Climate Change Unites the World

Jordan Peterson is an interesting guy. By 'interesting', I mean somebody who is thought-provoking and who is not afraid to speak his or her mind, especially in the face of massive opposition. Somebody who I will agree with sometimes, disagree with sometimes, and say 'I don't know' probably most frequently of all. By the way, I think Jordan could do with a bit of yoga, judging from his posture in the clip below.

I have known about Jordan Peterson for a while, initially through his famous 'gender-free language' stance in Canada; a reader of this blog put me onto this - you know who you are, thanks! My reading and 'researching' has generally been limited to the real personal essentials for the past year or two, however, so I have not paid him too much attention. I am just dipping into a few bits and pieces at the moment.

My few brief encounters with Jordan Peterson have been enough to effect a considerable change in my being. Jordan has rekindled my faith in the power, the possibility, even, of thinking. I had pretty much given up on 'thought'. Almost all of what is presented as 'thought' is in fact no such thing. It is received opinion, which is adopted by people because it aligns with their own personal biases or wishful hopes. Human beings too readily identify with their thoughts (read 'the words that unconsciously constellate in their minds'), while relegating the other aspects of being - feeling, intuition, sensation, if we follow Jung's system (which we don't have to) - to an inferior position unworthy of proper humans. Just check out pretty much any mainstream source, and it's all derivative crap. No proper thinking at all. Which suits the mainstream just fine: keep it stupid, keep it stupid.

So listening to Jordan Peterson for a minute or two has been personally revelatory. Not, to repeat, that I will necessarily agree with everything he says. But here is a man who knows how to think! It is marvellous, miraculous! So thank you for that alone, Mr Peterson.

This is Jordan Peterson speaking to folk at the Cambridge Union, pretty recently, I believe. On that subject close to all our hearts, climate change....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY

A Ramble Through the Sexes...

Prologue

So, today we're talking gender. Sex. Duality. Polarities. Roles. Stereotypes. That sort of thing. But before that, a word about language. I have a certain word in mind:

'Mindfuck'. This is a word that Pale Green Vortex has shied away from using, despite it being uniquely descriptive of one of the recurrent themes on this fantastic blog. You see, we are fully tuned into the modern zeitgeist and, above all else, do not wish to offend or upset anybody. However, we have noted with a degree of surprise that Maria Sharapova, in her autobiography 'Unstoppable', uses the word. If it works for Maria, it's good enough for us as well. Be ready for it to appear with gay abandon from now on.

At this juncture, you may be wondering what Pale Green Vortex is doing reading about the life of a famous tennis player anyway, when surely we should be studying conspiracies, multi-dimensional consciousness, and all the other stuff that turns up on this site. Well folks, it goes back to the 'Russian girls take drugs' theme, which was explored some time back. What was Maria's take on the 'naughty meldonium girl' story? This was the curiosity which fuelled our rare amble into sporting autobiography.

We are left in no doubt that our favourite rich blonde considers the meldonium incident a bit of a put-up job, by people who don't like her very much. Her description of the affair is clear, her reasoning impeccable. 'They' knew she was taking this supplement, as she had been doing so for years, and it was a monitored substance for a year before the ban. 'Not a day went by when I did not wonder if someone was trying to do me in.' And again: 'The world Anti-Doping Authority grew concerned about meldonium not because it improves performance but because it was being taken by so many athletes from eastern Europe and Russia.' Thanks, Maria, we love you. Despite your screeching. And as an autobio of a certain intelligence, we recommend your book to our readers.

Part One

Anyhow, we were going to talk about gender, that kind of stuff. Let's go back to my childhood, when genderish things were, generally speaking, remarkably simple. Men were men, and women were women. Men did what men do, while women did what women did.

Men, in general, got a job and went out to work. Their task was to provide for the family. They made the big decisions, like where to live, what colour the walls should be, where to go on holiday. In the evening they went home to the meal which their devoted wife had prepared. For this, and for other services provided by his wife, the man probably expressed minimal gratitude. After dinner, he would set about 'relaxing'. Typical relaxation pursuits might include reading the newspaper, watching the black-and-white television, and maybe spending a bit of fun time with the children.

