Fascinating Fascism.

November 15, 2010 at 7:06 P.M. I was in the midst of updating my security protection when my computer was switched off. I received a call at about the same time that this scan was attempted: November 15, 2010 at 6:43 P.M. from 866-800-2202 ("Phonathon"); earlier November 15, 2010 at 3:24 P.M. from 242-000-4266. I will now attempt to update my protection and backup files, again. All attempts to make necessary searches and scans of my computer have failed, so far. I will continue to struggle. "000" suggests N.J. governmental agencies may be involved in the telephone harassment.

November 15, 2010 at 3:14 P.M. Attacks against my computer have denied me access to the Internet and turned off my computer. I am writing from a public computer, one of several that I will use throughout the week. I was planning to visit the MET museum. However, the computer wars will require me to remain on-line from multiple locations in order to post new writings this week. ("How Censorship Works in America.")

November 14, 2010 at 7:35 P.M. My computer was mysteriously turned off after I posted this essay. I suspect that powerful forces in America do not wish me well. I am not going to be tortured or censored into silence. Sadly and disgustingly, Cuban-Americans and their paid-for politicians and mafia friends in New Jersey are probably responsible for these tactics. I feel great rage and loathing for anyone cooperating with these fascists. I will continue to struggle twenty-four hours per day to express myself freely and to confront the persons who have tortured me. (From a public computer.)

November 14, 2010 at 2:50 P.M. As I was working on a draft of this essay to post at my blog, my cable signal was blocked. My computer was shut off. I have rebooted my computer. I will attempt to correct the "errors" inserted in this draft text prior to posting. I will then attempt to post the essay. I can never know whether I will be able to return to this blog. I will do my best to continue writing. I will struggle to defend this work from sanctioned censorship and defacements as well as psychological torture techniques aimed against me. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

Michael Slackman, "With Words on Muslims, Opening a Door Long Shut," in The New York Times, November 13, 2010, at p. A6.
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (London & Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1987), pp. 139-155. ("Cynicism in World Process.")
Lesek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), entirety.
Brian Eno, Harold Pinter, John LeCarre, Richard Dawkins, Haifa Zangana, Not One More Death (New York & London: Verso, 2006), entirety.
David Rose, Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights (New York & London: The Free Press, 1004), entirety.

Earlier today my computer was turned off -- possibly through the use of a cellphone connection at a distance or actual intrusion -- in order to prevent my writing efforts and intimidate me. I believe that these criminal tactics are part of a deliberate strategy of psychological torture, censorship, and computer offenses along with countless other violations of basic civil rights over a period of years. This way of treating persons who write peacefully of their opinions and scholarship can only be described as fascism. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")

These tactics and methods have been developed by social scientists in affiliation with America's political parties or governmental agencies (or factions of the political spectrum, like the Right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami and New Jersey) for the purpose of destroying dissidents and/or suppressing radical points of view in society. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?")

I surmise that Republicans, primarily, but some members of both parties have adopted a "good/bad cop" approach to political sabotage and insurrection. One person is cordial, reasonable and cooperative (Mr. Graham); another party leader is obstructionist and non-cooperative (the aptly-named, Mr. Boehner).

I am so worried that, unlike ordinary Americans travelling at this holiday season, Mr. Boehner was allowed to board his plane without submitting to a pat-down search. How can we be sure that Mr. Boehner is not with Al Qaeda? There is some resemblance between Mr. Boehner and Ossama Bin-Laden, after all, and Mr. Boehner's office is said to face Mecca. This is all very suspicious. ("Al Qaeda" or "al-Qaeda" are deemed acceptable.)

New Jersey's Democrat-machine seemingly has some version of this dynamic at play in dealing with me and these writings. Under American Constitutional law and criminal statutes, these tactics are illegal. Censorship continues to take place, publicly, because of political corruption. In America, I am what a Muslim man must be in Germany -- an "inferior" person to be controlled or destroyed by power. America's "touchless torture" techniques are designed to create an "Auschwitz-like" psychological state for the victim. Even Jewish officials feel no shame in doing such things (censoring, torturing) fellow citizens. ("American Courts Must Not Condone Torture" and "The Heidegger Controversy.")

