For the use of Teal Terror and Inverarity
Teal Terror, you can post on my LJ as Anonymous. The comments will remain screened (invisible to anyone except me) until I unscreen them or comment on them. From what I've seen, that is not something that should worry you. One thing only: I suspect we are on different time fuses. The last time we debated, I was having a sleepless night, which is unlikely to happen regularly. So I may take some time ro respond to something you said, and I apologize in advance.
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My first point is that when I make a comment I don't look for responses, and most often I don't get them. If my comment dissents from something or someone, I make it in order to place my dissent on the record. Of course my dissent is worth the same as my assent - that is, precisely nothing. I am not a judge, not a rich man, not a politician or a columnist or a celebrity. I have nothing to offer except my consent or dissent. However, being a free man, I reserve the right to offer them.
If you respond, however, you must be prepared for a tilt with men. As far as I am concerned, debate is a serious thing, because ideas are serious matters. Nothing could possibly be more serious. Ideas kill people.
Ideas kill people. I grew up in a place and time when they were killing them in great numbers and in front of everyone's eyes - Italy, the seventies: the golden age of terrorists, many of whose worst crimes are still unpunished (and some of which have been certainly punished on the wrong person). If anyone thinks I am too ferocious in attacking, say, the notion of inevitable national doom - which is a chickenshit evasion from personal and group responsibility - or the idea of inventing religions to fit this or that notion of what would be good for society at large, I suggest that they first stop and think whether there is nothing about such notions that would lead people to justifying the shedding of blood. Of course, if you think bloodshed in the service of an idea or "right" or "future" or "quality of life" or any other reason whatsoever is ever justified, then there is nothing more to say. Thou shalt not murder, says my God. Yours, or whatever you may take for God, may say otherwise, in which case our most likely meeting is on the battlefield.
In the second case, the case of inventing religions to fit, I have a still more personal reason to loathe it. There is, everyone knows, a well-known modern religion that was invented by a science fiction writer purely for his own ends. I have been near it as I have been near Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and one or two other murderous cults; I have seen its results from close-up, as I have seen the results of paedophilia, physical and mental child abuse, organized rape, Mafia, dope addiction, and alcoholism; and I have no hesitation in saying that it is the most evil thing I have ever met. If it killed smaller amounts than the rest, it is because it is so far, God be thanked, smaller in reach and power; but I can tell you from having seen it with my own two eyes, that they managed, and managed routinely, what only the fevered and terrified imagination of a West staggered by Communist power could ascribe to Communism - brainwashing. It's what they do. They regularly brainwash human beings, destroying and rearranging their minds. I have seen this, I have had to help save one of their victims, and I hope I never have to do it again, because I never want to see again anything so evil. And that is an inevitable result of the notion of creating religions to fit certain purposes, because it amounts to intruding from outside on human minds to reframe the very frame of their thoughts. Religion shapes thoughts; a religion dedicated not to its own purposes, but having its supposed purposes designed purely to shape the thoughts of the faithful, will do exactly that, and do so with an instinctive efficiency, an innate ability to go for the most damaging strategy of demolition, that would stagger anyone who did not know of it. You, of course, could not know I'd had that experience; but to imagine that I get angry at ideas for some strange bizarre vice of my own - that I enjoy it or something - does not do honour to your imagination.
My comment about trying desperately to respect, etcaetera, was based on the point from which I started: that I neither demand nor expect a reaction from anyone to anything I publish. The only thing I want to do with it is do my free man's office of recording my view, especially when it is in disagreement with something. The only thing I really want is to make it known to anyone who'd made the statement, not so much that I disagree - that means nothing - as that disagreement exists, that it is possible to take a different view. I simply want their and their readers' attention brought to that. But, f someone resolves to take it on, then I expect them to play the game according to the rules: answer questions, avoid the infantile strategy of sneering and pretending that something is beyond the reach of intelligence (that only proves that it is beyond the reach of yours) and defend your views like a man. When that fails to happen, I may, according to how and to what extent it fails to happen, be angry or disappointed; but I will be twice as disappointed if the person who behaves so foolishly also and at the same time happens to be the author not only of some of the most judicious and valuable reviews I have read in a long time (and I am a great lover of reviewing and of criticism as literary forms), but also the onlie begetter of some of the most beautiful, valuable and vital fiction to have yet been written in this new century.