The woman, meanwhile, stayed at home. She bought groceries, cooked meals, cleaned and tidied the house, and looked after the children. In any spare time, she might visit a neighbour, for a chat and a cup of tea. She quite likely felt insufficiently appreciated by her husband, and many women from this time died quite young, having led tragically submissive and unfulfilled lives. Others, meanwhile, though appearing to be passive, really ran the roost. Those with the confidence and guile to do it and get away with it.

Even as a child, I was deeply unimpressed with this state of affairs. People tied tightly into rigidly stereotyped behaviour. No room for manoeuvre, no room for independence, individuality - or anything, really. Thus was created a society with uniformity and conformity its watchwords; a society with spirit, soul, and life-blood effectively wrung dry. Not exactly my cup of tea.

Change was required, that was it: change. Here we are, sixty years on. And all's changed! In our so-called modern western democracies, at least, the rigid stereotypes based upon gender have been in the process of crumbling for a while. In some quarters (cue: mainstream media, the main driver of cultural and social fashions and programmes) the rigid stereotypes are being replaced by - not just no gender stereotypes, but no gender roles at all. In particular, anything that men can do, women can do as well, whether it's becoming a builder or getting drunk and noisy on the train. It works the other way round a bit as well, but not so smoothly or completely.

It's a game of ping-pong, taking place within an arena of opposites. This is what mainstream programming does - all that it's capable of - bouncing trends between one pole and another. I suppose that it's a law of sorts: bounce from one unhealthy, or unbalanced, pole - that of rigid gender stereotypes - and you will inevitably end up in another unhealthy place. It is not possible to react from unhealth to health. Health requires a recalibration, a kind of transcendence of the duality of sickness altogether.

What I see being pushed is actually a form of non-sexuality. Or asexuality, more like. It is as if that strict gender stereotyping of the 1940s and 50s is seen as the only form that differentiation on the basis of sex can take. Gender, sexual duality, is therefore regarded as sick, something to be eradicated. Thus we arrive at a point where gender differentiation is considered unimportant, a mere detail. It's all fluid, man. There is no distinction between man and woman, really. We're all one. We're all the same.

Removing the tension between male and female cleans things up. There is a great collective sigh of relief. All those deep, complex, sometimes painful, emotions can be cast aside. People can relax, safe in the knowledge that nothing disturbing is going to happen, that nobody is going to upset them. No man is going to approach in the bar, say 'hello gorgeous', and get too close. The world is an increasingly sanitised place. It's sexuality for the facebook age: keep things on the surface, please.

Only one problem. There is a difference between men and women. It's quite a big difference; such a big difference that a certain tension, a felt frisson, is inevitable. While it's not quite the same as the primal dualism of masculine and feminine, it makes a reasonable proximation. It's the basis of creation, of how the universe is made up, of how it works. Remove that, and...….??!!

Part Two

I recently caught a minute or so of a woman on a screen. The topic she was talking about was consent between adults. She wished to define it. What constitutes 'consenting adults' and what constitutes violation and rape. She was not going to take any prisoners, this was immediately apparent. She was the type who would have a man lose his job and his reputation for daring to tell a female work colleague that she was looking good today.

I wondered what would make a woman devote a large chunk of her life to all this. Was it overflowing love and compassion for her sisters? I didn't think so. I didn't pay much attention to what she was saying: instead, I looked closely at her - who she was, or might be. I sensed no great compassion emanating from her being. She was hard, brusque, sharp. Aggressive in the way that people sometimes are who present themselves as rational beings. So what was it that was getting her mojo working?

It was later that it hit me. Surrender; fear; hatred; self-hatred. These were the words that unbidden came to me. How to weave them into a whole?

Surrender. I never gave much attention to surrender. And then kundalini turned up, and it became key. The books will tell you: to negotiate the influx of kundalini, the only realistic strategy is surrender. Give in to that force, that power, and you stand a chance of coming through it a better person. Resist, fight, attack, and there'll only ever be one winner.

For months I found surrender impossible. Clenching, clinching, flinching: these were my typical reactions as the energy tried to find its way up and through my body. Despite my years and decades of Buddhist meditation and other spiritual practices, I was unable to 'give up my ego' and allow kundalini her way. I was shocked at how little I was able to surrender. Things have improved somewhat since then.

'Surrender' is also an integral part of the fulfilled sexual response of a woman. So much so, that several authors I have read suggest that kundalini awakening is less problematic for female than for male, due to her biological and instinctive acquaintance with surrender. And, in another place, somebody muses whether a woman's kundalini awakening might be more complete than a man's, precisely because of this distinction: a man just can't do it in quite the same way.

