March 2003 - Nr. 3
Letter from the Editor
Dear Reader
It has been a very busy February and a cold one, as we all know. Our 3 tomcats searched in vain for spring and one of them, Duke Marmeduke II, started to hallucinate, as you can see on the front page. It is not going to take much to send me down that same road.
Waking
up the morning after the Austrian Ball transported us momentarily into that
bizarre never-never-land of sublime admiration for the magic of a winter
wonderland. A new coat of icing had settled everywhere, creating an
intricate filigree pattern of black and white, giving us the illusion that
our world is clean. The underlying grime was mercifully covered up, serving
as a metaphor for our other symbols of civilisation, beneath which lurks
many an abyss of dismal barbarism, politically, economically and
ecologically.
Nothing much has changed since I wrote to you last. The waves of nay and yea about a war keep weaving their pattern across the planet, fuelled by the never-ending speculations, convulsions and genuflections of a frantic media machine in search of non-existent news. In television land the undemanding, barely entertaining, often disgusting reality shows unfortunately still have not taken a dive, proving once again that reality has nothing to do with intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator of a public, falling prey to the money grabbing schemes of manipulating mongrels.
Those of us who understand the machinations of this scenario turn to art and culture to avoid looking at what really is real out there, certain in the knowledge that there is nothing we can do to change any of it. We leave it to a few creative and fertile minds to mirror our existence, to remind us of our civil, mortal and immortal duties as citizens and beings with responsibilities, or to uplift us with the artistic expressions of prophets past.
Such activities give us the necessary energy to continue, to carry on our chores of responsibilities in areas we can affect with change, closer to home. We require being uplifted spiritually to avoid sinking into hopelessness.
A young and very bright young doorman I spoke with (while waiting to be picked up by my husband after the ball) at the Royal York Hotel thought that politics and war should not be brought into context with spiritual or philosophical disciplines. What he meant of course is that government and religion do not mix well and should not. Why that could be true we see in the current western conflict with the oriental Muslim world. But we must not forget that religion has always only been used as pretence for war and a way to motivate the general population into it.
In rereading about revolutions and why they happen I was reminded that revolutions always happen when the economy of nations are severely damaged; and political terrorism (using religion as a motivator for participation) is always seen to be well planned and set in motion by design and to misdirect. The actual reason for war is likely, as one friend put it, energy production, meaning oil, causing the looming possibility of WW III. The opinion is that WW II and I both had this particular reason at the bottom of their conflicts. What would probably be more accurate to say is that it was and is about control, control not merrily about energy sources, but control of the world population as a whole. A long-term plan for globalisation and one world government was likely put into place before the year 1900. There are documents to that effect available in London, England, as referenced in Tom Buchwald’s book "Krieg der Schatten"(unfortunately out of print). The more the world is divided into recognisable sectors, like communism (east) and capitalism (west), the more it is possible to compartmentalise other areas, manipulate with political terror a war and make sure that the "right" group wins.
The unfortunate thing is that the actual players on all sides are probably not aware that they are fully manipulated by the very few that have always directed the traffic of anything on this planet. Thus you will have the righteous sounding zealots on both sides and they will sound convincing to their own people, because they speak to them within the context of their own cultural realities, including religious realities.
Clearly what is needed here is a workable solution that takes all these realities into consideration and encompasses a unilateral global sense of ethics, that can guide plans for problem resolutions with integrity while preserving the original character of the player’s culture, including their religion.
Life has many facets and the arts reflect all of them, or should. It is true that aesthetics can be found anywhere, even on a battlefield. Yet none of us would prefer to look for our necessary dose of aesthetics in such bleak places. Instead we turn to our concert halls and stages for replenishment, read in the literary pages of enlightenment, or listen otherwise to the sounds that make life more beautiful.
Until next time, with hopefully decisively good news!
Sybille Forster-Rentmeister
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