Sovereignty v Corruption; Integrity v Image
By Dr. Eugene Narrett - April 14, 2011
The reign of imagery fills the world with dazzling double-talk and lies. The glamour of its deceit both is and accelerates corruption of thought and reduction of speech. This glare or image-formation and idol worship is darkness, a fundamental lie about life. In the shadows of the lie the world is filled with Hamas (“violence”). [1]
Modern mass media like all technological processes do not arise by accident. Tekne, the source of “text” and “technology” is Greek for “weaving” and imagery derives through Latin imago-imaginem from magike, the work of witches and sorcerers. Because the West is organized around idealizing image work, transformations of identity of which the greatest is its originating possession, appropriation and displacement of Judaism it is the most dynamic culture of the eidolon. The process is one of emotional, especially “erotic frenzy” and its “demand for beauty” and development of a cult of aesthetics proceeds from inadequacy, feelings of “pain, deprivation and lack.” [2] Mephistopheles himself warns Faust that this fascination and its intrinsic goddess worship, the self reflected as a ‘wonder woman’ or “the Helen in every man.” [3] This “magic art” is “the Medusa” of “illusion” for which the West has in insatiable craving; it is its identity, organized around morbidity and illusion, the tenuous displacement of the genuine by representations.
In simpler historical terms, the modern-postmodern West is the decadent late stage of Classical culture that through the military might and will to power of ancient Rome, already immersed in syncretic goddess worship and magic imbued with Gnostic-Neo Platonism fractured Judah and then ingested and transformed the fragments it could assimilate to a new authority. This hybrid (Hellenic-Hebraic) and self negating quality makes the West fissionable, dynamic and self-destructive. We live during the last stages of its ossification as its elites, a new pagan Church empowered by modern magike-tekne paralyzes and sterilizes the world into a manageable package. This is the era of the cult of the machine and imperial Caesarism wielded by oligarchies. [4] It is like a snake that stings and then engorges its victim. It is a distillation of “false witnesses who breathe words of violence” like the demon lover in “Christabel.” [5]
This historical process, this all-embracing corruption and deceit began when the West formed itself by breaking, corrupting and assimilating Judaism and by scattering the Jews, the genuine originals whose presence the illusion could not and cannot abide: the genuine exposes and discredits the fake. The ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ cannot abide the pure water for which everyone thirsts, the enduring promises, sovereignty and wholeness accessible only through Davidic monarchy. [6]
All the pseudo-sciences of the Modern world, -- Darwinism, feminism, socialism, Positivism – and their postmodern cult-like successors, -- global warming, ‘over-population,’ ‘security’ – are decayed forms, replacement theologies, “intellectualized caricatures of the dogma of ‘justification by faith’ alone. [7] The detachment of mind from action and ultimately reason (“only by faith”) leads to worship of the imago – imagination, imagery and the deification of art (“sola Scriptorum”) and ends in “a toying with myths and tasting of cults that it is hoped might fill an inner void.” Romanticism, Victorian pseudo-gothic, Post Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop and X-Box show the aesthetic-technical side of the drive to manage the world and impose the fiction. Today’s impoverishment and starvation, debasement of currencies and failing crops are results of a culture in which war is called peace and lies replace truth. It has been a long time coming and the end of the end game is here. The goodness of life abundant, the true ‘Middle Earth’ is ruined and the god-beasts of Mordor rule. Their demonic drive for power is embodied in “the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone” [8] and they transform culture in all its aspects into images to be manipulated by the magic of high tech for the purposes of power. The satyr of Esau rules. [9]
Perhaps the most extreme and central magical drama, its series of tableau and poses, [10] the process of diplomatic pronouncements thick with deceit building into a crescendo of conferences and ‘agreements’ is the ‘peace process,’ the great lie of the great petrifact that the West has become. The West has an ongoing need to displace and bury the Jews; the original ‘host’ of its predatory imago whose emergence would give the lie to the parasitic fiction whose most blatant form is “the Palestinian people,” the cat’s paw of the Western oligarchs. The peace process is a war process that serves the new world order’s war system of contrived attrition and scarcity. It is the karua (“torn”) shalom of Esav, the antithesis of the truth of Jacob whose peace derives from integrity.
The essence of derekh Yehudi is sovereignty and integrity. The imperial oligarchy above all opposes all sovereign forms but theirs. It is the fact of life that Esav hates Ya’akov. It is natural, it is inevitable that the attempts to resurrect the Hebrew Kingdom coincide “with a period of crisis for Western culture” from the Greeks and Romans to Republican democracy and Communism, [11] the cistern of the West. It is one or the other: Caesarea of Jerusalem.