'Surrender' is altogether different to submissiveness, which is the characteristic quality of the female stereotyping of decades past. Submissiveness is the fallen, distorted version of surrender, in the way that it is intended here. Submission leads to diminution of the individual, whereas surrender is an act of sublime creation, leading to the opposite.

Shiva and Shakti: the divine masculine and feminine 'principles'; the creators of the universe through their union, their sacred dance of unutterable joy. Shakti, paradoxically, both surrenders completely, and is the divine lady of creation, the creative, 'principle'. Through their sacred interplay does the world come into being.

Surrender: it's inbuilt to the physiology, and consequently the psychology, of the female. Check out how sex between woman and man works. And so we come full circle, to the lady on the screen...…

Part Three

We're not talking rape, real abuse and violation. Neither are we talking about the behaviour of some men, who are really bad news when it comes to dealings with women. We're talking cultural and social norms; a culture where touching a girl on the arm, saying anything about her appearance, making a suggestion that she finds surprising, is viewed as offensive, criminal, the perpetrator to be taken to task. We're talking the fear of touch,maybe. Where 'consent' is something agreed over dinner, or jotted down in an appointments diary.

The things is - it's not quite as easy as that. As I intimated earlier, sex cannot be reduced to calendars, carefully-phrased agreements. Sex and sexuality emanate, in good part, from the world of Dionysus, not that of Apollo. Dionysus the wild one, the spontaneous, the sometimes dirty, the 'can't control me'. It is as if a certain element in modern culture desperately wants to discard Dionysus, with his touch of danger and non rationality. Instead, sexuality is to be claimed as part of Apollo's world. Clear, rational, predictable, even. Safe. We can breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our lives.

It's a move which can only lead to trouble. In Greek mythology, each god or goddess has their own domain. Should this principle be followed, then matters go not too badly. But if someone messes with the natural order of things, or a goddess or god tries to usurp what is not rightfully theirs, then there is trouble. Big trouble.

This 'land grab' by Apollo denotes a fear, I suspect. A deep fear of the nonrational forces. An attempt to tame the wild, the deep, the unfathomable. This is the shadow of #MeToo. Not the real abuse, which does happen. But the shadow is the fear of surrender, of part of what is the innately feminine. It would appear to be based upon hatred of ones female self, ones female body and its female functioning. It's a sad realisation, how so much modern, right-on, women's rights stuff, while superficially lauding a woman's freedom, is in fact self-hatred, a rejection of the core of ones being, no less, the expression of a wound.

The lady on the screen. Showing her wound. Showing it to the masses. Showing it through 'reason', through apparent concern. Her wound. How much is socially-engineered, who knows? For sure, many women walk around with wounds that have been socially engineered, manufactured, viciously so, the victim oblivious to the real source of her anger and indignation. Terrible, really, this manipulation of women. Turning them against themselves, while they believe the opposite to be true. And so it goes.....

Images:   Top: Marital bliss, 1950s style
              Centre: Tantric Buddhist Yab Yum
              Bottom: Shiva and Shakti Yab Yum  

 

           

Tardis News....

Jus a little thing connected with a topic that took a paragraph or two on Pale Green Vortex a while back....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhWtvktarbw

How to Shut People Up......

I watched some footage recently of protests and demos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Britain and the USA. It doesn't make for edifying viewing: police and military brutality, often in the face of minimal provocation. Throwing protesters to the ground, beating them with a variety of hard, vicious objects.

Vietnam, Biafra (in Britain, at least), repression of freedom of speech and various groups of people. Such were the objects of protest. I recall the police action in breaking up the final Free Festival in Windsor Great Park, 1974. Along with my friends, I was lucky: we sensed trouble in the air, and left the festival the day before the 'pigs' moved in. What happened was truly awful. Women, - including those pregnant -, children: nobody was spared the brutality unleashed upon the freak alternative youth on that dark morning just down the road from one of the Queen's prime residences.

In a sense, this action by the forces of law and order was successful: young people stopped protesting in such numbers on the street about wars; there were no more free festivals in Windsor Great Park. At the same time, it did the reputation of 'the Establishment' no good at all. It showed its own vicious colours all too vividly, and its real disrespect for anybody who dissented their programmes. 'Normal' citizens were left feeling uneasy. So another strategy of shutting people up was needed. Eventually someone had a brainwave. And political correctness was born.

