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Gaddafi was one of those Arab potentates for whom the moniker "crazy" was fitting, yet who spoke a kind of sanity. He did not believe in "Palestine" because he thought the Israelis had already stolen too much Arab land (correct) and he did not really believe in the Arab world – hence his tribal beliefs. He was, indeed, a very odd person.
www.independent.co.uk
Nietzsche:
Parable of the Madman
THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us---for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars---and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.]
The Diary of a Madman
By Nikolai Gogol
Adapted by David Holman with Neil Armfield & Geoffrey Rush
Belvoir
Directed by Neil Armfield
“Geoffrey Rush is in exuberant form” —Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) on Geoffrey Rush
“A knockout: superbly realized, utterly mesmerizing and ultimately heartbreaking.” –ABC Arts (Australia)
“Yael Stone is superb” —The Australian (Australia)
Academy, Emmy, and Tony Award winner Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech, Exit the King, Broadway) comes spectacularly unglued as the lowly civil servant Poprischin, driven mad by bureaucracy in Nikolai Gogol’s darkly comic short story The Diary of a Madman, adapted for the stage by playwright David Holman with Rush and director Neil Armfield for Australia’s adventurous Belvoir (Cloudstreet, 2001 Next Wave; Exit the King, Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre).
A burnt-out paper-pusher who ekes out a meager living in czarist St. Petersburg, Poprischin spends his days doing menial tasks, anxious and teetering on the brink of lunacy. Or is it lucidity? Immobilized by a rigid social hierarchy, Poprischin cuts adrift from reality: hallucinating a canine love affair, imagining himself well above his station, and conjuring entire realms both incredible and terrifying. Deeper and deeper he sinks into delusion, and—thanks to astonishing performances of Rush and breakthrough Australian actress Yael Stone (2011 Sydney Theater Award for Best Supporting Actress in The Diary of a Madman)—we, too, are eventually subsumed by a world in which reality is, at best, relative.
The Professor and the Madman
Mysterious (mistîe · ries), a. [f. L. mystérium Mysteryi + ous. Cf. F. mystérieux.]
1. Full of or fraught with mystery; wrapt in mystery; hidden from human knowledge or understanding; impossible or difficult to explain, solve, or discover; of obscure origin, nature, or purpose.
It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story — a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking.
Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray’s offer was regularly — and mysteriously — refused.
Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor–that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane — and locked up in Broadmoor, England’s harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius, and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a fascinating glimpse into one man’s tortured mind and his contribution to another man’s magnificent dictionary.
“I found THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN both enthralling and moving, in its brilliant reconstruction of a most improbable event: the major contributions made to the great Oxford English Dictionary by a deeply delusional, incarcerated “madman”, and the development of a true friendship between him and the editor of the OED. One sees here the redemptive potential of work and love in even the most deeply, “hopelessly,” psychotic.”
— Oliver Sacks, M.D.
“Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“An extraordinary tale, and Simon Winchester could not have told it better. . . . [He] has written a splendid book.”
— The Economist
“Madness, violence, arcane obsessions, weird learning, ghastly comedy, all set out in an atmosphere of po-aced, high neo-Gothic. The geographical span is wide, from Dickensian London to Florida’s Pensacola Bay, from the beaches at Trincomalee to the Civil War battlefields of the United States. . . . It is a wonderful story.”
— John Banville, Literary Review
“This is almost my favorite kind of book: the work of social and intellectual history which through the oblique treatment of major developments manages to throw unusual light on humankind and its doings. . . . Simon Winchester’s effortlessly clear, spare prose is the perfect vehicle for the tale . . . absolutely riveting.”
— Will Self, The Times (London)
“It’s a story for readers who know the joy of words and can appreciate side trips through the history of dictionaries and marvel at the idea that when Shakespeare wrote, there we no dictionaries to consult…. Winchester, a British Journalist who’s written 12 other books, combines a reporter’s eye for detail with a historian’s sense of scale. His writing is droll and eloquent”
— Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
“Winchester’s history of the OED is brisk and entertaining”
— Mark Rozzo, Washington Post Book World
“THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN…is the linguistic detective story of the decade…. Winchester does a superb job of historical research that should entice readers even more interested in deeds than words.”
— William Safire, New York Times Magazine
“elegant and scrupulous”
— David Walton, New York Times Book Review
“Winchester has written a powerful account of the shifting foundations on which meaning is built, and the impoverishment of a language that could not describe or give peace to one of its makers.”
— Lithe Sebesta, New York Post
“Mr. Winchester deftly weaves…a narrative full of suspense, pathos and humor…. In this elegant book the writer has created a vivid parable, in the spirit of Nabokov and Borges. There is much truth to be drawn from it, about Victorian pride, the relation between language and the world, and the fine line between sanity and madness.”
— Daniel Mark Epstein, Wall Street Journal
“a fascinating, spicy, learned tale”
— Richard Bernstein, New York Times
“Simon Winchester, in his splendid, oddball slice of history THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, has come up with an irresistible hook… [an] utterly fascinating account of how a combination of scholarship and nationalism begat what would become the Oxford English Dictionary… If the initial sections of [Winchester's] tale have the appeal of a gaslight Victorian thriller, Winchester doesn’t leave it at that. He’s a superb historian because he’s a superb storyteller…. The strange richness of it all is enhanced by the flawless clarity of Winchester’s prose. Winchester, investigating an odd bit of background trivia about the making of one of the world’s great books, has the courage of his own curiosity. The elegant curio he has created is as enthralling as a good story can be and as informative as any history aspires to be.”
