Long-time Alliance member Dick Lane responds to ‘The deafening silence of intellectuals in the face of growing global conflicts‘ from The Real News, which says ‘intellectuals should… not shrink from denouncing what they see as destructive of culture, values, and truth, notably when such destruction claims to be carried out in the name of these “domains of spirit.”
I’ll add my two cents.
A long friend of mine just reached me from Toronto, having escaped with his family, wife and three children from Belarus, his place of birth 40 some years ago. He was a child of Chernobyl. His wife is Ukrainian. He has many Russian relatives. His family is a survivor of the three way conflict of Stalin’s regime, the Ukrainian years of starvation by Stalin, the invasion of Nazi Germany (where only a third of Belorussians survived the war). His family is Jewish, and many did not survive the holocaust, or the pogroms.
There was a brief respite after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Putin is attempting to reclaim all the lies and promises of the Soviet past. There has been over a century of the modern horrors of communism…and the Nazis and fascism. It has come at these peoples from all three sides. I know the story of former Soviet Georgia, Georgian too. Not even to mention Hungary, Poland, East Germany, and their peoples. And the Romani.
It’s a human sickness. No intellectual bent has ever solved it, certainly not through political screeds. The mindset biases prove it every time.
So. Here we are in the U.S. There are no answers. Our leaders are never without fault. And we’ve been on the edge of nuclear war now ever since science brought us nuclear weapons. There are too many of us, filled with too much cultural bias, and intellectual arguments to boot. On all sides (how many can we count?).
It’s sickening to see.
Meanwhile the natural world all around us is being killed by our ignorance and our societies. We see it, but how many of us are really paying attention. We’ve separated our modern cultures from the living Earth by our taught illusions. There’s nothing wrong with you and I that we can’t fix, but our 21st century world of corporations, machines, ideologies, and greed for more is near done. What have we learned from the disaster that we call the 20th century that helped to bring us to this point? Not much, apparently.
The problem is modern humanity, the artificiality of planners, the intellectuals, the politicians, the base of growth at all costs (profit motive of the corporate world), now global. If we’re lucky it will collapse, this illusory house of cards, before many more years pass. And that will be very hard.
Otherwise, though, we’ll keep destroying this living world, us, only one of so many species, but none of those other species at fault.
I have grandchildren. I wish for them that they learn with their own minds, not this modern world of ideologies and cults. From everything that is good. Mind/Heart/Physical Being/Spirit, not separate. Enough of greed, the sick ideology of perpetual growth, fear of others, and all those who rationalize it.
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