The racist aspect lies with the fact that Zizek either knows about – but chooses to ignore – indigenous Asian culture, or that he is not interested in any interpretive narrative that lies outside of the scope of a Eurocentric thought. In short, Zizek is a postmodern bourgeois thinker, masquerading as a post-Marxist thinker. How did the dialectical forces of history create this Zizek figure?
Category: Philosophy
The Buddha Teaches How to Achieve a Successful Livelihood and a Tranquil Household – Without Abandoning Ancestral Worship
Original Article: Golden Lotus Rain (金色莲华雨露) Blog (Translated by Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD) Translator’s Note: Buddhism has had to integrate into an essentially Confucian culture in
Last Train Home (歸途列車) Film Review
Despite many permanently resettling in the cities, and abandoning their farm land, it is estimated that around 130 million migrant workers make the trip into the cities, whilst older and younger members of their families stay on the farm land and look after the home. This army of migrant workers spend 50 weeks of the year working in factories that provide living quarters and regular food to their workers. It is only during the two-week holiday of Chinese New Year that the factories shut-down and the employees are allowed home.
Taijiquan as Advanced Rationality
As a development of higher reason, Taijiquan is a distinct activity with a unique philosophy, which is indicative of an advanced rationality. This use of the human mind has developed a set of combat effective physical exercises that are designed to complement the anatomy and physiology of the human body. No movement exists within Taijiquan that has not evolved from the requirement of optimising the inner and outer physical structures of the body.
WWI: British Supterfuge – Courtine & Katyn – the Connection! (26.6.2014)
There had been only a few hundred bodies discovered by the Russian authorities, buried in the Katyn Forest area, and not the 10,000 claimed by the Nazis or the London Poles. All were dressed as Polish officers and had been executed with a single shot delivered to the back of the head. The ammunition used was of German manufacture, a fact that even Goebbels had to acknowledge in his diary. He attempted to explain this inconvenient fact away by claiming that German ammunition was sold to pro-Nazi factions in the Baltic States, and that it was this ammunition which was captured and used by the Red Army in its murder of these men in March 1940. However, this is revealed as a ‘lie’ by the fact that the Red Army had not entered the Baltic States until three months after the alleged incident was supposed to have taken place in the Katyn Forest, and therefore did not have access to German ammunition. Another obvious inconsistency evolved around the apparent age of the bodies. Were the bodies killed in 1940 by the Russians as the Nazis suggested (and the London Poles believed), or after July 1941 by the German invaders (as the Soviet authorities alleged)? Until July 1941, the Katyn Forest area had been a well known picnicking place for the people of Smolensk. It was only after July 1941 that the Nazi occupiers placed barbed wire around the area and prevented free movement in and out. Prior to July 1941, there was certainly no reported evidence of the presence of massed graves in the forest. What adds weight to the Russian claims of a German initiated massacre is the relative ‘freshness’ of the corpses, even in early 1944, despite the claims of General Anders, who never visited the Katyn Forest, or made any mention of Soviet brutality toward either himself or his Polish men whilst in Russia. Anders was of the opinion that the ‘type’ of soil in the Katyn Forest had inadvertently ‘preserved’ the bodies, giving the false impression of their death being nearer in time to the examiners, than was really the case.
On Seeing Behind the Eyelids – A Marxist Critique of Buddhism in the West
The Christian monastic tradition, as manifest through Western Christianity, has generally combined a stringent discipline with voluntary poverty and celibacy. The idealised image of the Buddhist monk, as it has entered the Western psyche, is one of a man who has abandoned what is here (real material life), for what is over there (imagined religious realms). Of course, as what is over there, by definition, is never here and now, its presence can never be empirically confirmed. The Buddhist rules followed by monastics and the laity take the place of Christian piety in the West, but are adhered to by most Westerners with a similar fanatic attitude that completely misses the point the rule is assumed to be designed to achieve. The physical practice of Buddhist meditation is of course the act of Christian prayer wrapped in saffron robes. Western converts meditate as if they are praying to a divine being, but with the added titillation that the divine being in question is their own imagined self-essence – or god removed from his heaven and relocated into their own head. Chanting mantras – the holy syllables of the East – replaces the singing of hymns and the chanting of monks, and sutra reading is bible study by other means. Just as god in heaven can never be logically verified, enlightenment in the head can not be seen in the environment or known to exist.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 