A Thought for the Day
In the context of a current moment that embodies the alienation of all from each, grappling with the already enormous exigencies of communication requires either serendipity or dexterity, or perhaps both great good fortune and extensive skill, requisite necessities made all the more manifest by the palpable and purposeful plans of humankind’s erstwhile rulers and betters to continue this seemingly eternal estrangement of those whose fates, being mutual, should express solidarity instead of suspicion, jocularity instead of judgment, a complex and paradoxical dynamic in which linguistic legerdemain, narrative nuance, and storytelling magic must play the key part of conjoining connection and moderating mutuality despite all the opportunistic and self-serving ruling class agendas that would divide and conquer all people while successfully picking their pockets in perpetuity till the end of time.
This Day in History
Today is both International Nurses Day and International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Awareness Day; in Rome a thousand seven hundred and thirteen years ago, Emperor Diocletian amplified his war on Christianity with an order to behead a fourteen year old convert, whom now we know as Pancras; six hundred three years afterward, in 907 in China, the Tang Dynasty came to an end as the forces of Zhu Wen drove Emperor Ai to abdicate; a decade and a half subsequently, in 922, back in Central Europe, an Islamic traveler, Abbasid, made his way to the Volga Bulgars, Vikings of the Balkans; eight and a quarter centuries and a year ahead of today, England’s first King Richard cemented connections with the Iberian Peninsula with a marriage to a royal daughter of Navarre’s nobility; MORE HERE
- What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine — they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine — they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
Nevertheless, there is a danger that by too strict an adherence to their present methods of propaganda, and consequent neglect of vital living issues, they may only succeed in stereotyping our historical studies into a worship of the past, or crystallising nationalism into a tradition – glorious and heroic indeed, but still only a tradition. MORE HERE
"class conflict" OR "class war" OR "socioeconomic conflict" OR "sociopolitical conflict" "central element" OR "sine qua non" OR "critical factor" "social evolution" OR "social development" OR "how society operates" OR "how society works" OR "how society evolves" OR "social relations" history OR origins analysis
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Nearly Naked Links
From Thursday’s Files
Spain’s Guernica Memories, & Not – https://theconversation.com/80-years-on-from-the-guernica-bombing-and-spain-is-still-struggling-to-honour-historical-memory-76238
WSWS on Thermonuclear Ecocide – http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/04/27/mills-a27.html
Marxian Critiques of Identity Politics – http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/a-marxist-critiques-identity-politics/