'Self-policing' was the stroke of genius which arose in response to this conundrum, of how to shut people up in a socially acceptable fashion. And political correctness was the ideology that emerged as fit for purpose. It's brilliant, really. You don't need police out on the street, when you have the general public doing the job for you. People who would have been on the streets protesting now serve as prime trolls for the Establishment without even realising it. Plenty of folk considering themselves as right-on, fighting the fight against evil, in favour of noble and ephemeral notions like justice and equality. While, in reality, they are doing the dirty work of the dark forces who they profess to despise. Unwitting slaves, really.

Freedom of speech is a big one. The freedom to communicate, or at least express, your feelings, your ideas, your inspirations, no matter how weird and wacky, how unorthodox and unconventional, they may be. Freedom of speech is closely related to freedom of mind: if things cannot be expressed, they are likely to wither away, or be dismissed by the individual as aberrant, unhealthy, pathological, and so on, leading to all manner of personal difficulties. Obvious example: the effects on some truly gay people of outlawing homosexuality in the west in the first part of the 20th century.

This freedom of speech is a most unwelcome freedom in the eyes of 'Establishment'. It creates all kind of problems, as people question, poke, and prod, sometimes even digging up unpleasant truths about the nature and activities of Establishment. With the advent of the internet, the problem has become still more acute, with information and ideas zipping around the globe with ease. It is a situation which clearly needed to be dealt with.

Self-policing through the totalitarian lens of political correctness is a genius solution. Coming from a generation which campaigned ceaselessly for freedom of speech, I find it galling when idiotic students in places of 'learning' (read 'brain correction') protest against anybody lecturing or speaking in public whose ideological or political colours do not match theirs. These students, of course, are proud of how absolutely right-on they are, and how they make sure nobody gets offended by a viewpoint that falls outside the norm. People believing they are making a new and better world, when they are in reality doing the dirty work of the Establishment. This is society policing itself to perfection. Studenst creating a nightmare world. The 'education' of these young people obviously doesn't run to seriously reading 'Animal Farm' and '1984'.

It is the same story with other totems of modern ideology: racism, sexism, anthropogenic climate change, and the rest. The original freedom-affirming meanings of racism and sexism have become warped, to enable shutting up of dissenting voices. Any doubts about the official climate change story are met with Holocaust parallelism, the questioner being dubbed a 'climate change denier'. There. That vicious accusation should shut them up. It is the shadow of the MeToo# movement, as well. I'm all for being able to jump up and down if you have been abused - by anyone -, but their programme comes laden with fear and manipulation, having the effect of closing down, or inhibiting, any kind of passionate or sexual response from the heterosexual male. Damping down feelings, shutting people up, especially heterosexual male people.

And with that I shall, for now, of my own accord, my own free will, shut up - until the next time.

Images: - Free speech, 1960s-style
             - The police seize a stage at Windsor. Photo: Steve Austin, from the excellent ukrockfestivals website
             - Student protests 2015
           

The Corrie

Summit of Corrie Etchachan

But in the climbing ecstasy of thought,
Ere consummation, ere the final peak,
Come hours like this. Behind, the long defile,
The steep rock-path, alongside which, from under
Snow-caves, sharp-corniced, tumble the ice-cold waters.
And now, here, at the corrie's summit, no peak,
No vision of the blue world, far, unattainable,
But this grey plateau, rock-strewn, vast, silent,
The dark loch, the toiling crags, the snow;
A mountain shut within itself, yet a world,
Immensity. So may the mind achieve,
Toiling, no vision of the infinite,
But a vast, dark, inscrutable sense
Of its own terror, its own glory and power.

From: In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd

I once wild-camped in Coire Etchachan. It was July 2013. I count it among my most pleasant and 'successful' wild camps. The weather was settled and warm, the location astounding, the ground level, and running water was close to hand. This was in stark contrast to some of my wild camps, which have been battered by wind, tentpegs plunged into a midge-infested peat bog before darkness completely enfolds the world. And what I considered to be level ground proves to actually be a slight incline, resulting in an entire night spent rolling down a hill in a sleeping bag, then hauling it back up again.

