Generation Kill Best Quotes

I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world – my whole generation is experiencing this with me.

Does God exist? Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said. At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience—and that was no small achievement—Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion. In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists. If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here. To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: “God knows the past, the present, and the future.” In that case, he had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and he would not be shocked by her actions. Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.

As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic— full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media. Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it.

Kiev became a linchpin of the medieval world, evidenced by the marriage ties of the ruling house in the second half of the eleventh century. Daughters of Yaroslav the Wise, who reigned as Grand Prince of Kiev until 1054, married the King of Norway, the King of Hungary, the King of Sweden and the King of France. One son married the daughter of the King of Poland, while another took as his wife a member of the imperial family of Constantinople. The marriages made in the next generation were even more impressive. Rus’ princesses were married to the King of Hungary, the King of Poland and the powerful German Emperor, Henry IV. Among other illustrious matches was Gytha, the wife of Vladimir II Monomakh, the Grand Prince of Kiev: she was the daughter of Harold II, King of England, who was killed at the battle of Hastings in 1066. The ruling family in Kiev was the best-connected dynasty in Europe.

You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by The Angel in the House. [...] She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. [...] She was pure. [...] She slipped behind me and whispered: 'My dear, you are a young woman. [...] Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure. [...] I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. [...] Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down...without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against.

Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political or social behaviour after they are twenty-five years old. On the other hand, few people become directive in these matters until they are between forty and fifty. Then they prevail for twenty years or more. The conduct of public affairs therefore is necessarily twenty years or more behind the living thought of the times. This is what Dr. Chanter calls the "delayed realisation of ideas". In the less hurried past this had not been of any great importance, but in the violent crises of the Revolutionary Period it became a primary fact. It is evident now that whatever the emergency, however obvious the new problem before our species in the nineteen-twenties, it was necessary for the whole generation that had learned nothing and could learn nothing from the Great War and its sequelae, to die out before any rational handling of world affairs could even begin. The cream of the youth of the war years had been killed; a stratum of men already middle-aged remained in control, whose ideas had already set before the Great War. It was, says Chanter, an inescapable phase. The world of the Frightened Thirties and the Brigand Forties was under the dominion of a generation of unteachable, obstinately obstructive men, blinded men, miseducating, misleading the baffled younger people for completely superseded ends. If they could have had their way, they would have blinded the whole world for ever. But the blinding was inadequate, and by the Fifties all this generation and its teachings and traditions were passing away, like a smoke-screen blown aside. Before a few years had passed it was already incredible that in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century the whole political life of the world was still running upon the idea of competitive sovereign empires and states. Men of quite outstanding intelligence were still planning and scheming for the "hegemony" of Britain or France or Germany or Japan; they were still moving their armies and navies and air forces and making their combinations and alliances upon the dissolving chess-board of terrestrial reality. Nothing happened as they had planned it; nothing worked out as they desired; but still with a stupefying inertia they persisted. They launched armies, they starved and massacred populations. They were like a veterinary surgeon who suddenly finds he is operating upon a human being, and with a sort of blind helplessness cuts and slashes more and more desperately, according to the best equestrian rules. The history of European diplomacy between 1914 and 1944 seems now so consistent a record of incredible insincerity that it stuns the modern mind. At the time it seemed rational behaviour. It did not seem insincere. The biographical material of the period -- and these governing-class people kept themselves in countenance very largely by writing and reading each other's biographies -- the collected letters, the collected speeches, the sapient observations of the leading figures make tedious reading, but they enable the intelligent student to realise the persistence of small-society values in that swiftly expanding scene. Those values had to die out. There was no other way of escaping from them, and so, slowly and horribly, that phase of the moribund sovereign states concluded.

And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her — you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it —-she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: “My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide my pen. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

The mal’oicch’, as it’s called in Calabrese, the Evil Eye, is the bad atmosphere generated by suppressed resentments, jealousy with the power to wound, ruin, craze, or even kill. The mal’oicch’ is particularly dangerous for blessed or beautiful or wealthy people, who often seem to have the best and worst luck because of all the accumulated jealousy, invidia, around them.

