tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post5897301233824508522..comments2023-10-21T08:02:56.571-07:00Comments on No Dhimmitude: Agon and Eros: Memorial DayDaghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-46391963027233015272010-05-31T23:14:33.953-07:002010-05-31T23:14:33.953-07:00I don't see the comment Truepeers just left he...I don't see the comment Truepeers just left here, so I'm going to post it myself:<br /><br />Truepeers writes:<br /><br />I'll just re-iterate that Stalin and highland warrior culture are not at all the same thing. Surely your Highland ancestors would have been revolted at the totally unmanly approach to kiling of Stalin. Orkney Dag, yes! Dag Stalin, oh no!!<br /><br />Tribal warriors have a real cause - their own and their own honour and integrity; Stalin did not have a real cause by any realistic measure and no amount of killing would change that except more deeply to destroy his own. At a certain point the destructive means made available by modernity become "ends" in themselves. And that's sign of a failed religion by any standard.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-47975947382478935832010-05-31T15:00:11.939-07:002010-05-31T15:00:11.939-07:00Stalin, it seems to me, was a Persian at heart. Th...Stalin, it seems to me, was a Persian at heart. There's no Achilles in him. Stalin was no warrior at all, not a hero, not a man who fought, just a murderer. He was passive. We can see his fatalism in the day following the German invasion of Russia, a functionary announcing it to him, Stalin rising from his chair in the expectation that he'd be summarily executed. He had no "battle" in him. He had only murder. Thus, he could exterminate millions or one or two with the same cruel dispassion, even die himself, passively. It would never occur to him to chase Hector around the walls of the city and kill him and drag his carcass around in the dirt as a sign of contempt for his enemy. To do that is to recognise the worth of an enemy, to spoil that worth in front of the world. Stalin had no poetry in him. So it is with the dhimmis who long for meaning where they have none. <br /><br />Those with poetry, even if it comes as blood-lust and battle or through making in machinery and works, have the eros of life in them. They can work in the mundane world and find in it satisfaction in conquering and making things work, whether the death of neighbours or the raising of coal from the ground. There is a capacity for meaning in such things, but none in murder. So it is that the slave empires have to keep killing: to fill the void with meaningless vapours. Slaves don't have meaning, like a meal of sugar-water. But to kill the Campbells! That is meaningful. <br /><br />Modernity can be a meaningless slavery in which one has no poetry. It would be a meaninglessness due to the slave needing a master, himself being unworthy of mastering himself. He might look for a meaningless master such as Stalin or Hitler to give him an illusion of meaning, dying to make it purposeful in spite of the emptiness of the hollow master's vapours, i.e the slave's self. So they go, and they die sometimes, and they pretend to be meaningful and they hate those who are truly fulfilled, I'd love to battle them in the flesh, if only there were a Hector among them to degrade afterward.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-49524791207645289112010-05-31T14:38:37.892-07:002010-05-31T14:38:37.892-07:00I'll just re-iterate that Stalin and highland ...I'll just re-iterate that Stalin and highland warrior culture are not at all the same thing. Surely your Highland ancestors would have been revolted at the totally unmanly approach to kiling of Stalin. Orkney Dag, yes! Dag Stalin, oh no!!<br /><br />Tribal warriors have a real cause - their own and their own honour and integrity; Stalin did not have a real cause by any realistic measure and no amount of killing would change that except more deeply to destroy his own. At a certain point the destructive means made available by modernity become "ends" in themselves. And that's sign of a failed religion by any standard.truepeershttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16401984575637492845noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-6328904560899999692010-05-31T14:26:49.640-07:002010-05-31T14:26:49.640-07:00The struggle to overcome our love of battle and mu...The struggle to overcome our love of battle and murder and death was fitted into Puritan religion, which makes our religion a fierce thing, a creative and world-dominating personality on the earth. All that war goes into conquering the earth itself. Machinery and making and hard ideas made real on the land and seas, into the universe. Three men survived the Battle of the Shirts because the sun went down and they couldn't stand up in the darkness to continue killing. Transcending that lust and turning it against Nature makes Modernity. <br /><br />Turning that eros to the agon of the world and seeing in that the Jews, that turns me, if not others, into a battling man for Good, not good myself but in love with those who are. I could call it the best of both worlds.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13144649.post-86700605070639213992010-05-31T14:13:30.468-07:002010-05-31T14:13:30.468-07:00When the question arises how to create and maintai...When the question arises how to create and maintain a Jewish Israel, I defer to those Jews who act on it, myself not being Jewish in any sense. But that's not the question I'm concerned with here: I concern myself with, personally, my own debt as a culture inheritor, one saved from my own life as removed by only a few generations from Island Highland tribalism and warrior ethos through the imposition, willing and demanded, of a rigid Puritanism that keeps us, at times, from our too easily embraced blood-lust. Thank God for God, I might say. Because of that, and because I, (and so many of my own,) am still a barely contained barbarian filled with lust for war, I find myself indebted to those who save me and mine from ourselves, i.e. the Jews. <br /><br />But I can't be Jewish myself. I can be that barbarian with a lust for blood and death who, on the edges of the world, does battle for the Good because it's available, it being done regardless.Daghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10664271893389366772noreply@blogger.com