Tag Archives: Joseph Conrad

great emancipator

Russia’s great emancipator. Ivan Turgenov helped bring freedom to the serfs by an ingeniously devastating method: showing them what their lives were like… “Almost everything I saw aroused in me a feeling of embarrassment, indignation, and disgust…In my eyes the … Continue reading

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international society of savage customs

What evil lurks in the heart of man? Maybe it doesn’t lurk, rather it dances, it teases, it flatters, it cajoles, it manipulates and end up getting its way. How? The dynamics must be complicated.Especially when evil gets under the … Continue reading

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terror: strategies of the absurd

…The Palestinians terror groups appear to have made the strategy of the absurd into a specialty: the sheer audacity, historically, of their most spectacular exploits seems to flout any criteria of rational behavior. However, other groups practice the same basic … Continue reading

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terror: sheer, irrational madness

…Even more distinctive of modern terrorism, asĀ  opposed to its origins, is the random nature of its violence. Earlier terrorists usually had some specific and comprehensible grievance against their victims. Quite often the attack was in retaliation for the acts … Continue reading

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madness alone is truly terrifying

or so said Joseph Conrad. The terrorists… …In nineteenth-century usage, however, attacks on the official establishment were conventionally terms acts of terror, and their perpetrators were ipso facto terrorists. Underlying the verbal convention lay a common pool of genuine fear: … Continue reading

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terror: the modern condition

“Madness alone is truly terrifying.” – Joseph Conrad Terrorism appears to be a specific malady of modern civilization. No other society, we tend to assume, has suffered to the same extent from precisely the same social and moral pestilence. This … Continue reading

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good neighbors: exterminate the brutes!

Senses of systematic collapse, an implosion borne of an inability to transcend inherent tensions from the use of the “other” as socialĀ  safety valve. Moments of madness. Is the point of power ultimately to prolong its use and attenuation while … Continue reading

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moving sale

Its always the same story:in the grip of forces they do not really understand; something out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Behind all these protestors and “freedom fighters” is a risk of unchaining a process that cannot be contained … Continue reading

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in search of paradise

In our shrinking globe it appears more difficult to find those elusive Shangri-la’s. Do a few endure, besides deep in our imagination, the longing and desire for the unfettered and fulfilling life, that special place where no one wants to … Continue reading

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paradise found lost and imagined

In search of paradise. In our shrinking globe there are not too many paradise’s that still endure. At the Red Fort in Delhi, one can still see decorative Persian script of the seventeenth-century over the arches illuminating the words, ” … Continue reading

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