Thursday, January 12, 2017

What does calm feel like?

.

I am driven. My energy and my focus do not match my expectations. I need
always to be improving, making, doing. What makes me so compulsive? So
demanding? So malcontent when I am staring into space?

I think it is fear. Fear of being forgotten, of having nothing, of
regretting at some future time that I might have been preparing and
there was time for me to prepare and I was doing nothing. I think I fear
the blank mind which slows down until it is numb. I fear that I did not
live my life completely and as fully as I was able. I fear not having
done the work that would advance my plans, bring me praise, raise my
status, and infuse the world with good memories of me. I fear losing a
chance to have feelings that might bind me to life and living things and
the love of the cosmos. I want to die with a full mind, a full heart,
after a life lived fully.

Is this a necessary emotional logic? The yogis of India teach methods to
overcome the wants of the body and the ambitions of the heart. Buddha
taught us to live for others and want nothing. These methods teach us
not to fill time with business and productivity, but to fill our time
with NOTHING. To exercise, feed and clothe ourselves, and meditate.
Those who do, they tell us, will escape the rat race of material want,
appetite, and ambition. The living beings on Earth now are trapped in a
cycle of unhappy suffering - "samsara" - suffering that only those who
train their minds and bodies can escape.

Trauma has driven me to fear - to fear loss of control over myself, to
fear the intentions of others, to fear the actions by which I might
prove myself competent or improve the lives of others. Trauma has
confused me, complicated my mind and my heart, and has compelled the
anxiety which drives me. Trauma and calm oppose each other.


--

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

The Friendly Fascist

January 4, 2017

In this excerpt of an interview by Al Letson from Reveal, (https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/a-frank-conversation-with-a-white-nationalist/) Richard Spencer discusses his aspiration for a white ethno-state. We can be grateful that he has spoken so clearly and candidly, because before he demands respect and fairness for his point of view, he has already declared his disdain for fairness and love of domination. Has anyone not heard the story of the scorpion and the frog?
                                                                                                                                                               

Richard Spencer:
...
Fairness has never been really a great value in my mind. I like greatness and winning and dominance and beauty. Those are values. Not really fairness.
...
I think whites are going to be, they're going to have an amplification of their consciousness of being white. That this whole process we're experiencing is not going to bring about racelessness. It's going to bring about a new consciousness amongst white people that actually wasn't there before.
...
But I think the only way forward is through identity politics. And the only way forward for my people, for us to survive and thrive, is by having a sense of identity. And I don't know what the future is going to hold, but we need that.
...
I don't know how history is going to unfold. What I do know is that for my people to survive we have to have a sense of who we are. We have to have identity. And we don't always have it. We don't have an ethnic racial consciousness. Now in terms of an ethnostate, I don't know how that will be possible.
...
What the ethnostate is, is an ideal. It's a thing, it's a way of thinking about we want a new type of society that would actually be a homeland for all white people. All European people. So that would include Slavs, that would include Germans, that would include Latins, it who would include people of all ethnicities that we would always have a safe space. We would always have a homeland for us.
...
But the thing is, I know that in my lifetime I'm going to have opportunities to fight for the survival of my people and my civilization.


Al Letson: What's the difference between you and the Klansmen that burned crosses on peoples lawns? What's the difference between you and you know, the people who don't look at me, an African-American man, as a full human being? Like what's the difference? …  to me it just sounds like the same old thing that I've heard before in a different packaging.

Richard Spencer: Well, I don't think it is the same old thing we've heard before. I think you just said that it's not. That you're actually intrigued by it. I don't, you know, look I'm not going to comment about you know some hypothetical Klansman or whomever.

Al Letson: There's no such thing as a hypothetical Klansman because the people that I'm talking about exist. They have gone out, they have burned crosses on people's lawns. They have lynched people. They've done horrible horrible things. They are the first American terrorists. So it's not hypothetical. I'm not comparing you to this thing that I'm just dreaming up. I'm comparing you to history. And I'm not intrigued by your ideas. I'm saying to you that like your ideas sound just like them, except you wear a nice suit and you can speak to me directly. And I respect that about you. I respect that you and I can have this conversation, that you're not wearing a hood, but it's the same thing. And that's so that's what I'm asking. Like what is the difference?

Richard Spencer: I'm sure there is some commonality between these movements of the past and what I'm talking about. But you really have to judge me on my own terms. Like I am not those people and I don't fully know, I don't know in the specifics of what you're referring to. Like I am who I am. And you, if you're going to treat me with good faith, you have to listen to what I'm saying and listen to my ideas. I think someone who would go down the path of becoming a Klansman or something in 2016, I think that is, those people are very different than I am. It's, it's a it's a non-starter. I think we need an idea. We need a movement that really resonates with where we are right now.
...
If you ask your average white person in America, "Who are you?" they are going to probably never get around to talking about their European identity or their heritage. They're afraid of it. They know it. Everyone's kind of racially unconscious. They know it in their bones but they're not conscious. They don't want to really talk about it and explore it and think about how that inflects their life. So that's what I want to bring. I respect your identity. I respect the fact that you think about it seriously, that you take it seriously. I want white people to take it seriously. In terms of what I was talking about of like we're going to do this together. I think that I want to see an identitarian future. I want to see people, different peoples, different civilizations having a sense of themselves and finding out ways to live together.


Al Letson: But a white ethnostate is not people living together. What you're saying to me now is different from what you said before because what you said before would basically mean that I would live in one state and my son, my white son, would have to live in another state. You know, for me when we talk about like my blackness and me saying that I'm an African-American man. It's true. I am proud of my blackness but I'm not advocating for ethnostate. So I want to respect you as a white man. I see that. I understand that history. I want you to respect me as a black man and see that and understand that history and then figure how we move forward together. That's the difference between me and you is that I want to move forward together. And you feel like those fissures that are between us are too big to pass over.

Richard Spencer: I have to be honest. I think we actually kind of hate each other. And that is a very tragic thing. And that's a very sad thing. And we don't trust each other. And we can talk about how one day we're going to all be holding hands, or we can actually be realistic about this and we can actually look at the power of human nature and the power of race.

                                                                                                                                                               

I heard his ideas, and he is happy with the idea of dominating other people. So how does he deserve to be respected for who he is, when he does not offer the same respect to others? How is he entitled to be taken for his ideas when he is asking us to do so as a distraction from the similarity between his ideas and the ideas of the Klansmen and people who lynched black people? How can we have "ways to live together" when he has already told us that as soon as he is able he is going to come and obliterate us?

Richard Spencer is from that breed of humans who have no interest in a common humanity, a sustainable culture, the idea of a social  contract, or a healthy planet for all of life. He sees only a hostile world around him and therefore we garner pure hostility. Given a chance, he will come for people with peace in their hearts, who would happily share their wealth with anyone, not to share but to take, killing them-us. We cannot negotiate with him or his ilk. If they come to kill us, passivism will not win the day. We will have to take up arms and answer his hate with hate. It might kill us. But would you leave the planet to such a man?

I do not advocate preemptive anything. That such sentiments have currency is deeply disturbing, but we can put some trust in the reasonableness of most of humanity, and try to avoid increasing the numbers of his followers, by working for sustainable, meaningful lives.