So here's a challenge for Mr. Kaufman. How does your description of the supposed eBook reader match up with me
Dear Xenophon,
I are speaking about a sweeping change that is, as we seek clarification, decimating the world of books and book culture. How any one individual stands in relation to it is, of course, not something that I can answer. How could I? Isn't that something that one must postulate to oneself, and then test to see if true. It's solrt of like the Diamon ring/Sierra Leonne paradigm.
How is someone in New Jersey, innocently buying a diamond ring for their beloved, in any way alligning with monsters who hack off children's arms in Sierra Leoone? How is someone who has decided to aquire a reader participating in the destruction of one of the principle legs on which our civilization stands: books and bookstores? And how would that, in turn, lead to the sort of totalitarian condition that I forsee? These are questions that I had hoped people might ask themselves. But apparantly, these are questions that few can bear to consider. Better to either call me a 'dumb-ass' or else, as you do, itemize all the things that you don't do, and wonder: what's this nut talking about? So, too, in any totalitarian situation, there are very few who can be singled out as filling the bill of participant in oppression. People only fit as tiny chips in the board of this particular scenario.How is one tiny chip to blame for all this? Well, you know: it reminds me of the film Shoah, Claude Lanzman's 9 hour documentary about the Holocaist. He interviews those who made the railway schedules, those who drove the trains. None of them, in and of themselves, seemed evil. They were just average citizens,
performing small acts each day. Their objectives were not to kill anyone. One
made train schedules. The other drove trains back and forth. They weren't even Nazis. Yet, by such small acts they contributed to genocide.
Now, what I am speaking about is not yet genocide. BUT: it is an important station in the road to totalitarianism that in turn could lead to more horror.
What matter how all this occurs, either by way of brownshirt, KGB or corporate moves. All end up in the same result: the shutting down of bookstores, the death of books, the death of privacy, the oipening of ourselves to totalitarian monitoring, the reliquishing of our freedom.
So many have sought to explain away the Orwell incident with Kindle. They've pointed to the legal issues, etc. Virtually everyone has miissed the
main points: that it happened at all and that the books deleted from Kindle were 1984 and Animal Farm.
They can't see the forest for the trees. You too are not able to see the forest for the trees. The trees are that device in your hand. To see the forest, please walk around your city or town and note these things.
The number of bookstores that have closed. The fact that everywhere you look people are hunched frowning over screens. That people are talking to others on cell phones while ignoring those around them. That people are whipping out devices to check their messages constantly.
Take it all in and ask yourself: what's going on here? Where is everyone? Why are so many human beings spending all their time on these machines? What is this? How did life come to be this way?
What does this all mean?
Perhaps there's some truth to the fact that these machines increasingly are controlling us, rather than the other way around. And that increasingly we are dissapearing through the screens into some non-existent illusion in which
our sense of humanity erodes and weakens.
And lastly, ask yourself: what right do these people at Amazon and Google have to come in as they have and decimate one of the most precious areas of human life: the book and book culture? And wonder: isn't that in fact the
very FIRST place that totalitarian systems seek to gain a foothold, and then complete control? Wasn't that true of the Church? Wasn't it true of National Socialism? Isn't it true of Communism?
Npw, it has become true of Hi-Tech. Hi-Tech may not even be aware that the ultimate endgame is totalitarianism. But that dosen't matter. The moment they mobilize totalitarian effots, like now, in their effort to eliminate and control the book, they stand alligned with the worst evils on earth.
And we must ask ourselves, each one, in the name of human freedom, where we stand in relation to that.
Sincerely,
Alan
http://evergreenreview.com/120/elect...k-burning.html