Camille Paglia, one of today’s most brilliant authors, defines
the French marquis de Sade “the most unread major writer in Western literature”.
Just as Machiavelli
(1469-1527) described the realities of political power struggles, de Sade (1740-1814) described man’s return to his primordial nature as an
unrestrained unleashing of violence and lust.
That reflects millennia of
worldwide convictions that man is the confluence of nature and culture (=evil/good, or the 2400-year old Chinese Yin/Yang), mostly in
fluid
coexistence.
Religious and cultural imagery like Eve's “original sin”, “Pandora’s box”
were spectacularly successful.
Freud has been presumably debunked, but he served
his purpose nevertheless.
De Sade’s writings are so much worse than ruthlessly realistic,
that many people cannot stand reading them and brand his descriptions as
“sadism”, or pathologic enjoyment in inflicting suffering. He was even jailed
for its writings.
The opposite voice
was Locke’s and Rousseau’s flattering interpretation of human nature, but it was
disproved in the French Revolution and virtually all wars.
De Sade’s fictional descriptions of limb dismembering and flesh-searing sexual tortures narrate facts executed by torturers in a real
nightmarish world which coexists next to the one of people with an acceptable evil/good
balance in which virtue prevails.
According to de Sade, ordinary people can enter its nightmares with frightening regularity in wars
and glossed-over horrors that surround us.
This descriptive mention itself is
revolting, but one could say that poisons or dangers must have adequately warning labels.
The dark side of human nature goes from simple cruelty to the Holocaust and
other atrocities, culminating with the 80 (documented) to 120 (likely) million
murdered victims of socialism between ca. 1917 and 1990. and still going
on.
The Bible itself details incredible holocausts perpetrated by many tribal or larger cultures.
Soren Kierkgegaard (1813-1855) said man is frightened by “harmless death”, but not by “truly horrifying things like sin and ignorance”.
Mistrusting ideologues profess to elect Rousseau’s
vision of an evil-free human nature.
Yet they eschew open confrontation with
the dark side of life, which demands the self-discipline politicians are afraid
to recommend.
Religions expose the unending human struggle between good and
evil.
Demagogues claim compassion for the citizens, but addict them to
“help” by a mistrusting government.
They issue suffocating rules and regulations rather than
information they fear the populace will misuse.
Our last (2000-1) liberal government imposed equal results rather
than equal opportunities, freedom from religion instead of religious freedom,
bellicose conflicting rights rather than cooperating duties.
Our present (2001-2) government is trying to remedy, but the "adversary system"
is still a
destructive fetishism.
Some people perpetrate the horrible, but the general public can only perceive it
and immediately look away, rather than being inured to it.
Therefore extreme
horrors become almost trivial to people who are otherwise shocked by the sight
of spanking a child.
I know no other explanation for the virtual indifference of the public to the
horrors perpetrated by the communists in Russia, China, or those still current
in Africa, where literally millions are dismembering and machete-slicing each-other
slowly, to enjoy the victims’ torture and prolonged agony.
Can we stop and meditate about it?
Thousands of live tortures and massacres of hapless victims are
as bad or worse than Sade’s
fictional tortures.
Clinton’s unpunished massacres of still uncounted (or
unrevealed) innocent
Serbian civilians are still being overlooked (let alone all his military
blunders in other countries, each of which he left in incredibly worse conditions than
when he "liberated" them), as well as de Sade’s warning
metaphors of those atrocities.
De Sade ended in jail only for what he wrote, and
the justice seekers about the above described massacres are
still told they are “flogging dead horses”.
We know, furthermore, that Clinton’s pilots knew darn well that their bombs were
horribly mutilating and dismembering completely innocent and defenseless
non-enemy Serb civilians, just like sadistic terrorists who kill
innocent hostages to extort ransoms or other conditions in cowardly safety.
Milosevic, the ruthless dictator, turned out to be his people's savior by just
surrendering to Clinton's extortion.
Clinton’s crime was remarkably worse, because of the
innocence and defenselessness of the
victims, and the insane presumption of righteousness by the perpetrators
protected by the detached invulnerability of disinfestation crews.
Describing Milosevic as a ruthless dictator may be correct, but his alleged
killing of some 600 armed fighting Albanian criminal terrorists and rebels was by far not
as criminal and barbaric as Clinton's killing (through the subservient NATO) of
unknown numbers (thousands?) of innocent, non
fighting unarmed Serbian civilians, without even declaring war, at a time when he
desperately needed a shocking event to divert public attention from his alleged rape of
Juanita Broaddrick (let alone the other women and
many victim/witnesses who had to leave the country or just disappeared).
Several
books with documented evidence have been written on these subjects.
And we do
nothing about it, "because the man is popular".
But think of the matter of Milosevic again: he surrendered to Clinton not to
save himself, but to save the daily thousands (?) of unarmed, non-enemies,
non-combatants, innocent men women and children civilians Clinton was killing in
their houses or streets, without declaring a war and without warning, only as
long as Milosevic did not surrender to Clinton undeclared armed attacks without
due process of law, evidence etc...
And now, Milosevic is a prisoner being
judged by a NATO court as a criminal,
for having surrendered only to save his
compatriots,
while Clinton, the slaughterer of helpless
innocents, is offered 10 million dollars for writing a book with his notorious
lies and deceptions.
Could
the marquis de Sade have written such a story?
Will the U.N. or an
American Tribunal prosecute Bill Clinton for crimes against humanity?
If
not, how can any law or nation ever explain it? He killed many more than Milosevic.
Moreover,
Clinton's victims were innocent, unarmed, non fighting
civilians, while Milosevic killed (still to be proven in court) only armed terrorist criminal rebels and their
kin.
History will record that and our
indifference.
Who stops and
meditates about it?
When terrorists are
caught, they are punished with execution or imprisonment, whereas many
perpetrators of many times worse mass holocausts are left
free, forgotten or cynically rewarded with medals or other showy rewards.
“They did it for a cause” “it is for our children…” adds Satanic sarcasm to the
evils…
Is that wisdom or are
we rotting in our cynical skepticism about honors, honorary degrees, medals,
elections, halls of fame, even Nobel prizes?
Average
citizens are pacified when any above-described horrors are glossed over, for they
refuse to make the impartial mental effort all are capable of if they really
want.
While they are
"mildly amused" by the mere mention of the atrocities, the “sophisticated”
upright citizens stampede enthusiastically into an orgy of righteous condemnation against a
(white) man accused of touching or addressing a woman “improperly”.
Whether we go to
court or not for these matters, both the "winners" and the "losers" remain
respectively of the same opinion they had (often angrily so) before a
judging party decided on the rights and wrongs of the matters.
Apparently, we need much more
brain, education and knowledge to discern right and wrong after both
sides have exposed their evidence.
Finally, we need
the teachers and who can educate our teachers' teachers.
**********************************
September 11, 2001 is now the historical
"9-11" nightmare. Suddenly, what I wrote
above falls to a forgettable impact level by comparison...
It shouldn't.
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