My father," said the young man, bending his knee, "bless me!" Morrel took the head of his son between his two hands, drew him forward, and kissing his forehead several times said, "Oh, yes, yes, I bless you in my own name, and in the name of three generations of irreproachable men, who say through me, 'The edifice which misfortune has destroyed, providence may build up again. 'On seeing me die such a death, the most inexorable will have pity on you. To you, perhaps, they will accord the time they have refused to me. Then do your best to keep our name free from dishonor. Go to work, labor, young man, struggle ardently and courageously; live, yourself, your mother and sister, with the most rigid economy, so that from day to day the property of those whom I leave in your hands may augment and fructify. Reflect how glorious a day it will be, how grand, how solemn, that day of complete restoration, on which you will say in this very office, 'My father died because he could not do what I have done; but he died calmly and peaceably, because in dying he knew what I should do.'" "My father!" cried the young man, "why should you not live?" "If I live, all would be changed; if I live, interest would be converted into doubt, pity into hostility; if I live I am only a man who has broken his word, failed in his engagements - in fact, only a bankrupt. If, on the contrary, I die, remember, Maximilian, my corpse is that of an honest but unfortunate man. Living, my best friends would avoid my house; dead, all Marseilles will follow me in tears to my last home. Living, you would feel shame at my name; dead, you may raise your head and say, 'I am the son of him you killed, because, for the first time, he has been compelled to break his word.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

I read that they have buried his body like a dog's - without funeral rites, without tribal wail, with no solemn song or act. That is the deed of to-day. That is the best that this generation has to give to this noble historic character, this man who in his person ends the line of aboriginal sanctities older that the religion of Christian or Jew. Very well. So let it stand for the present. But there is a generation coming that shall reverse this judgement of ours. Our children shall build monuments to those whom we stoned, and the great aboriginals whom we killed will be counted by the future American as among the historic characters of the continent.

The 1890s were apprentice years for Yeats. Though he played with Indian and Irish mythology, his symbolism really developed later. The decade was for him, as a poet, the years of lyric, of the Rhymers’ Club, of those contemporaries whom he dubbed the ‘tragic generation’. ‘I have known twelve men who killed themselves,’ Arthur Symons looked back from his middle-aged madness, reflecting on the decade of which he was the doyen. The writers and artists of the period lived hectically and recklessly. Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) (one of the best lyricists of them all – ‘I cried for madder music and for stronger wine’) died from consumption at thirty-two; Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), a dipsomaniac, died aged thirty-five from a stroke. John Davidson committed suicide at fifty-two; Oscar Wilde, disgraced and broken by prison and exile, died at forty-six; Aubrey Beardsley died at twenty-six. This is not to mention the minor figures of the Nineties literary scene: William Theodore Peters, actor and poet, who starved to death in Paris; Hubert Crankanthorpe, who threw himself in the Thames; Henry Harland, editor of The Yellow Book, who died of consumption aged forty-three, or Francis Thompson, who fled the Hound of Heaven ‘down the nights and down the days’ and who died of the same disease aged forty-eight. Charles Conder (1868–1909), water-colourist and rococo fan-painter, died in an asylum aged forty-one.

I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world - my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? What do they expect from us when a time comes in which there is no more war? For years our occupation has been killing - that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?

But the reason it had to be us is that the three of us understand something that most people don't. The devil is real, but he doesn't turn up in a red suit with hooves. You have to imagine him as like a disease that you get-you pass it on and you don't even know it. Educated people don't call it the devil; they call it trauma. It rewires your brain and tries to spread itself down to the next generation and the one after that, the pain rolling down through time. The old man talking to you in your dreams, I think you know that he's just you, the man you can wind up being if you go down this path. All that about the end of the world? The best and worst news you're gonna hear all day is this: There's no such thing. It's another one of Dave's fake painted-on exits. You try to end it, and instead of release, it's just waves of trauma. The devil wins. You hate your dad and you should; he poured all his sickness into you. But if you want to fight him, the way you do it is by making sure you don't pass on the trauma. That's how you kill the devil. The only way.