I will do my best to adapt to the challenge of writing essays under this condition of torture, with my computer being switched off by military-type tactics every few minutes. I will travel to public computers whenever possible. Fear of ideas and intelligence is a sign of a society in sharp decline. The challenge posed by these methods is to your First Amendment rights, not just to my freedom and privacy. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")

These attacks on my family's service providers are criminal, but tolerated by the American police for a small fee, perhaps. Censorship may be a way for N.J. to distract attention from my criticisms of the Soprano State's out-of-control child-porn and thievery. I will continue to struggle in order to write from some location. Your attention and dissemination of these views will help in my struggle. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")

Thilo Sarrazin is a German author whose recent book reflects tensions in his country and Europe that are mirrored also in recent transformations of the American political scene. It has been suggested that 9/11 was the beginning of the new century. Perhaps historians will chronicle the shift in intellectual space marking the ideas of our new era from the emergence of books such as Mr. Sarrazin's diatribe that are expressive of cultural earthquakes developing over several decades which are only being felt today.

These mounting tensions and collective psychological fissures are so controversial and passionate for people that death threats are common for intellectuals articulating the controversy and paradigm shift. I expect to see these ideas plagiarized soon, probably in The New York Times. (Again: "What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")

Much of the current debate and situation was anticipated by philosophers and cultural theorists reacting against the "ethos" of 1968:

"I believe that Critical Theory [Immanuel Kant] has found a provisional ego for critique -- a 'standpoint' that provides it with perspectives for a truly incisive critique -- a standpoint that conventional epistemology does not consider. It is not the basis of elevated, distanced critique that achieves grand overviews but a stance of extreme closeness -- micrology. (p. xxxiii.)

It is not because the "Other" is at a distance that new forms of nationalist hatred are emerging, but because the "Other" lives next door and is already implicated in any number of our identity and cultural choices, including our food and clothing, that hatreds emerge. Curiously, we fear contamination by Islamic foreigners as we consume "wraps" and use words (like "Algebra") derived from Islamic civilization which (like it or not) is deeply implicated in our speech, culture, and forms of expression, every day. Millions of Americans are Muslims. ("Against Anti-Americanism.")

Multiculturalism is not an option. Like breathing, toleration may have become a requirement of survival for all of us. Hence, the discovery not of American exceptionalism or German folk-identity, but of our common humanity frightens and infuriates simple persons yearning for an impossible return to a lost purity and nationalism that is a creature of outdated myths.

How do we update our necessary mythology of national identity and spirituality while retaining commitments to humanism that will be essential to survival in an overcrowded and resource-challenged planet? This is the challenge of today and, even more, for tomorrow. Mr. Sarrazin's book is an elegy for the prejudices of yesterday. ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "How Can We Be Moderns Again.")

Mr. Sarrazin believes that Muslim religion makes people intellectually inferior and undeserving of German citizenship in much the way that Jewish religion was once said to produce the same result among alleged "lesser persons" and "inferiors," German Jews:

" ... Mr. Sarrazin chastised the poor, saying they could easily survive -- even thrive -- on the approximately $5.50 a day they received for food from public assistance, and that they should stop complaining. He personally derailed a plan to privatize the German rail system, upsetting a political deal but winning praise for his fiscal acumen. He had to manage Berlin's finances when the city was about $75 billion in debt and is credited with significantly reigning in city spending."

Evidently, even Chancellor Merkel has expressed beliefs that would have destroyed the career of any mainstream German politician only 20 years ago:

"Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested -- indirectly -- that she agreed with one of Mr. Sarrazin's points, when she said that multiculturalism was dead."

The generation that includes Sarrazin and Merkel was on the barricades in 1968, witnessed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the alleged demise of socialism, only to discover a Wasteland of pointless consumption, banality passed off as wisdom, and globalization as the new term for an old-fashioned imperialism that made Germany an adjunct to America's political ambitions and subject to the whims of a man described by the German press (inaccurately) as a "cretin," Mr. George W. Bush. Mr. Bush's friendly fondling of Chancellor Merkel at a conference was a source of embarassment to all Americans.

Writing of Mr. Sloterdijk's book, Jurgen Habermas comments on the deflationary mood of a generation of educated Germans enduring the death not of a civilization or "Thousand Year Reich," but of all hopes and ideals for a post-totalitarian future of "Enlightenment": "[Sloterdijk] explains the aftermath of the shattered ideals of 1968 with means he borrows from philosophical history, he gleans from the pile of rubble a piece of truth the cynical impulse." (Back cover of Critique of Cynical Reason.)

