An interesting quote, some ramblings and a peanut butter and jam sandwich

It's 11:30pm and despite my best efforts to get an early night I find myself unable to sleep, so I thought I'd post this rather interesting quote from Mr. Theodor Adorno. It's taken from his Minima Moralia (page 106 of the Virtuoso edition 2002) and is part of a discussion convering history and facism, but still remains pertinently relevent. See what you think:

'For only leaders who resembled the people of the country in their ignorance of the world and global enconomics could harness them to war and their pig-headedness to an enterprise wholly unhampered by reflection.' 106

...while I'm on the subject, I also happened across this unsettling quote from the former Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

You have to ask yourself what creature is democratically administered warfare? Surely for such a concept to maintain itself its need must operate from behind a lie, otherwise its motivation is no longer democratic but fascist. I would argue that it is impossible to legislate any form of warfare without initially administering a lie great enough to propagate the necessary progression to conflict. What happens when the war becomes the veil, the propaganda machine, when the template is inverted and all we see is our society at war? Normative consent?

Hmm...time for bed methinks. Might try and read some Dostoyevsky; I bought a copy of The Brothers Karamazov as a treat for doing very little work last week. I managed to pick-up Bleak House and Karamazov for 60p, which as any book fiend would agree are rich pickings indeed. I went through a South American/Latin American phase these last few months, but now I think I'm heading into classic European Novel territory, that is to say, the big fat ones with those long Russian patronymics that have you rolling and whiping dribble off the wall with a beach towel. Or perhaps not. I remember reading Anna Karenina and thinking it one of the best books I ever read. It often strikes me as odd how come books seem to find you at exactly the right moment in your life, as if they're out there in general circulation just working their way towards you in ever decreasing circles. It's for this reason that I used to 'release' the odd novel on a bus or train by simply leaving it behind in the hope that someone else might pick it up at just the right moment. Youth hostels the world over have their own little library orphanage where weary travellers surrender their bag-worn copies of Lolita, Bryson and Hemmingway, along with countless copies of Let's go Bulgarian Yak Coughing, or The Rough Guide to Bog Snorkelling.

I think a good travel book, (fiction not guide) would be Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, since it's one of those books that really come into their own when you're travelling in a foreign country and have lots of alienesque architecture to fill you with feelings of genuine antiquity, something you never really seem to appreciate when its in your own backyard. People sometimes say to me that if you spend all your time with your nose in a book you miss what's going on around you. In response I would say that appreciate what goes on around you all the more for having spent some time in the imagination of another, whose common experiences blend with your own and provide glimpses of life from the other direction. You could spend the eveing getting to grips with the latest happenings down at Emerdale farm, or alternatively spend an hour with Hemmingway, or Proust, or Marquez, people who spent their lives trying to steal moments of recognition from the abyss, to be passed around and gilded by experience. Nietzsche once said 'do not look too long into the abyss else it might look back into you' or something to that effect. But there have been those among us who have spent their time at the edge and have come back to tell us a little something about it. At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, it is precisely because of this that we find something for ourselves in great literature; the great universal truth of human suffering born witness. It never ceases to astound me that I pick up a book written by a nineteenth-century Russian dissident and read his words as if he were whispering them to me.

Anyway, enough ramblings for tonight, I have a long day tomorrow reading Adorno's Aesthetic Theory.

ps. peanut butter and jam sandwiches really are a fantastic combination.