Demonstrating for peace to promote war was nothing new. Totalitarianism always requires a tangible enemy. To the ancient Greeks, a holocaust was simply a burnt sacrifice. Khrushchev wanted to go down in history as the Soviet leader who exported communism to the American continent. In 1959 he was able to install the Castro brothers in Havana and soon my foreign intelligence service became involved in helping Cuba's new communist rulers to export revolution throughout South America. At that point it did not work. In the 1950s and 1960s most Latin Americans were poor, religious peasants who had accepted the status quo. A black version of liberation theology began growing in a few radical-leftist black churches in the US where Marxist thought is predicated on a system pf oppressor class ( white ) versus victim class ( black ) and it sees just one solution: the destruction of the enemy. In the 1950s UNESCO was perceived by many as a platform for communists to attack the West and the KGB used it to place agents around the world. Che Guevara's diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro, were produced by the Kremlin's dezinformatsiya machine. Changing minds is what Soviet communism was all about. Khrushchev's political necrophagy ( = blaming and condemning one's predecessor in office. It is a dangerous game. It hurts the country's national pride and it usually turns against its own user ) evolved from the Soviet tradition of sanctifying the supreme ruler. Although the communists publicly proclaimed the decisive role of the people in history, the Kremlin and its KGB believed that only the leader counted. Change the public image of the leader and you change history, I heard over and over from Khrushchev's lips. Khrushchev was certainly the most controversial Soviet to reign in the Kremlin. He unmasked Stalin's crimes, but he made political assassination a main instrument of his own foreign policy; he authored a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West but he pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war; he repaired Moscow's relationships with Yugoslavia's Tito, but he destroyed the unity of the communist world. His close association with Stalin's killings made him aware of what political crime could accomplish and gave him a taste for the simple criminal solution. His total ignorance about the civilized world, together with his irrational hatred of the "bourgeoisie" and his propensity to offend people, made him believe that disinformation and threats were the most efficient and dignified way for a Soviet leader to deal with "bourgeois" governments. As that very clever master of deception Yuri Andropov once told me, if a good piece of disinformation is repeated over and over, after a while it will take on a life of its own and will, all by itself, generate a horde or unwitting but passionate advocates. When I was working for Ceausescu, I always tried to find a way to help him reach a decision on his own, rather than telling him directly what I thought he should do about something. That way both of us were happy. From our KGB advisors, I had learned that the best way to ut over a deception was to let the target see something for himself, with his own eyes. By 1999, President Yeltsin's ill-conceived privatization had enabled a small clique of predatory insiders to plunder Russia's most valuable assets. The corruption generated by this widespread looting penetrated every corner of the country and it eventually created a Mafia-style economic system that threatened the stability of Russia itself. During the old Cold War, the KGB was a state within a state. In Putin's time, the KGB now rechristened FSB, is the state. The Soviet Union had one KGB officer for every 428 citizens. In 2004, Putin's Russia had one FSB officer for every 297 citizens.

Day after day, the curtain rises on a stage of epic proportions, one that has been running for centuries. The actors wear the costumes of their predecessors and inhabit the roles assigned to them. The people in these roles are not the characters they play, but they have played the roles long enough to incorporate the roles into their very being, to merge the assignment with their inner selves and how they are seen in the world. The costumes were handed out at birth and can never be removed. The costumes cue everyone in the cast to the roles each character is to play and to each character’s place on the stage. Over the run of the show, the cast has grown accustomed to who plays which part. For generations, everyone has known who is center stage in the lead. Everyone knows who the hero is, who the supporting characters are, who is the sidekick good for laughs, and who is in shadow, the undifferentiated chorus with no lines to speak, no voice to sing, but necessary for the production to work. The roles become sufficiently embedded into the identity of the players that the leading man or woman would not be expected so much as to know the names or take notice of the people in the back, and there would be no need for them to do so. Stay in the roles long enough, and everyone begins to believe that the roles are preordained, that each cast member is best suited by talent and temperament for their assigned role, and maybe for only that role, that they belong there and were meant to be cast as they are currently seen. The cast members become associated with their characters, typecast, locked into either inflated or disfavored assumptions. They become their characters. As an actor, you are to move the way you are directed to move, speak the way your character is expected to speak. You are not yourself. You are not to be yourself. Stick to the script and to the part you are cast to play, and you will be rewarded. Veer from the script, and you will face the consequences. Veer from the script, and other cast members will step in to remind you where you went off-script. Do it often enough or at a critical moment and you may be fired, demoted, cast out, your character conveniently killed off in the plot. The social pyramid known as a caste system is not identical to the cast in a play, though the similarity in the two words hints at a tantalizing intersection. When we are cast into roles, we are not ourselves. We are not supposed to be ourselves. We are performing based on our place in the production, not necessarily on who we are inside. We are all players on a stage that was built long before our ancestors arrived in this land. We are the latest cast in a long-running drama that premiered on this soil in the early seventeenth century.

