Friday, June 29, 2018

‘To Build the Boldest Bridges’

James LaFond's Impressions of The Forest Passage by Ernst Junger: Pages 67-97

“It is not inconceivable that the lawlessly maintained files [of the medical establishment] will then furnish the documents needed to intern, castrate, or liquidate.”
-The Forest Passage, 69:1

68
-The higher form
-Self-healing over doctors

69
-Evil of institutional medicine
-Charlatans, faith healers, miracles

70
-Weakness of the technician
-Overpopulation

71
-Rights, freedoms, individuals, authority
-German collective guilt

72
-Social liquidation
-Rebels
-Criminal authority

73
-Old Germanic freedom
-Home defense oaths

74
-Clearly against national socialism
-Freedom as hardship

75
-War for freedom
-Fourth generation warfare

76
-Modern mass war favors guerilla operations

77
-Freedom as struggle

78
-The armed individual
-The Forest Passage of the rebel is a negotiation of the tension between freedom and necessity

79
-The danger of empty routine
-Military reduction in form
-War crimes as vengeance

80
-Duty and crime are compatible
-Validity

81
-Law, custom and dominion

82
-Persecution: moral, religious, political
-Midpoint of the nihilistic process

83
-Rationalism to mechanism
-Propaganda as a subspecies of technology, replaces morality [values are supplanted by consumption of aggression and submission cues fed to the collective, death of organic society]

84
-Infamy, judgement and non-participation

85
-Criminal as secret hero
-Anarcho-tyranny prediction

86
-Internal morality in the face of amoral modernity
-Fear of freedom

87
-Will of the zeitgeist
-Property and catastrophe

88
-Disenfranchisement, incarceration, dispossession
-Mechanism of erasing the human identity
-Destruction through division

89
-Existential property
-The souls of potent men and women
-Consumption and wealth

90
-Orwell
-Dispossession & fictional utopias
-Property as a slavery ideal
-Intersection of dispossession and slavery ideal = slavery

91
-The sovereign person
-The plight of Cortez in the night

92
-Regimes & dynasties
-Man’s being

93
-Enfeebled modern spirit
-Immortality

94
-Temporal anxiety
-The word

95
-Contacts with being & language
-Man’s nature

96
-Violence
-Suffering
-Poetry
-Power

97
-Best summary ever written would make a nice header for a manifesto for human autonomy

Conclusion


Ernst Junger, soldier, officer, memoirist, novelist and philosopher experienced the passage of already tyrannical nations into a human erasing globalist system, promising heaven on one hand and dispensing hell with the other. His war experience and intellect permitted him to resist the pull of time into what was to him a politicized ship of fools plowing through a never-to-be-plumbed sea. He offers to the conscious reader the opposite option of the temporal ship, being the transcendent journey, traditionally understood by men of many races who guided their juniors, from the time before history and civilization and decreasingly into the shadows of modernity, as a journey through a forest, where the wayfarer is beset by darkness, doubt, beasts, thickets, rock and water, largely out of contact with the guidance of heaven. These two metaphors for navigating life as either a passenger on a ship which has sailed or a wanderer in a world which assails come to life starkly in the words of the old soldier.

(c) 2018 James LaFond

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