Phttp://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2008/08/death-match-iii-follow-money-and-follow.html


Part I: If the Words Don't Kill You, the Bombs Will

Part II: The Hideous Horror of the Biden Selection


The major part of this post will concern U.S. foreign policy generally, and what we can anticipate from Barack Obama's foreign policy prescriptions more specifically. I most recently addressed the latter in the second part of this series. I want to preface the current discussion with some observations about a particular aspect of the Western cultural perspective. This is a very complex issue, which I will address in only an abbreviated form. If I have time at some point, I'll return to this subject in more detail. But it is important to understand the manner in which we tend to approach many (if not most, or even all) subjects, and the way in which we attempt to analyze certain questions. The relevance of this to certain problems of foreign policy will become apparent in short order.

On several occasions, I have offered excerpts from Jamake Highwater's fascinating and provocative book, Myth and Sexuality. (In particular, see "Of Abortion, and Women as the Ultimate Source of Evil.") One of Highwater's themes, and one which frequently carries great irony in the context of events of the last seven years, is that despite what many propagandists for endless "civilizational" war would have us believe, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all spring from the same cultural and historic roots. Those roots and the more specific beliefs to which they gave rise resulted in a series of dualities. More than that, and more to the terrible point in light of world events, they resulted in a series of warring dualities. In many respects, the current and likely future military conflicts are only the latest manifestations of this ancient set of conflicts. It might be more effective to express this idea in another form: if it is true that we often remake the world in the form of the ideas we hold and believe to be correct (whether they are in fact correct or not), most wars and other conflicts are only the physical manifestation of conflicts that first found expression in the way we analyze and organize the world in our thought.