It is, as they say in university cafeterias, "not for nothing" that Mr. Bush's memoirs (probably not only ghost-written, but also ghost-read) have appeared as the controversy surrounding Mr. Sarrazin's book explodes. These works and much of our cultural-political climate unfolds against the weary protest of a generation whose hopes have mostly faltered upon the reefs of so-called "success." Utopia was to be born with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, we only have a new McDonald's in Berlin. "Scratch the surface of the cynic and you will find an idealist underneath." ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")

Mr. Sarrazin expresses fear for Germany's future because of Muslim immigrants. Many in America and Germany share concerns for the future based on the popularity of this book and tolerance for political crimes, such as I experience, which are worthy of the Guestapo in the thirties that are now deemed acceptable when victims are members of alleged "rodent-like" species, i.e., Muslims in Germany or Latinos in America. The identical description ("rodents") was applied to Jews in the Nazi era. ("Obama Says: 'Torture is a Secret!'" and "America's Unwilling Experimental Animals.")

" ... Mr. Sarrazin believes that intelligence is inherited, not nurtured, and since Muslims are less intelligent (his conclusion) than ethnic Germans, the population will be dumbed down (his conclusion)."

In actuality, there has been a substantial increase among graduate students in America, mostly in the hard sciences, from the Islamic world over the past decade. I suspect that the same is true in Germany and France. What is deeply offensive to Mr. Sarrazin and others like him, everywhere, is inescapable interconnectedness and mutuality of need as well as concern in today's shrinking world. I was happy to see two Muslim young men who were obviously graduate students in America in a subway train discussing their assignments, but not yet the masters of New York's street Yiddish. Give them another year in Manhattan and they will be complaining about "schlepping" everywhere carrying their books.

The individual who has embodied the opposite view in our times by sharing in the humanity of others -- including a man who tried to kill him -- is Pope John Paul, II. Along with a handful of others, Dr. King and Ghandi, Nelson Mandela and a few more, like Bishop Tutu and Mother Theresa, Pope John Paul, II understood his moment in history and helped to define his century of "solidarity." Lezek Kolakowski, "On the Dilemmas of the Christian Legacy," in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), pp. 61-129.

We will no longer survive through nationalistic imperialism and domination, racism or religious intolerance. Ethnic or nationalistic identities that become rigid and unbending will crumble, whereas those that are flexible and bend with political winds to INCLUDE and not EXCLUDE others will thrive, for example, in the spirit of China's concept of "wu-wei," or "without action," and also in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition at its best. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")

We accept, embrace, share and do not demean or destroy what is different - not even with political correctness as a weapon or club to beat others into submission -- if we are true democrats and liberals in America or Europe. A taste of their own intolerance as "American niceness" is usually sufficient to make this point even to our "skinny-dressed-in-black" friends residing "on" the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This is not only a Republican problem.

It used to be that the only persons residing "on" the Upper West Side were homeless people, whereas many persons lived "in" Manhattan. However, an insistence on such grammatical distinctions today is a sign of elitism and insensitivity to women's issues. ("Skinny People Dressed in Black.")

Recent intolerance is not exclusively about religion. Whether you are an atheist or believer, you will have to come to terms with one billion Muslims in the world. The Muslim world will have to accept that young people may be devoted to their faiths and still heavily into "The Matrix" and "Harry Potter." Movie fans and computer geeks are not the young Muslims who will be made to hate America or the West. It is great to hear New York Muslims using Yiddish expressions. My daughter sounded like Barbara Streisand in "Yentl" during her adolescence. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

What is clearly reflected in this book and others like it about to be published in America and elsewhere is frustration at an increasingly diverse Germany and Europe, also America. Islam refuses to bend to the dominant orthodoxy in the Western world -- a benevolent atheism, worship of Darwin and other forms of scientism, and brain-dead versions of New Age drivel (America's t.v. pundits). George Stephanopolous?

Western sophisticates resent Islamic dogmatism and violence without considering the real causes of rage in the Islamic world. The answer is not the intellectual deficiency of one side in this debate, but the common failure to feel the pains of others. Empathy and love are the lessons in our religions and ethics on which we can all agree, even if we are secularists or democratic socialists. (Again: "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me" and "Civilization and Terrorism.")