@seenunseenmag 14/ So perhaps the deeper question is what common longing for historical resolution is refracted through religious nationalism’s distinct civilizational forms—however violent they may be—and whether any adequate response asks for a shared religio-political horizon, too.
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Copy of tweet thread here: Tracing the threads of my work in Bosnia to Gaza. On love and passion during genocide, on willful complicity, on the banality of evil that is anything but. Thank you @lithub & @danpsheehan for keeping these stories on the radar. That's a powerful fusion of moral gravity and literary grace, Seema. Bosnia, Gaza, Kashmir, Myanmar, Xinjiang—a clear pattern of dehumanization, persecution and abandonment hardening into the architecture of our world, isn't it? To let it go unanswered is to cede humanity’s soul. Where India, or nice, White, Christian America for that matter, may yet make Gaza seem a teddy bear's picnic by comparison. What then, when a global politico-media complex fuses across state borders to significantly "other" a culture or race? Where is the archetypal trend headed?
@alon_mizrahi 4/ Sure, the U.S. defines a fulminant apex of this derangement vortex, but the fever is epistemic, virulent, networked, global and, clearly, fast-metastasizing. No nation or culture can—or will—extract itself from such an epochal, totalized psychosis, in isolation.
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Here we are, then, upon the threshold of a transcultural, transnational, religio-political complex of fascist universalism and its demonic perversion of an authentic, planetary yearning offering us the only way out of our 'war of all against all', rightly called salvation. Image one: Agreed and, frankly, a worldwide contagion: Jihadists, Zionists, Hindutvavadis, 969ers, Crusaders, they're all at it. And whilst we're not the only only ones suffering from this plague, nor are we the only ones God welcomes. This, hardly news to planetary prophetology, of course. Quote Tweet Clearly, the supercharged universality of this phenomenon - pat, predictable, cookie-cutter dialectics of ethnonationalism, purity and exclusion, span a dizzying array of languages, cultures and borders, just now - powerfully affirms its common, transcultural, archetypal origins. Image two: 1/ Hence the fundamental nature, role and promise of the political liberator, savior or Great Emancipator, here to revision the bodies, minds and souls of men in a bastardized, religio-nationalist image of the messianic hopes of our times. The transcendent function, perverted. Quote Tweet In other words, the bastard appeal of such ethno-nationalist analogs is universally paradigmatic. How then, to effectively address the immense planetary forces encouraging the emergence and powerful enchantment of such personalities and their platforms? Quote tweet: Hardly news, even as the illuminating recognition that no one culture, creed, philosophy, religion, nation or otherwise can save us, inevitably requires a planetary reckoning with an inclusive eschatology. We're saved, finally, by the beauty and brilliance of our togetherness.
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