuck in the collective memory because it seemed larger than life. And their timing was right, coming at the start of what the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle later called “a mechanical age.”

People of the time recognized all the astonishing new benefits the Industrial Revolution conferred, but they also worried, as Carlyle put it in 1829, that technology was causing a “mighty change” in their “modes of thought and feeling. Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” Over time, worry about that kind of change led people to transform the original Luddites into the heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life. “The indignation of nineteenth-century producers,” the historian Edward Tenner has written, “has yielded to “the irritation of late-twentieth-century consumers.”

The original Luddites lived in an era of “reassuringly clear-cut targets—machines one could still destroy with a sledgehammer,” Loyola’s Jones writes in his 2006 book Against Technology, making them easy to romanticize. By contrast, our technology is as nebulous as “the cloud,” that Web-based limbo where our digital thoughts increasingly go to spend eternity. It’s as liquid as the chemical contaminants our infants suck down with their mothers’ milk and as ubiquitous as the genetically modified crops in our gas tanks and on our dinner plates. Technology is everywhere, knows all our thoughts and, in the words of the technology utopian Kevin Kelly, is even “a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God.” Who are we to resist?

The original Luddites would answer that we are human. Getting past the myth and seeing their protest more clearly is a reminder that it’s possible to live well with technology—but only if we continually question the ways it shapes our lives. It’s about small things, like now and then cutting the cord, shutting down the smartphone and going out for a walk. But it needs to be about big things, too, like standing up against technologies that put money or convenience above other human values. If we don’t want to become, as Carlyle warned, “mechanical in head and in heart,” it may help, every now and then, to ask which of our modern machines General and Eliza Ludd would choose to break. And which they would use to break them.


2012-05-20

Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four - Themes, Motifs, & Symbols

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/themes.html


George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four
Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Dangers of Totalitarianism

1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government.

Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous.

In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.

In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years.

Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach.

As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel. These include:

Psychological Manipulation

The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The telescreens also monitor behavior—everywhere they go, citizens are continuously reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them.

The Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party.

The Party also forces individuals to suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose end is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose.

Physical Control

In addition to manipulating their minds, the Party also controls the bodies of its subjects. The Party constantly watches for any sign of disloyalty, to the point that, as Winston observes, even a tiny facial twitch could lead to an arrest. A person’s own nervous system becomes his greatest enemy.

The Party forces its members to undergo mass morning exercises called the Physical Jerks, and then to work long, grueling days at government agencies, keeping people in a general state of exhaustion.

Anyone who does manage to defy the Party is punished and “reeducated” through systematic and brutal torture. After being subjected to weeks of this intense treatment, Winston himself comes to the conclusion that nothing is more powerful than physical pain—no emotional loyalty or moral conviction can overcome it.

By conditioning the minds of their victims with physical torture, the Party is able to control reality, convincing its subjects that 2 + 2 = 5.

Control of Information and History

The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents. As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them.

By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.

Technology

By means of telescreens and hidden microphones across the city, the Party is able to monitor its members almost all of the time. Additionally, the Party employs complicated mechanisms (1984 was written in the era before computers) to exert large-scale control on economic production and sources of information, and fearsome machinery to inflict torture upon those it deems enemies.

1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.

Language as Mind Control

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.

If control of language were centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them.

This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.

Interestingly, many of Orwell’s ideas about language as a controlling force have been modified by writers and critics seeking to deal with the legacy of colonialism.

During colonial times, foreign powers took political and military control of distant regions and, as a part of their occupation, instituted their own language as the language of government and business.

Postcolonial writers often analyze or redress the damage done to local populations by the loss of language and the attendant loss of culture and historical connection.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Doublethink

The idea of “doublethink” emerges as an important consequence of the Party’s massive campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation. Simply put, doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time.

As the Party’s mind-control techniques break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for that individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told.

At the Hate Week rally, for instance, the Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally, and its former ally becomes its new enemy. When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event.

In the same way, people are able to accept the Party ministries’ names, though they contradict their functions: the Ministry of Plenty oversees economic shortages, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth conducts propaganda and historical revisionism, and the Ministry of Love is the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment.

Urban Decay

Urban decay proves a pervasive motif in 1984. The London that Winston Smith calls home is a dilapidated, rundown city in which buildings are crumbling, conveniences such as elevators never work, and necessities such as electricity and plumbing are extremely unreliable.

Though Orwell never discusses the theme openly, it is clear that the shoddy disintegration of London, just like the widespread hunger and poverty of its inhabitants, is due to the Party’s mismanagement and incompetence.

