Apocalypse Now
A forking of history is the time of instability. It is
the time when even a puny effort of a lone man can
change things.
On the green lawns of Hyde Park an old tramp walks about
and carries a scruffy cardboard poster, ‘The End is
Nigh’. He has done it for years, if he is still the same
tramp I spotted some thirty years ago. But a broken
clock will sooner or later show the right time. Could it
be that this ominous moment has arrived? The magic
pentagram has been broken and Tower of Babel had
collapsed on 9/11. Jews lord over the Holy land. Dollar
is high, but the creativity of Christendom reached its
nadir; its shops are full but the churches are empty;
there are many dealers, wheelers and brokers, but no new
artists, poets, saints. Floods and draughts, summer
snows and winter heat, poisoned rivers and dried-up
lakes remind us that our Mother Earth is very, very ill.
The Apocalypse is now, many people felt vividly during
last months.
Justin Raimondo wrote last week of a piece in the Weekly
World News, “that ludicrously lurid tabloid no one will
admit to reading on the supermarket check-out line, and
its oddly prescient story: "Face of Satan Photographed
Over US Capitol!" There was even a picture that oozed
sheer malevolence: a thin, mocking face that peered out
of a black swirling cloud, manic eyes ablaze and the
mouth twisted into a satanic sneer. The Weekly quotes
"one unidentified veteran CIA operative" as saying: "The
image is a portrait of terror unlike anything we've ever
seen in this country. Is it something supernatural? Is
it some kind of life form? Is it - and hell yes, I'll
ask the question - is it Satan himself?" [i]
This feeling, once a sole preserve of highly imaginative
and sensitive persons, or devoted readers of the Weekly
World News, now splashes across the social checkerboard.
In Moscow and New York, Jerusalem and Baghdad, Paris and
Berlin, secular and practical people greet each other
with the question, ‘Is it the end of the world?’
- Yes, it is, - replied to this question an important
American philosopher, Immanuel Wallerstein, but added a
careful caveat in the title of the aptly named book, The
End of the World as We Know It [ii]. He came to the
conclusion that a very long period of human history has
reached now an unpredictable end. The world as we, or
our parents and grandparents, know it is about to end,
indeed.
Wallerstein thinks ‘the world as we know it’ came into
being some 500 years ago in the Western Europe and has
come to its crescendo in the United States of America.
It is characterised by a specific aberration of human
development, called ‘Progress’. Wallerstein bravely
refused to accept the axiom of ‘unavoidable positive
development’, and stated, it wasn’t a necessary process,
but a negative development. In plain words, this
development is a celebration of unlimited greed and
domination drive, a denial of God and Man.
This development caused the great destruction of nature
and society, has ran its course and brought us to the
brink of the abyss. Probably we would have arrived there
long ago, under the Iron Heel of the oligarchy, as Jack
London felt in 1910, but the Russian Revolution of 1917
shook the world and offered an alternative, writes
Wallerstein. That is why peoples of the Western Europe
and North America had a chance to form their welfare
society with prominent middle class and rather content
workers, while the Third World got a respite from
punitive actions and colonial conquests. Before 1917,
England did not hesitate to shell a Japanese city of
Shimonoseki as a revenge for assassination of the
British diplomat. Before 1917, social differences in the
European society were as big as those in the modern
Third World. After the collapse of the socialist system
in 1991, this great respite of history was over. We are
back at 1914, according to Wallerstein.
It is possible to view the world events in a rather
different light. With all respect due to the Russian
revolution, there was an additional powerful player who
meanwhile changed sides. In the beginning of 20th
century, a new social and spiritual force came into
being. In an article of mine [iii], I called it ‘the
Mammonites’, the worshippers of Mammon. The Mammonites
fought against the old elites across the checkerboard of
the entire world. In Russia, they exterminated and sent
to exile the traditional Russian elites. In England and
Scandinavia, the old elites lost their power due to
advent of social democracy. Germany and Italy had their
elites destroyed in the WWII. As long as the old elites
still existed, the Mammonites were promoting a
pro-equality agenda, and transfer of resources from the
old elites to people in general.
That was the time of great hope. The great force of
Mammonite wealth and networking assisted the forces of
equality, and not too many people gave a thought what
are the true plans of the powerful allies. As long as
the New York bankers, lawyers and media owners supported
the humanist agenda, one could ignore their deeper
thoughts.
After the failed revolution of 1968, the Mammonites
obtained their goals and integrated with the old elites.
Afterwards, they scraped the nice talk of equality and
civil rights; instead, they adopted a new agenda, the
enslavement of man. In a similar way, the bourgeois
utilised the power and anger of the low classes in the
French revolution of 1789. The workers and peasants
removed the old aristocratic elites, and then the new
bourgeois elites gave them the push and took the power
by using the military genius of Napoleon. After 1968,
the relentless History began its new turn.
The Mammonites do not need democracy or welfare state
anymore. Now they need a Napoleon, to entrench their
rule. That is why, after 9/11, the forces of oligarchy
are erasing the Bill of Rights, democratic freedoms, the
UN Charter and international agreements, and create a
new world of few millionaires, a squeezed middle class,
pauperised workers, a powerful army and police. They
plan to emerge unassailable at the end of the turmoil.
