Circles and Echoes


Available on Netflix. It’s a Must Watch movie. It helped me see.

I know I get tiresome repeating my term Serendicity, which is a combination of serendipity and Carl Jung’s synchronicity. But I harp on it because it’s such a standard part of my experience. When I ask myself a question I cannot answer, the universe gives me a hint from an unexpected direction. Not that I always know how to interpret the hint.

Where we are today. I’ve been ping ponging for weeks between two discrepant concepts. There’s the Egyptian concept of ‘Maat,’ which underlay their whole civilization, the idea that all things must be held together in a whole that keeps the world from flying apart. The symbolic purpose of the pyramids was to be a physical demonstration of Maat. Why the Egyptians tried very hard for thousands of years to do things the same way. Every man, no matter how humble, was part of the base of the pyramid that made the world continue to exist. Lately, though, I feel — with my weird sense of interconnections among all manner of things — that it’s all coming unglued. I start to see daylight, and scary other light, where there should be solid joins. Imagine a pyramid starting to separate, block from block and layer from layer. Through the expanding gaps you see, uh, what kind of light?

The other concept is Nietzche’s theory that everything repeats EXACTLY, in a kind of vicious whirlpool, or even tornado, of experience. And, lately, it feels like repetitions are occurring in my lifetime that I would have thought required centuries to circle back on and around the past. As the circle tightens it throws off sparks, a different kind of scary light, so many sparks that the whole begins to shimmer and distort, as if you cannot believe what your eyes are telling you. Maybe these are small circles of similarity nested inside Nietzche’s grander theory, a kind of proof. No actual logic explains this kind of insanity. I shake my head.

Together, the two concepts seem like a philosophical paradox, a superposition of the immovable object and the irresistible force that have somehow merged to ensure our destruction.

I have a physical sense of this, a simultaneous feeling that it is all flying apart AND imploding, like a collapse into a black hole, both at the same time.

As a born motorhead, I know something about speed. But I cannot wrap my head around the astonishing acceleration of this phenomenon. I cannot catch my breath. I cannot find a powerful enough metaphor. Therefore, I cannot write intelligently about it. Why, I suppose, I have so many apocalyptic dreams, however prosaic.

The sky is falling, almost literally, and yet everything goes on as before. The contradictions mount, the absurdities climb to new and unbelievable heights, and hardly anyone seems to notice the widening gap between reality and rhetoric.

It was less than a quarter century ago that the most massive attempt to organize society in accordance with Marx fell completely apart. Yet today, the hottest ticket in so-called progressive circles is a French Marxist named Piketty. Collectivist, centrally managed economies don’t work. But people who are presumed to be smart are panting to do it all over again.

Science has been transmuted to a religion, and unproven theories are promulgated like a gospel that seeks Inquisition-like punishments for those who dare not to believe. Those who are skeptical of ‘climate change’ are called deniers, recalling the language once used to describe people who pretended there was never a Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. Scientists — yes, scientists — argue seriously that people who do not accept their proclamations about climate change should be silenced or even imprisoned.

While, at the same time, people who use these same words and arguments have no problem comparing the historical victims of that factual holocaust to the Nazis who committed it.

Pig on the wing, courtesy of Roger Nazi Waters.

Pig on the wing, by Roger ‘Himmler’ Waters.

And they see no reason to silence — despite their silencing mood — people who would compound the sins of the past by engaging in real holocaust denial.


In Philly. Mayor Nutter is irate about climate change deniers. Holocaust deniers not so much.

This is at least marginally okay for some reason. Okay to make the Jew cry. Why? Because we’re used to seeing Jews cry? We like to see Jews cry? A little more than half a century is enough time to pretend that we don’t all basically hate the Jews?

Or is it a convenient mechanism for preparing ourselves against the day when Iran nukes Israel? They had it coming. How do you feel? I’m on record.

What goes on in our little heads? Why I posted the movie trailer above. Scots and Jews are both Chosen People. As small as their populations are, they embody the best and worst of all of us. Why I have no problem using the Jews to ask questions about how we think or don’t think, how we act or don’t act, in the face of truly terrifying circumstances.

The movie is about Hannah Arendt, a brilliant Jewish philosopher who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for the New Yorker. Eichmann was the chief operations officer for the organization that transported Jews from all over Europe to the death camps. The Israelis captured him in 1961 and put him on trial without what you would call legal jurisdiction.

