Re: A link that's suggestive of our survival associations here...
Geschrieben von BBouvier am 09. Oktober 2005 13:47:52:
Als Antwort auf: A link that's suggestive of our survival associations here... geschrieben von basecampUSA am 09. Oktober 2005 03:37:26:
Hallo, Basecamp!
"These are people who were slaughtered
by the Communists
during the Civil War," he said.
"This is what they will do again
if they have the opportunity.
We study this every night so we never forget.
We must do everything necessary to keep our families safe."
Nach den Schauungen werden sie es.
Aber uns wird im TV pausenlos erzählt,
die nationalen Spanier seien die "Bösen" gewesen.
Was im Umkehrschluss die Kommies zu den
"Guten" macht.
Mit diesen Internationalisten
waren nämlich die US im Bunde.Gruss,
BB
>The Rights of Survivors
>By Richard Thieme
>There are moments when we find ourselves face-to-face with unmitigated evil and - surrendering our innocence and fantasies of a disneyland life - we see the truth of the human heart.
>When I was twenty-one, I lived in Madrid, Spain, in a fascist regime overseen by Francisco Franco, with whose help Hitler had practiced blitzkriegs in preparation for war.
>I found myself on an all-day train ride from Cordoba to Grenada. The wooden cars often halted for long periods of time. I was in a compartment with two members of the state police, the Guardia Civil. There were pairs of them on every train, plane, and bus, every platform, every station. Their job was to search the faces that streamed past them for recognizable enemies of the state.
>Over the hours, I engaged in conversation with one of the guards. Suddenly he said, "Do you want to know why we must remain vigilant?"
>I said sure.
>He reached into his case and brought out a thick book. He crossed to my bench and sat next to me, leaning close. For an hour he turned page after page, showing me hundreds of photographs of mutilated heads. Faces shot away, skulls broken, faces with vacant staring eyes.
>"These are people who were slaughtered by the Communists during the Civil War," he said. "This is what they will do again if they have the opportunity. We study this every night so we never forget. We must do everything necessary to keep our families safe."
>So we do not minimize, do we, what human beings who believe, who know that they are right, will do to one another? Sometimes their motivation stems from nothing more complicated than the desire to survive.
>Back in the fifties, a neighbor proudly showed off her new bomb shelter. Hardened against nuclear explosions, with its own food and fuel supply, the shelter cost a pretty penny.
>Another neighbor on the tour said to me aside, "If the bomb falls, all rules are off anyway. I'll just get a gun and take theirs."
>When I left the ordained ministry, some members of the church were confused, as if my decision threatened their faith. One waited several months before asking if I still believed in God. I thought, how do I do justice both to the depths of my religious experience and the realities of life on our planet?
>"Yes," I said. "I believe that God exists. But that doesn't mean," I added, "that things aren't as bad as they look."
>Survivalists at their most extreme are preparing to hunker down for Armageddon and kill anyone who comes too close. While that's a far cry from libertarian philosophy, I sometimes hear their echoes in the seeming indifference of libertarians to the obligations of community, the imperatives of the net in which so many libertarians are at home.
>Libertarians love cyberspace, with its metaphor of the frontier, its wide-open spaces, and its grandiose illusions of autonomy. Cyberspace is the simulation of a world in which we seem to be on our own, as if rules don't apply out here on the edge.
>New political parties always embody the economic and social factors that give them rise. The libertarian movement is one version of the devolution of centralized authority into smaller units, a devolution driven by technological change. In the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, even Great Britain with its outer edges - Scotland, Ireland, Wales - demanding greater autonomy, the process is simply more obvious.
>Many American voters see little difference between the Republican and Democratic parties except at their edges. The Libertarian movement, riding the technological changes that are flattening hierarchical structures around the world, is the right place for technocrats who want to be fiercely autonomous.
>Of course, the truth is seldom simple, and the much heralded flattening of structures can also be seen as the widening of branches on tall fractal trees that are bigger than ever. Global hierarchical structures, coalescing around the convergence of self interest among those whose decisions move economies if not mountains, are a more certain consequence of the computer revolution than the fantasies of the virtual frontier.
>Some libertarians paint a picture of the Ticking Year 2000 Bomb that rivals the nuclear doom of the fifties. They advocate the kind of survivalism - guns, canned goods, and a hideout in red rock country - that my neighbor had in mind when he looked over that bomb shelter and decided he would take it.
>At the other extreme, in the minds of those for whom the state is supreme and the individual an inconvenient abstraction, plans for martial law are already on the books, just in case. That's a more communal way of saying that anything can happen, and we must be ready to use any means necessary to protect the state.
>Real survivalism is communal, a fact that ought to be obvious to the denizens of cyberspace. The Internet that weaves such a compelling illusion of autonomy is a community of nested communities. Plug computers into one another and community happens. As language once determined that we could not consider someone fully human unless they spoke the dialect of the tribe, computerized networks increasingly determine that we are not fully human unless we are woven into the fabric of the wired world.
>In essence, computer networks are social. Networked people live in a symbiotic relationship with networked computers. But it is the people that define the system, because human beings are the field of subjectivity that gives it meaning.
>The Net gives us permission to be autonomous and free in new ways, but that permission is contingent. Liberty is not license, and rights without the acceptance of responsibilities do not long endure. To be fully human, we must recognize that securing another's good is axiomatic to securing our own. Neither anarchy nor fascism ensures the security of interdependence or the real autonomy that we experience when we act as if our self-interest is always mutual.
> http://www.thiemeworks.com/islands/archive/19980627.html
>-Basey (Einer der Gemeinschaft der survival-Solisten)