Miscellany

The Zeitgeist movie, pornography for paranoids, has been doing the rounds of the internet, sustaining the insane 9/11 "Truth"Cult and borderline anti-semitic conspiracy theories, by propping them up with a bizarre post-Da Vinci Code New Age cosmology. It is debunked here and here.

The Spanish Civil War is one of my abiding interests. Here is an article posted at libcom about Trotskyist lies on anarchism: Felix Morrow on Spain.

Ruth Benedict, the anthropologist, was part of the American occupation of Japan after the war. For some leftists, that amounts to treachery. But her work was also a force for peace and reconciliation. OpinionJournal links to a 2003 NYT article on this: "As the occupation of Iraq appears more complex by the day, where are the new Ruth Benedicts, authoritative voices who will carry weight with both Iraqis and Americans?" OpinionJournal ventures an answer: "Some of them are working with the U.S. military. Perhaps the Pentagon was belated in enlisting them, but there is a move by some anthropologists to blacklist their peers who cooperate with the U.S. military. This effort may be anti-American in intent, but if it is successful, it will also be anti-Iraqi in effect."

Camille Pisarro was a left libertarian Caribbean Jew* who lived in South London - how more appropriate for this blog can you get? Here's two pieces: "Shabby Jews of Lower East Side Meet Pissarro's Leisure Class"("Curator Karen Levitov emphasizes Pissarro's anarchist -- that is, anti-authoritarian -- political views, though these are hardly evident in his painting") and "Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country" ("The artist espoused an anti-bourgeois, anarchist ideology and was passionate about the plight of the working classes").

Grateful acknowledgements: Jogo and Arieh

*Word Jew linked to wikipedia as my small part in the google war on JewWatch.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I had no idea Pissaro was Jewish. Also I only learned relatively recently that Modigliani was Jewish, too. That, in fact, his family was directly descended from Baruch Spinoza's brother's family. Did you know that Michel de Montaigne was a descendant of conversos? I wanted to include Montaigne in my list of influences but I only began to read him in earnest about a year ago and can't say with confidence that his ideas swayed me in some momentuous way. I liked what he says about friendship a lot, though. He is a precurser to Martha Nussbaum in some ways. Sorry to ramble so.
bob said…
I had no idea of the Modigliani/Spinoza connection.

I've only erad a little Montaigne, but I liked it a lot. I get the Nussbaum conncetion.

Please feel free to ramble here!

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