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"Hope Against Hope"
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| SFway |
Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2007 9:13 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Nadezhda:
"Real humanism knows no limits and is concerned with the fate of every individual." Osip Mandelstam: "...herded, with the herd..." These are the antipodes for which no synthesis exists - one must choose the one or the other. There is no middle ground, no "gray area", no possibility of "negotiation"...just a choice of what one is to be and what one is to do. |
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| SFway |
Posted: Tue Sep 18, 2007 8:51 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
Nadezhda:
"The Chekists were the avant-garde of the 'new people' and they had basically revised...all human values. They were later replaced by people...who had no values at all, revised or otherwise." Comment: is this what we have seen and are seeing within the union bureaucracy? As Pearson mentioned in another thread, we had union leaders possessed of a cause; replaced by "revised" values; replaced by those with no values. Mandelstam: The full line reads: "And clutching in my fist a worn year of birth, herded with the herd..." An expression of the natural response of the individual to bureaucratic demands and requirements. |
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| SFway |
Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 9:25 pm
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
One of my very esteemed UNCHARTED brethren has asked me what is precisely the point of this thread, that its message seemed unclear.
A fair question. Honestly, I hadn't really thought about it. In retrospect, I suppose the point is to delineate and define certain problems we have all encountered in the course of our common economic activities (i.e. our jobs), our union activities and our political activities. One of these problems is the general apathy and lethargy we experience among union members and the voting public as a whole. A second problem is the convergence of the corporate movement (if you will) with the labor movement. "Convergence" is probably not the correct word; let us say the "merger" of the labor movement into the corporate evolution, the increasing dominance of labor by the corporate. These are things that have happened before, in other places and under parallel conditions - and these have elicited identical questions: "What is happening to us? Why are these things happening? What can we do to remedy the situation?" The voice of Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam speak to these experiences and questions. So do the voices of others, voices I will begin to introduce shortly. They are voices that we need to hear, voices from whom we can learn. Nadezhda: "People who were silent or closed their eyes to what was happening also try to make excuses for the past. They generally acccuse me of subjectivism, saying that I only see one side of the picture and ignore all the other things...None of this, to my mind, absolves us from our duty to make sense of what happened. We have lived through a severe crisis pf nineteenth-century humanism during which all ethical values collapsed because they were founded only on man's needs and desires, his longing for personal happiness. The twentieth century has also shown us that evil has an enormous urge to self-destruction....However much we shout about these elementary truths, they will only be heeded by people who themselves want no more of evil. None of this, after all, is new: everything is always repeated, though on an ever greater scale. Luckily, I shall not see what the future holds in store." |
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| SFway |
Posted: Sun Sep 23, 2007 2:34 am
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Joined: 26 May 2006 Posts: 573 |
I would like to introduce another voice into the dialogue. Not that we have finished with Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam, not by a long rune, but because this is another voice that needs be heard.
The name of this man is Milovan Djilas, revolutionary and dissident par excellence, among many, many other things. Before I introduce him "formally", let us hear something he has to say "Other types of discrimination may crush a human being physically, while ideoliogical discrimination strikes at the very thing in the human being which is perhaps most peculiarly his own. Tyranny over the mind is the most complete and most brutal type of tyranny; every other tyranny begins and ends with it.... Thought is the most creative force...Men can neither live nor produce if they do not think or contemplate....Man may renouce much. But he must think and he has a deep need to express his thoughts....It is tyranny at its worst to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts not their own.... Man's imperishable aspirations for freedom of thought always emerge in conceret forms...Today they lie in dark and apathetic resistance, and in the unshapen hopes of the people." Why do we do what we do? in our workplaces, in our unions, on UNCHARTED? Because, as human beings, ultimately, we can do no other. |
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