RULE THE WORLD OR GUIDE IT? | 2006-01-22
As I exercised real power people around me kept saying, "There are REAL powers that rule the world and guide it."
When you exercise real power, the one thing you DON'T do is GUIDE it. Marx never GUIDED Communism. Boas's concept of Jews leading a coalition of minorities against their common enemy, the white gentile, really got going after his death in 1944.
In fact the key to exercising real power, to changing the world, is to invent and boil down concepts that can then be used by others. The ideas you come up with are infectuous precisely becauase they are useful to others. Political reality does the GUIDING.
You can CHANGE the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean you will change it the way you WANT to. Boas certainly never envisioned a world in which the third worl would be Israel's worst enemy or Europe would be filled with anti-Semitic Moslems.
There is no doubt about it, when you hold a hand grenade you have power. That does not guarantee when it will go off.