Golden Wave in the Sun

 

Blueberry Hill song, 12 Monkeys movie and Vladimir Putin's performance

The essence of the promise of stability, prosperity and security is at the mercy of science and human intelligence. If something still got out of hand, it was because someone was probably negligent, did not perform his task properly, did not turn in time to the appropriate expert - a phenomenon known in modern language as "failure" that requires investigation and examination.

In his book "The Critical Space", the French philosopher Paul Virilio described in detail the striving of rational-scientific thinking to achieve control in the world of phenomena with a tendency to control even the uncontrollable. But capturing the great promise of technology and science will, in his view, lead to an "integral accident" that will not only change the human perception of technology but may even bring an end to the "modern project."

Of course, Virilio did not wish for such an "accident" but warned against it: as great as the promise is, so is the depth of the crisis. Indeed, modern man's expectations of science and the state find themselves repeatedly battered in the face of defiant reality. This time, in the Russia-Ukraine war, we are not just facing a "global accident".

From Gaston Bechelard to Paul Virilio

Gaston Bechelard and Paul Virilio are two of the greatest French philosophers of the twentieth century. They have many similar characteristics: Phenomenological and the anti-structuralist approach. Cognitive fracture as a key for understanding human behavior. Existence of eternal movement, speed and present. Flight and aviation as key amplifiers of consciousness. Importance of material reality and especially architecture. Negation of Post-modrnism. Poetic writing style. Affinity for physics of relativity. Different characteristics are: Purification versus accident. Psychoanalysis versus technology. Classics against Hyper-modernism.

Bechelard [1884 - 1962] was a senior member of the French Academy of Sciences, and greatly influenced postmodern French philosophers. He contributed greatly to the study of the poetics and philosophy of science. He developed the concept of the "cognitive rift", which is essential for the progress of science out of crises. He has extensively developed the concept of "dynamic imagination", according to which the main function of the creative imagination is to refute existing images.

Virilio [1932 - 2018] was a cultural theorist, urbanist and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings on technology, as it has evolved in relation to speed and power, architecture, the arts, the city and the military. The major concepts he developed are "Dromology" ["Racing"] and "Global Accident". According to them, modern culture, the cyberspace, is instantly virtual. It moves at the maximum speed of light, creating a reality of a uniform world, a huge global city, which is a terminal saturated with detached images and prone to accidents.

For both, fliht and aviation are key to creative thinking. They are  a male-female creature alike and the deity in person. The attributes embodied in these concepts becomes for them, automatically and involuntarily, the creative intuition. This is similar to the reliance of many other creators on these concepts as a starting point for thinking. For example, the issue of UAVs stands out today. It has become a tool through which one can review and summarize any human phenomenon. For Bechelard the UAV is another good conductor, an amplifier, for the imagining mind. For Virilio, it is another link in the de-localization and global accident of humanity.

The difference between Gaston Bechelard and Paul Virilio is the difference between the optimist and the pessimist. Bechelard's point of view is personal and intimate, compared to Virilio's global-cosmic point of view. Bechelard observes in space what the near and familiar reality is, on the personal and private scale. Virilio is replacing Bechelard's dream and reverie with technology and media. He looks at the world from the outer and unfamiliar space, on the superpersonal scale and on society as a whole. Bechelard is the desire, the passion and the hope. Virilio is the surrender and defeat, the inevitable global accident. In Bechelard the world is as round as a well. For Virilio, the world is as square as a screen. Bechelard is innocent and Virilio is cynical. In Bechelard the world opens up and in Virilio it is closing.

While Heidegger, Virilio's spiritual teacher, view the radio as superficial and a reduction, Bechelard saw it as a possibility for deepening and uniting hearts, a kind of universal utopia. The conversations in cafes are loud, but in the universal world of radio, everyone hears each other, and everyone can listen comfortably.

Clues to Bechelard's critique of the "distressed philosophy", as he called existentialist philosophy, can be found without difficulty in all his writings. The refusal of distress was inconsistent with the fashion order of his time, but Bechelard remained consistent in his positions. Boldness was needed to write, in the middle of the twentieth century, in France, in the days of the existentialist climax, that "distress is false: we were created to breathe well''.

Many writers note the psychic powers that Bechelard's philosophy imparts to those who come through its gates, the healing quality inherent in his philosophy, in the possibility he offers, in which man and the world are in constant poetic dialogue. There is indeed a lot of loneliness in Bechelard's philosophy. This is, without a doubt, a philosophy of the individual, the loner. But he is not alone, he is always in the company of the world. Moreover, he is in the company of the beauty of the world. The natural destiny of dreaming, Bechelard believed, is to see the beauties of the world. You can not dream of ugliness in a reverie. Beauty is not only aesthetic, it also a need of the cognitive, ethical and mentality of the person.

Virilio is replacing Bechelard's dream and reverie with technology and media. The sorting and comparison based on the classicical writers by Bechelard, alternates with him to the sorting and comparison based on the present reality. Bechelard's point of view is personal. Virilio's perspective is global. According to Virilio, the world has changed. It is not the same world known by classical works and history. It all became a bustling mega city. We can no longer rely on our natural perception. It was completely distorted by the Tele-Media. The original and new poetic image can not exist in the world of electronic consumerism images, which enslave the imagination and cognition. Loneliness is no longer a sacred value. It is mechanical, and stems from the social split into "human points" created by technology.

The words, too, became worthless. Only the oral experience, the continuity that the delay and acceleration in speech are capable of, remained. It is the stops speech can create, by the wisdom of the thinker, in the mind of the listener. Virilio, through his stretched paragraphs, brings back the reader to the beginning of the social consciousness, of the shoutings of primitive man. He does not have a dialogue with the reader, as does Bechelard. There is hom survival for its own sake. No hand caressing. There is a finger that press the destruction button.