One of the themes of 1984, inspired by the history of twentieth-century communism, is that totalitarian regimes are viciously effective at enhancing their own power and miserably incompetent at providing for their citizens. The grimy urban decay in London is an important visual reminder of this idea, and offers insight into the Party’s priorities through its contrast to the immense technology the Party develops to spy on its citizens.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Big Brother

Throughout London, Winston sees posters showing a man gazing down over the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” everywhere he goes. Big Brother is the face of the Party. The citizens are told that he is the leader of the nation and the head of the Party, but Winston can never determine whether or not he actually exists.

In any case, the face of Big Brother symbolizes the Party in its public manifestation; he is a reassurance to most people (the warmth of his name suggests his ability to protect), but he is also an open threat (one cannot escape his gaze).

Big Brother also symbolizes the vagueness with which the higher ranks of the Party present themselves—it is impossible to know who really rules Oceania, what life is like for the rulers, or why they act as they do.

Winston thinks he remembers that Big Brother emerged around 1960, but the Party’s official records date Big Brother’s existence back to 1930, before Winston was even born.

The Glass Paperweight and St. Clement’s Church

By deliberately weakening people’s memories and flooding their minds with propaganda, the Party is able to replace individuals’ memories with its own version of the truth.

It becomes nearly impossible for people to question the Party’s power in the present when they accept what the Party tells them about the past—that the Party arose to protect them from bloated, oppressive capitalists, and that the world was far uglier and harsher before the Party came to power.

Winston vaguely understands this principle. He struggles to recover his own memories and formulate a larger picture of what has happened to the world. Winston buys a paperweight in an antique store in the prole district that comes to symbolize his attempt to reconnect with the past. Symbolically, when the Thought Police arrest Winston at last, the paperweight shatters on the floor.

The old picture of St. Clement’s Church in the room that Winston rents above Mr. Charrington’s shop is another representation of the lost past. Winston associates a song with the picture that ends with the words “Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!” This is an important foreshadow, as it is the telescreen hidden behind the picture that ultimately leads the Thought Police to Winston, symbolizing the Party’s corrupt control of the past.

The Place Where There Is No Darkness

Throughout the novel Winston imagines meeting O’Brien in “the place where there is no darkness.” The words first come to him in a dream, and he ponders them for the rest of the novel.

Eventually, Winston does meet O’Brien in the place where there is no darkness; instead of being the paradise Winston imagined, it is merely a prison cell in which the light is never turned off.

The idea of “the place where there is no darkness” symbolizes Winston’s approach to the future: possibly because of his intense fatalism (he believes that he is doomed no matter what he does), he unwisely allows himself to trust O’Brien, even though inwardly he senses that O’Brien might be a Party operative.

The Telescreens

The omnipresent telescreens are the book’s most visible symbol of the Party’s constant monitoring of its subjects. In their dual capability to blare constant propaganda and observe citizens, the telescreens also symbolize how totalitarian government abuses technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve civilization.

The Red-Armed Prole Woman

The red-armed prole woman whom Winston hears singing through the window represents Winston’s one legitimate hope for the long-term future: the possibility that the proles will eventually come to recognize their plight and rebel against the Party.

Winston sees the prole woman as a prime example of reproductive virility; he often imagines her giving birth to the future generations that will finally challenge the Party’s authority.

Posted via email from bobmartin's posterous

2012-05-17

Professor Hillel Weiss - What Must Also Be Said


Excerpts from Professor Weiss' epic opening speech before the European Parliament Conference meeting on the topic of Peace in the Middle East. Tuesday, May 15th.
From Professor Hillel Weiss


“Ye shall love truth and peace,” says the prophet.

Peace cannot be based on a lie! There is no truth without peace and no peace without truth. This is written is written in the Bible and accepted in natural law. Truth is based on justice whose role is to save the oppressed from the hand of his oppressor.

The question that we face is: Who is the oppressor and who is the victim? Who is the occupier and who is being deprived? For those who are devoted to what is written in the Bible, the issues are clear and simple.

But for now, let us look at international law, which is binding, and begin with a short survey:

Professor Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish liberal, moderate leftist, and lover of Israel, one of the top legal experts in the United States, has again recently condemned the International Court of Justice at Hague for delivering political decisions.

This is in contrast to the International Criminal Court at the Hague which refused to act as a rubber stamp: It did not recognize Palestine as a state and rejected a series of proposed resolutions that Palestinians submitted against Israel for war crimes, during “Operation Cast Lead”.

