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Posted by Ron Price on July 10, 19104 at 07:00:00:
GETTING WARMED-UP
Thirty million Chinese died of starvation in the years 1959 to 1962, more people than in WWII. -ABC Radio News, 27 October 1996, 7:30 am.
Here was the fanatical determination of saviours-in-a-hurry intent on fitting an imaginery man into an artificially contrived social harmony, a harmony that was the source and motive of all contraditions, paradoxes, casuistry, hypocrisy, ruse and tyranny. -J.L. Salmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution: The Origins of Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century, Secker and Warburg, University of California Press, Berkley, 1980.
While I was getting warmed-up to pioneer
in those interregnum1 years,
having just become a member
of this slowly growing movement, then,
in Canada, after seventy years
still less than a thousand believers;
while an institutionalization of charisma,
to use Weber’s term,2 was taking place
over which there was, at last, some control,
thanks to a Will and Testament;
and those saviours-in-a-hurry3
from capitalism and science
to communism and individualism
continued their courses of acidic divisiveness
through an unpretentious simplicity
in the lower elements
and an effete and sophisticated selfishness
in the upper ones;
while a vision of the eventual triumph
of universal justice continued to consolidate
within the germ of a new Revelation
which grew out of what looked like
the colossal disaster4
of an insignificant offshoot of the Shaykhi school
of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shi’ah Islam:
thirty million Chinese people died of starvation,
unbeknownst to me, a student in high school
learning to cope with the first expressions
of his libido and his depression.
Ron Price
27 October 1996
1term used for the period 1957 to 1963 after the Guardian died and before the Universal House of Justice was elected.
2 Max Weber used this term, about 1912, in his discussion of a form of leadership in religion based on charisma.
3 see J.L. Salmon quoted above, at the beginning of the poem.
4 Shoghi Effendi used this term for what Babism appeared to look like in 1852.