But this darkest hour is also a time of hope.
Tomorrow is hidden from our eyes for a good reason. We
have reached now the great bifurcation of history, says
Wallerstein, a historic crossroads, one of those that
happens once in a millennium. By definition, forking is
the time of instability. That is the time when even a
puny effort of a lone man can change things. In the
periods of stability, even huge efforts do not change
much. For a few hundred years, people believed in the
predestined and unavoidable outcome of history: the
Marxist dream or Welfare state or Second Coming. This
time of certainty is over. We could fall into the New
Dark Ages, into one of the bleak anti-Utopias, and our
children will not forgive us for our passivity. We still
could pull and push, and hope for the best.
A Jewish joke tells of two men who failed to move a
trunk as they pushed and pulled in the opposite
directions. Certainly one has to know where and when to
push and pull, otherwise the trunk will stay put. That
is why the following outline is a proposal for
constructive thought and action. The US bombing of al-Jazeera
TV station, coming so soon after their bombing of a Serb
TV, is added proof that words are important. Once, Karl
Marx described human history as a history of class
struggle over ownership of the means of production. I
would describe it as a war of ideas.
We can imagine two great protagonists, familiar to us
from the Book of Job, playing with new ideas on the big
checkerboard. Satan could pervert every idea of God; God
could turn every idea of Satan into a wonderful thing,
i.e. love to the land of Christ caused murderous
Crusades, but materialist Communism brought great
uplifting of hearts. The players have no hands, and it
is our, human task to make moves, to make right choices,
to help God to win the game. Conceited warriors of yore
used to say `God’s with us’. Humble thinkers of the
present, we should say, we are with God.
II
Wallerstein made a heroic effort, not altogether
successful, to describe the end of the world in
materialistic terms. I am not sure whether it is
possible. Our world in general evades such description.
Moreover, I do not think it desirable, for the reasons
stated below. We are conditioned to accept materialistic
reasoning only, and reject explanations that defer to
forces of a different plane. It is an important part of
the aberration that people came to reject the spiritual
component of the world. Until the Aberration the very
idea of a totally materialistic world, explainable by
sheer materialistic laws, would have been an oddity.
Man’s vision of the world varied with time and place,
but it never was so purely materialistic.
The ancient thinkers saw the world as a
spiritual-material, multi-layered continuum where forces
of Good and Evil, Virtues and Sins, Nations and Ideas
have their own semi-independent existence. Sometimes,
these forces were described as gods, or angels, or
demons. The New Testament speaks of the Prince of the
World and other forces that confront Man. St Paul was
aware of troubles to come, as ‘our struggle is not
against flesh and blood, but against the powers of this
dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in
the heavenly realms’ [iv].
Their vision seems to me to be better adapted to
reality. It is easier to explain calamities and
salvation, catastrophes and prosperity by interaction of
different Higher forces, than by purely material factors
or by God’s changes of mood. It is easier to explain why
the Trojan War lasted ten long years by the struggle of
pro-Trojan Gods with pro-Greek ones, allowing for the
pretexts of Helene’s beauty or commercial interests. The
Cold War could be seen as the struggle of the Russian
Communal Spirit with the American Mammon. The
forthcoming WWIII against peoples of the Third World can
be spoken of by a religious mind as ‘Armageddon’.
Serge Averintsev, the prominent modern Russian thinker,
reminds us of the paradox of Biblical faith and asks:
‘How could the omnipresent, transcendental and spiritual
God bless by His Presence a specific place, be it the
Holy of the Holies, or Mary’s womb, body of Jesus the
Man or bread and wine of Eucharist?’ He points out that
it is one of tenets of faith, ‘I will dwell among the
Israelites’ [v], said God of the Old Testament, and the
same verb is used again in Gospels: ‘the Word became
Flesh and has dwelt among us [vi]’. Averintsev reveals a
God-inspired thought: ‘The Prince of the World [vii],
that is, the force hostile to God’s Presence, attempts
to separate Transcendent and Immanent, to close the
doors of Creation in face of Creator, and in this way,
to cleanse Nature from all that is Super-natural. He is
supported by an unwilling ally: that is zealot
theologian rationalism who strives to remove all traces
of popular beliefs or esoteric plurality and to reach
pure transcendentalism [viii]’. It is a deep thought:
Satan supports (or generates) ideas that exclude God’s
Grace from our life.
Coming back to our two protagonists over the
checkerboard, we could say: Satan wins (God save us!)
when all traces of Divine Presence are eliminated from
our world. However, Averintsev missed a point. Nature is
a source of divine inspiration, and God, Who dwelt in
the tents of Israelites and in Mary’s womb, also dwells
in a spring below mountain shrine in the Highlands, as
well. It makes the task of Satan even more formidable,
but he does not shrink from the challenge. He has two
options, to destroy Nature, or to destroy Man’s capacity
to communicate with Nature, and he tries both.