Dershowitz levels lethal criticism against the UN, among others, as the leader of the double standard against Israel, and regards it as a corrupt organization that aids and abets terror.

And indeed, after three “Durban Conventions” , after the prostitution of the word ‘racism’, and after accepting Libya in 2003 as a member of the UN Commission on Human Rights, much like in May 2012 -  and now in May 2012, accepting Syria to that same position as a leading member of the Commission on Human Rights and the representative of Asia - every honest person must view the UN as a cynical group whose main concern is to protect terrorism.

It is the main cause of the corruption of the ethics of human rights as formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations itself, the gift to the world of the French Jew, Rene Cassin.

We have mentioned the Jewish contribution to the struggle against racism and we shall again mention that the Torah of the people of Israel, preceding every other monotheistic religion that purports to supplant it, was the first to claim that “There is one father of us all”, blacks and whites, Arabs, Germans, and Jews, and that father is Adam.

And therefore, if there is a non-racist message in the history of mankind, it is in the Torah of the people of Israel.

The religion of Israel is its national religion - and this and only this element is what defines its identity as a nation – and allows every human being the option to convert to Judaism. To be Jewish is not a matter of race or blood.

It is only barbaric peoples, who rummaged around looking for racial purity, who should rightly be called ‘racists’. For example, the Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, who has said more than once that in the Palestine he envisages, there is no room for Jews.

In the same interview that Dershowitz gave to the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon on April 27 , 2012, he says “Western society has a tremendous problem today with international law, which has become in many cases a source of evil and which serves the hardcore left and Islamist right as ammunition against the democratic values of the West (...)”

The hardcore left was never interested in law and justice. Its ideology permits the use of the law for political purposes. In his opinion, “the State of Israel must create for itself an independent corpus of international law that will be reflected in the decisions of its High Court of Justice and will be based on the principles of international law.”

...The law known as “Human Dignity and Freedom” , a Basic Law in the State of Israel, should make it illegal to expel a Jew from his own land, but does not. The entire law was legislated for the “other”. The law was designed for the Arab population but is a dead letter/ a law no longer enforced for the Jews who are known as ‘settlers’. That was what happened with the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their land which is recognized in international law as the national home of the Jewish people alone, as we shall see shortly.

An American justice provides strong support for our position – a Jew who sits on the Federal Appellate Court, Richard Posner, who wrote a scathing critique of the judicial theory of retired Israeli High Court Justice Aharon Barak. Posner’s critique appeared in an article written on the English edition of Barak’s book Judge in a Democratic Society.

The article was published in the New Republic and in it, Posner attacks Barak in the sharpest language: “Barak establishes a world record for judicial hubris,”(...) He is a legal buccaneer”.  According to Posner, his writing is “to be considered Exhibit A for why American judges should be extremely wary about citing foreign judicial decisions.[…]”

“What Barak created out of whole cloth was a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices […]But only in Israel (as far as I know) do judges confer the power of abstract review on themselves, without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision. One is reminded of Napoleon's taking the crown out of the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.”

Let us return to the central issue: Is a Jew living in Israel in areas that were liberated by the Israeli Army in 1967 indeed a foreign occupier who is violating the Geneva Convention designed to protect human rights, to prevent the theft and dispossession of an occupied people?

And in the Land of Israel under the international law in effect today , is the Jew a foreign occupier of a territory that does not belong to him, but to a state that does not exist and never existed, a state called by the name of Palestine?

In the words of its own heads such as Yassar Arafat, Faisal Husseini, Zuhair Mohsen of the terror organization Al Saika, and even former Knesset member Azmi Bashara - all of it was invented for no other purpose than to be a Trojan horse whose reason for existing is to destroy the state of Israel.

Only a week ago, one of the Hamas leaders from Gaza was photographed imploring Egypt and complaining of the lack of raw materials. He says: We are all brothers. Half of the PA Arab families in Gaza are called al-Masri, meaning from Egypt, and they come from Egypt and the other half from Saudia Arabia. The film may be seen on Youtube.

Dr. Ohana-Arnon, in his article on the origin of the Arab immigrants, says: “Palestinian society is built on a clan or hamula system. The origin of the hamula can be learned from its name: the al-Masri hamula is from Egypt., al-Hindi from India, al-Mugrabi from Algeria, al-Ajami from Iran, al-Turki from Turkey., al-Hawari from Hawara in northern Sudan, now living in Nazareth. Al-Araqi is from Iraq (they settled in the Israeli cities of Tira and Taibeh). Abu-Kask is from Egypt settled (in the inner coastal region) Huran from Mt. Huran – Mt. Druzim south of Damascus, Bushnak from Bosnia (now in Caesarea). Masarwa –from Egypt. Habash from Ethiopia, now in Lod. Barnawi from Borno in Nigeria, now in Jerusalem, Turkeman from the Causcasus.

