After checking with the folks in Italy (the translation of stories from Palestine has been put to sleep for the night) I read a few more stories. Imagine a situation where a medical facility is evacuated at gunpoint after being fired upon (EU reps were inside at the time), the facility is dynamited, and to top it off one of the doctors is used as a human shield (again at gunpoint) for enterring private houses after their doors have been blown in. Such is the state of things raging in the occupied territories this day.
The Society of the Spectacle (4) (Debord) includes this anticipation of Fukiyama's "end of history": Philosophy, in the process of being superseded by historical thought, has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its world only by denying it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total history to which it has relegated everything has already come to an end, and that the only tribunal where truth could be judged is closed."
The text continues with something I'm going to have to toss around for a while: "When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this historical thought has not been forgotten, its refutation of that thought’s conclusion is at the same time a confirmation of its method.
Historical thought can be saved only by becoming practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class can be nothing less than historical consciousness operating on the totality of its world."
When I read "Hegel performed the task of the philosopher — “the glorification of what exists”" it occurred to me that the main strength of the pseudo-activist who manufactures consensus shares more than I thought with the neo-liberal spin-doctor: the point is to implement the clique's plan, and then it's merely a matter of interpreting the past as the situation demands ... it's a lose-lose situation where the specifics can always be re-jigged to put one's activity in the best light. After the ecology has been devastated or the stock-holders mugged and the profits banked, picking over the bones of the argument is a mugs game! A real activist engaged in the project of emancipation wants each and every to be a conscious agent of change ... that's the democrat's strength and confidence: the fearless wish to empower the mass.
The Society of the Spectacle (4) (Debord) includes this anticipation of Fukiyama's "end of history":
The text continues with something I'm going to have to toss around for a while: "When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this historical thought has not been forgotten, its refutation of that thought’s conclusion is at the same time a confirmation of its method.
Historical thought can be saved only by becoming practical thought; and the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class can be nothing less than historical consciousness operating on the totality of its world."
When I read "Hegel performed the task of the philosopher — “the glorification of what exists”" it occurred to me that the main strength of the pseudo-activist who manufactures consensus shares more than I thought with the neo-liberal spin-doctor: the point is to implement the clique's plan, and then it's merely a matter of interpreting the past as the situation demands ... it's a lose-lose situation where the specifics can always be re-jigged to put one's activity in the best light. After the ecology has been devastated or the stock-holders mugged and the profits banked, picking over the bones of the argument is a mugs game! A real activist engaged in the project of emancipation wants each and every to be a conscious agent of change ... that's the democrat's strength and confidence: the fearless wish to empower the mass.