— Charles Taylor, Salon
“One of the great strengths of this book is historical mise-en-scene, particularly for nineteenth-century America and England…[a] marvelous work of historical and philogical imagination.”
— Linda Bridges, National Review
Nixon "Madman Theory" Alert Revealed in Declassified Documents
In late December, 2003 declassified documents published by the National Security Archives disclosed a worldwide secret nuclear alert Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, stage-managed from 13 Oct. to 25 Oct., 1969. The alert consisted of a series of actions to ratchet up the readiness level of nuclear forces hoping to jar Soviet officials into pressing North Vietnam to meet U.S. terms in peace negotiations. The move caused no change in Soviet policy towards North Vietnam.
The nuclear alert was based on a diplomacy-supporting stratagem Nixon called the Madman Theory, or "the principle of the threat of excessive force." Nixon was convinced that his power would be enhanced if his opponents thought he might use excessive force, even nuclear force. That, coupled with his reputation for ruthlessness, he believed, would suggest that he was dangerously unpredictable.
Although Nixon favored this theory more than most, threatening excessive force was nothing new. In the 1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and then-Vice President Nixon, had overtly practiced a version of the Madman Theory by means of the "uncertainty principle" and coercive nuclear "brinkmanship."
The Voice of Revolution
The End of Muammar Gaddafi
by BINOY KAMPMARK
The words of the human rights lawyer and spokesman for the National Transitional Council, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, were stated with chilling effect and certainty. ‘Our revolutionaries managed to get the head of the tyrant, who has met his fate and destiny like all dictators and tyrants.’ In the end, any talk about human rights or preserving the life of a leader wanted by the International Criminal Court, was just that. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi is, at least from what can be gathered, dead. He was found in a drain pipe and, after pleading for mercy, shot. There was no grand theatrical exit from one of the modern world’s great thespian dictators.
The colonel was the son of a Bedouin farmer, born in a tent near Sirte, and becoming a firebrand who soon began plotting the overthrow of King Idris I. Islam tempered by socialism – his ‘third universal theory’ – was ushered in from 1974, as detailed in The Green Book, seeing mass nationalisation of industries and the entrenchment of labour councils.
The West, broadly speaking, has seen in Gaddafi varying degrees of orientalised fear and admiration. He has been deemed everything from being a ‘mad dog’ to being wily, a cunning leader who knew the pulse of his people. The words of US Senator Lindsey Graham on Gaddafi’s demise, recorded on his website, provide an extreme variant of it. ‘The Mad Dog of the Middle East is dead and the Libyan people can breathe a sigh of relief.’
The remarkable ‘mad dog’ also, it seemed, induced madness in other countries, notably the United States. An idea was spread in the early 1980s that Libyan crack forces would infiltrate the United States to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, naturally filtered through that unreliable ‘friend’ to the north, Canada.
Press outlets such as Al-Jazeera have reported an incessant stream of celebratory scenes. Catharsis has followed in the wake of brutality. But these are celebrations that are marked by trauma and merely create a false unity in a country that is deeply divided. There are also broader regional implications. As Mahmood Mamdani, director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University at Kampala, Uganda, the demise of Gaddafi and the manner of his ousting will usher in a period of greater interventions.
The sovereignty of African states, eliminated altogether during the age of imperialism in the nineteenth century, mediated, controlled and modified during the twentieth, will further be circumvented during the twenty first. Vast economic interests are being carved up by such emerging powers as China and India. The focus of Western interests has also been intense, though very much a military one.
The Arab Spring, given the Libyan example, is not without its external, Western driven motor, and this is where citizens in the Middle East and parts of Africa have reason to worry. ‘Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our attention to internal social forces,’ writes Mamdani, ‘the fall of Gaddafi has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection between internal opposition and external governments’ (Al-Jazeera, Aug 30).
Gaddafi’s death will provide the litmus test for the NTC. The militias that roam Tripoli have loyalties to specific towns and areas, a situation that will become more acute now that the target of their vengeance is dead. The Tripoli Military Council, which controls the city, is said to be backed by Qatar and factions loyal to the interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril. As has been evidenced recently in Egypt, a spring can reverse as quickly as it came. The voice of revolution in such countries remains very much the voice of the man in uniform.
Jeff wrote:There's no disputing he ruled as a tyrant, but why isn't it sufficient to say that? To call him a madman is worse than calling him evil, and less accurate. Evil, at least, is worthy of study. Not the ravings of a lunatic.
MacCruiskeen wrote:Therefore, in two years or so, you can expect to see Hugo Chavez eaten alive by lions, live on TV, presuming lions still exist.
MacCruiskeen wrote:Yay, team!
Inspiring, isn't it?
Choose your allies, of whom The Sun might well be one (and Sepka another).
Another World Is Possible, namely this one, only even crueller and even more deeply stupid.
norton ash wrote:Yeah, Bill Maher's yukking it up about dead Qaddafi on HBO right now.
I guess murder and violating a corpse is funny when the rest of the world is a cartoon.
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