Not all of the Arabs in the land of Israel are immigrants, but it is foolish to ignore two basic facts: first: that from the late 19th century and until the British mandate, there was a great wave of Arab migration towards Israel, and the second – that in order to create a significant “refugee problem” UNWRA determined in an arbitrary and unprecedented manner that only two years of residence in the country before 1948 is sufficient to define a person as a Palestinian refugee for all of his life, allowing him and his descendants to demand the “right of return.

The world’s enthusiasm for the Palestinian issue does not attest to a sense of justice but to a fervent hatred of Israel. The nations say: “Let us go and destroy them from among the nations, and the name of Israel shall no longer be remembered”. This is the garden-variety brand of anti-Semitism, which must inevitably bounce back to those who launch it, when they will feel remorse and shame. The punishment for nations who try to dispossess the people of Israel from God’s land and take it over is written many times in the Book of Books. I will just refer you to one chapter regarding the nations being judged in the Valley of Jehosaphat, from the Book of Joel, chapter 4:

1 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring back the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
2 I will gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there for My people and for My heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and divided My land.
12 Let the nations be stirred up, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all the nations round about.
16 And the LORD shall roar from Zion, and utter His voice from Jerusalem, and the heavens and the earth shall shake; but the LORD will be a refuge unto His people, and a stronghold to the children of Israel.
17 So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God, dwelling in Zion My holy mountain; then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.

This is the question that confronts us here too. Did the Jews conquer a country which was not theirs and mistreat the original inhabitants? Or perhaps it is exactly the opposite: the Arabs’ continuing conquest of the Land of Israel and now of Europe as well is the topic of the discussion.

The foreign occupation is Arab occupation – and it doesn’t matter if it began in the 7th century. The Ottoman conquest was stopped in Vienna in 1683, the Moslems conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and were expelled from there hundreds of years later in the Reconquista. Rome occupied Israel and destroyed the Holy Temple on the Temple Mount in the year 70, expelling al the Jews from their land.

Everything that has been happening since is a continuation of this conquest and occupation. Each time there has been a new conqueror and occupier until the present day when the true owners of the land are finally returning and putting an end to a 2000 year occupation.

The God of Israel who has a design for human history- the God of the universe keeps an account. An account of every Jew who perished in the Holocaust, as well as in Egypt under the Pharaohs who embedded Jewish infants in bricks.

Wherever they hurt, strangled, and slaughtered Jews, the God who keeps accounts will come and when it pleases Him, He will exact payment. About that, we have no doubts...

Gunter Grass is a friend of the radical left in Israel. Grass likes to cite the influence of Israeli writer Amos Oz on the subject of Israel. The Israeli leftists deny the natural and normal right of self-defense to the State of Israel, like Charles de Gaulle who denied Israel the right to the first shot. No one denies Israel its classic right to be the victim.

Even if Israel were destroyed - God forbid - by Iran, it would not have the moral right to make a second strike, according to the Goldstone Report. Just like the Turkish response to our stopping the flotilla to Gaza, so would be the nations of the world’s reaction to an Israeli victory over Iran. That is a very sick thought.

Professor Alan Dershowitz said in his interview: “First I want to say that those Israelis are not only the greatest enemies of Israel; they are also the most dangerous”. He mentions names and adds: “These are all people who wrap themselves in the Israeli flag just so they can burn it”.

The State of Israel has been radically poisoned by accusations of occupation until it does not notice that it itself has been occupied by groups of assimilated or kowtowing Jews.

That is not to mention the anarchists who criticize us every day of the year organized and funded by authorities who turn a blind eye and abandon the army to their provocations. Israel has wittingly and unwittingly opened its gates wide to all that seek her destruction. And that is not just a metaphor. Other examples are encouraging the illegal African immigrants who come to Israel by the thousands, flooding the country

But look at yourselves in Europe today. How did you get to where you are? Was it those ideologies that deny nationalism under the guise of multiculturalism, inventing the obligation to identify with the legitimacy of the enemy’s narrative and obliterating truth as a basic tool of human existence.

Have they not destroyed morality, law, science, and the economy?

Have they not destroyed the culture of the West?