Virilio is one of the most prolific and poignant critics of the drama of the modern technological age. The enterprise of his life is an ongoing reflection on the origins, nature, and influences of the technologies that make up the modern  and postmodern world. He was particularly interested in military technology, representation technologies, computer and information technologies and biotechnology. The question of aviation as a dystopia is central to his thinking, as aviation is a key factor in the creation of the visual world and the global city, a world-terminal that is negatively interactive. Although Virilio does not ruling out technology, he radically criticizes the ways in which it changes the world, and even the human race. The criticism towards him is that he has a flawed perception, which is too negative and one-sided, and loses the empowering and democratic aspects of new computer and media technologies.

Sources:

Gaston Bechelard. The poetics of space

John Armitage. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews

Paul Virilio - Camera movement over eighty years

The properties of the element of fire guide Virilio in writing on the subject. Fire is an almost imageless element, except for three: light, heat, immediacy. The light according to Virilio is the light of the camera, the heat is the weapon, the immediacy is the decision making.

Virilio reviews how the development of the camera was due to the development of the machine gun, and in general how the development of cinematic photography was due to the consequences of various military developments. Observation and visual intelligence are the cornerstone of the military. That is why they have been at the forefront of technology since the dawn of history to the present day. As the weapons became more sophisticated and the slaughter on the battlefield increased, so did the need for more sophisticated means of observation. The observation plane became the most effective means, and in this way the battlefield, and later the whole world, also became cinematic. The war itself became a spectacular visual spectacle, due to the sophistication of the night lights and the intensity of the shells, in parallel with the sophistication of the defenses against them, trenches and fortifications, which created a sense of disconnection.

The function of the camera is first to connect the fragments of the whole that are revealed to it in separate images, into one complete image. Unlike more modern photography, which focuses on details and create resolutions. Nowadays, with the development of means of observation also for the invisible, such as infrared and radar, and other electronic means, the problem is the management of the information that comes from them, which is the most reliable, but also dense. This created the need for computing, and from there it was a short way to make automatic decisions. In this way the war became a nonstop film, and the nonstop time management replaced the management of space. There was also an obsession with stealth weapons, simulations, and electronic deception. As a result, the war became impersonal and intangible.

Because the sense of reality went wrong, so did human reason. The need to filter information under the conditions of human-machine combined activity was first discovered in World War II, with the sophistication of air defense equipment. Thus was founded the science of cybernetics, based on the concept of the system and the feedback, and in particular the negative feedback, which allows for the screening of human errors through practices.

A detached worldview was created as a result, making motion pictures more tangible than reality. Reality, which has been imprisoned and eliminated by the electromagnetic cyber world, is being revived through the worlds of guided imagery of cinema. Movies have become the telescopic rifle through which we look at war in particular, and the world at large.

In World War II, aerial observation, which has become very sophisticated, has become the most important means of feeding raw materials for films designed to portray reality with an objective eye. But the aerial observation also turned the surface into a detached object, as in a laboratory. Everything became too clear and immediate from the air, and repeated evidence was required, as in a laboratory experiment, to confirm any report. This is due to the increasing speed and mobility of the modern ground military movement. The need for a broad verbal interpretation of the outcome of air battles and bombings, has turned silent films into talking films, among viewers in the command rooms. The ability to carry out nocturnal attacks using bright lighting and the use of radar added to the sense of cinematic detachment from reality. The speed of the decision became more important than its correctness. Mobility, the hallmark of the military force, has become a series of means of communication, sent only by the commander-in-chief to any force on the ground. Statistics have become a major tool for him in decision making.

The citizens of the home front have also became partners to the reality of the command rooms. They were attentive to alarms, under the cloud of uncertainty of the bomb approaching them on the one hand, and watched at night the spectacular spectacle of the air defense spotlights and light bombs.

A similar spectacle is currently being experienced by Israeli citizens watching from a protected area in the background during clashes in Gaza, such as in Operation ''Wall Guard'', in which trails of thousands of missiles illuminated the sky. The first Lebanon war is an early and different example of the means of sight taking over the war, using the unmanned aerial vehicles to asist the airplanes.

In World War II, the culmination of the spectacle of light and fire was the atomic bomb. Immediately after the war it was replaced by the exhaust from the jet aircraft engines, and a few years later the fire emitted by the missile engines launched into space. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which required an immediate response from the United States following fears of launching missiles from the island, expressed the empowerment of the processes that connected the observation, immediacy and weapons, that are a modern incarnation of primodial fire.

In the Vietnam War, unmanned jet aerial vehicles were used for the first time, as part of a sophisticated electronic system of aiming and collecting data from various sensors. The UAVs, and the missiles launched by pilots remotely using the Send and Forget method, contributed to the disengagement of the fighters from the war. What remains is the link between the flash of light and the war. For war as a vision in Vietnam contributed the use of drugs by soldiers. War as a cinema has become a default.

In the 1970s, the advanced flight simulator was developed, which enabled full simulation of operational flight, and became almost its replacement. The flight has become a cinematic misenscene. Strategic deterrence was also practiced through electronic war games. The computerized maps, created using the aerial scan of the surface, created a new world of computer mapping, imaging and navigation. The pilots were given an overhead display, sophisticated helmets, and the ability to fly and launch through speech and eye focus. The flight became automatic. The eye and the weapon merged.

