File spoon-archives/nietzsche.archive/nietzsche_2002/nietzsche.0207, message 97


From: "Paul Murphy" <Villanova-AT-btopenworld.com>
Subject: Re: Emerson on complicity
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 15:01:23 +0200


hear, hear...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Sanchez" <heliogabalus-AT-eudoramail.com>
To: <nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Sunday, July 14, 2002 10:13 AM
Subject: Re: Emerson on complicity


> If Eric looks at American Transcendentalism to support his 'liberal
democrat' apologism for neo-colonialists genocide, he'll find little (except
abstract proto-existentialist individual-as-consumer bullshit). Thoreau and
Emerson stood united in their hatred of the US's invasion of Mexico (and
remember, what Ulyssess S. Grant said, that the civil war was divine
punishment for that aggression), and Thoreau was willing to go to jail
rather than pay taxes which fund, what our modern lingo calls, (state)
terrorism.
>
> In the same essay Eric quotes from, Self-reliance, Emerson goes on to
explain that the reason why one should 'trust thyself' is because we cannot
be 'cowards fleeing before a revolution.'
> He continues: 'Society is everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of
every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company [or corporation],
in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each
shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue
in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not
realities and creators, but names and customs. *Whoso would be a man, must
be a nonconformist.*'
>
> Then Emerson speaks directly to Eric when saying, 'I am ashamed to think
how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead
institutions,' and calls to Americans: 'Let us affront and reprimand the
smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times ... in the face of
custom and trade and office.'
>
> This is why i defend an ethical sense of history and must agree with Mark
Twain (when the US slaughtered 200,000 men, womyn, and children in the
Spanish-American War at the turn of the century) in suggesting that the US
flag should replace the stars and stripes with the skull and crossbones.
:kev
>
>
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>
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