The Trouble with Finkelstein, Whiteys, et al
Watching Norman Finkelstein throw away the final years of his life arguing with bigots as Piers Morgan, others, reminds of the 'The Coffee House of Surat'. They're the stuff of snake oil salesmen.
Below is a splendid summary of Lev Tolstoy’s famed ‘House of Surat’ reproduced from Med Amine El Makrouz, 2015.[1] It encapsulates precisely the Chinese Confucianist worldview (actually Daoist) that Tolstoy mistakenly attributes to.
The Coffee House of Surat is a short story written in the 19th century by the acclaimed Russian thinker Leo Tolstoy.
It deals with the idea of religious assuredness. This is done both directly and through an elaborate metaphor involving the sun that makes an appearance in the second half of the story. I'll explain this in more detail below.
An angry banished Persian theologian strikes up a heated debate in a local coffeehouse in Surat (hence the name) as to whether or not there is a god. Everyone presents opposing and vehemently clashing ideas. For example, the African slave worships a small idol made of wood from the fetish tree (that's actually a tree, I googled it ) whereas the Brahmin, the Catholic, and the Jew all have their distinctly conflicting theories on God and the religion through which to communicate with him. They argue.
Everyone is shouting and arguing intensely in this heated argument, everyone except for a Chinaman, a student of Confucius who sat silently in the bar drinking his opium.
When people asked him for his opinion, he delivered a long and convoluted metaphor involving the sun through which he shows all of them to be wrong. The metaphor is a story in itself and takes up the second half of the story. It goes something like this:
There's a blind guy on an island called Sumatra. He's become blind from incessantly looking at the sun in a foolish attempt to discover what it is. Eventually, he's come to the conclusion that as the sun’s neither solid, liquid or gas, it must not exist at all! As he's blind and cannot see its light he becomes further convinced of his own theory.
His slave lights a small coconut lamp in the darkness of the hut and begins to move about. This sparks a conversation on the sun, which the blind man vehemently protests does not exist. A fisherman, an Indian, an Egyptian, and an Englishman all joined in the argument, providing their own theories behind the sun. You can already see the similarity between this metaphor and the real-life instance in the coffee house.
Eventually the pilot of a ship begins to speak, dropping enlightenment bombs on everyone. He's like, "You're all wrong! The sun shines everywhere, it's nothing to do with where you're from. The sun doesn't shine for you!"
With this the Chinaman snaps out of his metaphor and concludes his argument. The Chinaman believes that, when it comes to faith, it is pride which causes emnities between people. Every nation or religion attempts to confine God to the walls of their temples. They all want a 'special' God for themselves.
The Chinaman then puts forward the idea that the world is a temple,[2] an undying tribute to the diversity and complexity of our creator. He says that, "The higher a man's conception of God, the better he will know him and will emulate or imitate his goodness. Thus, don't judge anyone, don't criticize anyone's beliefs. If you're a true man of God you won't try to convert people, you'll accept them the way they are."[3]
There is not much symbolism or material for deconstruction in the piece; the message is quite simple and straightforward. The predominant themes are unity through diversity, and a sadly unusual open-mindedness when it comes to religion. The metaphor can be seen as Tolstoy's attempt to analyse the problem by stepping back and looking at the larger picture, one free from sentiments and other personal bias.
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NOTES
For Makrouz text, see https://www.academia.edu/38243892/The_coffee_house
By ‘temple,’ the reference is to a single over-arching phenomenology called Life, which Spinoza calls Nature, the word being synonymous with God. This is, in its turn, manifested as, Schopenhauer says, ‘The World of Will and Representation’. Hence, an apple tree apples. It can do nothing else. Another, related (Chinese) idiom, grow beans get beans, grow melons get melons. Similarly it is with the planet earth, which Daoism regards as a phenomenon. Notion of ‘temple’, whatever that is, is encapsulated in the first lines of the daodejing 道德經 (circa 500 BCE) that every Chinese school child is required to memorize and recite. (Even in translation, which is near impossible, the lines below won’t make sense to the western mind who are prisoners to their indoctrination that the universe is an artifact of an external force, that is it is made up or constructed.)
道可道,非常道 dào kě dào, fēicháng dào
名可名,非常名。mingkeming, feichangming
無名天地之始; wúmíng tiāndì zhī shǐ;
有名萬物之母。 yǒumíng wànwù zhī mǔ.
Accepting people “the way they are” is antithetical to Judeo-Christian culture, which has instead tended to extenuate their western barbarism. Accepting people “the way they are” requires the westerner to reject that culture. But, if that were possible, then rejection won’t make them the western barbarians that Israel so well represents. For the rest of the world, there’s only one solution: Keep out the whiteys, from the river to the sea.
For Tolstoy’s ‘Coffee House of Surat’, 1892. English translation 1901, see, https://archive.org/details/CoffeeHouseOfSurat_LevTolstoy
Further reading Tolstoy and China, Derk Bodde, Princeton, 2015
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POSTSCRIPT
Above is Bajiao, Gansu today, first built in 81 BCE when, even at the time, had unimpeded lifelines to all China and some 700,000-to-1 million Han government troops. The other, in identical straits is Gaza, encircled by Zionist Israeli, hence, at the mercy of barbarian Jews; just a few thousands would be enough to strangle the Palestinians.
No support, nothing, how is Gaza to break out and be free?
China destroys USA? Will China’s destruction of the US Pacific forces help?
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