The critical space according to Paul Virilio

Global urban geographical decentralization, which is a major phenomenon nowadays, has led to the creation of huge cities and an endless, legal and illegal suburban expansion that extends across entire countries. The State of Israel, in particular, has long since became, due to its small size, population density, and lack of governance in the area of ​​regional planning, a single suburban city. This situation is changing the definition of sovereignty. It marks the end of the uniqueness of the place, which characterizes the old political stage and the historic city, and its replacement by the principle of immediacy, the unity of time, which is a politics of intensity and interactivity, of a technical set-up. Systems architecture has finally replaced the historic architecture and urbanism system.

The ubiquitous, immediate presence is being followed by the replacement of the traditional agenda, which was based on the solar cycle,  with accelerated technological agenda, realized by the electronic and digital media. The accelerated agenda is pushing past habits of populating space. The stable regional and urban planning of the space has long been replaced by a general lack of restraint, under social enslavement to accelerated technology. Accelerated technology accompanies humans on their daily journey by high-speed means of transportation, aircraft, cars and trains. These means of transportation greatly eroded the importance of the traditional urban space. Humans have become transfer players in the geographic space, where they are constantly mobile.

A third reason for the disintegration of traditional space is modern weapons, the operation of which is characterized by automatic remote decision-making at lightning speed. A heavy critical mass has been created, heralding a catastrophe of the dismantled historic city, of the traditional urbanization, as well as of the state.

Because the cohesive spatial layout was lost in favor of an invisible morphological configuration, a committed personal, interactive isolation was created. An atomization of the individual was created. In this accelerated process, the individual is awaiting return to the homeland, but has no escape from life in the suburbs.

The endless urban expansion marches along with the inner urban collapse. Both together eradicated the distinction between urban population and colonial settlement. They obscure national citizenship, the very obligation to grant significant political citizenship to populations under authority. Separating colonialism from state citizenship is completely impractical, given these urban processes. The sense of enclosure in the kibernetic space is common to all sectors.

Both sides live on the scale of individual survival. Each of the two types of citizenship has, in practice, rights and obligations that equal their status. The "colonial" citizen is exempt from military service and other civilian duties. He is able to build his private home on state land without obtaining building permits, not paying taxes, marrying several women and more. The "state" subject is obligated to obey every law, mild or severe, and the authorities take every opportunity to impose authority on him. Both types of citizens enjoy free basic social and health insurance. The economic ties between them are numerous and diverse.

The traditional extroverted international colonialism, which was characterized by the occupation of territories far from the homeland, has now become an internalized colonialism, dominated by global technology and media corporations. The traditional city collapsed into itself and crumbled. The centers of major cities around the world have become slums.

The immediate interactivity of the technologies has led to the decline in the value of the local human workforce. It gives priority to multinational monopolistic centralism. This is an ideology that denies the rule of national freedom movements. It creates opposing niches for the pursuit of self-management. It corresponds to a minimum country claim presented by economists. This claim enables the creation of technologies that do not require full employment and a real and practical presence of employees.

The pursuit of sovereignty today is a symptom of a simultaneous search for momentum. It is an acceleration that characterizes all separation movements, that exists between all contemporary urban classes, regardless of their national identity. The aspiration for political isolation is of extraordinary dimensions, and includes all sectors of the population. The anti-establishment ecological movement has long exhibited its enormous dimensions, for example in the North American survival movements. Survival movements can also serve as a touchstone for their absurd chances as a counterculture.

Today the spatial disruption has become the disruption of time. Transience has become a key concept in employment. Technical unemployment, temporary employment, dispersal of the wage burden, fragmentation of the labor system, fragmentation of residence, fragmentation of the family, and so on, have become the distinctive hallmark of life today. In addition, a culture of online social networking has been created, based on similar principles.

The traditional family and community, which were the building blocks of national identity, have disappeared. They fell apart following the modern lifestyle. This disintegration also has negative consequences for the status of citizenship, as it allows for disobedience to state institutions, such as through a tax revolt and a lack of governance. There is no real civic center, almost no valuable political center. The real weapon is first and foremost the position, array and direction of the forces present in the current systemic deployment, which tends to completely neutralize the ties between the citizens, the neighborhood unit.

As a result, the development of terrorism today is limited. Terrorism has nothing to do with substansive actions today. In fact, the various national terrorist movements have never had anything to do with opposition to the collapse of traditional urban systems. They expressed a utopian connection to the homeland, while the land of their longings had long since became a suburb. 

Traditional terrorist bodies are today  inefficient and irrelevant, in the reality of mega cities, which are spreading and collapsing simultaneously and uncontrollably. First, they arose to present a false utopian vision of the homeland, but not to deal with the urban issue as reality requires, by way of presenting an independent alternative to urban renewal. Second, they operate in a crumbling society, because the family and the traditional community, which are the source of classically organized resistance, no longer exist for all the inhabitants of the mega cities. Third, they operate in an outdated strategy, of conventional weapons, while the key today is the technological weapon, based on speed.

Military technological progress, which nowadays dictates political decision-making, is characterized by ballistic missiles. Everything is known today in very short durations, a few minutes and sometimes even less. The first response doctrine argues that in order to achieve the target, the nuclear missiles must be launched before those of the enemy have left the ground. These characteristics are similar to those of unmanned aerial vehicles, which are currently the most common weapons in the war against terror.

In order to be able to express themselves, the various political resistance bodies must adopt quick quantum thinking like lightning, based on time and not on space, and act according to commutes between center and fringe, in the territory in which they are located. Speed also requires action in attacks instead of defense. This is at the risk of losing self-identity, which is typical for quantum decision makers. They also run the risk of lack of public support, engaged in time management in a technological and informative race, and baseless political promises, in an urban environment that has lost its original identity.

The article was written based on Paul Virilio's book "The Critical Space".

