This article is probably more from a liberal view. However it
shows the progression of Israel to becoming almost pure fascism and militarism.
Israel is a highly militarized society and despite elections it functions more
as a military government or a police state. In the end of this article Grant
calls for peace between Israel and Palestine. That call has been dismissed
entirely by the present Israeli government. -សតិវអតុ
by John Grant
As
a writer/photographer and a tax-paying American citizen, a story in the New York Times about
Israel’s culture wars made me cringe. It seems the powerful, militarist right
in Israel -- so committed to expansion and settlements in the West Bank -- is
now trying to suppress ideas among the nation’s artistic and literary minds.
Human
creativity amounts to an individual human mind with its rich, active
sub-conscious engaging in a dialogue with the outer realities of life. The
mash-up that results is called Art. It’s a process that’s often infused with a
subversive sensibility at odds with established power. In his perfect republic,
Plato banned poets. Tyrants throughout history have been threatened by artists
and writers. Hitler, of course, gave up on an artistic career in order to rule
Germany and the world as his own personal work of art; he had men like Joseph
Goebbels to assure artists and writers weren’t a threat. Art that didn’t
promote Aryan purity and German superiority was “decadent” and banned; careers
were destroyed. The impulse to attack artists and to cut off their patronage
and funding is as old as tyranny itself.
It’s the perennial struggle between Power and
Truth. In the short-term, Power can, and often does, run over Truth like a tank
in the streets; while in the long run, Truth has the tendency to eat away at,
and undermine, that Power. It’s at this juncture -- when Power has made its
play and relegated Truth to writhing in the dust -- that the book burners and
the state culture warriors begin to attack the arts for disloyalty, a failure
of patriotism or in the end with trying to destroy the state.
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