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Subversive Acts of Humanity: A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

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Ken Breniman

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“In just a few moments, the so called liberal Fisk who had worked in the Middle East for a quarter of a century-who had lived among Arabs for almost half of his life, whose own life had been saved by Muslims on countless occasions in Lebanon, Iraq and Iran-yes, that nice, friendly Fisk had turned into a racist, profiling the innocent on board his aircraft because they had beards or brown eyes or dark skin. I felt dirty. But this, I already suspected, was one of the purposes of this day. To make us feel dirty, to make us so fearful-or so angry-that we no longer behaved rationally.”

SocietyRacismTerrorismWorld PeaceRacial Profiling9 11Islamophobia9 11 Attacks
Book:The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
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“Even the sociologists who conceded that modernity meant progress over ignorance, chronic poverty, and pervasive subjection still viewed it as an impoverishment of our capacities to tell beautiful stories and to live in richly textured cultures. Modernity sobered people up from the powerful but sweet delusions and illusions that had made the misery of their lives bearable. Devoid of these fantasies, we would lead our lives without commitment to higher principles and values, without the fervor and ecstasy of the sacred, without the heroism of saints, without the certainty and orderliness of divine commandments, but most of all without those fictions that console and beautify.”

SocietyModernity
Book:Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
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“Tolstoy's novels are about the planet Earth and Solzhenitsyn's are about Pluto. Tolstoy is writing about a society and Solzhenitsyn is writing about the lack of one... surely there is something wilfully unhistorical about being disappointed that Pierre Bezhukov or Andrey Bolkonsky or Natasha Rostov find no equivalents in Cancer Ward. Characterization in such wealthy detail has become, in Solzhenitsyn's Russia, a thing of the past, and to expect it is like expecting the fur-lined brocades and gold-threaded silks of the Florentine Renaissance to crop up in Goya's visions of the horrors of war. Solzhenitsyn's contemporary novels- I mean the novels set in the Soviet Union- are not really concerned with society. They are concerned with what happens after society has been destroyed.”

SocietyRussiaSoviet UnionTolstoySolzhenitsynCancer Ward
Book:Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays
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