Style and Content in Paul Virilio's Works

Quotes on Paul Virilio, the French Post- Modernist thinker, from the book: The Virilio Reader,  editor James Der Derian:

Preview: Reading Paul Virilio's writings is an oral reading. It is well understood only when read. This is because the word being heard has the ability, because of the time needed to be spoken, to pause on the visual image for the appropriate period of time to decipher it, while producing and creating the appropriate mental stimulus for deciphering, something which is impossible when the eye experiences constantly changing images in silent reading, or as in the everyday reality in general. In this respect, Virilio is like other Post Modern French thinkers, including Gaston Bacheler, who also create difficulties in understanding them without getting into their shoes. Thus, any reading of a summary or article of their writings is worthless. Read the source first to understand what it is all about, like reading a song.

Paul Virilio character impression was of  of a proud yet somewhat shy man, with none of  the character that marks many of the nouveaux philosophes. He was popular and received many invitations to speak, and accepted only few.  Born in 1932, as a child his first encounter with the speed of the war machine came at the outset of the Second World War, listening to the radio in his hometown of Nantes, hearing that the Germans had reached it, and then, almost simultaneously, hearing the sound of tanks outside his window. It was his first brush with Blitzkrieg. Aerial bombardments also left a deep impression, as they destroyed the city completely. He was drafted to fight in France's war with Algeria, before taking up a career practicing and teaching urban architecture. In between he learned the art of stained-glass making.  His official bios usually begin with his tenure as professor (1969), general director (1975), and president (1990) of the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture.

Beside his contributions to the philosophy of technology and society he wrote numerous shorter pieces on film, art, architecture, and current diplomatic-military affairs.

Virilio represents the power of will, intellect, and belief over the technological predestinations of late modernity. Virilio believes that accidents play a double game, as both disaster and diagnostic of the human condition. They can serve as a powerful agnostic wrench in the works of the new techno-deities. 

Virilio's gift for original and often un anticipated transition from seemingly commonplace discussions to profound, at times transcendent, critical syntheses, requires a particular attentiveness to the interplay of the topical and rhetorical. He is able, in part, to accomplish these transitions - which might best be described as accidental syntheses – by virtue of the specific sensibilities of the French language and culture not easily reproduced in other lenguages. 

What is for some panache, others will consider indulgent. At times these unwieldy sentences appear to be nothing more than an expedient means for imparting raw information. In other instances the task of reading him involved recognizing moments in which a shift in registers occurs from what at first appears only to be informational, to what finally amounts, in a quasi haphazard fashion - by virtue of a sheer glut, a vertiginous welter of references - to one of those unique accidental syntheses. 

The task may then best be described as sensing, approximating, or even guessing in a manner which strives for a certain rapport.

Internet browsing, hypertext and other computer-related stuff, goes well with Paul Virilio's theories about the impact of speed on the western world as we know it. Climbing up across Searching in the Internet tree, one will find the complete collapse of distance accompanied by a radical attenuation of identity. Lost sight, as well as the original site of the "Person'' are characteristic to browsing. He - or she are thinned out, disappearing into the infosphere, seven degrees removed from everything. Something that one moment had been so close, seemingly so significant, had become nothing at all.

Virilio is not the first to discern this dark side to an Enlightenment which had, for the most part, contracted a new happy, progressive marriage of self, reason, and technology. Earlier warnings about the possible perils of technologies of reproduction have been powerfully and persuasively voiced. 

First on just about every list would be Walter Benjamin. Writing in Germany in the 1930s, he observed how mechanically reproduced art, especially film, would become useful for Fascism, for the rendering of politics into aesthetics, with the advantage of mobilizing the masses for war without endangering traditional property relations. In the essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he anticipates Virilio's linking of technologies of acceleration and war in citing an early analyst and advocate of speed, the Futurist, Filippo Marinetti.

Second is Guy Debord, leader of the Situationniste movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, author of the short but highly influential, Society of the Spectacle. Surveying the spread of spectacle, the fetishization of the image, and the rise of a consumer society, he anticipated the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in May of 1968 in France. 

Third, there is Michel Foucault's extra-disciplinary genealogies of politiwas techniques of control arising from pan-opticism. Displaying no anxiety of influence, Virilio takes Foucault's pan-opticon model to an extraterrestrial level of discipline and control, offering a microanalysis of how new technologies of oversight and organizations of control, innovated by strategic alliances of the military, industrial, and scienti communities, have made the crossover into civilian and political sectors create a global administration of fear. 

All of these critical thinkers and others have provided key insights into the political and social implications of the advent of new technologies of reproduction. Yet they seem out of date, stuck in place, when compared to the restless yet, in all its timefullness, strangely rustless conceit of Virilio, that the proliferation of highspeed, realtime, cinematic, global, computer networked - in a word – virtual systems of how we see, has forever changed how we know. 

In an essay which originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Virilio maps the social consequences: What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information super highways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this nonsituation, is going to usher in a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

In short, virtuality destroys reality. On its own, perhaps not a great loss; but Virilio has his eye where others do not, on the collateral damage done to the ethos of reality, the highly vulnerable public space where individuals responsively interact. For Virilio, the interconnectivity of virtual systems is not ushering in a new day for democracy but a new order of telepresence; high-paced interconnectivity is becoming, technically and literally, a substitute for the slower-paced intersubjectivity of traditional political systems. He sees the self as a kind of virtually targeted ground-zero; once voided, concentric circles of political fallout spread, leaving in the vitrified rubble.

reading Virilio will, inevitably, leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but also the style of Virilio. In a typical Virilio sentence, which often elongates a full paragraph, the concepts can spew out. Many get recycled in later books. Some, benefiting from a new empirical settings, stand out like polished gems. But almost all of them them provide radically different takes on the social implications of technological forces, liberating their analysis from the customary.

a very important and central claim of his books is ''Critical Space'': The exo-colonialism of the industrial, imperial period has become introverted – internally, by the de-industrialization and pauperization of the urban center, and externally by the rise of an intensive transnational capital and transpolitical megalopoles. Mega cities are in   a post-industrial endo-colonization. 