In order to understand the events and the outcome, we
have to make a daring step, one that we were taught not
to make, ever. For 500 years, the material research and
spiritual quest were separated, and we were
indoctrinated in keeping them separate. This proposed
treatment of reality is not the dualistic Manichean
approach now peddled by the proponents of the
Apocalyptic WWIII. There are more shades of grey than a
simple Black and White picture. Let us try and integrate
these two lines, of Immanent and of Transcendent, and
achieve a whole picture of the world.
We shall discover, to our amazement that the two lines
run parallel, as two different languages describing one
reality. For instance, modern re-discovered love of
nature, called by the long word ‘environmentalism’ or by
colour-code ‘green’ could be translated by Christian
society as ‘love of the Virgin Mary’. Indeed,
Dostoyevsky identified Our Mother Earth with the Mother
of God. Destruction of nature could be connected with
rejection of the Virgin. Averintsev’s ‘all traces of
popular beliefs or esoteric plurality’ point to the
local spirits still worshipped by the less materialistic
part of the mankind.
The New World Order is, in religious terms, the
beginning of the Kingdom of Anti-Christ, based on
removal of all spiritual elements from our life. In
practical terms, it is an ambitious attempt of total
enslavement of Man.
III
It is not as easy as it seems. A man is connected by
four ties to this world: he has roots in the native
soil, he belongs to his family, his territorial
community, and to God. While the ties survive, a man can
not be enslaved. These four pivotal points represent the
ancient figure of Cross, as it was depicted by ancestors
of modern Palestinians on the rocks and walls. Long
before it served as a tool of execution, Cross was a
great mystic sign of old, hidden from the laymen. It was
known to Moses, who put a sign of cross on forehead of
his people while the angel of death roamed outside. The
cross is found in the oldest levels of Palestinian and
Egyptian digs.
In the Chalcolithic Age, over five thousand years before
Christ, ancient Palestinians, cave dwellers of Tel Abu
Matar near Beersheba laid the sign of the Cross with
small pebbles, each one of them also carried a sign of
the Cross. ‘The cruciform mark was intended as a sign to
avert evil and give protection’, wrote the noted
archaeologist Jack Finnegan [ix]. In the days of the
Bible, it was called ‘tau’, while Greeks named it ‘chi’.
King David made a sign of the Cross (tau) while in
danger [x] . Prophet Ezekiel [xi] promised salvation to
good people who would lament over injustices committed
(by Sharon and Olmert?) in Jerusalem. These good men
will have their forehead marked with the saving sign of
Cross (it is still done nowadays by Egyptian and
Ethiopian Christians).
The Essenes of the Damascus Covenant quoted these lines
of Ezekiel, as apparently they knew of this ‘sign of
protection, deliverance and salvation’ [xii]. Thus it
was understood by the Church Fathers, Origen and
Tertullian, who could ask their Palestinian
contemporaries. Priests of Jerusalem Temple were
anointed by drawing Cross on their foreheads by pure
olive oil [xiii] , as if the name of Christ (X) was
written on them. The choice of the Cross for the
execution of Christ was, therefore, meaningful: his
enemies wanted to disprove and undermine the idea of
salvation. But followers of Christ accepted the
challenge and made this secret sign public. They drew it
on their foreheads: ‘It is a tradition from the
Apostles’, said the Christian Palestinians of Jewish
origin to Basil of Caesarea in AD 375. Gnostics
preserved these ideas in their texts.
The spiritual meaning of the Cross, as we said, was a
sign of four ties of a man. A man is tied to the earth,
to his family, his folk and to god. As long as a man
retains but one of these ties he will never be totally
suborned, totally corrupted, totally enslaved. Still he
needs all four, and in the right balance. If he cares
about his family and forgets his community; if he loves
God, but neglects the soil, and vice versa, he is doomed
in the long run.
The new proponents of the ancient subjugation paradigm
wish to do the Satan’s work and remove Divine Presence
from our world. For this reason, they fight Faith, they
destroy Nature, and they uproot Man by breaking his
territorial, social and familial ties. They do it
everywhere, from Vermont to Afghanistan. But Palestine
is the pilot project for the new world order, as Spain
in 1936 was the pilot project of rising fascism.
They do it in the Holy Land for a reason, as its native
people are deeply rooted in its soil and daily witness
God. Holiness of the land is not a historical
coincidence, but a feature of its unique landscape and
people. At this hill, by this spring, under that old
tree, the Palestinian heroes Abraham, David and Jesus
united with God. Villages of Palestinian Highlands are
the anchors of mankind, and without them we shall be
thrown on the reefs.
IV
Men fight the uprooting, but their measures are often
ill-perceived and erroneous. Modern nationalism is a
failed mechanical defence against uprooting. When the
real thing – love of one’s community and soil – is gone,
it is supplanted by a fiction of a nation. German
nationalism offers us a case study.
