Re: [ejlist] Kosovo & Jünger

[richard_al <richard_al@csi.com>]

Hi all

OK Gary for the analysis and I have little things to add.
Don't agree as usual with John.
Being daily confronted with the civil (mean not military) titans, 
I don't see what is contentious in the text.
About the particular political question, see further.

Gary Kern wrote :
.../...

>  Zamyatin & Orwell had it right for this century: totalitarianism, Big
>  Brother.  But Huxley and Jünger seem to have it right for the next:
>  entertainment industry, bureaucratic entanglement, Titans of business
>  and technology.
>
>  And Jünger had the solution: Waldgänger. The best you can do is take a
>  book and go fishing, and hope that you're not trespassing on anybody's
>  land or that no idiot with a boombox and a backward baseball cap will
>  come by.  In fact, the Wald part of the formulation is at risk. The
>  individual is finished, except as a hermit, turning his hour glasses in
>  his secret study, if he has one.

>  GK

>  (Note new e-mail address)

Ok with the diagnostic and now, harder, the "solution".
The Waldgänger, sure, but only possible for a Goethe prizer and 
Pour le merite medallist. In the same, Voltaire says "let's sow 
our garden". And we, zombies in Metropolis, for who the society 
invented the summer and winter holidays, we can play the Waldgängers 
on the beach. Somebody said " problems are never solved,
simply displaced".


The case of Kosovo is, imho, a very current case. And Milo, a very
classical politician, who read Machiavel but was probably very surprised
by the attacks of titans he was not used with, well he probably never 
read EJ. Btw, the situation comes from a four centuries history, 
so one can't solve the problem with 3 lines and 4 pictures. 
That's why it's not usefull to say contentious about a text, 
for instance that of Peter Handke, whatever one can think about him. 
His position is perhaps a reaction to the cartoonist vision 
(nazi, genocide etc...) plated on the crisis.
 Sure the medias will show the horror and retrospectively justify the
intervention, the titans have their food for a long time.

Best

richard