Undoing What Was Done

A report in Libération this morning decries the sack of the ruins of the archeological site at Nimrod, using heavy construction equipment to destroy the heritage of earlier societies that they consider blasphemous, having already addressed, apparently, a wealth of societal treasure in the museum at Mosul. My father actually worked on digs around Mosul in the mid-Thirties, and somewhere in the family treasure, there exists a small trove of 8-mm. film of locals moving dirt in their burnooses, no bulldozers being available. I recently discovered some prints of RAF photos of the dig site, part of the stuff of Hank’s personal legend.

The reflection runs thusly: is it worse to desecrate to artifacts of the past than it is to ensure that all but selective material gets buried in collective ignorance and forgetfulness? I can’t think of a single constructive or positive comment to make about the beheaders, the desecrators and those who would establish a religious or doctrinary hegemony of any sort, and that includes those in our own society whose walled-in take on life looks to take us back to some new version of feudalism. The horror of ISIS should lead us to look at our own foibles and missteps a little more closely, particularly that seemingly insurmountable impulse to bomb anything that moves, each time sowing more dragon’s teeth with each bomb that falls. I wonder when we will realize that we’re still getting the same results with our repeated actions that clearly don’t work for the majority of us (or them) and down tools for a reassessment of links between our actions and what people do in response.

I don’t know if that will help bring those Assyrians up to speed with current Islamic thought, but it might to some distance toward setting our own society free from the constraints imposed by the greedy canyon-minds.

(…one way or another, this darkness got to give.)

Birds Of A Feather

There probably isn’t too much for me to add to what has been said by Owen Gray, or posted by Jim Scott, but I’m offended, as always, by the silliness that constitutes the dominant tenor of the discussions of events in the political landscape. Eve Adams’ defection to the Liberal Party smacks of political opportunism and her bleatings about being the victim of bullies and fear-mongering shouts of the hollowness of a message hollered down a bamboo tube. Did she not vote for all the regressive and destructive legislation that passed through the House during her tenure as a Conservative MP? Where was the crisis of conscience in the face of Omnibus Budget Bills, secret trade negotiations and the building of the structures of repression in Canadian law? She only left when it became apparent that she would not be running under the Conservative banner anywhere in Canada. Conversely, if the Liberal Party of Canada not represents her values, what does that say about what we might expect from a Trudeau régime? It’s a daunting prospect, one of those frying pan/fire dichotomies that clouds any hope of a return to some form of humanist hope for a society floundering in ignorance and lack of care for self, society and the environment. Of course, the media love the stuff: they can promote the ongoing soap opera of…

Ooops! Got busy, had to leave this and I’ve totally lost my train of thought. Who cares where Eve ends up? Who cares about Justin’s hair or his carbon tax? Mulcair’s daycare initiative is a vote-getting ploy. Ms. May stands up and says all the right things, but is this what her party stands for? I really like the idea of people like Leadnow.ca who are working to elect someone other than Harper, but I have a hard time at this point seeing how that would work without a load of cooperation on the part of the other three parties. They are like the Conservative, Reform and other splinters who floundered and fought amongst themselves, allowing for a succession of Chrétien governments which, in the end weren’t that much different from what Harper offers now. We just weren’t as far down the road of secret trade deals, the militarization of police forces, the suppression of dissent, the hollowing out of the real economy and the transformation of Canada into a beggared, oil-soaked dystopia (OK, not there yet, but the signs are pretty clear).  At what point do we get depressed and sneak off in a corner with a dozen IPAs in a vain attempt to dull the pain of watching anything civilized get trashed through a combination of mean-spiritedness and ignorance? I’ll (hips!) let you know when we get there.

Today’s attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo, as well as on the spirit of criticism in which they worked, brings thoughts of all those works of the Enlightenment in which tolerance was such a dominant theme. The illustration is from the cover of a recent pocket edition of Lettres persanes, by Montesquieu, in which he portrayed the foibles of contemporary European society as he would have imagined it to be perceived by a couple of visitors from the Levant, in effect mocking his own people. Montesquieu went on at some length in other works, notably L’Esprit des lois, about the need for separation of powers and about keeping religion out of the business of worldly government, a notion that seems increasingly imperilled all over the world, though not every so brazenly as seems to be the case with certain fundamentalists unable to close their eyes to an irreverent attitude on the part of those who don’t share their views of either the spiritual or the temporal world. When Charlie Hebdo first published images of the Prophet, it was clear that they had knowingly hit on a very raw nerve, and to those most offended, being an equal-opportunity lampooner matters little, underlying the sense that certain sects of almost all religions cannot and will not distinguish between the affairs of this Earth and those of whatever version of celestial existence is part of their credo. In addition, and this is where the real rub arises, they cannot and will not accept that what constitutes their own system of beliefs has no relevance for those of other systems of belief: they have all the right answers, and they have the answers for everyone, to the point where simple argumentation will not suffice for redress of transgression and all other dogmas must be extirpated. These are people who are not willing to let the elected and the damned be sorted at death, heretics must be expedited on their way to eternal damnation. Charlie Hebdo chose to be the burr under the saddle in a time and place where there was considerable risk of inciting the kind of violence that was visited upon them today, they knew those risks and chose to proceed. It’s a heavy price to pay and will only be validated if there arises a true spirit of willingness to tolerate diverging opinion. It is also a little painful to hear the commentary from folks like John Kerry and Stephen Harper, as well as other leaders who have been the beneficiaries of tolerant societies who rise up to pontificate on the values represented by a free and open press and the unfettered flow of information and ideas, but who support emasculated and feckless organs of a press establishment that consistently curries favour with corrupt enterprise in both the public and private sphere, and whose organs of government engage in prosecutions of whistleblowers and other truth-tellers, the rendition and torture of prisoners and the extra-judicial executions of those who either refuse, or even neglect, to follow their own social and economic dogma. It’s sad that we pay so little beyond lip service to the thought embodied in the works of Montesquieu, his contemporaries in the Enlightenment, and those who both preceded and followed up in the quest for tolerant pluralism.