While German society retained its roots, the Germans
loved their towns and villages, their small kingdoms and
duchies. They listened to Beethoven and Bach, ate their
wurst mit sauerkraut, they were happily parochial and
content. When the fabric of the society had been
damaged, the Germans chose the phantom of German
patriotism as a healing balsam. The Viennese painter,
Adolf Hitler was an uprooted immigrant in Germany, a man
who severed ties with his soil and his community, with
his family and his Church. Even worse, he was not aware
of his loss. His love of Germany and of German people
excluded the landscape, the soil of Germany from his
consideration. That is why he dreamt of conquest of
Eastern Europe and Russia in order to create on these
lands a new Aryan Master Race Empire, as Anglo-Saxons
created the United States on the lands on the Native
Americans. He did not understand that Germans removed
from German soil would lose the qualities he admired.
Expansion to the regions outside of the natural
landscape of the people is a deadly trick.
His nationalistic ideas were borrowed from the vast
arsenal of Jewish thought. The idea of racial
superiority, of Master Race and Untermench could be
found in many fervent Jewish religious teachings.
Genocide is permitted, nay, ordered by the Old
Testament, and the commandment ‘Exterminate the nation
of Amalek’ still is listed as No. 604 out of 613
commandments of Orthodox Judaism. Recently the orthodox
Bar Ilan University Rabbi published a concise treatise
called The Commandment of Genocide in Torah, elucidating
and elevating the concept of genocide to the level of
positive commandment for believers. (We shall not enter
now a separate question of praxis, practical
applications of the theories).
As many copy-cats, Hitler failed to observe the
difference [xiv]. The Jews are a non-territorial group,
while Germans were formed and based on their territory.
Territorial people do not have to expand beyond their
natural limits; moreover, they can not exist outside of
it. A proof of it was provided by descendents of Germans
in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the US: they lost their
ethnicity and became Americans.
One can understand his error. Hitler was horrified by
Jewish success, by ‘the rise of the Jew’, and decided to
emulate the Jewish strategy. His boycott of Jewish shops
and enterprises was an emulation of boycott of Gentile
enterprises and lockout of Gentile employees by the
Zionist Jews in contemporary Palestine. His idea of mass
expulsion of the Jews copied the concept of transfer of
Palestinians, as envisaged by Zionists since Theodor
Herzl and executed in 1948.
An American psychologist, Kevin McDonald, described the
Nazi doctrine, ‘a mirror image of Judaic strategy’ and
therefore the greatest threat to Jews. He predicted that
in future, Gentile Europeans and Americans worried by
‘the rise of the Jew’ ‘will emulate aspects of Judaism
by adopting group-serving, collectivist ideologies and
social organisations [xv]’. McDonald was right in
stating that ‘it will constitute a profound impact of
Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy on the
development of Western nations’. His conclusion is
deeply pessimistic: the Judaic strategy is doomed to
win, whether carried out by the Jews, or by the host
nations.
For a white supremacist, this conclusion calls for
speedy action of applying the Judaic strategy in the
interests of the host nations. For a Jewish supremacist,
the Judaic strategy should be applied by Jews only. But
for us, non-racists, the Judaic strategy is bad per se,
whether applied by Germans, Jews or WASPs. There is a
possibility of totally different, non-Judaic response.
While copy-cat strategy is self-defeating, there are
other strategies, based on non-Judaic concepts of
territory and local content.
Nationalism is the difference between real and perceived
national content. A fully rooted Englishman has no need
for English nationalism, as he breathes England. He is a
vessel full of local content, with no place for
‘Englishness’. When an Englishman feels he has lost part
of his ties, he tries to make it up by love of the
English idea. Nationalism rises on ruins of local ties.
When the ties of a man with Tuscany, Kent, Burgundy
weaken, he needs the substitute of Italy, England,
France. Eventually nationalism turns into chauvinism and
forgets its real local content altogether.
American super-patriots, Neo-Cons, are totally devoid of
American national content. Their jingoist flag-waving
comes instead of love for the real America and of
Americans. They support unlimited immigration into the
US, as they do not care for their fellow-Americans. They
do not care for the rest of mankind either, as they
would nuke Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, for the sake
of Israel. People justly repelled by the Cyclopean
aggressiveness of this sect are being manoeuvred into an
anti-nationalist, universal and cosmopolitan agenda.
Could it be that we are doomed to make our choice
between facelessness and jingoism?
There is a real alternative to both diseases, to Scylla
of nationalism and to Charybdis of the ubiquitous
rootlessness, and that is: love to specific region and
village. Faulkner’s love to Yoknapatawpha and Barth’s to
Maryland, Joyce’s obsession with Dublin, Rolland’s
passion for Burgundy, the Florence-centred world of
Dante and Botticelli, gave us the key to universal human
nature, as local content verily exists, as opposed to
abstract generalities.
Zionist leaders with their cheap sophistry used to
claim, “there is no Palestinian People”. As every
sophist, they spoke some truth, but not all the truth.
Palestinians’ local content was so rich that they had no
need for the uprooted man’s nationalism. Palestinians
are the people of their villages, for them, their Jifna
and Taiba, Nasra and Biram are irreplaceable. We get an
inkling of this concept by recalling the plaque on the
cross: ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.