Now that I'm directing my attention straight at her, it's hard not to look at her crotch, given her cross- legged position. Her black bikini briefs are perfectly in place, without a hair, or even a follicle, to be seen. I wonder if she waxes everywhere? Or if she's had electrolysis? I've heard that's the norm for singletons in the US-the Tinder generation. A doctor friend told me that even in the UK, everybody he sees under the age of thirty is entirely de- void of pubic hair these days.

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. “There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise.” That is what Schwab did. But what do average people do? The exact opposite.

six reasons why email is the best: My company AppSumo generates $65 million a year in total transactions. And you know what? Nearly 50 percent of that comes from email. This percentage has been consistent for more than ten years. Don’t believe me? I have 120,000 Twitter followers, 750,000 YouTube subscribers, and 150,000 TikTok fans—and I would give them all up for my 100,000 email subscribers. Why? Every time I send an email, 40,000 people open it and consume my content. I’m not hoping the platform gods will allow me to reach them. On the other platforms, anywhere between 100 and 1 million people pay attention to my content, but it’s not consistent or in my control. I know what you’re saying: “C’mon, Noah, email is dead.” Now ask yourself, when was the last time you checked your email? Exactly. Email is used obsessively by over 4 billion people! It’s the largest way of communicating at scale that exists today. Eighty-nine percent of people check it EVERY DAY! Social media decides who and how many people you’re seen by. One tweak to the algorithm, and you’re toast. Remember the digital publisher LittleThings? Yeah, no one else does, either. They closed after they lost 75 percent of their 20,000,000 monthly visitors when Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018. CEO Joe Speiser says it killed his business and he lost $100 million. You own your email list. Forever. If AppSumo shuts down tomorrow, my insurance policy, my sweet sweet baby, my beloved, my email list comes with me and makes anything I do after so much easier. Because it’s mine. It also doesn’t cost you significant money to grow your list or to communicate with your list, whereas Facebook or Google ads consistently cost money.

This generation is lousy with lost boys, and loving one of them means hollowing yourself out to make a space for them to crawl inside. So you do that, because that’s what girls are supposed to do, and because it’s so good to be needed. Just for a little while. Just until your boyfriend gets a job and your best friend stops trying to kill himself. I learned the truth at twenty-two: you can’t save the world one man at a time. Watching these young men growing up into a very different world from the one they were promised, my first reaction has always been sympathy. It’s surprisingly easy to sympathise.

Challenging the earlier economists of his day, Marx was keen to show how the products of capitalism did not just magically appear, nor did they have inherent value. Instead, Marx wanted to show that the value derived from commodities was part of a specific kind of social relationship—one in which the labor power of workers added value to commodities. In this way, the notions of commodities and labor lie at the center of understanding how Marx viewed capitalist relationships as inherently exploitative, as the dominance of one class (the bourgeoisie, or the owners of the means of production) over another class (the proletariat, the working class, or those who have nothing to sell but their labor). Proletarians were lending labor power to the production process, transforming goods into saleable commodities, and receiving only part of the value generated in this process. To Marx, this was wholesale thievery; the expenditure of human effort to produce commodities was the actual expenditure of human life, of the limited time that any of us have on this planet, and it came at the expense of us realizing our actual nature as productive, creative beings that generated meaning through our labor. Marx believed deeply in the notion that humans were creative and that we could be positively world-transformative.Through our labor, we not only make the world, but we also express the best part of ourselves as a species. The hijacking of all of this for the productive ends of the bourgeoisie—for mere profit—was, to Marx, a horrible crime being perpetuated on the weaker by the stronger.

The man who did the shooting was a civilian, Peter Kakhovsky, a gifted intellectual of extreme purity of motive in whom the conviction of the necessity of regicide burned with a gem-like flame. Determined to kill, expecting to die, this brilliant and terrible apparition, his slender form bundled up in a sheepskin coat, his delicate features surmounted by a shabby top hat, shot to kill with that indiscriminate ruthlessness which was later to characterise a whole generation of revolutionary terrorists. If he could not yet murder the Tsar, he would do the next best thing.

