by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker blog By and large, for an ideology to take root among a people or a nation it is necessary to transform the individual into the mass man. For masses are – before in time and now often in the impalpable ether – what crowds are in space. Namely a large quantity of people unable to express their human qualities – for members of masses
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker blog When events do not make sense or are such as sense cannot untie, an option is to forget all about them – the head-in-the-sand solution. Another is to remember that man is but a quintessence of dust and often, therefore, not even worth the dust that the rude wind blows in his face. Yet another option is an attempt at interpretation, with emphasis
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker blog Does art imitate nature or is nature herself inherently artistic? The debate has engaged the minds and pens of many critics and philosophers. But, given that comedy is equally a form of art, when man becomes unintentionally comic, is his comicity attributable to art or nature? The question may seem irrelevant or one among the children of an idle brain, but I jumped
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker blog Words being arbitrary, they owe their power to association, and have the influence which custom has given them – for language is the dress of thought. Therefore on hearing the words “Democracy in America,” some will think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s book by the same title. Others, not having read the book (an enterprise of no mean feat), will think that it took
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog – plus a fundraiser for the Saker detailed in the video below The mythical average citizen probably believes that the universe is under the perpetual superintendence of uncontrollable forces. And that the hallucinating social changes currently occurring – and of which he is sometimes the victim – are akin to a force of nature. Meaning that the slings and arrows of outrageous prevarication,
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog An Eastern monarch, of whom we know the existence but not the name, kept an officer in his house whose employment it was to remind him of his mortality, by calling out every morning at a stated hour, “Remember prince that thou shalt die.” Indeed, the contemplation of the frailness of our present state appeared of so much importance to the famous legislator
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog It is a property of the past to sink into oblivion, and of unpleasant truths to fade into evanescence. To such past belongs the attack on the USS Liberty. When to the session of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, Israel’s 1967 war of Middle East invasion is/was for me but a negligible blip compared to other important personal
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog “One, no-one, one hundred thousand” is the title of a novel by Italian author Luigi Pirandello. ‘One’ refers to the image that everyone has of himself, ‘no one’ refers to what the protagonist decides to be at the end of the novel. ‘One hundred thousand’ refers to the images that others have of us. As the plot of the novel unfolds, the protagonist
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog Francois Mitterrand, the longest serving president of France (1981-1985), not long before he died (1996), he made this quite extraordinary statement: “France does not know it, but she is at war with America. A permanent, vital, economic war, and only apparently a victimless war. Yes, the Americans are inexorable, they are voracious, they want undivided power over the world… It is an unknown
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog Making sense of Western media is like fitting wheels to a tomato – time consuming and completely unnecessary. Ever since the media became an instrument of persuasion, the greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinion than they are in fashion. In turn, fashion is independent of reason and reason requires thought. An activity – reason – discouraged in principle
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog There is a certain satisfaction, however idle, in finding the seeds and weak beginnings of social phenomena that affect the world at large. And in understanding the orientations and critical directions of the historical process we live in. Even if most of us remain helpless and impotent spectators of public calamities, or witness the vanity of conjecture and the inefficacy of predictions. For
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog However it might be varnished by imagination or sophistry, the Covid pandemic is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of our times – but it is also the culmination of a mode of thought gradually developed through a long historical gestation. For what originally was (and still is), the natural and necessary need for assistance by him who is sick or in pain,
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog To understand Hegel the reader must be in perfect health, though sometimes the minds of geniuses deliver compact nuggets of wisdom, understandable and usable by the rest of us. One such instance is the idea of ‘Zeitgeist,’ the spirit of the times. Pedantically speaking, Hegel preferred the form ‘Geist des Zeit.’ It was English poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold who introduced the
By Jimmie Moglia for The Saker Blog A man’s life’s no more than to say ‘one’ – Hamlet tells his friend Horatio. And Voltaire has a character from one of his novels declare, “… We in a manner begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom… I consider myself as a single
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog Samuel Butler published his novel Erewhon in 1872. The title is the (almost) reverse spelling of ‘Nowhere’ and it applies to a country the author discovered. He probably had in mind the Southern island of New Zealand where he minded sheep for a while. The protagonist, Higgs, tending sheep in a prairie, looks at a mountain in the distance and wonders what lies
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog It now seems certain that we have a Jon Bidet for president. For if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a Biden, metaphorically speaking, by any other name still smells like a poorly maintained sanitary device, however many euphemisms the imagination may body forth out of the forms of things unknown. The American election campaign with its arcane modalities,
By Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog During the cold war the West called dissenters those Russians in the USSR who voiced their complaints against the system. A definition – ‘dissenter’ – which, processed through the lexical grinding machine of the CIA and associates, was actually stripped of its original meaning to become a weapon of trivial instrumental imperialist propaganda. Said it another way, it was the dissenters who gave
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog If flattery is the infantry of negotiations, then mendacity is the air force of politics. There are exceptions, but as a practical rule truth tellers are not deemed worthy of the public trust. To the question, “who does the deeming?” the reader will have already answered euphemistically, “the mainstream media,” better known as “media from hell.” Meanwhile the social media conglomerates are now
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog It takes strength, endurance, resignation and stomach to like Donald Trump. Not for what he actually is. Under the pen of Alexandre Dumas, for example, Trump may even appear as a not-dislikable Yankee D’Artagnan of sorts. Maybe with less finesse than the original musketeer, whose contained yet French swaggering captivated millions of readers, when reading was still ‘cool’. Rather for some infamous things
by Jimmie Moglia for the Saker Blog Sometimes ideas born out of an apparently sensible necessity evolve into something diabolically inevitable. On the other hand, the history of the formation of ideas is, or could be, what frees the mind from a blind search for explanations. For the alternative is to (dis)-content ourselves with effects without knowing their causes, other than attributing the faults of the system, for example, to