That is one of the many things we can learn from
Palestinians. Love of our territorial communities,
villages and towns, and its people instead of a glorious
idea of the nation and the state. In an American context
it means giving priority to the rights of states vs.
federal power, priority for county vs. state
authorities, support of village vs. county. One can
learn some good ideas from the Swiss: one can not
immigrate into Switzerland unless one is accepted by one
of the territorial communities. It is fair: if some rich
liberals or Neo-Cons support immigration, let them take
the immigrants into their neighbourhoods as their
neighbours. I guess it would stop immigration almost
completely.
Local content exists as opposed to the abstraction of
the nation. It also provides a secure protection against
the alienating and unifying plague of Globalisation. I
agree with the critics of the nationalism and nation
state: nationalism failed profoundly everywhere, from
Italy to Japan, from Serbia to Israel. This 19th century
invention produced rivers of blood, created mafia-like
structures, oppressed liberties and caused strife. But
what is the alternative? Is it a Mammonite universal
super-state rising nowadays on the base of Pax
Americana? Is it emulation of Jewish strategy of
national uprooted groups in a multicultural society? No,
it lies in unique character of our villages and cities.
Power should be devolved down, to the level of local
community. On this level, there will be no room for
bureaucracy and manipulative ‘democracy’. It will save
ordinary people from the dictatorship of clever experts
and rich moguls [xvi]. We should learn from our
Palestinian brothers to love our villages and cities,
and to make them as unique as Jifna and Florence. One
can not be a true patriot of one’s land unless one loves
one’s town. Not in vain, Ulysses longed for his own
Ithaca, rather than for Greece.
V
Many good men object to Zionism and compare it with
colonial settler movements or with the German National
Socialism. Certainly, its praxis despoiled the lovely
land of Palestine and acted as a great concentrating
tool in the hands of supremacist Jewish leadership in
America and elsewhere. However, Zionism had its reason,
alas, unmentionable in the age of Political Correctness.
Let us dare and state it. Zionism and anti-Semitism have
not only supported and nourished each other, as
anti-Zionists are wont to say. Early Zionists thought
that some peculiar Jewish qualities are bad, and should
be eliminated, preferably by removing Jews into harsh
environment of Palestine, or Uganda. Zionists called the
traditional Jewish mindset, ‘Galutiyut’ (Diaspora
features), but it was basically identical to the
Jewishness, as seen by anti-Semites.
Recently, the witty American Jewish anti-Zionist Lenni
Brenner commented on Chaim Weizmann’s letter of 1914.
Weizmann, the leading Zionist and first president of
Israel, had an important talk with Lord Balfour (of the
Balfour declaration) and Balfour confided that ‘he
shared many anti-Semitic ideas. <Weizmann> pointed out
to him that Zionists too are in agreement with the
cultural anti-Semites’. Brenner triumphally concluded,
‘translated into blunt English, Balfour thanked Weizmann
for confirming his anti-Semitism’.
It could sound odd for young readers used to sycophantic
Jewish writing, but the first Zionists were very strict
with the Jews they knew. For them, a plethora of Jewish
lawyers, porn dealers, currency traders, lobby
activists, bankers, media lords, real estate moguls,
liberal journalists were ‘an undesirable, demoralizing
phenomenon’, in the words of Weizmann, or ‘scum of the
earth’, in harsh words of David Ben Gurion. Zionism
accepted the main premise of anti-Semitism, and offered
a remedy, Mao-style ‘re-education’ in an isolated remote
countryside.
However, History decided otherwise. Galutiyut, the
(Diaspora) Jewishness turned out to be a winning
strategy in the Mammon-worshipping West. The named
lawyers and media lords captivated America’s mind and
became the model for many Americans, Jewish and Gentile.
Israeli Zionism lost its spirit, degraded into military
dictatorship and survives only thanks to subsidies of
the captivated America. Still, it does not mean that
‘anti-Semitic’ diatribes of the early Zionists were all
wrong, as worldly success is not the only measure of
things.
There was one feature of (Diaspora) Jewish mindset that
was particularly strange and unique. When good Russian
Jewish kids of fin-de-siècle left the sheltered life of
Jewish townships and entered the Gentile world, they
became aware of a tragic element of Jewish existence,
its almost total divorce with Nature. Jews were not
interested in Nature at all, they did not describe in
verse or prose, they did not paint it, they did not
connect to it; they did not care for landscape outside
their schtetl. Young men and women felt it has to be
changed. Some of them moved to Argentina, where Baron
Hirsch tried to attach Jews to land. Others established
colonies in Crimea, or in Palestine.
They planned to get rid of their Jewishness. They did
not mind the name (well, some did, and demanded to be
called Israelis or Hebrews, or Canaanites), they minded
the qualities of ‘the Jew’ and wanted to get rid of
them, and reunite with Nature. Not being strict
Zionists, we would say that some people of Jewish origin
succeeded to get rid of this feature without going to
Palestine (probably they could be described as
‘descendents of Jews’ rather than as ‘Jews’). Majority
of Israeli Jews failed to attach themselves to the land
in Palestine, as well, as it hardly could be done
without fusion with the local inhabitants.
