Generally Speaking: War, Corruption and Politicians.

 

War is a constant in our existence. The reasons our "leaders" or politicians give us for war are always lies, and over the last 25 years, surprisingly similar. "Can't let 'them have a nuclear weapon", "They have weapons of mass destruction", "They are terrorists, and our democracy is at stake", "It's a matter of national security", "They are a leftist regime, and we need to do regime change, free the people, and enable democracy" - all lies and insanely repeated over and over again, and strangely, the majority believe this nonsense. The reasons for war are quite simple: resources, oil/gas, high finance, money laundering, and corporate supremacy. These elite sociopaths are willing to murder millions of people for a profit.  US Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler wrote a little book called; War is a Racket. He writes: 

"I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."

"The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar, and the soldiers follow the flag."

War is good for the few while the rest of us pay the price with our lives. 

It has been slowly revealed how desperately corrupt our politicians are while in office and what they do once out of office. In the US, it has become common knowledge that Congress practices insider trading and is getting away with it. What has also come to light for many people is that the US government is entirely captured by Israel. This is also true in my home in Australia. Our government continues to deny the genocide in Gaza, send $ and weapon parts to Israel in support of their 3-year genocide. The Australian media echoes the support for Israel, and our top Spy in ASIO, is spreading disinformation about Iran. For one who studies history and geopolitics, as an Australian I find this extremely embarrassing. 

There is a shard of light amongst all these lies, war, and corruption. And that is, people generally across the globe are aware of this psychopathic behavior, and protesting our growing "democratic" totalitarian governments. They can only put so many people in jail for social media posts before a serious backlash. 

Generally, this war in Iran is for Israel's dominance in the area, but more so, the vast resources and oil that Iran possess. This may sound like an oversimplification of the war, but I truly believe it's that in a nutshell. 

People are becoming more aware of the lies around them and are voicing their concerns and fighting back. 

This can only be a good thing. 

Zweig – 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman –Comment.

 

After finishing this brief novella, I was again struck by Zweig's astounding insight into the human psyche. We can live our lives and never truly understand what drives us, emotionally or otherwise, to do the things we do. Suddenly out of the blue, something in our environment ignites a deep response, intense feelings, and our rationality simply disappears. Indeed, we can experience these profound urges, but many never act on them. This novella explores acting on impulse, doing something so out of character, that one's inner and outer circle of friends and family are shocked and now their world irrevocably changes. Obsession can be a dangerous thing. 

Our narrator is a gentleman visiting a European resort who witnesses, along with the other guests, a surprising scandal. A married woman with children meets a stranger at the resort, and ends up leaving the resort with him, abandoning her husband and family, with no word to anybody. Of course, the husband is devastated, but the response from the many guests at the resort becomes quite heated. Our narrator seems to defend the woman, having a different take on human nature. Among those debating the issue is a dignified woman in her seventies, who takes our narrator aside and requests his company to relay an incident in her past that she has never confessed to anyone. This incident that transpired over a 24-hour period, has tormented the woman for many years. 

Our distinguished woman at this stage is a widow, wearing only the color of mourning, and has never really moved on since her husband's death. She finds herself in the gaming room of a casino, observing the patrons in the throes of gambling, a past time that she shared with her husband. She explains that to gain greater insight into the gambler, one must watch their hands rather than their faces, to truly grasp their emotions and intent. She watches the hands of a young man making bets on the wheel. At first, he is winning, but later is all in on a certain number, losing everything. The man is in utter ruin, and the desolation in his demeanor reflects a movement towards self-destruction. The noble woman cannot help herself and follows the young man out of the casino. It is raining and she knows he will suicide before the sun rises in the morning. Totally out of character, she intervenes, in an attempt to save the man from himself. 

Zweig's storytelling touches deeply into the nature of the soul. The psychological realism is really quite astounding. The reader can feel the young gambler's desolation, and the woman's concern for the young man's welfare. The woman's actions are so out of character that she is shocked yet continues down this emotional unknown path. 

In 1927 when 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman was published, it was praised by many in Europe as an absolute masterpiece for its lyrical intensity and psychological power representing the human condition at its most vulnerable. 

Excellent read.

Stefan Zweig – Nietzsche – Comment.

 

Stefan Zweig penned several biographical miniatures who he believed shaped his writing and European culture overall, including Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevski, Casanova, Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, rather than focusing on the philosopher's physical timeline of dates and events, Zweig presents us with his insight into the man’s psyche, his spirit, and the gruesome suffering of the man’s creative process. 

Where the great German minds of philosophy (Hegel, Goethe, and Schopenhauer) preferred order, a tendency to discipline the spirit, creating an architecture of ‘truth’, a grand narrative, Nietzsche followed the opposite path, abolishing these grand stories of the soul, listening to his demons, he revealed the big lies, and taught us a different way of viewing reality, tearing apart staid perceptions of ourselves, and existence. His approach to knowledge, “...born from an altogether different temperament, from a virtually antipodal universe of the spirit...wholly of the demonic kind; a hot breathed, nerve quivering, inquisitorial passion which never satisfies itself and is never exhausted...never does he allow himself a knowledge set in stone...” (P.28)

Nietzsche physically was a very sick man. Moments of respite from his suffering were few and far between. The man’s diet was strict, and sticking to this eating regimen was paramount to his continued existence. The philosopher constantly plunged himself into the abyss of uncertainty, deconstructing contemporary knowledge, always alone, but pushing forward anyway. Any human being both sick physically and mentally stretched must have a place to escape this suffering, and for Nietzsche it was music. But this was not the music of his youth, Wagner, the loud, bombastic and stimulating dramatic, though now a refuge of escape, ...a kind of psychic bromide, an interior sedative. (P.70)

Art and nothing but art – we have art so that we might not die of truth. (P.70)

Nietzsche’s last years before his mental breakdown was the most productive and inspired. It is reported that many if not of all his friends and colleagues, abandoned him, claiming that the man had finally gone completely insane. In the end, no publisher considered publishing his books. Thus, he had to resort to self-publishing, spending his last savings, only to be read by no one. 

In a moment of despair, the philosopher writes: After a call like my Zarathustra, from the very innermost recesses of my being, to not hear a single word of response, nothing, nothing, only immutable solitude multiplied, there is an inconceivable horror in this and even the strongest would perish before it. (P.75)

Close to his last mental breakdown he wrote a prophetic line: They will understand me after the next European war. (P.87) Of course without question this turned out to be true. And his work continues to be studied and debated in the present time. 

Zweig’s Nietzsche is a masterpiece of psychological and spiritual erudition of one of our great western philosophers.