Hannah Arendt was herself a survivor of a French internment camp, as well as the former lover of Martin Heidegger, an eminent German philosopher who disgraced himself by joining the Nazi Party. Both facts are more or less irrelevant to Arendt’s controversial appraisal of what she witnessed in the Eichmann trial. Which was that Eichmann was not the arch-villain the press and his prosecutors made him out to be. He was merely a bureaucrat, a mediocrity, who had no moral basis for guilt because he did not, could not, think.

She coined the term “The Banality of Evil.” She also proposed that Jewish leaders of the time were complicit in the holocaust by not doing enough, not resisting enough. For which she was savagely attacked by Jews and others. She received death threats. Lifelong friends turned their backs on her.

Both of the causes of the vituperation against Arendt are still in play today. For example, days before I saw this movie I saw a modern incarnation of Eichmann in the button-eyed pup who uttered the “Dude, it was like two years ago” riposte to Bret Baier. Different cause perhaps. Not obedience but pure dumb-ass narcissism. Same result. No thinking going on. Not really human. Anyone who’s seen Lois Lerner sitting blank faced in a congressional hearing has seen Eichmann. Probably, you have Eichmanns where you work. The result doesn’t have to be death. It’s just that in the right (wrong) organization, death can be the result; it would all be the same to them.

And Jews are still complicit in the gathering peril of Israelis. Intellectual Jews who fund and support and write vehemently on Obama’s behalf despite his evident anti-semitism, to which they are willfully and idiotically blind. Which is, despite all the intellectual and educational credentials in the world, another manifestation of Eichmann syndrome. They think they are thinking, they’re sure they’re some of the best thinkers in the world, but what they regard as thinking is to real thinking what masturbation is to loving conjugal sex. And there’s no part of them that can ever learn the difference.

Where are you in this picture? Do you feel the pyramid flying apart? Do you feel yourself inside the accelerating maelstrom, the circle? Can you hear the echoes from our impending future? Or do you just not think about it? Think about this if you can. And this. And feel this (Not for children, VERY graphic).

Meager soundtrack with that. Here’s a better one. Thinking and feeling are more closely related than most smart people imagine.

P.S. This just in: Holocaust a hoax, according to California schoolteachers? How far from the yellow star? That rumble you hear is the fundament crumbling in fear.

5 thoughts on “Circles and Echoes

  1. On visions like this, I look to you as a sage, a guide. No, in my everyday life, I don’t see the pyramid coming apart, don’t see the crack or the terrible light. I know it means that I should snap out of it and start paying attention. So I’m immersing myself in the many links, and as I navigate them, think about them, and feel them as you urge, I’m finding links to my own past and important dark memories. As an exchange student to Germany, I visited Dachau with a class of the grandchildren of citizens from the Nazi era. I was certainly driven to tears by the evidence of the exhibits and standing in the very places where the atrocities occurred, and I was shaken by the German students. Some glimpsed the gravity of the place and their history, but others treated it like another sight seeing tour, already forgetting their history despite being part of it.

    The Hannah Arendt film is now at the top of my list, but I’m taking time this afternoon to watch the last link. My school’s network and YouTube itself blocked my viewing, but now I’m home and can open that door, see Auschwitz Birkenau. I’m bracing myself because I know what I’m about to see, but I need to feel it to get closer to understanding your vision of the pyramid and the acceleration.

    Finally, in my position as a science teacher, I hear the word ‘denier’ starting to be flung about in my building. I’ve been in the position to forcefully correct students on their use of it, tell them about the origin and reveal why it’s being used insidiously to label skeptics. I show them this video made by the warmists and they start to understand. Some of them do, at least.

    Okay, I need to watch that last link. I’ll be back.

  2. I am in the middle of industrial scale bitcoin mining. I am helping roll out over 20 megawatts of power for machines that only do one calculation. The whole thing is moving so fast and has so many major players involved that I cannot help but feel that I am being sucked into something that I cannot accurately frame.

    The world is accelerating into nothingness, into the absence of velocity. Think about that. Accelerating to zero.

    I have no time to elaborate. I will call you when I can.

    • Confirmation of a sort. Some of us feel it. Lake in an email coined the term ‘plosion.’ For those who are not experiencing it, it’s physical, like a weight in your limbs you cannot shift away. There’s also dread.

  3. What a brilliant essay, tying together what is happening. The rampant anti-semitism continues to be alarming coming from all those progressives who preach tolerance. The videos are astonishing.

    As for tomorrow, I’m counting on the equal but opposite reaction to set things right.

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