The reason of Jewish divorce with Nature was explained
in different terms, but to the same effect by an
important Russian historiographer, ‘Russian Toynbee’ Lev
Gumilev. He considered an ethnos as a group connected to
its landscape. Ethnos can’t exist outside of its
ecological niche. Gumilev defined Jews (or
unreconstructed Diaspora Jews, a Zionist would say), as
people of anthropogenic (man-made) landscape. That is
why it is so easy for a Jew to change his place of
living: he disregards the Nature, while modern cities
are basically all the same. That is why a Jew has an
advantage in competition: while a part of, say, English
mind refers to skills needed in the natural environment
of the British Isles, a Jewish mind is wonderfully
concentrated on advance in man-made environment.
Gumilev replaces the traditional dichotomy of Jews vs.
Gentiles by another one, people of man-made landscape
vs. people of Natural landscapes. It does not coincide
with a city/village division, as a city dweller can be
integral part of its landscape. Such men live in the old
beautiful cities, Florence and Oxford, Jerusalem and
Mecca, Suzdal and Leon. These cities grew like flowers
in their setting, they created art, built cathedrals and
mosques; they were unique, and local, and universal in
the same time. There is also a place for great cities of
the world, Paris, London, New York, Bombay, Shanghai –
they are meeting places for civilisations. However,
modern man-made cities, Milton Keynes, Luton, St Denis,
the suburban spread of New Jersey, our Holon and Afula
are faceless, similar to each other and devoid of
culture.
An ethnos is successful in its own ecological niche, and
unsuccessful in a foreign one. In order to win in the
competition with other ethnic groups, an ethnos tries to
adapt oneself to environment or to adapt environment to
its needs. We observe a similar process while fishing a
big fish: a fish tries to pull the fisherman into its
own environment, water, as it rightly presumes it can
win there. A fisherman tries to pull a fish into his own
environment, dry land, as he is certain he can win
there.
That is why (Diaspora) Jews are wont to exclude foreign
(for them) natural landscape and supplant it by a
man-made one, where they know how to apply their
strategy. It is as instinctive a move as the attempt of
a fish to pull the fisherman into the sea. An example of
such strategy is provided by the Canadian Jewish dynasty
of Reichmann.
This pious Orthodox Jewish family was active in real
estate in Canada, England and elsewhere. They immigrated
into Canada from Austria in Hitler’s days, and in 1980s
their assets were assessed at $40 billion. Reichmanns
invented a shopping mall, the urban design that changed
lives of people all over the globe. Malls undermined
socially integrated inner cities, killed small
traditional shops, devastated artisans and supported
brand names, big companies, car ownership, suburban
living and social disintegration. Malls eliminated the
advantage of a local product or producer over an
imported or centrally produced one, as in the mall there
is no traditional shop or traditional shopper, no
loyalty or age-old craftsmanship.
Malls made Reichmanns fabulously rich, and Canadians
used to say, there are rich, super-rich and Reichmanns.
They supported various Jewish charities and Israeli
projects, spent much money on Russian (‘Russian Jews’)
immigration to Israel. But they caused more harm than
good to the nascent Israeli society. Their malls
devastated Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, as relatively
affluent shoppers switched to malls, while local shops,
and after them local cafes, local social meeting points
lost their clients. Israeli society, once rather
cohesive, disintegrated into an amalgam of various
groups. Children of immigrants, with their tentative and
dubious connection with local landscape, stopped playing
on the slopes of Judean Hills, and spent their free time
wandering the malls, getting used to man-made
environment and to shopping as entertainment. Mall kids
can easily move from a mall in Jerusalem to a mall in
Toronto, with the same brand names, built by the same
Reichmanns. Thus (Diaspora) Jewish trend succeeded to
undermine the Zionist utopia, as well as social life and
traditions in many countries around the globe.
VI
The Mall did not appear on the empty space. Shoppers for
the future malls grew in mass-produced rectangular
standard housing blocks, built after the WWI. Inspired
by Gropius, Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, they are basically
the same all over the world, including my native
Novosibirsk. These housing blocks brought us into
man-made environment, divorced from local content,
national traditions and natural surroundings. Faceless
cities rebuilt after great destruction of the World Wars
are particularly depressing, but even cities untouched
by war madness were often ruined by the modernist trend.
The Swedes invited Oscar Niemeyer, a Brazilian-born son
of immigrants, a disciple of Lucio Costa and Gregory
Warszawchik, to contribute to the beauty of Stockholm.
He proposed to demolish the medieval core of Gamla Stan,
the Old City, and replace it by an accurate row of
rectangular blocks. This project was scraped, but as a
compromise, nice 19th century central area of Hotorget
was erased and transformed into identical blocks. The
same blocks were erected on the site of beautiful 18th
century Arbat area of Moscow. A friend of the Soviet
Union, Niemeyer influenced big scale housing building
programme in post-Stalin Russia that turned many
Russians into man-made landscape men.
Once I took a Russian TV director, a pretty Russian girl
from Moscow, for a walk in En Jedi canyon, one of the
most charming and delightful spots in Palestine with its
springs and wild goats, lush greenery and small pools.
