…by Jonas E. Alexis
Surely Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov must have a sense of humor. And you need things like that in the political landscape. Humor, as we all know, keep things simple and allow human beings to relax during difficult times. “When people are asked what’s important in their lives,” the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us, “they often mention humor.”[1]
Plato was very critical of laughter because it tends to overpower rational self-control. When a person generally “abandons himself to violent laughter,” he reasoned, “his condition provokes a violent reaction.”[2]
We can agree with Plato here, and people like Aleister Crowley understood this principle as well. In fact, Crowley believed that through a play (and of course that includes humor), one can change the cultural milieu and perhaps an entire country. Crowley saw that movies and films would be some of the main vehicles to bring that about.[3]
But there is a place for humor in all serious disciplines, including politics, otherwise things will get too dried and depressing. As the book of Proverbs puts it: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
Last month Sergei Lavrov called John Kerry a “skirt-wearing woman” because Kerry has been producing ridiculous arguments over the past few years with respect to Syria and Assad. Kerry said last year that Assad was “the single greatest magnet for terrorism that there is in the region.”[4]
The single greatest magnet for terrorism that there is in the region? So, if we takes this statement to its logical conclusion, it was Assad who took the Russian plane down last October. It was Assad, not Erdogan and his family, who was caught making a deal with ISIS. Lavrov obviously saw that Kerry was making his job way too easy. With explanatory power and intellectual muscle, Lavrov said:
“If we are to follow this logic, it turns out that Assad is not the only magnet for ISIL. Lebanon, Turkey, France and Egypt became magnets for ISIL. And if we are to recall that both France and Turkey have always insisted on the immediate departure of Assad from power, then the ‘Take Assad out and everything will calm down’ logic disappears completely, because ISIL reaches its goals of creating the Caliphate with no regards to what is going on in Syria, with no regards to what and who and how feels about Assad.”[5]
Lavrov moved on to say:
“None of the predictions put forward by our Western colleagues—that the people would rise and overthrow him—have materialized. This means one thing—that Assad represents the interests of a significant majority of Syrian society, and a peaceful solution without him is not going to take place.”[6]
More food for thought:
“When our Western colleagues and their friends in the region turned away, a huge number of terrorists, extremists and foreign fighters came into the country to solve the problem of overthrowing the regime [in Syria].
“At some point in time those who encouraged such a process—as in similar cases in the past—lost control over the situation, and the terrorist instincts of these foreign fighters prevailed. They realized they had a chance to materialize the idea of a so-called ‘Islamic State’ the one that was invented in the middle of the last decade by the guys that Americans released from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“And so the process was out of the control of foreign governments and became a self-perpetuating movement. Huge territories have been captured, oil fields have been seized [by ISIL]… and by now, most likely everybody understands that this threat—like a genie out of the bottle—is not going to be pushed back inside.”
“To Mr. Lavrov,” said the New York Observer, “fighting both ISIL and Assad at the same time is inconceivable.”
“Our Western partners say that when the problem with Assad is resolved, we will organize the coalition to take down ISIL. But then doesn’t it become clear if that Assad is against ISIL, it is necessary to take him out to fight ISIL? Or is ISIL against Assad?
“And if it is so, by weakening Assad, we play into ISIL. Even John Kerry tells me all the time—and recently repeated it publicly—when there’s no more Assad there will be an effective coalition… But I think that everybody is starting to understand the necessity of more pragmatic approach.”[7]
So, it is Lavrov, not Kerry, who actually represents the Western intellectual tradition, which was largely built on the principles of reason.
The logic is pretty clear: Lavrov stands with the party of Logos in the political landscape, and Kerry represents anti-reason.
Those two worldviews (reason and anti-reason) will be at war with each other until the end of time, and both Hegel and Solzhenitsyn would have argued that the party of reason, which they see is sustained by a divine process, will triumph in the end.
If they are right, then we can do nothing less than to join the party of reason. Solzhenitsyn in particular lived in a period where the party of anti-reason produced arguably the most violent atrocity known to man. And he had enough experiential evidence which seemed to have pointed to the idea that anti-reason would triumph.
But Solzhenitsyn was not a carnal, and he never lost hope that reason would win. Carnal men cannot understand metaphysical reason and its divine providence. Carnal men cannot see beyond the natural world because for them nature, or the cosmos, as Carl Sagan himself put it, “is all there is or ever was or ever will be.”[8]
That bold assertion seems to have lost its hope with a number of scientific discoveries and mathematical principles.[9] So, the carnal man cannot quickly move to the idea that nature is all there is anymore.
But since he is a carnal man, he has to resort to ideas that are less probable or less obvious than the idea that Logos is the objective source for the moral law and political order in the universe. In short, the typical carnal man always ends up agreeing with the metaphysical worldview that makes up the New World Order.
So, when I see carnal men repudiating Zionism and at the same time affirming the principles of Darwinism or even Capitalism, then it is a clear sign that those people either do not understand Darwinism or Capitalism, are lying, or simply do not understand logic.[10]
[1] “Philosophy of Humor,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 12, 2012.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Aleister Crowley, Magick: In Theory and Practice (New York: Dover, 1976), 12-15.
[4] Quoted in “Russia Foreign Minister to John Kerry: Stop Being a Skirt-Wearing Woman, Accept Assad,” NY Observer, November 24, 2015.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 1.
[9] See for example John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Readers Library, Inc., 1992); Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).
[10] I will come back to this idea in a future article entitled “Putin and the Metaphysics of the New World Order.”
Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.
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