Re: CHAT: pacifism

In a message dated 2003:12:20 11:42:42 AM, ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:

>[snip]
>
>>         You & your Imperialistic, Decadent Civilization has been Counted
>> & Counted Again, Weighed, is found severely Lacking-&-Wanting...
>>         ... It will be Divided & Torn-Apart/Asunder in an Earth-shaking,
>> world-shattering Final Conflict rivalling that of the Fall of the Roman
>> Empire,...
>
>..as the Roman Empire did _not_ fall in any earth-shaking,
>world-shattering final conflict - indeed, there was no even less dramatic
final conflict >- either the comparison doesn't hold good or we have nothing to
be concerned >about.

    Yepyep, I know that the Roman Empire fell over a long period of time. So
did USSR - Soviet Russia... in a period covering just about 2-3 generations of
Russian history.
    The fall of both these empires have had tremendous impact on history -
collective and individual - much like the aftershocks and unforeseeable effects
of the Black Death (circa 1347-49) -and- the "discovery" of the "New World" in
1492... and the mechanized trench warfare of World War 1 that wiped out
nearly a whole generation of Brits, Aussies, French, Prussians, etc..

>In one of his poems, T.S. Eliot wrote:
>
>"This is the way the world ends, not in a bang but a whimper."
    "manunkind"  CAUTION: Echoland   Wasteland      ;)

    the days drag - on like dead dogs
    having the past in front of us, we have hindsight
    the future tends to creep up on us from behind, ambushing us...
        kuz we can't see in back of us too well, hehe...
    the dead occupy the futurological after-[this]-life: GibberGibber
GIBBER-GiBBeR

>'twas certainly the way the Roman Empire ended - and the whimper was a
>few centuries of withering away - no great bang.
    Entropy is still Earth-shakin', world-shatterin'... it's just like
spiritual death: it usually takes longer than mere bio-physical death. But the
Cosmos & it all follows the cosmic 2nd law of Thermodynamics--- the Cosmos consumes
itself as it spirals ever outwards, downwards, circle never quite closing
btween chaos/complexity & order... the Cosmos expands whilst simulanteously
"burning out" into darkness, perfect vacuum, absolute zero...

"...There is life feeding on this dead heap. ... life will complete its
cycle, teeming within this lump of death." - Bela Bartok

>So if the passing of our civilization is to rival that of Imperial Rome,
>we're in for a few centuries of gradual decline as a new order emerges
>(presumably neo-feudalism :) - but forget the apocalyptic bang.
    More like a scattered mix of varieties of the following:
    1)  Max Ernest's Surrealist painting _Europe after the rain_ depicting a
mutant fungoid-covered urban ruin jungle-like landscape with bird-like
humanoids barely (& sparsely) visible to the casual look... A new Dark Age or a New
Ice Age...etc.
    2) barbarian over-run Roman Empire, esp'ly the early feudalistic,
post-Hadrianic _Pax Britannia_ of the barely "civilized" pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes
    3) the post-apocalyptic mise en scene depicted in the _Mad Max_ movie
trilogy (esp'lly the 2nd movie _Road Warrior_.)
    4) the former Yugoslavia... a further Balkanization of the world as we
know it...
    5) an over-freighted, cluttered, ecologically-damaged world like that in
the sci-fi movie _Blade Runner_

---|-----|--------|-------------|---------------------|
Hanuman Zhang

"... simple, chaotic, anarchic and menacing.... This is what people of today
have lost and need most - the ability to experience permanent bodily and
mental ecstasy, to be a receiving station for messages howling by on the ether from
other worlds and nonhuman entities, those peculiar short-wave messages which
come in static-free in the secret pleasure center in the brain." - Slava Ranko
(Donald L. Philippi)

    "The sky and its stars make music in you." - Dendera, Egypt wall
inscription

Replies