‘Couldn’t you make a replica of this canyon in an Eilat
hotel spa’, she complained after the walk. She was
serious: this city dweller had no need of nature with
its beauty. She was not alone. While showing to the
Russian tourists gorgeous Arab mansions of Jerusalem, I
heard sceptical remark, ‘well, probably one can live
there, if there is no choice’. But standard housing
blocks on the outskirts of Jerusalem brought out their
enthusiastic acclaim.
Rural Russia was transformed as well by introduction of
standard housing, by collectivisation and mass shift of
population to cities. Eventually, Russia became a land
of two paradigms, of man-made and of natural landscapes.
The division was felt in arts, literature, politics,
preferred economics and social structure. Dominance of
man-made was almost total, as the post-Stalin Communist
leaders were increasingly Western in their desires. The
dissident opposition supported even more thorough
man-made policies. Natural landscape writers and artists
were marginalized.
The consequences of this advent of man-made paradigm
were grievous for Russia. Its nature was destroyed;
rivers were poisoned by industrial waste, villages
erased as economically unviable. 1991 completed the
transfer of power and influence into man-made hands, as
it was signalled by meteoric rise of Jewish oligarchs,
few super-rich bankers and industry moguls.
Similar process took place elsewhere as well, and the
man-made paradigm became the dominant of the world. Now,
I do not think that Niemeyer, Reichmanns and other
creators of man-made environment were consciously
labouring for the sake of the (Diaspora) Jewish world
domination, as conspiracy fans would have. Some of them
acted subconsciously by creating an environment they
would be able to prosper in, i.e. man-made environment.
Others could not even understand that man-made
environment is deadly for the Natural Man and explained
the resistance by people’s prejudice. Strong-willed and
stubborn, they thought they know better what is good for
the people. Probably they did not even understand that
it was good just for them.
Instinctively, as fish pulls the fisherman into the
deep, the Jewish media owners formed public opinion for
the man-made; Jewish financiers provided funds for
man-made projects; Jewish real-estate developers built
and promoted housing estates, as they sympathised with
the man-made world, and felt that they will prosper in
this new world. I think these actions were instinctive
rather than conscious as they took place in the Jewish
colony in Palestine as well. There is no doubt these
people had deep sympathy for Israel, and Niemeyer lived
for a while in our country, but their activities in
Israel were as destructive as anywhere else.
One can compare this process with a similar development
that took place earlier, when the British immigrants
colonised North America. They had to compete with local
inhabitants, the Native Americans, who lived in perfect
symbiosis with the nature. In order to survive, the
colonists had a choice: to change themselves or to
transform environment. The Pathfinder of Fennimore
Cooper was a man who adapted to nature and to the ways
of Native Americans. If Native Americans would be strong
enough to block or limit immigration from Europe, if the
English colonists would share the French excitement with
the Savage, there would be a possibility of adjustment.
However, the English settlers, fervent Protestants,
devotees of the Old Testament, were inspired by the idea
of their Chosenness, of being a New Israel repeating the
conquest of Joshua. Local people were, correspondingly,
‘Canaanites’, who should be ‘dispossessed’ (Ch. 33:53
and «utterly destroyed” (Ch 21:3). The paradigm of the
Old Testament (overturned by the New Testament and
Koran) is the paradigm of total war, annihilation,
dispossession and domination. By reverting to the Old
Testament, the colonists declared war on less chosen
ones. That is why they killed and dispossessed the
Native Americans whenever they had a chance, but they
also destroyed the environment: killed bison, poisoned
wells, ruined the prairie. Destruction of environment is
a natural mode of takeover by a foreign group.
VII
The reasons for landscape destruction are frequently
presented as purely financial. Whenever a beautiful
spring dries up, a river swells with industrial waste, a
forest is cut off and a hill has been desiccated, we are
supposed to blame human greed. However, one witnesses
this process in the absence of profit motif, as well. In
my native Siberia, many villages were destroyed and
whole landscapes ruined by creating man-made lakes and
hydraulic power systems. In Soviet Siberia, there was no
profit motif, and vast supplies of electric power were
not needed [xvii].
One can offer thousands of examples, as nature
destruction goes on without real profit being sought or
taken. One of the most inspired writers of the Web,
Diane Harvey, asked in despair: ‘The purposeful
relationship between the ruling minds of Earth and the
agonizing death of the natural world is mystifying. What
could motivate the present owner-operators of this globe
to allow planetary life-support systems to degrade into
a state of toxic shock? The death-throes of nature
intensify, yet the fatally destructive human operations
continue unabated, as if this state of affairs had
nothing to do with human life. We must ask ourselves if
those powerful men at the helm of this sinking ship,
responsible for the poisoning of an entire planet, have
genuinely lost their minds. We wonder if such ardent
devotees of greed have finally been overwhelmed and
driven mad altogether by this master-vice. Are we being
carried along in a slipstream of reasonless chaos,
toward the abyss? [xviii]’ ’
Diane Harvey, as Immanuel Wallerstein, makes a heroic
effort to see reason in the apparently unreasonable
behaviour and she almost succeeds by stretching the
concept of greed. She concludes, ‘the global corporate
power structures… have engineered the destruction of
nature as the greatest business opportunity of all
times. They have in mind to force mankind into total
dependency on their replacements, and to control us
absolutely through these very substitutes for natural
existence they plan to sell us. I propose that the
forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately
destroying this entire world in order to sell their
simulated version of it back to us at a profit’.
