From the desk of Friedrich Hansen on Thu, 2011-01-13 16:20 When the Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd visited Israel recently, he brought a wrath of sunflowers to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in the country that had become a safe heaven for Jews. Of course this was the Australian ex-Prime Minister who was toppled at the face of it for his broken promise to tackle climate change. I will try to show here that he - for reasons I don't know yet - touched on an enigmatic issue that could have some important implications. For what might falter down under is still very much alive elsewhere. The German Greens, now the second largest party, will have a lot more clout soon to implement their target of running Europes biggest economy on 100% “clean” energy by 2050. They have already set the standards for the anti-Western renewable energy revolution by rejecting the most sensible nuclear power option at all costs. The sunflower has come to symbolize this irrational obsession in the West which is probably best explained as a remote echo of Hitlers engrained anti-nuclear bias. From the desk of Steve Kogan on Thu, 2011-01-13 11:00 This is Part 2 (B) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan. In his early notebooks and The Birth of Tragedy(1872), Nietzsche draws a sharp line between aesthetic understanding and systematic thought, a distinction that informs his philosophical argument on the limits of science and objective research. Guided by his critique, Spengler questioned the scientific model of historiography in German education, in which history was now seen as Nature (in the objective sense of the physicist) and treated accordingly . . . The habits of the scientific researcher were eagerly taken as a model, and if, from time to time, some student asked what Gothic, or Islam, or the Polis was, no one inquired why such symbols of something living inevitably appeared just then, in that form, and for that space of time. Historians were content, whenever they met one of the innumerable similarities between widely discrete historical phenomena, simply to register it, adding some clever remarks as to the marvels of coincidence, dubbing Rhodes the "Venice of Antiquity" and Napoleon the "modern Alexander," or the like; yet it was just these cases . . . that needed to be treated with all possible seriousness . . . in order to find out what strangely-constituted necessity, so completely alien to the causal, was at work.
Sunflowers And Human Rights
Rhythms of History (2)
Thursday, 13 January 2011
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