From: rsakella@p4.cs.man.ac.uk (Rizos Sakellariou)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Subject: Re: Versailles System = Madness
Date: 6 Sep 92 21:18:54 GMT

Under this subject title, there is a long article in soc.culture.europe,
which I personally found quite interesting and I'd recommend reading it 
for those interested in a "different" analysis of present day's world.
In order to give an idea, I quote (without permission) a few parts.

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The Versailles System: An Act of Madness Unparalleled in History 

by Jacques Cheminade 

We are now reaching the end of the 20th century and fortunately so. 
   Progress, like at the end-phase of the Roman Empire, has been reduced to a
set of technological tricks, material realization of scientific impulses
coming from an often remote past... ...The human mind is no more enabled,
generally, to understand and create. It is as if a universe without man, our
universe, were left to a wild angel driving a cybernetic machine--a rusting
machine, doped by a gleaming computer. 
   Worse of all, we are losing the moral fitness to survive. We are losing
that precious quality of mind that both makes us love our neighbor and discover
new ideas, we are losing the cognition, the moral, active knowledge, that we
have all been created in the image of God, even if some repeat it at random
with dead words. Most of us have lost the capacity to intervene when our
fellow human beings are suffering and dying before our own eyes. 
   ...
   The truth is that we have almost lost what the Greeks called {koinonia,} 
the sense of one's link to the species, and what was further accomplished 
by Christianity as {agape,} transcendent {caritas humani generis.} 

   Our Sick Century

   Let's look at what happened during our century, our sick century: 
   - {mass butchery wars}...
   - {mass-scale concentration camps}...
   - {mass-scale Malthusianism}...
   - {propagation of mass-scale diseases}...
   - {men treated as a commodity,}...
   - the worst irony of all, is that {those today condemning the
     past crimes of the century are often the very ones preparing and
     accomplishing the crimes of today,} against the peoples of the South 
     and of Eastern Europe, and against the very future of our species 
     as a whole...
   ...
   We are therefore left with only two possible conclusions: Either man is
evil, and the world is doomed, or man is perfectible, and as a man his task
is to change and perfect the world. 
   ...
   ... let's activate in our minds certain other things, let's
create paradoxes, notions of differences, thus awakening to the
understanding concepts.  The Aristotelian world, the world
of Avarice and Melancholy, the Malthusian dead-ended world, can never
generate a single concept, because it is flat. 
   ...
   It is the world defined by geopolitics, Malthusianism, usury and
entropy--a world with neither Hope nor Agape. A world with no ``beyond.'' 
   ...
   Let's take the image of a circle, or the value of the Golden Mean, and
communicate it as such: We are in the world of Aristotelianism, the world of
ephemerals. Let's take an historical situation, and comment about it,
accurately communicating facts and developments: We are again trapped in
the world of Aristotelianism. 
   But then let's give a chance to construct something, a circle with
rotating action, the Golden Mean with the reproduction of our species, and
let's teach that activity of the mind, through for example the rigorously
defined architecture of a building ``in God's image:'' we have a cathedral. We
have Van, Autun, Aachen or Chartres. 
   Let's give a chance to construct something, Europe as an economic great
design breaking through the borders of earthly empires...
   ...
   Isn't that beautiful? 
   Let's then convey that beauty in our deeds, and there could one day be a
new Renaissance, a new Age of Reason after the Versialles order--not chaos. 

From New Federalist v6, #33.
----
         John Covici
          covici@ccs.covici.com
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek