Conquest by Idol by Dr. Eugene Narrett The “Palestinian people” is one of many ‘facts’ created by governmental polices and embedded in minds by endless repetition in the mass media. A related “idol of the marketplace”[1] of ‘common knowledge’ is “the peace process,” a virtual deity to which lives and thought are sacrificed as if on an altar of deceit. There are myriad examples from the interpersonal to the geopolitical level in which fictions or lies displace truth; in which fantasy, often reflecting the self-interest of powerful groups, displaces history. This is part of a logic and worldview embedded in the Hellenic roots of the West. Reality is fragile, prone to distortion and even domination by images or slogans made plausible by repetition or by dazzle in their presentation: Hollywood and other film media specialize in the latter effect. Truth becomes elusive when a powerful drive to re-define is blended with a belief that everything is relative, that nothing is fixed or integral; that there is no integrity. This idea, firmly established today will be hostile to anything, anyone or any nation that indeed has an integral and specific character and history. To the extent that any person or nation embodies or is built around the concept of integrity and wholeness, memory and history the powers will direct against a specially large amount of their transformational images, their ‘new facts’ and lies, their ‘idols of the marketplace,’ the lies of the modern state, “the cold monster” Nietzsche terms it that claims to be the people and “the ordering finger of god”; the State and those who sell its lies. The terms “great actors” and “poison flies” admirably describe the talking heads and anointed experts who feed people the daily truth as developed by those who own and direct the ‘information’ media. To them, Nietzsche writes “to upset means to prove: to drive to frenzy, that means to him to persuade, and blood to him is the best persuader.” We are familiar with the routine use of excitements and hype to sell the news and its truths; with the complementary focus on violence and disasters for “blood is the best persuader.” The best way for government to revolutionize law or policy is by crisis, real or threatened. The creation and dissemination of images and slogans, enhanced greatly by the modern mass media has become the language of culture, a corrupt language that disorients and whose science is disinformation as Orwell wrote. Its language is the basic “technology” since the latter word’s literal meaning is the knowledge of weaving (text- textus the root of technology is Latin for weaving or woven cloth). The term magike tekne nicely describes the power and creation of images and ideals in our culture. Magike tekne is image weaving, the primary means of casting a spell and suggests the power of the Arts and media to construct ‘reality.’ Magike is the source of the Latin imago – imaginis and thus, through French, of our words image, imagine, imaginary, imagination and their cognates defines the major work of Western culture: we live in a culture whose dominant Hellenic root asserts, “in its pain and melancholy” awareness of its hybrid nature (its self-irritating possession and appropriation of Judaism) and a compensating “demand for beauty” that grows every more intense.[2] The power and central role of the image derives from Western civilization’s Greek root with its urge to represent life in idealized images. So in writing “Conquest by Idol” I refer to the ability of an image, ideal, idea or symbol to create history and to resurgence of the West’s Greek aspects to dominance in its late and elegiac phase. I refer not only to images or slogans constructed intentionally to misinform the public and to displace truth with lies but with the generation of all idols that compel belief by their dazzling role as objects of desire or disturbing plausibility. In this way and to this extent, history becomes an artifice that reflects the idealizing demands of a dominant culture, that is to say a culture that has an intense drive to generate images, eidolon. But idols and ideals have a dangerous tendency to possess, dominate, absorb the worship of and displace the reality of those that project them and all others that live beneath their influence. They are like stars and the stars and starlets churned out by the film and fashion industry’s image machine are major icons in creating the virtual history and genuine melancholy, pain and deprivation of our epoch and, as with the Greeks (as Nietzsche noted) leads to an intensifying demand for surface beauty. An intense commitment to idealization, metamorphosis and anthropomorphic deities is essential to Hellenic (and other) cultures. A firm proscription of this idealizing and, inevitably alienating and disorienting tendency, the cult of aesthetics or magike teknedistinguishes Hebraic culture. No wonder the West is very dynamic, unstable and at war with itself, breaking itself down and, increasingly burying Israel and its Jewish content as the idealizing tendency of image projection, enhanced by the mass media, grows greater.... [1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I in The Portable Nietzsche (NY 1954, translated by Walter Kaufmann), 160-66, sections “The New Idol” and “The Flies of the Market Place” on the State and those "actors" who purvey its slogans and 'spin.' [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy & Other Writings (Cambridge University Press 1999, edited by Raymond Geuss & Ronald Speirs, translated by R. Speirs), 7 from the preface to the 2nd 1886 edition |
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