joanna bujes:
> Hey Michael, what gives? I started reading, hoping that this would be an
> actual Romanian socialist....and I wound up with another clash of
> civilizations turdlet.
> WHY? WHY? ....I can get this out of the New York Review of Books, New
> Yorker, etc.
The article has some interesting passages, or I should say non-passages in what I'm about to cite. Notice the following:
Vladimir Tismaneanu:
> ... Never ever did populist radicalism
> offer more than what Max Weber once called "sterile excitation"
> (Weber, 1957, p. 115). The attacks on "mondialism" coming from
> the anti-American Left and the Right attached to the values of
> "Blut und Boden" (blood and soil) have one common denominator:
> the angst, the fear provoked by the dislocations of modernity,
> the rise of the middle class (bourgeoisie), and the dissolution
> of traditional forms of state and religious control over citizens.
> Hence the fascination exerted by leftist -- in fact neo-Leninist
> -- theories of dependency on the ideologues of the radical Right
> (in Russia, Hungary, Romania). ...
>
> ... Obviously, the Arab world's hostility to Israel
> is linked not only to historical-territorial issues. The ultimate
> cause for this adversity is that Israel is a democratic and prosperous
> society, despite the absence of natural resources comparable
> to those held by its Arab neighbors. In its radical versions,
> at the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, anti-Americanism
> is synonymous with anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Explicitly
> or implicitly, it repudiates the foundations of Judeo-Christian
> morality in the name of completely opposed norms. The result
> is the shaping (indeed the invention) of a tradition of victimhood,
> sacrifice, martyrdom, and sacred duty to kill in the name of
> the ultimate sacred goals. The end, once again, sanctifies the
> means.
> ...
Tismaeanu places _Blut-und-Boden_ in the bad set and liberalism, capitalism, cosmopolitanism/mondialisme, etc., in the good set, but then puts Israel in the good set and its enemies in the bad set; yet rationale of Israel is _Blut-und-Boden_, and a good deal of the exercise of that rationale has involved the fanatical behaviors to which Tismaneanu refers. Surely this writer could be expected to be smart enough to deflect such a criticism in advance and to better conceal his own fanatical belief in the liberal _eschaton_ which sanctifies everything it touches, including those _jihads_ of which its ruling classes approve.
-- Gordon