Ancient Wisdom: Paradise and Hell Entwined in Pulsating War by Alastair Crooke for Strategic-Culture
Balance and reviving inundations are deemed heretic and will not be tolerated, writes Alastair Crooke.
“I am angry. I am angry that so many refuse to open their eyes to what is happening today in France, and around the world”. She adds: “I am really passionate about this: I sense you feel this passion”.
Of course, there is amongst people generally a numbness, bemusement and (also) a deep fear of poking one’s head out from the ‘narrative trench’ in which we sit – and where, enclosed by high trench walls – we experience a modicum of safety. Best not to range too far from that!
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Narrative warfare however, has taken a new turn, with western political parties, mass media and platforms not just abandoning argument, but in emulation of the Grand Inquisitors, firing-off volleys of charges (witchcraft, heresy, etc) without real basis – with the aim, as Lyndon Johnson taunted, of ‘making the sonofabitch deny it’. Of course, then as now, it is impossible to prove the negative: Admit to woke heresy and be burnt alive, or deny it until every bone is cracked on the media ‘rack’.
The point is that de-platforming, boycotts and shaming of individuals or parties as supremacist or racist, in today’s climate, are seen to work: They can be leveraged through the tech-platforms to such a degree that critical thinking can be not just suppressed, but individuals and parties shamed and ‘cancelled’; and swept off from the political ‘board’ entirely with a swipe from weaponised narrative.
This one-sided approach envisages no truck with opponents, save to accept their unreserved recantation; or to light the bonfire beneath the feet of their careers. The point here, is that ‘between-ness’ becomes heresy, and so too, is the understanding of polarities – the understanding that duality is deeply a part of human experience, as much as the double helix resides in our DNA. History teaches us that such radical one-sidedness almost invariably tilts toward intolerance, repression and ultimately, violence.
Which brings us back to the lady’s lament above at the arid, desiccated, political landscape sweltering under the brassy sun of Apollonian ratiocination, devoid of passion, very masculine, and empty of human empathy.
Shakespeare touched on this issue of human empathy – at a moment in history that resonates with ours today – through his focus on the Great Goddess: the symbol of feminine sensuality and power: the symbol of renewal (renewal of life at its most basic). The myth behind Venus and Adonis and that of another poem Lucrece, Ted Hughes argues, reflects precisely the schism of cultural war of Shakespeare’s times: Protestants and Catholics, both seeing each other as ‘devilish’ and heretic, with no compromise possible except cancellation.