Her diagnosis is bleak, but it is not bleak enough. Who
promised Ms Harvey she will be sold the replacements,
air and water, in the dark tomorrow of our nightmares?
After all, greed and profit, even capitalized,
presuppose a lasting mode of operation. It calls for an
effort to recognize that greed is not an elementary
particle, neither a simple force. Beyond it, there is an
older and darker figure, the domination drive. For
domination, greed is just means to the purpose. Yes, it
is nice to sell air to Miss Harvey and to make a
handsome profit. But maybe it is even nicer to refuse to
sell her air and watch her dying throes? After all, my
ancestors, obsessed with domination drive, paid good
money for the Christian captives after the Persian sack
of Jerusalem, and slaughtered the prisoners, refusing
the profit-taking [xix] . Profit is not the last word;
greed is not the ultimate sin. No greed can explain a
drive of billionaire to make more billions. He is after
different game, domination.
As we said, domination calls for slaves, and no man can
be enslaved while he is connected to nature. That is the
reason of nature destruction; it has to be done to
enslave a man. But beyond domination drive, beyond
destruction of nature, we observe something else. As a
Columbus’ sailor at landfall, we rub our eyes in
disbelief: it just can not be so!
For two hundred years, or more, Christendom tried to
live without God. Some denied His existence, some
didn’t, but believers and unbelievers explained our
existential problems without appealing to God’s presence
in Universe. Our good and bad drives and desires would
suffice, normally. There is an adage ascribed to various
scientists, from Newton to Einstein, saying, ‘I had no
need to introduce God into my formulas’. A medieval
English scholar from Surrey, William Ockham (he served
as a prototype for the principal character of Umberto
Eco’s thriller, Name of the Rose), stated a principle
called Ockham’s Razor, ‘Do not multiply entries beyond
necessity’. He meant that of two competing theories, the
simplest explanation is to be preferred. That is why we
do not usually appeal to the spiritual categories while
explaining mundane events.
While we relaxed in our totally material world, another
principle of medieval logic, Law of Manifestation,
prepared us an ambush. This law states, ‘An existing
entity will eventually manifest itself’. A
non-manifesting entity could be called non-existent as
well, without loss. Theoretically we knew that at
certain speeds, the space won’t conform to age-old
Euclid’s rules. Instead, a new geometry established in
19th century by a brilliant son of Hanover priest,
Bernhard Riemann, will became operative. Practically,
our mind refused to accept it – until it became a
reality.
Theoretically, a believing man should be prepared to
observe a manifestation of spiritual world, of God and
lower Forces. Practically, we refused to believe in such
a possibility. A Swedish lady pastor was asked, what she
would do if she would be granted the vision of St
Birgitta. ‘I’ll have two beers, a big steak, and if it
will not help, I’ll take myself to a psychiatric
clinic’, she replied. If that is an approach of a
priest, what can one expect from laity?
While we turned away from God’s presence, and screened
Him off our life, we helped His adversary at
checkerboard. Now, his influence and plans became
palpable, and no amount of steaks and beer would change
this fact. The latest developments in human history,
gratuitous destruction of nature, and war against spirit
can not be plausibly explained by rational material
causes. Beyond all-too-human figures of big
corporations, beyond capitalised Greed, beyond the
paradigm of Domination, the faceless Destroyer made his
appearance, as Lord Darth Vader on the captive planet.
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[i]http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/bizarre/bizarre.cfm?instanceid=10
[ii] 1999, University of Minnesota Press
[iii] On the Move
[iv] Ephesians 6:12
[v] Ex 29:45
[vi] Jn 1:14
[vii] Jn 12:31, 14:30, 16:11
[viii] Serge Averintsev, Sophia-Logos, Kiev 2001
[ix] The Archaeology of New Testament, Princeton
University Press, 1992
[x] I Samuel, 21:14. reference in Biblical Archaeology
Review 1980
[xi] 9, 4:6
[xii] Finnegan p 334
[xiii] Talmud, Horayot 12a
[xiv] see an amusing if indecent poem of the Afghan poet
Rumi, Gourd Crafting, on failure of a copy-cat to
observe the details of the action, and of its sad
consequences.
[xv] Kevin McDonald, the Culture of Critique, Praeger,
1998, page 330
[xvi] This idea was promoted by Bakunin, an arch-enemy
of bureaucracy, and beautifully expressed in the best
Lenin’s book, the State and Revolution (1916).
[xvii] Eventually it was utilized for aluminium
production, and after 1991, it was privatised and now
belongs to a citizen of Israel.
[xviii] Global Totalitarianism And The Death Of Nature,
Diane Harvey, http://www.rense.com
[xix] see my article
Mamilla Pool