The radical left argues that nationalism, all nationalism, is the religion of the murderers. Now all over Europe we are hearing more and more voices of regret over the multicultural tactic which means Europe surrendering without firing a shot. That is the main reason that the Right is winning elections in European countries such as France, and the reason that I was invited here.

But those sleeping European leaders continue, they still continue to encourage the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the enormous resources they possess. They invest hundreds of billions into a black hole. As long as this contradiction exits, Europe will continue to turn into Eurabia.

Cosmopolitan perceptions open the doors of Europe to millions of work immigrants and give them the rights of citizens. Very soon there will be no Europe, as your host city proves. Why is the false claim that “Islam is shaking off the post-colonial conquest in Europe” not accepted in Europe, and why is it applied to Israel as an occupying nation? What is this double standard of morality?

Indeed, one of the examples of international law in the view of universal justice is found in the Bible. Certainly an enlightened individual would ask himself what is the validity of the Bible. What is the validity of God? Has he left His job or changed the rules and forgot to inform us?

Is the Bible the last refuge of the scoundrel? Church heads in the Middle East as well as extreme rightwing Islamists maintain that the Jews of today have no connection to the nation mentioned in the Bible! And indeed these things are examined every day.

The very fact that there are six million Jews in the Land of Israel today organized into a state and not like ashes that were spewed out at Auschwitz and scattered over the continent is perhaps proof that God’s power is greater than the power of all the enemies of Israel from within and from without. If so, who is right? Does justice represent only the entity by whose hand it is suppressed? Does it represent only might and woe to the vanquished?

In 1947 the Arabs refused the UN General Assembly proposal to partition the Land of Israel into two states. A recommendation which was not accepted as a decision. It was refused and the seven Arab countries launched a war against the State of Israel on its first day of existence. Israel had accepted the recommendation to partition. The Arabs were defeated in battle as usual.

But Jordan illegally occupied the territory that was designated for an Arab state that didn’t exist and never had. This occupation was recognized only by Pakistan and Great Britain. When Jordan was defeated in 1967, and expelled from the territory by the State of Israel, the territory reverted to its original owners both according to the Bible and to positivist international law of today.

What is interesting here is international law and Israel did restore to itself the territory that Britain had received as a mandate in 1920 from the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference, a mandate for a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. Without infringing upon the personal rights and religious rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land, namely the Arabs. That is the legal status to this day.

Appearing on the website of the Land of Israel loyalists is a document, written by Yoel Lerner, a student of the legal expert Howard Grief together with Gedalia Glazar, that shows the continuity of international law and conventions on this subject.

The one who conquers territory from a conqueror wins that area. We Jews say that what is called potentially Palestine under the partition proposal known as resolution 181 was purified through Abdullah father of Hussein and with the defeat of his son , and his willing surrender of the West Bank in 1988. And the Peace Agreement between Israel and Jordan 1994, according to which Jordan gave up all her claims in the west bank.

We are not occupiers in our own homeland. That was also said by Netanyahu in his speech to both Houses of Congress last year. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the same thing, thanks to the organization that we have established “the Land of Israel Loyalists” developed by legal scholars Howard Grief, Eliav Shochetman, and Talya Einhorn.

However, because Israel law has been occupied by the left, and for other psycho-political reasons, Israel has generally refrained from using these arguments because it feels that rights which are based on the Bible are not suited to an enlightened state.

The State of Israel’s obsessive pursuit of peace, peace until the last Jew, is a dangerous compulsion that inflames the hatred of our enemies and intensifies all future war.

At times it seems that for an unattainable peace, Israel is prepared to risk the lives of its citizens and to hand over its God-given land to its enemies, not only as a recognition of the value of peace but as a desire for legitimacy which it seeks from the nations of the world, especially from its neighbors. King David, the poet of the psalms, related to this in his psalm about neighbors and peace, for example in Psalm 120:

1 A Song of Ascents.
In my distress I called unto the LORD, and He answered me.
2 O LORD, deliver my soul from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue.
3 What shall be given unto thee, and what shall be done more unto thee, thou deceitful tongue?
4 Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of broom.
5 Woe is me, that I sojourn with Meshech, that I dwell beside the tents of Kedar!
6 My soul hath full long had her dwelling with him that hates peace.
7 I am all peace; but when I speak, they are for war.

That is why the State of Israel has been making a mistake ever since it was established when it makes so-called peace its top priority as an attainable goal, instead of decisively defeating the enemy that sees peace as only a strategy to improve their ability to destroy us.