There have been no wild camps the past two summers. First came the 'heating' pre-kundalini phase, when my being seemed to be softened, sweetened, and averse to long rough walks in the mountains. Then came full-on kundalini emergence, during which period the tenderising process continued, while accompanied by explosions of hitherto unknown energies, which rendered mountain heroics still less appropriate. And the hernia, which first appeared almost a year ago. The last thing this abdominal bulge wanted, or indeed permitted, was vigorous physical activity.

This coming year may well be different; I currently feel that it might be. But, until the time arrives, who knows?

Images: The wild camp, Coire Etchachan
             Evening stroll from camp onto Beinn Mheadhoin summit

It's Time to Meditate

'Shut up and listen!' This simple directive contains the essence of what 'meditation' means to me these days. Forget everything you think you know. Forget who you think you are, what you think you are. Forget your friends, your family, foes, everybody else. Forget the past, the future, the present. Your hopes, your dreams, your fears. Your identity - yes, above all, your identity. Forget the lot. Just shut up and listen. Then, and only then; then, just maybe, something very interesting, something beautiful yet more than a bit disturbing and scary, something completely unexpected, may begin to emerge.

It wasn't always like this. I have been 'doing meditation' for over forty years. At times it's been very sporadic, at other times it's been hours a day. But it's only in the past six years or so that I've kind-of stumbled into what now seems so blindingly obvious: just shut up and listen.

I used to practice, as one of my little bundle of meditations, something sometimes called 'just sitting'. It's not the same as shutting up and listening, though. The emphasis nowadays is on listening - on developing an attitude of alert yet soft receptivity. The 'outside world' is as important as what is going on in the interior. Listening to the sounds of traffic or vacuum cleaner opens up the world more than 'watching the movements of my mind.'

Closer to the spirit is Castaneda, when Don Juan exhorts him to 'stop the internal dialogue.' This is more like it. The problem is that 'you' will never stop the internal dialogue, since 'you' depends on the internal dialogue for its own phantom existence. It needs, somehow, to be tricked.

'Shut up and listen' is a phrase that I've pinched from Georgia Lambert. She describes four stages or levels of meditation. First up is 'relaxation': calming down, releasing stress, we've all been there. Next is 'visualisation', by which I take her to mean realising that you can create your own reality through working on, in, through, your mind. You begin to take your life into your own hands. Then there is 'concentration', which she warns can be very boring. It might be, but can be the contrary, in my experience. And finally, we get to 'shut up and listen'. This, according to Georgia, is real meditation.

I dedicate this modest wee piece to a recently sadly deceased buddie of mine. He would probably have liked the general drift, though would most likely have come up with a list of doubts, queries, and rejoinders of a philosophical kind. Such was his way. He might have also liked the picture. I shall miss him: I already do. Fly, friend, fly...

Image: One of the Five Faces of Hecate, one of Luis Royo's finest creations, in my view. It doubles as Four of Pentacles in the Royo Dark Tarot. Solid, earthed, watchful, watching, waiting. Secure, steadfast, confident in oneself. Such is the Four of Pentacles as manifesting here.    

Conditionings of Race and of Culture

(Warning: There is nothing, in my view, the least bit offensive about anything in this article. Its overarching theme is how all of us can easily become unconscious slaves to our racial and cultural conditioning - something to be avoided whenever possible. Nevertheless, there are those who might beg to differ. So, should you go ahead and read, you have been warned).

Part One

Englishness. I am English. Can't get away from it. It's had its effect. In some respects I am probably not too typically English. In other ways I am quintessentially so.

Fair play. A level playing field. These have, as far back as I can remember, been of importance to me. There is an element of natural 'rightness' about this feeling, but also an unmistakeable Englishness. If I sense that someone is getting special treatment, has an unfair advantage, then I don't like it.

As a child, I took to playing the game of cricket. In my mind, at least, cricket was just that. A sport in which the ideals of fair play, a level playing field, were held in highest esteem. A little corner of a nasty corrupt world where honesty, fair play ruled; where excellence was king, and nobody threw tantrums in order to try and gain an advantage.

I was reasonably proficient, and played and practiced a lot, mostly in the back garden in evenings, and in the local park with a few friends, when I should have been doing homework. At secondary school, I was picked for the house under-thirteens cricket team (it was a state school, but had pretensions, so all pupils were allotted to one of four 'houses' for sports and other activities). I was only eleven at the time, and excited to be chosen.

