-----Original Message----- From: Gerd Groenewold [SMTP:[email protected]] Sent: November 30, 1997 5:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: World State
Greetings to everyone. I am very new to this list (I've been here for about one day) so if I am covering any territory already talked to death, I apologize. To start with, though, I would like to say that in the last day I have been very impressed with the conversation I have seen. The comments on _The Glass Bees_ (Zapparoni = Spielberg) were fascinating. I have always rather imagined a figure combining Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. By the way, does anyone know Bill Gates's middle initial? If it happened to be 'D' it would add the required consonant to a highly revealing little play on sounds. But this is so obvious that it must have been joked about before. Or not - as Junger says, the most obvious is the most difficult to see. I noticed the discussion about Juenger in Russian. I don't know if this is true, but according to the dust jacket on my copy of the translation of _Marble Cliffs_, that book was translated into Russian following the invasion of the Soviet Union. Of course, that could very well be incorrect, and even if it is correct, I have a hard time believing it stayed in print very long, as it could be seen as anti-Stalinist as well as anti-Nazi. Again, I hope I'm not going into something already discussed. Mr. Calvo asks whether in Juenger's vision of a World Empire people would have to all speak the same language. Juenger himself seems to answer this in the interview with Julien Hervier published in English as _The Details of Time_ where he says while discussing the concept of the World State that "In an empire, everyone can speak whatever language he wishes - Polish or Yiddish - one's mother tongue, whatever it may be. But in a nation state, everyone has to speak the same language, etc." You beat me to exactly that quote, but I will react to the negative bias towards English in Mr Calvo's and other previous messages with another quote from the same book: "There are excellent novelists in America, better ones than here: Hemingway, Faulkner, and so many others. Their works are valuable for their subjects as much as for the great quality of their style. Even if our language loses a great deal of syntactical richness through contact with English, we may nevertherless wonder why it is that the British have such a remarkable poetry.' This gets to part of what I find really fascinating about Juenger's idea of the World State, which is the idea that while centralized authority becomes larger, expands over a vaster area, it also becomes much less important to the individual. Instead of the culturally homogenizing influences of the nation state, there is instead a return to a sort of regionalism. Instead of feeling some kind of (often false and nebulous) affinity as "Germans," for example, people instead feel a more real cultural identity as "Westphalians" or "Franconians" or "Lower Saxons." GERD GROENEWOLD -- "...once Ares is no longer in charge of wars, the shacks of flayers multiply, the sword becomes a slaughterer's knife." - Ernst Jünger
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