The Written Peace: Open Forum of June 28, 2006

To start this open thread this evening, your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums offers you the graphic at left, which presents the scanned title page from Greg Palast's book, Armed Madhouse. That's his signature below "To Dark Wraith" on the page. I was about to rotate to a new book in the advertisements, but given Mr. Palast's kindness in autographing my copy, I shall leave Armed Madhouse as the featured title for a few more days.

The book I had planned to start running in the sidebar advertisements section is entitled War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. Given that the paperback edition was published in June 2003, the work is still remarkable in its timeliness. Mr. Hedges was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now serves as Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Suffer me a quote from his book:

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, used to tell us we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or, as he liked to say, "the Christian fascists." He was not a scholar to be disregarded, however implausible such a scenario seemed at the time. There is a danger of a growing fusion between those in the state who wage war—both for and against modern states—and those who believe they understand and can act as agents of God.

Considering that the copyright of this book is 2002, that paragraph has a chilling backdrop: in the early 1980s, a prominent ethicist was warning of the rise of fundamentalist religious power in the sphere of governance, and four years ago, the warning was re-iterated in the early months of what would become a precipitous fall into the abyss of war that would turn out to be without end.

This brings to mind a line by Ben Kingsley in the role of Mahatma in the movie Ghandi: "I know a way out of Hell." Now, the question for us in this, our own time is obvious: "Do we know the way out of Hell?"

I would submit to you that it will not be as easy as merely working really hard to elect a slate of progressives to federal offices in November of this year and 2008. The trajectory of the modern-day "fascists"—be they riding into our lives, our world, and our collective future under the banner of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism—has been set for a long, long time. It is not, as some believe, a phenomenon of the 21st Century; and it is certainly not a reaction to the events of September 11, 2001. That latter touchstone was symptomatic, but it was by no means the only evidence of a degraded land returning to and advancing toward a brutish, unreasoning, authoritarian way of life for all the peoples of the Earth. September 11, 2001—for all its awful, catastrophic tragedy—will not have been the last or even the worst of the conflagrations right before our eyes; and those who would draw us into that abyss will use each and every one of the coming tragedies as a weapon against us—against us as much as, if not more than, against any putative enemy of ours—as will the fundamentalists of other nations whose fellow citizens suffer the calamities we visit upon them.

Is there a way out of Hell? The answer is, most unfortunately, "Yes"; and that answer is unfortunate because it means we must, if we choose to bequeath upon the future even the vaguest hope of freedom, bear to a path that will likely take us straight through the worst of everything we thought we had forever banished with the Age of Enlightenment. We must do battle again; and this time, we shall labor beneath a burden unlike before when our ancestors suffered greatly to drive into the caves of antiquity that forever hungry, howling beast. It is as in the old story about the young man who saw the Devil for the first time: the problem wasn't that he had seen Lucifer; it was that Lucifer had seen him.

Know thine enemy? This time around, the enemy knows us.


Speak your peace; this is an open thread. Dance the night away. Drink deeply from the cup of community, have an espresso, turn on the jukebox, and kick back in one of the easy chairs to say what's on your mind, even if it's to tell your host that he's an apocalyptic doomsayer. (He really is, actually.) If you're planning to get into the cupboard, see if you can find that stash of potato chips I put in there last month. We could have a good night here if we had potato chips to go with the drinks and music.


The Dark Wraith waxes the dance floor for the breakdance competition.