I was to be opening bat. This is a particularly challenging role: you bat first, normally to face the most ferocious bowlers that the opposition can throw at you. You need to be a bit of a hero, or a mug. I went in, apprehensive but prepared, for the first ball of the innings. As opening bat, you are prepared for a small but extremely hard ball to come hurtling very quickly in your direction. The object is to avoid all temptation to run away, to erase fantasies of ending up in hospital, and take on the challenge; give as good as you receive.

The bowler was Trev Chandler; the umpire was history teacher 'Ted' Taylor. First ball: straight, accurate. I defend stoutly. Not very fast at all, really. Maybe things aren't going to be too bad. Second ball: short, down the leg side. I hook it hard and high, two runs. No problems. At this moment, I begin to fantasise about a real run-feast. The bowling's a piece of cake.

Third ball: slightly short, straight. I hit hard, snicking it loud onto my pads and out onto the off-side. To my surprise, Trev Chandler is appealing. To my even greater surprise, that is to say my disbelief, Taylor is raising his finger. Out! Out? No way! You cannot be out leg before wicket if you hit the ball with the bat first. That's the rules, Basic. Out?

Had I developed the inner Serena Williams, I would have approached that pathetic umpire, screamed at him, called him a thief, and threatened to smash up his history room with my cricket bat. As it is, I was far too timid, and far too English. I walked slowly and dejectedly off the pitch, with pure contempt in my heart for that umpire, who didn't even know the basic rules of the game.

A great innings might have altered the trajectory of my life. Afterwards, I played school cricket with a degree of success for a number of years. Then, aged sixteen, I decided that the game was a bourgeois aberration, and went off to research trepanning and the burgeoning counter-culture instead.

Part Two

Fair play. Level playing field. No unfair advantages. It's been axiomatic to my philosophy of life. In this respect, I am a true egalitarian.

Related to this is my attitude to what I shall term double standards. One law for me, another law for others. I don't like it. All other things being equal, I'm all for everybody having the same chances, being treated the same way (according to their own aptitude, skill, intelligence, etc).

So when a group of people appear on the world stage putting themselves forward as 'God's Chosen People', with the conferred status implied, I am not going to be very impressed. I am aware that there will be an underlying conditioning that goes with that belief, and it is one that will remain within the individual, regardless of conscious beliefs, unless they have undertaken rigorous personal deconstruction and purification through self awareness and deconditioning. Otherwise they stay rather like my father, who was a professed atheist, yet continued to display many characteristics typical of the Protestant environment in which he grew up.

I received a bit of 'feedback' after my piece on the taboo against discussing the Jewish situation (27/07/2018), including some extensive criticism. Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote. Of course I am not condoning any crude facebook-like insulting or name-calling. I simply call for the freedom to discuss freely and to air ones point of view.

God's Chosen People: by implication, they will wish for special treatment. And judging by the kid gloves applied by our 'western democracies', our leaders all implicitly agree with the special status of the self-appointed special ones.

I was, rightly or wrongly, strongly affected by events during the 'migrant crisis' of 2015. Masses of people streaming into eastern and central European countries from the Near East, along with a few African nations. Nobody in authority seemed to be very concerned at all: just let them all in, whoever they are.

Those photos, of crowds snaking across east European countrysides. Surreal. It was obvious to me from the outset that these were not all bona fide refugees. A cursory glance at these photos showed a preponderance of working age males, not families with women and children (of which there were some, but that's all). We didn't need the United Nations to come along and tell us that, well after the horse had bolted.

It was the open acceptance of this bizarre situation, an invasion, really, by most authorities, the lack of serious questioning of what was really happening, that finally brought me round to a degree of sympathy with the 'forced multiculturalism as aimed at the death of Europe' point of view. It was a notion that I had found so abhorrent, I had resisted it for a long time as far-right paranoia, Surely nobody could have such a vicious aim. But now the evidence was there, staring me in the face.

Among all this I was conscious of a number of prominent Jewish and/or Israeli diplomats, politicians, commentators. They seemed to be all for this absorption of non-Europeans into countries like Hungary and Germany: 'open borders'. But all the while Israel was to be exempt from taking in any of these 'refugees'. It's a nation to remain 'pure'. Sorry, guys and gals, but such things make me suspicious. Double standards.

