From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Apr 06 2006 - 13:55:33 EDT
Jan Myrdal had this to say once about the limits of rationality (rather pithy, strong statement without nuances or relativisations): "....the unconscious one does not betray. He walks secure through life. But we who are a part of the tradition....and carry on the tradition we have betrayed with awareness, insight and consciousness, we have carefully analyzed all the wars before they were declared. But we did not stop them. (And many amongst us became the propagandists of the wars as soon as they were declared.) We describe how the poor are plundered by the rich. We live among the rich. Live on the plunder and pander ideas to the rich. We have described the torture and we have put our names under appeals against torture, but we did not stop it. (And we ourselves became torturers when the higher interests demanded torture, and we became the ideologists of torture.) Now we once more can analyze the world situation, and describe the wars and explain why the many are poor and hungry. But we do no more. "We are not the bearers of consciousness. We are the whores of reason." --from Confessions of a Disloyal European, by Jan Myrdal Lateron he added: There are those intellectuals that live and write for grants, scholarships, official honours, good criticism in the official reptile press and membership of this or that academy. Of course I find them despicable. They dress the economic and military needs of their masters in ideology. The whores of reason, as I put it in "Confessions of a disloyal European". Against them it is necessary that we as conscious writers who do not accept and follow the political line now established by Washington behave responsibly. We do that by discussing the present day reality openly and seriously with arguments and counter-arguments as long as we can. The ethnical, religious and cultural conflicts are increasing. But they do not develop on their own. They serve the interests of the imperialists. Today the most reactionary circles in Washington by using them try to dismember not only China but also India, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and other countries. Many Western intellectuals are being used as tools in this. He who has witnessed a real communal riot knows that it is too late to argue when throats are being slit. It is today that we must understand how to write in order to increase mutual understanding and respect between religions and cultures; to defuse the conflicts. Thus we must strive to overcome the attempts to organize ideological crusades. Source: http://www.fib.se/pensvar.html
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