Podcast of the Day: Agony Column interview with Walter Mosley!

Podcast of the Day: Agony Column interview with Walter Mosley!

A great interview by Rick Kleffel with Walter Mosley in full on brilliant mode discussing his new GIFT OF FIRE omnibus novels. Covers everything from Philip K. Dick to Hegel to Christ to creation myths to Darwinism to Jazz to the American Prison System. Listen to it here and thank me and the Agony Column later! 🙂

Subscribe to the Agony Column podcast here.

Nazism and Zionism and Hitler’s last laugh

“Political Zionism is a far cry from the idealistic form that refined, cosmopolitan Jews like Herzl and his Western European (and North American) admirers thought that they had bought into. That is why the vast majority of them became disillusioned with the whole project long before Kristallnacht and then WWII. People like Einstein, Freud, Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes and Martin Buber smelled a rat, and they made it clear that they had no interest in supporting the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. This was, in fact, the prevailing sentiment among the vast majority of Western European and North American Jews. All of that began to change in the late 30’s and by the time of the liberation of the camps in 1945 this vociferous opposition faded away among Jewish liberals, progressives, socialists and humanists. European fascism of the Italian and German varieties ensured the success of political Zionism, the mirror image of Nazism, but with “the Jewish People” now cast as being simultaneously “the victims” and the “Master Race,” just like their role models, the Nazis, before them. History not only repeats itself – it plays practical jokes.”

The above is part of a a longer article authored by Roger Tucker, and is pretty intriguing. You can read the whole thing here.

Einstein and the Rights of Man

Einstein understood it best.

He understood the central conflict of our age, the conflict of man and machine.

He saw the failing behind the wonders of a new age, that we were not so much making something new, as losing something old.

“Our Technology grows faster than our humanity” he wrote on that windswept day.

And the whole of the last century, the 20th century, was an affirmation of that statement. A war of man and machine. As industrialization to cut costs and maximize profits, strove to make humans more machine like and machines more human. The capacity of humans shrank, as the limits of machines grew.

By the end of the 20th century Man was the mindless drone performing repetitive tasks, while machines were the wunderkinds and geniuses of a new age.

Einstein understood that the 20th century had become an age of tradeoffs. We stopped growing, evolving and handed it to machines to do for us.

That we had taken the magic that was within us, this glory of Shamans and Wiccas and spirits, and had traded, externalized it, taken it away from the creatures of the wet and the warm, and imbued it into a cold, stark, controllable entity of tomorrow.

The conflict of Man and Machine, the theme of the 20th century, was the displacement of wonder, the restructuring of magic.

In the 20th century we gave up trying to be heroes and holy men and decided to be predictable and comfortable.

We redefined humanity as something disposable and common.

The 20th century was ultimately a move to diminish the very rights of man. The move away from the concept of man, to other manageable concepts like worker, drone, statistic, to concepts devoid of ‘I’.

The whole push of the 20th century toward obedient machines with the adaptability of men, and adaptable men with the obedience of machines.

And if the 20th century set the stage for such a bleak and dystopian present, then the 21st century has clearly been set in motion to be the age wherein we must war over the rights of Man, and either nobly win, or meanly lose…. our Freedom.