Virilio was arguing from the perspective of a post-Einsteinian relativity, that not only seemed to play fast and loose with analoging, but also seemed to violate some of the basic laws of physics. The inadequacy of language to describe results and the field of quantum mechanics in general, confirmed with Virilio's point of view. The reader might have to suffer some conceptual gymnastics to get it. Yet, for every one of Virilio's oblique concepts or extravagant theoretical claims, there are others which slice right through the sludge that is served up as political analysis.

By this quality alone, there is no question that he belongs in the company of Benjamin and Adorno, Debord and Baudrillard, Foucault and Deleuze, Barthes and Derrida, for taking our understanding of the discursive relationship of technology, society, and politics to a higher plane of political as well as critical consciousness. After the millennium turn he stands out from the critical crowd, as a conceptual innovator and intellectual provocateur, the one who goes to the edge and sees beyond the traditional maps of modernity. 

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Superheroes, Star Wars movies and aviation culture in the 20th century

The fighters have been a focal point of admiration for every generation, in their lives and deaths. Their qualities were focused on a single character who was exemplary to the public and the savior, and received a mythical character. A particularly revered hero is a super-omnipotent superhero with superhuman powers. The superheroes have undergone a transformation process throughout history, created because they belonged to the popular culture of their time, which had a characteristic emphasis, and used the technological means at its disposal. The characters of ancient superheroes, from the Bible and Greek mythology, became knights on horses in medieval societies. The early heroes of the early twentieth century were aviation pioneers and fighter pilots. Superheroes in the colorful comic booklets were very popular in the United States during the interwar period. After World War II, with the development of space flights, and at the same time as television viewing, the superheroes were identified with the first spacecraft pilots, such as Gagarin and Armstrong. In the early 2000s, the superheroes underwent another transformation, with the development of computing technologies, and now appear mainly in Marvel films. As reality became more complex, the need for archetypes became more important. Cinema, as a multidisciplinary and multidimensional medium, is a place where most of the myth appears, as both cinema and myth appeal to as broad a common denominator as possible.

The periodic transition between different types of characters is not sharp, and there is an overlap between them, as well as sub-genres that are characteristic of the interim periods and situations where no clear superhero characterization has taken place, or when a different characterization is needed. For example, in the 1930s, dictatorial political leaders, such as Hitler and Stalin, enjoyed a superhero image. Following the political crises in the 1960s in the United States, during and after the Vietnam War, superheroes such as Rambo, who were more human and represented personal and social protest, appeared on the movie screen. At the other end of the arc of superheroes are the simple real men who survived unbelievable hardships, led by Holocaust survivors. The survival motif is central to popular culture, but only dozens of films have been made about real survival journeys, as opposed to the countless works of fiction. Much research has been done on Holocaust survivors, but their image has not yet been created as superheroes. Their personal stories blended into the overall myth of Holocaust and Revival of Israel.

The "Star Wars" film series is based on the pattern of superheroes in the stories of mythology, as developed by Professor Campbell, the renowned expert on myth theory. "Star Wars" may be his most well-known legacy left behind. Within this film series, nine sequels have emerged, which are the canon of the series as a feature epic. The first movie in the series came out in 1977, and the last one in the end of 2019. It's about 40 years, then. The series gained unprecedented popularity. It was defined as redefining cinema, as it created an imaginary universe full of details. It has acquired millions of fans on the level of religious believers, and is recognized in almost every home across the globe. Some claim it have changed the world. It is an escapist replacement for the complexity of the race to space, which is one of the characteristics of modern life and central in every country.

The nine-movie canon consists of three trilogies, which represent the parts of the human soul and its evolution, according to Id, Ego, Super Ego. The Disney-owned franchise company also develops it through spin-off films, unique complexes at Disneyworld sites, and as a merchandise that includes computer games, books, comic books, clothing and toys. In this way, the brand reaches every soul in the way that is most appropriate, according to the latest branding and marketing approaches.

Professor Joseph Campbell has been a major source of inspiration for the series creator, George Lucas, and they also formed a personal friendship. Campbell's main book is "The Hero with Thousand Faces ." This book presents the defining characteristics of the superhero figure, who are kept behind many embodiments in different cultures and eras. The Star Wars movie series is entirely based on this theory. The films include a gallery of typical archetypal mythological characters, such as the superhero character, the mentor, the distressed maid, the trickster, the evil hero, the omnipotent magician, and the like. At the same time, the superhero in the series is going on a journey, known in terminology as "The Hero's Journey". This journey includes many stages of development, which are well characterized by the stories of superheroes of all cultures.

Because in much of the twentieth century, the superhero character was identified with pioneer pilots of airplanes and spaceships, two of the star heroes of "Star Wars," Han Solo; the trickster who is Luke Skywalker's faithful friend, and his son Ben, who became an evil hero by the name of Kylo Ran and the successor of Darth and Wader, are of central importance. The importance of the transformations undergone by Han and Ben Solo is also linked to the importance of the dream of flying to the development of the soul. Aviation ability has been identified, from the dawn of humanity, as a characteristic of gods. Han's "Millenium Falcon" spacecraft is the fastest in the galaxy, and it is the object most identified with the series, with the exception of Luke Skywalker's Light Sword. Harrison Ford, who plays Han Solo in the series, is a superstar of Hollywood, and portrayed another superhero character created by George Lucas, Indiana Jones.