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

Tyresia (Τειρεσίας) Tyresias is blind, it is said, but we are not really sure. We read that Tyresias was blinded by the gods because they did not want him to prophesy about 'private' matters. However, other ancient historical documents say that Tyresias was the son of a nymph who was made so by Athena as a punishment for seeing her bathing naked, but was then made a soothsayer by the goddess herself at his mother's request. Perhaps the best-known fact about Tyiresias is the one I am about to tell. One day, while walking on Mount Cillene, Tyresias came upon two snakes mating, and, annoyed by the scene, killed the female (according to one version, he merely separated them by striking first the female and then the male). At the same time, Tyresias was transformed from a man into a woman. He lived in this state for seven years, experiencing all the pleasures a woman can experience. After this period he was confronted with the same scene as the serpents. This time he killed the male serpent and instantly became a man again. One day, Zeus and Hera were divided by an argument: whether in love the man or the woman felt more pleasure. Unable to reach an agreement, with Zeus claiming it was the woman and Hera claiming it was the man, they decided to summon Tyresias, who was considered the only one who could settle the dispute as he was both man and woman. When questioned by the gods, he replied that pleasure is made up of ten parts: a man feels only one and a woman nine, so a woman feels nine times as much pleasure as a man. The goddess Hera, furious that Tyresias had revealed such a secret, made him blind, but Zeus, to compensate for the damage done, gave him the power to foresee the future and the gift of life for seven generations: the Greek gods cannot undo what other gods have done or decided. So Tyresias' blindness is actually the condition for him to fulfil his role as soothsayer. Sight comes into play directly, as a violation of a code of conduct enunciated by Callimachus (the laws of Cronus state that whoever sees an immortal against his will will pay a high price for that sight).

As a transmuted energy, anger is mirror-wisdom – undistracted, undistorted clarity. But in order for us to find this clarity, to polish this mirror, we need to cut through the insidious process of justification. Justification is the authority we invoke to license our anger. Because of this it is important not to allow space for the distorted indulgence of justification. This can be very difficult because the process of justification is a strong part of our education and a salient feature of the world’s cultural heritage. The nuclear balance of terror was part of that process. Totalitarian political movements (either extreme left or extreme right) are a manifestation of that process; and, unfortunately, it has also become part of the very ideologies that have arisen to benefit humanity. How often have we heard people saying: “Of course I’m angry! Wouldn’t anyone be angry?” And, of course, this is a purely rhetorical question. The concept that we have every right to feel anything that we feel needs to be called seriously into question. At best we can say that we simply feel what we feel. It is a delicate balance: to acknowledge emotional needs, on the one hand, and to have a sense of these needs being conceptually generated on the other. This balancing act requires the experience of emptiness, because without it, we either indulge ourselves or brutalise ourselves. The experience of emptiness, in this sense, helps us to view our emotions with a degree of humour – with more sanity and true perspective. With this sense of space we can find ourselves adopting a very powerful stance – the stance of a practitioner. Then it is no longer possible to say: “You have made me angry!” All we can say is: “I have made myself angry in reaction to what I have perceived you to have done to me”. In this way we make ourselves completely responsible for what we feel. That is really wonderful, because from this perspective we stop laying this responsibility on other people. Taking responsibility for whatever we may happen to be feeling is what enables us to kill justification. Dechen, Khandro; Chogyam, Ngakpa (2014-01-14). Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism (p. 143). Shambhala Publications. Kindle Edition.

The millennials said it best: You Only Live Once. And for that precious thing that one can’t live without, they will spend their whole lives searching. When they find it, they will keep doing it until it kills them. The older generations shriek at this intensity, but it is simply how the millennial mind is wired. “What use of living if you don’t live on the edge?” they ask. After all, the life force is strongest the nearer we are to death. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

In 1982, when Arafat and his Fatah fighters were besieged in Beirut, on the brink of being pushed out of Lebanon by the Israelis, Gaddafi sent him an open telegram suggesting his best option was to kill himself. “Your suicide will immortalize the cause of Palestine for future generations,” he said. “There is a decision which, if taken by you, no one can prevent. It is the decision to die. Let this be.” Arafat is reported to have replied that if Gaddafi would like to join him, he might consider it.

I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world- my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account?