In the conflict between fragmentation and wholeness, lies and truth, the constructed agglomeration versus integrity, contrived scarcity against natural abundance, arrogance and junk science against happy simplicity and genuine industry, the world, conditioned by the dazzle of the distraction machine prefers magic to miracles. And so the world is dying in the grasp of the gazirpatai and amgushim of the electronic coliseum. Their “pit is empty, it has no water in it,” only the “snakes and scorpions” [12] of a mind filled, like Macbeth’s, with images that displace life, with delusions of power and rule, the “fatal dagger” of delusion in which the lust for an omnipotent future destroys the present, filling it with the equivocations and lies of the supernatural, of “the fiends.” [13]
Under the sway of their distraction and dazzle machine “that lies like truth” “confusion has made its masterpiece and “all best things are thus confused to ill.” [14] The lie buries the truth and the enameled artifice of increasingly implausible deceits hardens to morbidity and fractures of its own pretences. Only global Caesarism disguised by hollow chants of “democracy” hold the shell tenuously together. This is the terror and horror of the dark within the dazzle of image-world. Elaborated in terror and as an act of terror, the image-ideal or idol, say of ‘humanitarian intervention’ leads to and collapses in terror. It is the false peace and false messiah of Esau and its karua shalom. It strives to bury its antithesis the genuine shalom that arises from the truth of Jacob linked to its foundation in Joseph. [15]
The source and essential basis of peace (shalom) is integrity or wholeness (shaleim). The plenitude of peace with its bridge to the Divine from the foundations of humanity cannot arise except from shin-lamed-mem. The teaching of Jacob blends the water of kindness and wisdom with the fire of life and insight and is cousin to the ladder (sulam) by which a spirit and mind that keeps itself from the clutches of those who “capture the eyes and steal the mind.” [16] When Jerusalem and all Israel settles in its place the lands now chaotic will enjoy peace in the clearly distinguished Malkhut Yisrael and “the world will yield its produce.” [17] The noise of the contrived ‘twitter revolution,’ the chattering of small birds activated by the screams of mighty vultures is the penultimate offensive of the War system. It will be swept away, and their empowering illusions with them by a storm wind of glad song for “singers as well as flute players, all wellsprings are in you, O Zion.” [18]
Those who are thirsty will come to the water.
May the purgation of image-world be soon and may all good people be spared its fury.
[1] Tehillim 74:20; c.f. Tehillim 27:12 quoted below
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” section 8 in The Portable Nietzsche (NY 1954, translated with introduction & notes by Walter Kaufmann), 518-20; second quote from Nietzsche’s preface to the 2nd, 1886 edition of his The Birth of Tragedy (Cambridge University Press 1999, edited by Raymond Geuss & Ronald Speirs, translated by Speirs), 7
[3] Goethe, Faust I 2427 – 2604, 4183-4211 (NY 1965 translated by Charles Passage), 85-92, 146-7
[4] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (NY 1962, 2006 abridged English edition by Alan Helps translated by Charles Francis Atkinson), 382-414, chapters 19-21
[5] Tehillim 27:12; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel” (1797-1816), “Geraldine” the demon lover of indeterminate identity possesses and displaces Christabel. See also “Kubla Khan” 12-24
[6] Isaiah 55:1-11
[7] Spengler op cit, 346-8
[8] Ibid 411
[9] The Birth of Tragedy op cit on the satyr & see Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre” (1810)
[10] Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Problem of the Actor” in The Gay Science I section 361 (NY 1974, translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann), 316-17
[11] Israel Eldad, The First Tithe (1950; Tel Aviv 2008, English translation by Zev Golan), 121-22
[12] Rashi on Genesis 37:20-4, c.f. 40:1-4 for another pit with snakes and scorpions
[13] Macbeth 3.2.36, 2.1.33-61, 5.2.42-4, 2.3.7-66 inter alia
[14] Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound I. 618-28
[15] Genesis 37:1, “the generations of Jacob Joseph” are the bridge (vav 6) from truth to foundation. Through them integrity (shin-lamed-men 370) becomes true peace, shalom (376) against the karua shalom of Esav (376) the war process that under the reign of media imagery & diplomatic deceit shatters peace and yields terror, the distorted and horrible reflection or re-presentation of the wholesome (ish tam) original: Sluttish pagan goddess rapture in high tech form wars on Yesod HaTiferet, the generations of Israel.
[16] Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvoth negative commandment #32
[17] Tehillim 67:7
[18] Tehillim 87:7
Prof. Eugene Narrett is the author of five books about cultural history and Israel related issues. His latest book is Culture of Terror: The Collapse of America (May 2009). Dr. Narrett blogs at www.israelendtimes.com.
Dr. Narrett is available to lecture and his services are available as an editor or co-writer of fiction or non-fiction projects. For more information, you can contact Dr. Narrett via his website at:
http://israelendtimes.com/contact/
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jewish Eye.
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