Islam is rife with concepts involving deception such as Hudna and Tahadia which are proof of Mohammed betraying the tribe of Qurayish and his treachery against the tribes of Jews at Khayber as a symbol of his ethics in dealing with my people, the people of the Book.

To this very day the Battle of Khaybar serves as source of inspiration for Moslem soldiers in their wars, especially against Israel. During the first intifada the demonstrators shouted slogans like “Khaybar Khaybar ya yehud, Jaish Mihammad sa-yaud” meaning “Remember Khaybar, Jews, Muhammad’s army will yet return” or “Khaybar, Khaybar Jews, to Palestine we will yet return”.

Therefore one cannot sign any peace treaty with followers of Muhammad. No hudna or tahadia can be the basis of negotiations. Who in the Jewish side negotiating even tactically on the basis of these concepts can assume responsibility for the consequences of these so-called agreements, such as for example, the peace treaty with Egypt which is collapsing now with a great crash.

Peace is not a strategy. 

In conclusion, I will relate in brief to the status of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel under international law. This is in complete contradiction of the false and malicious propaganda that is poisoning the entire world as though the Jewish people, acting through its representative the State of Israel, is acting in violation of international law.

It began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 through the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement in 1919, which is the only Jewish-Arab peace agreement, then to the important resolutions of the San Remo Conference in 1920 where the international community gave the Jewish people a national homeland which included both banks of the Jordan River.

Great Britain, acting according to its standard norm, betrayed this idea in 1922 and tore off the east bank of the Jordan from the Jewish national homeland. Even after this deed of “perfidious Albion”, the resolution was approved - that the entire west bank of the Jordan belongs to the Jewish people as a national home.

According to senior jurists, this decision is in effect and binding to this very day. It was ratified among other places in Article 80 of the UN charter which recognized all of the resolutions that under the Mandate had given rights as binding resolutions.

In contrast, the 1947 partition plan was a recommendation of the UN Assembly only and remained a recommendation which was even rejected by the Arabs who responded by launching a war against Israel that very day to annihilate it. This is what caused the refugee problem which they carefully preserve to this day to use as a weapon against the state of Israel and the Jewish people and to rob the public funds.

The claims that the State of Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention under which one is prohibited from expelling a population and settling another in its stead are propaganda slogans with no basis in law. As one of the top legal experts in the world has said, this is the irony of the absurd, because Israel expelled no one from the occupied territories of a state.

The 'settlers' went joyfully to settle in their own land as part of the Divine process of Redemption ...

Those who call themselves Palestinians are not a people and they have no state. No one displaced them. Indeed, the opposite is true – Israel rehabilitated them and gave them a chance to live normal lives. The only ones in the Middle East who live this way, in what is known the Arab space, act in submission to incitement and extreme ingratitude, and use their usual culture of falsehood to fight Israel.

The Middle East has indeed collapsed.

The San Remo agreements fell because the artificial states that were created as a result of the temporary victory of the Allies in World War I was obliterated by everything that happened in the Middle East.

States like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq are in various stages of disintegration mainly because of their own tribal rivalries and internal religious wars.

The West did manage to maintain the situation for some one hundred years through a system of bribery. But now the end has come, together with the Arab Spring.

It is still not clear what will happen in Egypt except for chaos, but the West bears heavy responsibility for what is happening in Syria and Iraq. The fall of the Qadaffi regime has repercussions all over Africa and is causing continued bloodshed that no one can solve. The UN as usual shows itself to be a factor that encourages wars and not a peace maker.

Let the Arab and Moslem nationalists return to their national habitat, and the Jews to theirs, as Abraham divided the lands between himself and his nephew Lot and between Ishmael and his brothers, and peace and truth may you love for the sake of G-d's name.

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2012-04-30

A Covenant with Death

A_covenant_with_death


 טו  כִּי אֲמַרְתֶּם, כָּרַתְנוּ בְרִית אֶת-מָוֶת, וְעִם-שְׁאוֹל, עָשִׂינוּ חֹזֶה; שיט (שׁוֹט) שׁוֹטֵף כִּי-עבר (יַעֲבֹר) לֹא יְבוֹאֵנוּ, כִּי שַׂמְנוּ כָזָב מַחְסֵנוּ וּבַשֶּׁקֶר נִסְתָּרְנוּ.

'We have made a covenant with death, and with the nether-world are we at agreement; when the scouring scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood have we hid ourselves';

Isaiah Chapter 28 יְשַׁעְיָהוּ
Verse 15

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