Filmmaker Hans Bertram created several aviation films in Nazi Germany. During World War I, some of the most successful fighter pilots were soon promoted to become communicated icons of valor, warriors who donned the national spirit of the war. This was particularly evident in Germany, in the form of the Flying Circus pilots and their commander Richthofen. They became national icons, with a prominent presence in film and print, and in all circles of society. Between the two world wars, aviation films were constantly reinforced, helping to shape contemporary thinking about aviation development. Aviation achievements envisioned a new, stronger and more disciplined German Reich capable of dealing with multiple industrial claims and joining the twentieth-century imperial competition. The memory of World War I was built through the myth of the war experience, which legitimized it by changing the real-life picture. The main image engraved in the collective memory of this war, to this day, is that of the gallant fighter pilot. The distinct symbol of totalitarian and mythical modernism in Nazi Germany was the airplane. Not the airplane per se, but its connections, not the pilot per se but the concepts it entails, were the focus of attention. They served as a means of liberating revolutionary burdens of the past.

In Nazi Germany, the superheroes of American comic booklets were not popular, nor were other superheroes of this style. The Nazis saw themselves as a supreme race, according to the "Superman" model designed by Nietzsche, their official philosopher. The popular superheroes were characters from German folklore and history, such as in Richard Wagner's operas, and from the aviation world, whose heroes were considered to embody the "Suprmman". Bertram was among them. He was part of the famous Pilots Gallery, with Charles Lindberg at the top, who became superheroes in the world media. In 1927, Lindberg crossed the Atlantic alone by airplane. On his return he was honored as king, and millions came to a parade in his honor in New York.

In May 1932 Hans Bertram set out with a friend from Germany to a flight around the world. They had a forced landing in a desert in Australia, and undergone a two-month survival journey, with extensive media coverage on the search for them. He returned to Germany in April 1933, after a year of great upheaval in Germany as well, during which the Nazis came to power. He wrote his story in a book, which became a bestseller with seven million copies in Nazi Germany. He then moved on to writing screenplays and directing films. The story of his survival journey in Australia overlaps with the mythical ''Hero Journey'' that NAzi Germany needed at that time. This is in light of its plot, its exposure in the media, and its connection to the motifs of ''survival'' "superman" adopted by the Nazi regime. Bertram is probably the only pilot in Nazi Germany to have completed a "Hero's Journey," and who has written a non war-propaganda book on the subject. His most famous film is "The Baptism of Fire," a full-length documentary from 1940 about the campaign in Poland, which was characterized by devastating German bombings from the air.

The images of aviation and pilots on television and cinema in the State of Israel involve the military dependence on the air force, which created here the myth of the "best air force in the world". This myth is also rooted in Israel's relations with the United States, which include American popular culture. Therefore, it is interesting to see how major television events, such as the first flight to the moon or the crash of the Columbia Space Shuttle, and ''Star War'' movies, have affected Israeli society. At the same time, it is interesting to review the films that deal with the Israeli Air Force and their impact.

Air transport has become central today. The issue is complicated, in part because, unlike maritime and land transportation, which are the cradle of civilization, aviation is a new dimension. Important, capital-intensive development projects in aviation may shape the fate of a nation. But they are largely startups, which have a very high percentage of failure. Two examples of this are the attempt to land the Israeli spacecraft "Genesis" on the moon, and the development of the "Lavi" aircraft.

The need for heroes in the aviation field is motivated, besides the race for space and the race to develop new aircraft, also by the need to develop the infrastructure of airports, which have become civilization centers due to the airports cities around them. The airports of cities have replaced the maritime port cities, which until recently were the centers of the human race.The "Terminal" theme is well-developed in the Star Wars series. Its many forms, together with the gallery of figures appearing in it, present an alternative order to the constant chaos experienced by passengers today. This chaos, resulting from the routine of the experience, runs counter to the flight aura that existed until World War II.

Another important connection between superhero films and modern-day reality is that these films, in many cases, show sections of a world on the verge of destruction, usually as a result of the invention of new weapons by the forces of evil. The Holocaust worldview in these films overlaps with the  Jewish Holocaust survivors worldview, whose world was also destroyed. The good ending in these films, when usually the good people beat the bad guys, is a therapeutic move. The general destruction worldview is also close to everyday reality, as politicians regularly warn of a disaster that could result from enemy attacks, usually from the air. That is why every citizen takes to himself the images of the imminent destruction, as seen in the superhero films, for the promotion of his personal affairs. Those who have experienced the devastation to the truth, such as the Holocaust survivors, are usually left behind in the race to fulfill their dreams.

The main negative aspect of the development of air power is the many wars that have been decided by it, such as the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur War. In addition, airborne terrorism has become an integral part of daily life. Its climax was in the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001. We are witnessing it today in cyber threats, the incessant rocket launches toward Israel, and the passengers and baggage checks before flights. Serious aerial accidents are an integral part of reality, from the era of early aviation to the present.

One of the results of the importance of aviation to human existence in all strata is that the discourse on aviation has become an unconscious part of everyday discourse and is difficult to isolate. Therefore, it is important to see if the awareness to the issue in Israel does not diminish the understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and aviation. This connection was expressed by the fact that senior Nazi pilots, who were crowned superheroes, played a major part in the final solution planning. A multifaceted aviation culture is evolving nowadays, in the face of the reality imposed on us like a mountain. The Star Wars series does not provide a complete set of tools for understanding the world of flying and aviation, but the complexity it presents is certainly a progression, as opposed to the stalwart approach to the topic so far in popular culture.

