“The Conqueror, whose core issue is safety splits us into Conqueror and Enemy/Victim, tells us, "Don't trust!" and generates fear, paranoia, distortions of reality, and the need to annihilate enemies.”
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)
Context: The Conqueror, whose core issue is safety splits us into Conqueror and Enemy/Victim, tells us, "Don't trust!" and generates fear, paranoia, distortions of reality, and the need to annihilate enemies. The Conqueror seduces us by making us feel special, sometimes grandiose and self-righteous, sometimes especially weak and victimized.
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Starhawk 59
American author, activist and Neopagan 1951Related quotes
On the Chinese government's policies towards Uighurs, the mainly Muslim minority living in Xinjiang in China's far west http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-china-blog-31018617 (7 May 2014)
“It is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim.”
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 22 “Death on Neotrantor”
“There is a war that makes us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”
Source: The God of Small Things
“Fear is a powerful enemy, but a useful friend.”
Ch 6
The Rahotep series, Book 2: Tutankhamun
Quoted in "Fallen Soviet Generals: Soviet General Officers Killed in Battle" - Page 198 - by Aleksander A. Maslov, David M. Glantz - 1998
Illustrated London News (16 July 1910)
Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)
A Prescription for Hope (1985)
Context: Throughout human history, when confronted with what was deemed a deadly enemy, the fixed human response has been to gather more rocks, muskets, cannons, and now nuclear bombs. While nuclear weapons have no military utility — indeed they are not weapons but instruments of genocide-this essential truth is obscured by the notion of an "evil enemy". The "myth of the other", the stereotyping and demonizing of human beings beyond recognition, is still pervasive and now exacts inordinate economic, psychologic, and moral costs. The British physicist P. M. S. Blackett anticipated this state of paranoia: "Once a nation bases its security on an absolute weapon, such as the atom bomb, it becomes psychologically necessary to believe in an absolute enemy". The imagined enemy is eventually banished from the human family and reduced to an inanimate object whose annihilation loses all moral dimension.