Customer Reviews

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan

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This is a very important book which examines closely the beginning of "western civilization" and details ways in which it is a destrucive force. It begins on the plains of Mesopotamia and continues through modern days. Using marxist analysis it offers a perspective on why modern life in "so-called" first world societies feels so hollow (leading to school shootings?) and how this "leviathan" of western civilization literally eats cultures alive (leading to the US mono-culture, and the appropriation of everything authenitic into something for sale). It can be a depressing read, as the only solution put forth is to start nomadic communes, but it is an important book to read in order to further analyze current events and the current oligopy and perhaps use it to identify other methods for beheading the beast.

This book, Perlman's masterwork, is as likely to drive you insane as the fictional play that induces madness, "The King in Yellow," was said to have been.

How so? Perlman didn't just set out to teach history, or even to teach an alternate interpretation of history. Perlman set out, using a great deal of poetry and his own carefully constructed alternate vocabulary, to change the way that you think about history. In capsule summary, he attempted to show that when the first proto-Babylonian king enslaved the first nearby tribe, creating the first Bronze Age society, he accidentally created a living hive mind, a colony creature, the first Leviathan. In his narrative, what the rest of us call "the rise and expansion of civilization" he attempts to persuade you to see as first one, then two warring, hive minds struggling against each other, expanding not so much because of their unholy appetites but because of their need to eradicate or encapsulate any non-hierarchical (escapee) people that are near enough to the "skin" of a Leviathan to risk infecting the minds of those who make up creature.

With apologies, I would like to contradict the other reviewers by saying that if you think that Perlman's analysis of history is Marxist, you're not paying attention. His personal utopian vision is anarcho-primitivist. But even if you don't come away from this book a converted anarcho-primitivist (I didn't), you will come away from it equipped with a vocabulary and a set of concepts that render much of the world visible and explicable that are invisible and inexplicable to those who haven't read it, and that's a schizophrenia-like experience that is impossible to eradicate and difficult as all heck to spread.

Exemplary essay, a pity the author didn't follow through at the end with the state of the state of Israel or the Zionist Leviathan but then again, I have not read his many other works. Nevertheless, while I recommend a read of Abram Leon's "Jewish Question", this particular book makes the necessary corrections to the very outset of civilization itself, something Marxism incl Abram Leon's heart felt work - necessarily covers up. This book covers nothing up. In a phrase - "Fighting fire with Fire" = "Burning down the house". So much to question and from a very humane view point wonderfully written but again, I have not read other works by the same author so I cannot make any charge that he has not put any other way out or way forward in his other works.
How confusing for the Israelites of the earliest times under the leadership of Moses - 'Thou Shalt not Kill' except for a massacre ordered on his own people and then against another 3 other tribes although probably slavers - makes one wonder whether religion is a paramount factor in the 'general' schizophrenia of many societies and this kind of reflection is needed at this time.
I couldn't agree more with his assessment of communism and his knowledge and expose of Engels (Marx) "Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State".
My only variation of opinion of the outset of his plausible beginnings of the accident we call 'civilization' is that it was not as he describes hypothetically - a slow accident with a slow contortion of human nature, rather, I recommend a review of cataclysmic and other earth-wide archaic traumas which would be more realistic in the 'throwing' of the lost original indigenous clan whose nature was perverted and mutated as a result of being thrown into a 'hostile' environment but the environment itself was not exactly hostile, but begins nature as other, but before this, this indigenous group was somewhere in the world at home in the nexus of their original place in nature, somewhere in the world.
As against Abram Leons theories of the Israelites beginnings, I would say throw that out, because for certain the hebrews were like every other man on the planet = indigenous and at home somewhere - unfortunately captured by the first buggers to get lost and loose their minds (matter over mind) hence wherein the bible is accurate - they were taken without price (as were all slaves pretty much in the history, the short history - of the man of civilization).
I would say its a crucial read.