From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: two third pro-war?
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2003 01:09:53 +0000


Rene de Bakker wrote:

>My point is not to choose sides, but the pattern that is in almost all of
>them.
>The first 2 hits in Google when asking: Bush Hitler Iraq:
>
>1
>The United States President, George Bush, has reminded Europeans of the
>heavy price
>they have paid for appeasing dictators and challenged NATO members to join
>him in
>confronting Saddam Hussein and fighting terrorism beyond Europe. In a
>speech to
>students on the eve of a two-day NATO summit, Mr Bush compared the 
>challenge
>of the Iraqi President to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938,
>which led to World War II.
>
>2
>The alleged weapons of mass destruction are a casus belli.  The Iraqi use
>of chemical
>weapons on the Kurds happened when Iraq was our ally during the Iran-Iraq 
>War.
>Bush is just looking for an excuse to attack, the same way Hitler
>manufactured an excuse to
>attack Poland.
>
>We are told: there is going to be war and victory - 'we will win' -
>All applause cannot make that contention more trustworthy,
>and as such it is indifferently another promised hail victory over a 
>semitic
>threat.
>Or one must be able to make clear, in how far one's victory is different
>from an other, and then i say: this is not done, because national 
>prosperity
>is the only goal, and the ethical standards that are bound with them
>by means of logical standards, they are only values, that is instruments
>of will to power. As long as Nietzsche is not taken seriously: (why not??
>he is so much more clever), there will be repetition, only the cloths will
>differ.
>
>So hey, please watch what i'm saying: not more than that
>all action legitimizes itself by constructing something fundamental bad
>on the opposite side: this goes for inflicting war on Iraq, and it goes
>for that German minister. At the bottom there would be the same
>'revengeful thinking', that Nietzsche diagnosed. To his amazement
>(not really) the European princes at the end of the 19th century thought
>they could do without him, while they were the ones caught in the web
>of WtP, and all their plans with them.
>
>'Old Europe', that's very dangerous, willed blindness. Reading Heidegger,
>who went after the oldest of old Europe, and at the same time proclaiming
>the values of that same Europe, of which after a long history have survived
>only the economic remainders, now the more fanatically, 
>fundamentalistically
>believed in.
>
>I did not mention ethical or logical standards, they play no role in
>world politics. Rationalism and ethics are instruments of will to power,
>not in the times of Leibniz and Kant, but now that the ratio as spirit is
>flown,
>they are, that's what Nietzsche says, and that's what Heidegger says cannot
>be skipped over. So 'Hitler' is still there because nihilism is left out,
>denied
>as the stimulus that cannot be left out, because it is the shaking
>fundament of
>everything now, and as such the motor for all kind of fundamentalISMS.
>That all have their 'Hitler' or their 'Jew'  -quite a worrying
>indifference, not?-
>just look at all of them, not at the formal argumentation, but at their
>'substance',
>never even close to the panoramic view of Nietzsche's justice amidst 
>nihilism,
>always the ethical balloons, that legitimate the plundering of the world,
>once the
>opportunity is there. And how you standarded intellectuals let yourself be
>used
>to let it go on undisturbed.
>I agree with Botho Strauss about radical evil: it is always there, in all,
>so we have
>to take responsability for it, and not always conjure up its guaranteed
>champions,
>in order to be able to wash our own hands in advance, when they're going to 
>be
>used.

Ok then, take your conflict. Your conflict? Yes, your conflict. Your 
conflict against the side that says that NOT all action legitimizes itself 
by CONSTRUCTING (key word) something fundamentally bad on the opposite side. 
Your conflict against "willed blindness," against "a worrying indifference," 
against "plundering the world," and especially against those evil 
"standarded intellectuals." By your own analysis, you have legitimized 
yourself by constructing something fundamentally bad on the opposite side. 
You have constructed your own Hitler. Welcome to the club of "standarded 
intellectuals." So, my "fundamentalism" or yours?

ANthony Crifasi

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