Статьи (на английском), которые произвели на меня впечатление

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БЕСПЛАТНО РАЗДАЮ ССЫЛКИ И ПОЛУПОСТЫ ДО КОНЦА МАЯ

1. Esquire - I Miss Iraq. I Miss My Gun. I Miss My War.

I've spent hours taking in the world through a rifle scope, watching life unfold. Women hanging laundry on a rooftop. Men haggling over a hindquarter of lamb in the market. Children walking to school. I've watched this and hoped that someday I would see that my presence had made their lives better, a redemption of sorts. But I also peered through the scope waiting for someone to do something wrong, so I could shoot him. When you pick up a weapon with the intent of killing, you step onto a very strange and serious playing field. Every morning someone wakes wanting to kill you. When you walk down the street, they are waiting, and you want to kill them, too. That's not bloodthirsty; that's just the trade you've learned. And as an American soldier, you have a very impressive toolbox. You can fire your rifle or lob a grenade, and if that's not enough, call in the tanks, or helicopters, or jets. The insurgents have their skill sets, too, turning mornings at the market into chaos, crowds into scattered flesh, Humvees into charred scrap. You're all part of the terrible magic show, both powerful and helpless.

That men are drawn to war is no surprise. How old are boys before they turn a finger and thumb into a pistol? Long before they love girls, they love war, at least everything they imagine war to be: guns and explosions and manliness and courage. When my neighbors and I played war as kids, there was no fear or sorrow or cowardice. Death was temporary, usually as fast as you could count to sixty and jump back into the game. We didn't know yet about the darkness. And young men are just slightly older versions of those boys, still loving the unknown, perhaps pumped up on dreams of duty and heroism and the intoxicating power of weapons. In time, war dispels many such notions, and more than a few men find that being freed from society's professed revulsion to killing is really no freedom at all, but a lonely burden. Yet even at its lowest points, war is like nothing else. Our culture craves experience, and that is war's strong suit. War peels back the skin, and you live with a layer of nerves exposed, overdosing on your surroundings, when everything seems all wrong and just right, in a way that makes perfect sense. And then you almost die but don't, and are born again, stoned on life and mocking death.

2. Интервью с Адамом Кертисом

In an age where people don't know what's what, we sort of agree with that. We look for order and want that. And our politicians can't give it to us - our media elites can't give it to us because they don't know what's what anymore. So far from creating a new richness and openness, we all work together to create a new system of agreed order, because we want it.

It's not that we're not bad people, that's what happens in an age of populism, a populist democracy.

The elites have given up, so no one's telling you what's what any more, we don't want that any longer - so we're beginning to work together sooner and actually, that's exactly what I was being accused of.

So what we're living through is a period of intense conformity. It is the great paradox of the age.

This was pointed out to me once by a man who ran a focus group, and it's the reason I made The Trap.

He said, "Everyone out there" - and we're looking through the mirror - "thinks they are an individual. But actually more and more people are exactly the same. Not only in how they dress, but how they feel about themselves and about each other." They talk in the same language.

And I researched it, and it's true - he's completely right. We live in an age where we think we're completely individualistic, but actually, we're more conformist than we have been since the 1960s.

3. Джон Н Грей о миллениаризме

Communists and Nazis alike anticipated a historic cataclysm, a rupture in history in which human life would be utterly transformed. Both were implacably hostile to conventional religion. And yet, as Cohn shows, they replicated an apocalyptic conception of collective salvation that was structurally identical to that of powerful strands in medieval Christianity. It was no longer God that would bring about the salvation of the world. "Humanity" - or a privileged section of it, thought to be especially progressive or racially superior - would initiate the miraculous transformation. While the content of belief had been modified with secularisation, the structure of thought had not changed. History was still seen in apocalyptic terms as a struggle between good and evil, which would end - though only after the most violent conflicts - with the victory of good.

Reading Cohn's masterpiece left me with a suspicion of world-transforming political projects that has remained with me ever since. At the same time, I was convinced that no view of the modern world which neglects the persistent power of religion could be taken seriously - a view that events have only reinforced. Not only has religion not faded away, as secular thinkers expected, but repressed religious passions permeate secular politics, often with malignant consequences. When I came to know Norman Cohn, I was interested to learn that the book was triggered by conversations among captured Nazis on which he had eavesdropped as part of his work in intelligence during the Second World War.

P.S. - Если интересно вот еще интересное видео Грея о кризисе.

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