Map of the human figure of the Holy Land

Anthropomorphism is one of the most characteristic traits of humankind. It is the provision of human qualities and appearances to inanimate objects and animals. It is very common in world cultures as a means of expression. The great popularity of it rests on the fact that the human body is a central focus of attention in human society. This principle is used on a daily basis in the framework of all known religious beliefs. Anthropomorphism in the modern world is also required, in order to improve the connection between the machine and the person. The human body is a miniature world in which the outside world is reflected and vice versa. Anthropomorphism is greatly aided by the brain's ability to perceive vague stimuli as familiar and meaningful, especially in its vigorous activity in recognizing human faces.

Maps are powerful means of transmitting messages using cultural symbols. Many ancient maps represented a visual essence of knowledge combined with the worldview of their creators. Although modern scientific mapping uses sophisticated means of measurement, accurate maps also represent an interpretive and tendentious perspective. At the same time, there is a historic collaboration between medical professionals and artists in order to illustrate the anatomy by the most graphic and artistic methods, even at the expense of pure scientific description.

Anthropomorphic maps, in which the surface is described as a human figure, exist since the dawn of history. These maps offer a reflection of the personal and collective identity of the human body. These maps were created in a lengthy procreation process. The landscape is not exactly the character of man. A complex transformation process is required to make geography a human portrait. But this is possible because there is constant dialogue between man and landscape, as a process of refined dynamic and image in action.

Early Anthropomorphic maps are the Zodiac maps identified with the entire universe and the maps of the inhabited world of antiquity and the Middle Ages. What gradually evolved in modern times are Anthropomorphic maps of countries and continents, which are based on an imaginary identification of the surface with the human face and body. Atlases of these maps were very successful until the twentieth century. Nowadays, political cartoons are sometimes shaped as humanized maps and they are important geopolitical tools.

The concept of 'the image of God' is of great importance in Judaism, but the image of man is not connected to the Land of Israel. This is despite the fact that in the Bible it is written that God, the people of Israel, and the Land of Israel are one entity. This definition determined the fate of the Jewish people, because in contrast to the clear concreteity of the people and the laws, the boundaries of the land remained vague and undefined.

The map of the Holy Land as a human figure, created by Avinoam Amizen, is a revolutionary description of the geography of greater Israel. The map is the result of research in time and space, body and mind. The human form includes the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as a human face, the Negev Heights as a neck, and the Sinai Peninsula as a torso. Completing the picture are Edom mountains as the hair and Lebanon mountains as the rays of an angel.

In the process of creating the map, the landscape was examined by many photographs and maps in relation to human, anatomical and artistic, figures. The level of correlation between the regions of the earth and the human body is incomparably greater than that found in any other anthropomorphic map. This is the level of correlation that calls for a scientific examination of the relationship' as a physical reality with a unique relief, engraved in the soul and elevating it.

Planet Venus

From: Peoples Guide to the Cosmos

Orbiting at an average distance of 67 million miles (108 million kms), Venus is the second planet from the Sun, and other than the Moon, our closest neighbour in space. At its nearest, Venus is only 26 million miles from us, a mere stone's throw in astronomical terms. With a diameter of 7,600 miles (12,040 kms), Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth, and has often been referred to as Earth's sister planet. Venus is also the only planet in the solar system besides Earth and Saturn's moon, Titan, to possess a significant atmosphere, so it has always seemed a natural assumption that Venus must be very similar to Earth and could quite conceivably be home to some form of life. But the cloud cover on Venus is so thick, it's impossible to see the surface of the planet, and for most of human history we could only gaze up at those beautiful, bright white clouds, and wonder if there was indeed a vast tropical paradise beneath them, teeming with life.

It wasn't until 1962 that we developed the technology to send a spacecraft to Venus to find out for sure what might be lurking beneath those impenetrable clouds, and when NASA's Mariner 2 spacecraft finally visited Venus, it discovered something shocking. Despite its closeness and apparent similarity to Earth, Venus was about as different as it could possibly be.

It seems the same greenhouse effect that makes life possible on Earth, has made life seemingly impossible on Venus. The greenhouse effect is the result of certain greenhouse gases in a planet's atmosphere absorbing infrared radiation, and keeping the planet warm, like a blanket. Earth's atmosphere has just the right amount of greenhouse gases, mostly in the form of carbon dioxide and water vapor, to keep the planet just the right temperature for life to thrive. It is, however, a delicate balance, and Venus is an example of this balance being upset. Sometime in the planet's past, widespread volcanic activity saturated the atmosphere of Venus with greenhouse gases, and the planet began to heat up. The increased temperature created even more greenhouse gases, creating a positive feedback loop that resulted in Venus having a surface temperature of 482 ° C (900 ° F) - hot enough to melt lead.

And the story gets worse. The atmosphere on Venus has become so thick and heavy, the pressure on the surface of the planet is 92 times that of Earth - as crushing as the pressure one kilometer beneath the sea. And Venus has no magnetic field (as Earth does) to ward off the lethal radiation from the Sun, making the planet even more deadly. As a final indignity, the clouds are composed of sulphur dioxide, so that when it rains on Venus, it rains sulfuric acid.

Many scientists point to Venus as an ominous example - a warning if you will - of what could happen to our very own Earth if the current trend towards increased greenhouse gases and global warming is not properly addressed. In 1991 NASA sent its Magellan spacecraft to Venus, equipped with a radar imaging system that was able to map the surface features of Venus beneath the clouds, giving us a detailed look (shown below) of a brutally hostile world.

In a Universe so full of ironies, both physical and philosophical, there is surely no greater irony than those lily white clouds of Venus conjuring up images of love and beauty for almost all of Human history, in reality hiding a lethal hothouse of molten metals, crushing pressures and poisonous gases that make Dante's Inferno look like Disneyland.

From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics

Geopolitics as “intermediate” science

By Alexander Dugin

Geopolitical concepts became the major factors of modern politics since a long time ago. They are built on general principles allowing to easily analyze the situation of any particular country and region.