Part Three

Then there is a little matter concerning war. The Second World War. Let's visit Wikipedia for some numbers. According to this source, 60 million people died as a result of that event. I find all this difficult to read, let alone write. It makes me feel sick to the pit of the stomach just to consider it, whether it's folk killed by Germans, Americans, Japanese, British, or anyone else. That's my problem, I suppose. That such loss of life could take place is beyond personal belief. It is also beyond personal belief that such devastation was in any way 'necessary' or 'unavoidable'. I don't buy that.

We'll take a look at the breakdown of the deaths of civilians. Jews in the Holocaust: six million. The number is well-known, and the effects reverberate to this day. The Holocaust has been a factor in shaping many events and attitudes since 1945, probably more so now than when I was a child in the 1960s. We all know of it, and television continues to remind us on a regular basis.

Looking  further at the statistics, however, I was surprised at what else I found. Russian civilian deaths: 4.5-10 million (a figure fraught with great complications, it seems). Chinese civilian deaths: 7-8 million. That's a whole load of people. Comparable to the Holocaust; yet their effects on world events thereafter seem to have been, well, roughly zero. It's as if they never happened: those people never lived and perished. Their importance is nothing compared to those victims of the Holocaust. Dead Russians and Chinese: nobody gives a monkeys, really.

Differing western attitudes are also reflected in the different ways that the leaders of aggressor nations are generally viewed. Hitler is the devil incarnate. While Stalin? Well, he had his faults, but not such a bad guy really. Uncle Joe. You can wear a Stalin t-shirt and it's cool (in fairness, Hitler t-shirts are also available to buy, not all of them obviously ironic). There is a restaurant in Inverness named 'Revolution'. On the wall there hangs a cartoon entitled 'Bolshevik Tea Party'. There we see Leon Trotsky and Uncle Joe Stalin sitting together laughing over a nice cup of tea.
       
Double standards on the global front. Suspicions aroused.

Part Four

There is, I suggest, another element at work in how events are viewed, attitudes towards them, in the mainstream west. It emanates from the depths of what I shall term, in a generalisation more sweeping than any I have ever made, the western consciousness.

Western thought, western culture and civilisation: all have been increasingly characterised by the development and glorification of 'the individual'. This is what it's all been based upon: differentiation and identification of the individual as a unique and precious living entity. It is from this that we gain our sense of worth. We can see it already in Augustine, talking about the personal, private, interior heart as the real thing. We had 'ego theory', history as the lives of great men, and the rest, until we reach the modern day. Personal growth, self development, personal coaches. Who am I? Find your self, your own deep, true self. What do I really want? You are special, you are unique. Self confidence, self esteem. Because you're worth it. This is what so much of modern culture is built on. And I put my hands up and submit that it's the way that I have largely looked at the world, and my own life, until now.

This culture of the west has seen many invaluable contributions from Jewish people to its development. Practically, psychologically, financially, in terms of personally driven human beings, Hollywood today, and many other walks of life. In truth, western culture and outstanding Jewish individuals are inextricably interwoven. So if we imagine Holocaust victims, we imagine the unimaginable: six million fully differentiated individuals, with individual aspirations, personal hopes, fears, wishes, and the rest. Six million special, valuable people fated to an early death.

Think of those Russians from the 1930s and 1940s, and the imagination may come up with something a bit different. Lots of men with weather-beaten faces and cloth caps, out in the cold and the potato fields. Women with headscarves and stern expressions. Undernourished skinny children, running around in clothes that didn't make it into the fashion magazines. People less defined, less distinct, less emergent from the group, from the collective.

As for those Chinese, well the imagination probably comes up with nothing much at all. An enormous undifferentiated mass. A sea of anonymity, of non-differences. An ocean of homogeneity.

The unconscious kneejerk response of conditioning deems our Jewish victims to be more unique, more special, more significant, than their Russian and Chinese counterparts. As people, they are simply more important.

I am passing no judgment here; no rights and wrongs, no good guys and bad guys. My primary aim  is simply to try and root out some conditioning which goes towards attitude, perception, bias, all perfectly unconsciously. The effects of conditioning will always be there: I shall always be English, Freud will always be a Jew, Gorbachev a Russian. But the light of awareness may make us less a helpless slave of those conditioning forces; and, by the way, thereby less likely to fall prey to the manipulations of those whose motives are far from universally benevolent.

'I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' Voltaire.

Images:

Top: David Gower, English cricketing elegance
Middle: Bodyline bowling. Fair play or not?
Bottom: Stalin t-shirt