05

If modern war reveals one thing above all others, it must surely be the barbarous extents to which the civilized will go to protect their vested interests, including the bombing of churches, monasteries, mosques, etc.

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Have just finished reading Joachim Fest's intriguing biography (in translation) of Albert Speer entitled Speer and Hitler, which I was always likely to get around to eventually because of the high esteem in which I hold the DVD drama-documentary of the same name featuring outstanding performances by Sebastian Koch and Tobias Moretti in the principal roles, one of my all-time favourite Germany-related DVDs both of whose discs I have watched more times than I care to remember in the couple of years since I acquired it from HMV in Oxford Street in London's West End. Not surprisingly, it was largely based on Fest's biography and features an interview with Fest himself which throws additional light on the project and on his own professional relationship to Speer.

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I've never owned a computer, whether desktop or laptop, that wasn't a complete and utter farce! Computers are like women, with whom one's relationship, if one happens to have one, goes steadily downhill. Then one picks oneself up not through the wisdom of abstinence, but with the help of a new relationship or, in my case, computer – at least temporarily. For the next computer turns out to be just as much of an idiot as the previous one.

When machines (and the dongles or whatever attaching to them) let one down, as they frequently do, there is usually a book or notebook to fall back on, so to speak, as though in revulsion against the stupidity of machines like computers and their dicey peripherals.

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An unpleasant feeling of being surrounded, on all sides and if not above (since I live on the top floor) then certainly below, by neighbours who are somehow remarkably sensitive to if not cynically and sceptically opposed to one's thoughts and the processes by which one thinks at all, and do everything in their power to thwart or inhibit them, evidently in consequence of a tendency to regard thinking as a form of madness. Most if not all of these neighbours I would guess to be of foreign origin and some, I know for a fact, are definitely female.

As you go through life you come to realize, through bitter experience, that intelligence is pretty much the exception to the general rule, and that most people, far from endorsing intelligence, are perfectly able to get along without it. In fact, they are more inclined to make war on it, as though it were a threat to their existence or lifestyle and possibly even an obstacle to seduction.

Intelligence is precious precisely because it is rare and, like all rare things or attributes, it is not characteristic of the masses, with their slavish adherence to nature principally in the form of female dominion.

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I've always distrusted people who are against art and culture, finding in them not merely a philistine opposition to it, but a barbarous indifference deriving from a love of sport and an unhealthy fascination with war.

The socialist delusion of raising the lower orders up through the provision of culture or, failing that, education … is premised upon an underestimation of the connection between manual labour, particularly that carried out in gangs or large groups, and the ensuing or correlative philistine disposition which renders an appreciation of all but popular culture impossible. But, of course, the other side of the socialist delusion is the anti-elitist sarcasm that would reduce society to the lowest-common-denominator of a culture-rejecting philistinism geared to manual labour and competitive sport, if not, as a summon bonnum, militaristic combativeness!

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When I see the word 'editor', I incline to think of the Henry Miller expression about 'reaching for one's revolver', since the evidence of most print books to have come my way is that latter-day editors must be either incompetent or just plain ignorant, if not daft. I, on the other hand, am my own eScroll and eBook 'editor' and, as a rule, I achieve results typographically superior to those of the majority of books published in print by conventional publishers, who seem to be busily engaged upon the process of what the Bible calls the 'dead burying the dead', in their case under an avalanche of editorial and/or typographic incompetence.

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Have just seen an internet banner advertising the claim that 'God writes new book', or something to that effect, which is obviously false, like so much else on the internet, because God wouldn't write a book, since merely the superconscious concomitant (candlelight to candleflame-like) of metaphysical sensibility, the joyful superfeeling, as it were, of the Soul, especially the male soul when it is 'turned on' or, rather, when, as a male, one allows oneself, in spurning worldly distractions, to be superconsciously or truthfully aware of it, which is Truth and, hence, a godly concomitant of Heaven.

I don't have any time for anthropomorphic concepts of God, still less for cosmic concepts having more to do with stars or quasars than persons. Either way, and one would be looking at a shortfall from, if not antithesis to, what is properly godly in precisely the sorts of religious 'bovaryizations' that most people, preferring not to de-mystify themselves or to have religion itself de-mystified, tend to accept, if not relate to. Pah!

Authority is good when true, because without it there is mere anarchy within some kind of democratic consensus, whereby each man – and woman – chooses his own god or interpretation thereof. Better the authoritative oppression of the false from the standpoint of true knowledge coupled to the calculated suppression of falsity than the 'fool's paradise' that must needs otherwise obtain, as in a democratic or worldly age like the present, when religious truth is virtually anathema from standpoints that, for commercial reasons, both advance and worship beauty.

A civilization is as good as its type and degree of culture, and that depends on authoritative control from those – ever a tiny minority – 'in the know'.

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