>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.
Not only that, the passage above asks the reader to believe that "Judeo-Christian morality" (whatever it is) is on the side of liberalism & cosmopolitanism. !!! -- Yoshie
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