Geopolitics in its present form is undoubtedly a worldly, “profane”, secularized science. But maybe, among all modern sciences, it saved in itself the greatest connection with Tradition and traditional sciences. 

Modern chemistry is the outcome of the desacralization of a traditional science — alchemy, as modern physics is of magic. Exactly in the same way one might say that modern geopolitics is the product of the freedom from ecclesiastical control and desacralizing of another traditional science — sacred geography. 

But since geopolitics holds a special place among modern sciences, and it is often ranked as a “pseudo-science”, its profanizing is not so accomplished and irreversible, as in the case of chemistry or physics. The connection with sacred geography here is rather distinctly visible. Therefore it is possible to say that geopolitics stands in an intermediate place between traditional science, Sacred Geography and profane science.

Terrorism of poor regional planning in Israel

The 'Human figure map of the Holy Land' was created, in part, from a desire to give the  environmentally wounded Land of Israel an idyllic look.

The desolate land with a natural look which was attended by early Zionists is nowdays largely covered with a layer of concrete and asphalt, in part because of the desire for territorial achivements.

The Arabs who live in Israel and the Palestinian Authority copied the pattern and also conquered the country in the same format, of towns invading endlessly to natural areas.

The result is a clash between two teritorial masses, which already reached a critical level.

Peace to Israel will not come by politicians, nor by capital investments in combined projects of any kind.

Peace will come by geographers and city and regional planners, who will sit and draw maps of areas and settlements under the most desirable and appropriate pattern, to enable the different communities in this land to grow in harmony. 

It will be done not in accordance with 'facts on the grounds' by which, for example, most Arab towns  in Israel were declaired as cities without a proper planning, or asphalt barons constructed more and more highways with intensive consuming of land and the like.

Planning should be done according to what is right and correct from the planning point of view, under the fact that the whole land from the Jordan river to the Mediteranean sea is just one small geographical unit, a small piece of land which should be designed and built under this definition.

This insight of more then just close proximity, the insight of one planning area, was ignored by the international and local politicians.

What will be the benefit of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians if they will develop in their land concrete communities, which will spread within a few years and will cover all the hills, valleys and plains in an uncontrolled way.

Formulating a peace agreement without a united landscape image, designed and detailed in all aspects, will paradoxically hasten our  common downfall.

There are two theories of general regional collapse due to a severe environmental crisis:

The first describes the gradual and slow collapse.

The second describes an immediate collapse, after many years of apparent stability.

The best known result of terrorist extremism is terrorist acts against human beings. The results which are less published, but are very noticeable for those who know the land, are of construction terrorism, which violate the ecological balance and lndscape views under the arguments of religious, political and sectorial values.

The valleys around the Temple Mount, which were once green areas, had become over the last few decades crowded urban housing and unplanned neighborhoods.

On the other hand, the Israeli government covered the green hills around Jerusalem with suburban neighborhoods.

A building which is built in an inappropriarte  place will remain for centuries. Even if it would be demolished, there will be a very long time until nature will cover the ruins. 

This is in contrast to air pollution, which can be fixed within a relativly short time.

These serious facts on the ground are a form of terrorism that makes the conflict insoluble.

Alleged minor defaults of local authorities, which are not careful enough about construction laws, including careful planning and tight control, are the real source of the conflict today.

The Christian powers watch after the handling of the State of Israel in the field of regional planning. 

For them the State of Israel is part of the Holy Land, the idyllic land of the Bible and the New Testament, which is the object of all time longing.

Perhaps they prefer an ecological disaster, the result of construction violations which will make the country a no man's land, where might makes right.

Such a disaster is in accordance with the Messianic Christian concept of heavenly Jerusalem and the land of Israel as a place of longing only.

Environmental issues are very important to Germany in particular. Germany's re-unification was performed largely thanks to the strong German Green Party.

If we will learn to understand the critical importance of regional planning and establish appropriate authorities to enforce it properly, we can leverage it to a level where a peace agreement with the Palestinians would not be necessary.

Peace will be realized for granted in a country which is working on maintaining and developing the natural landscape, just as a person is recognized and respected by those around him if he behave properly.

Man is shaped in the pattern of the landscape of his birthplace.

The chaos of unplanned environment is spreading also to the planned urban environment.

Here are some examples of planning chaos in the cities in which we live:

Haifa metropolitan area is where the situation of the environment is getting worse all the time, in terms of regional planning in particular. For example, small adjacent cities with similar communities in Haifa bay create a dense cluster and long had to be united into one big city. This was not done and the result is a multi-year environmental cheos. The lack of strong leadership contributed to continous dangerous air pollution from the petro-chemical factories nearby.

The situation of public transportion in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area is very poor, according to a series of articles.

The damage that poor public transportion cause to the economy is enormous. Time lost for every citizen is accumulated into millions of hours each year. But it seems that none of the politicians is raising his glove, and we hear about a record year of cars sales, traffic congestion and endless new highways.

Israel need a 'Singapore Program'. Singapore has limited land resources and its civil leaders understood that they can not allow uncontrolled construction, that will prevent them from developing human resources properly. Therefore they have enforced strict rules in the field of environmental protection. Singapore is now a symbol and an international role model, but there is no political party in Israel which adopts this symbol.

There are many Insufficient government authorities in Israel, such as National Land Administration, currently undergoing a paradoxical  reform for privatizing state lands on one side and creating a unit for maintaining land resources on the other.

Preserving and maintaining the very limited land resources of Israel requires people of military stature, generals who will conduct the campaign against the territorial terrorism.  

They'll have to deal with the issues of enforcement of planning and building laws in a military disciplined manner. There should be headquarters, intelligence, forces, spokesmen and so on, as in any orgenized army.

Earth is an irreplaceable resource.