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Spengler on Asia Times
Jun. 30th, 2005 11:28 am <From this mefi thread.>
__ Indians and Chinese, for that matter, rarely take an interest in anti-Semitism, because their cultures are both ancient and robust. It is the peoples whose love for their own culture is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death that have deep cause to detest the Jews.
__ Wagner's audience had no trouble recognizing in Wotan and the other immortal gods the ancient aristocracy of Empire and Church, who made a fatal compromise with capital (the Ring of world domination) and thus sealed their own doom.
__ The details are far less important than the common starting point: the crisis of the immortals. Wagner's immortal gods must fall as a result of the corrupt bargain they have made with the giants who built Valhalla. Tolkien's immortal Elves must leave Middle-earth because of the fatal assistance they took from Sauron.
__ What Italian has done anything of political importance in the past 500 years? What effect on history had all the stiletto-and-arsenic games of the Italian condottiere?
__ Grim men of faith - Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin - led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists.
__ No pope in recent history identified more with the popular folk-religion of Catholicism. (John Paul II) canonized more saints than any of his predecessors, and lent papal authority to the Cult of Fatimah.
__ "Youth culture" is an oxymoron. Youth does not create culture, it inherits it. Children of all cultures, to be sure, play with each other spontaneously, because their Spieltrieb (instinct to play) is inborn.
__ Just what do we mean by culture? T S Eliot argued that it was no different from religion: It is the whole complex of associations and references which tell us who we are and where we came from. ...language bears its own history within itself. Educated discourse is a patchwork of quotations, a continuous reference to the past.
__ All cultures worship at the shrine of their ancestors. They exist to ward off the presentiment of death... "youth culture" is a meaningless term because the young do not require culture, because they feel themselves to be immortal.
__ Of all the silver wrung from American mines after the Spanish conquests, not a penny remained in Spain, observed the historian Fernand Braudel. It went to China for silk and spices. There it lay like a dragon's hoard until the 19th century, when China disgorged it to Britain in exchange for opium.
__ Indians and Chinese, for that matter, rarely take an interest in anti-Semitism, because their cultures are both ancient and robust. It is the peoples whose love for their own culture is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death that have deep cause to detest the Jews.
__ Wagner's audience had no trouble recognizing in Wotan and the other immortal gods the ancient aristocracy of Empire and Church, who made a fatal compromise with capital (the Ring of world domination) and thus sealed their own doom.
__ The details are far less important than the common starting point: the crisis of the immortals. Wagner's immortal gods must fall as a result of the corrupt bargain they have made with the giants who built Valhalla. Tolkien's immortal Elves must leave Middle-earth because of the fatal assistance they took from Sauron.
__ What Italian has done anything of political importance in the past 500 years? What effect on history had all the stiletto-and-arsenic games of the Italian condottiere?
__ Grim men of faith - Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin - led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists.
__ No pope in recent history identified more with the popular folk-religion of Catholicism. (John Paul II) canonized more saints than any of his predecessors, and lent papal authority to the Cult of Fatimah.
__ "Youth culture" is an oxymoron. Youth does not create culture, it inherits it. Children of all cultures, to be sure, play with each other spontaneously, because their Spieltrieb (instinct to play) is inborn.
__ Just what do we mean by culture? T S Eliot argued that it was no different from religion: It is the whole complex of associations and references which tell us who we are and where we came from. ...language bears its own history within itself. Educated discourse is a patchwork of quotations, a continuous reference to the past.
__ All cultures worship at the shrine of their ancestors. They exist to ward off the presentiment of death... "youth culture" is a meaningless term because the young do not require culture, because they feel themselves to be immortal.
__ Of all the silver wrung from American mines after the Spanish conquests, not a penny remained in Spain, observed the historian Fernand Braudel. It went to China for silk and spices. There it lay like a dragon's hoard until the 19th century, when China disgorged it to Britain in exchange for opium.