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There is still another point I want to make to inverarity in particular. You have missed something utterly fundamental. Reflect on the different treatments I gave to Teal Terror and to a certain friend of yours with a fox-based name. Think on their different results and reasons.
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My first point is that when I make a comment I don't look for responses, and most often I don't get them. If my comment dissents from something or someone, I make it in order to place my dissent on the record. Of course my dissent is worth the same as my assent - that is, precisely nothing. I am not a judge, not a rich man, not a politician or a columnist or a celebrity. I have nothing to offer except my consent or dissent. However, being a free man, I reserve the right to offer them.
If you respond, however, you must be prepared for a tilt with men. As far as I am concerned, debate is a serious thing, because ideas are serious matters. Nothing could possibly be more serious. Ideas kill people.
Ideas kill people. I grew up in a place and time when they were killing them in great numbers and in front of everyone's eyes - Italy, the seventies: the golden age of terrorists, many of whose worst crimes are still unpunished (and some of which have been certainly punished on the wrong person). If anyone thinks I am too ferocious in attacking, say, the notion of inevitable national doom - which is a chickenshit evasion from personal and group responsibility - or the idea of inventing religions to fit this or that notion of what would be good for society at large, I suggest that they first stop and think whether there is nothing about such notions that would lead people to justifying the shedding of blood. Of course, if you think bloodshed in the service of an idea or "right" or "future" or "quality of life" or any other reason whatsoever is ever justified, then there is nothing more to say. Thou shalt not murder, says my God. Yours, or whatever you may take for God, may say otherwise, in which case our most likely meeting is on the battlefield.
In the second case, the case of inventing religions to fit, I have a still more personal reason to loathe it. There is, everyone knows, a well-known modern religion that was invented by a science fiction writer purely for his own ends. I have been near it as I have been near Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and one or two other murderous cults; I have seen its results from close-up, as I have seen the results of paedophilia, physical and mental child abuse, organized rape, Mafia, dope addiction, and alcoholism; and I have no hesitation in saying that it is the most evil thing I have ever met. If it killed smaller amounts than the rest, it is because it is so far, God be thanked, smaller in reach and power; but I can tell you from having seen it with my own two eyes, that they managed, and managed routinely, what only the fevered and terrified imagination of a West staggered by Communist power could ascribe to Communism - brainwashing. It's what they do. They regularly brainwash human beings, destroying and rearranging their minds. I have seen this, I have had to help save one of their victims, and I hope I never have to do it again, because I never want to see again anything so evil. And that is an inevitable result of the notion of creating religions to fit certain purposes, because it amounts to intruding from outside on human minds to reframe the very frame of their thoughts. Religion shapes thoughts; a religion dedicated not to its own purposes, but having its supposed purposes designed purely to shape the thoughts of the faithful, will do exactly that, and do so with an instinctive efficiency, an innate ability to go for the most damaging strategy of demolition, that would stagger anyone who did not know of it. You, of course, could not know I'd had that experience; but to imagine that I get angry at ideas for some strange bizarre vice of my own - that I enjoy it or something - does not do honour to your imagination.
My comment about trying desperately to respect, etcaetera, was based on the point from which I started: that I neither demand nor expect a reaction from anyone to anything I publish. The only thing I want to do with it is do my free man's office of recording my view, especially when it is in disagreement with something. The only thing I really want is to make it known to anyone who'd made the statement, not so much that I disagree - that means nothing - as that disagreement exists, that it is possible to take a different view. I simply want their and their readers' attention brought to that. But, f someone resolves to take it on, then I expect them to play the game according to the rules: answer questions, avoid the infantile strategy of sneering and pretending that something is beyond the reach of intelligence (that only proves that it is beyond the reach of yours) and defend your views like a man. When that fails to happen, I may, according to how and to what extent it fails to happen, be angry or disappointed; but I will be twice as disappointed if the person who behaves so foolishly also and at the same time happens to be the author not only of some of the most judicious and valuable reviews I have read in a long time (and I am a great lover of reviewing and of criticism as literary forms), but also the onlie begetter of some of the most beautiful, valuable and vital fiction to have yet been written in this new century.
-------------------------------------------
There is still another point I want to make to inverarity in particular. You have missed something utterly fundamental. Reflect on the different treatments I gave to Teal Terror and to a certain friend of yours with a fox-based name. Think on their different results and reasons.