Eso’s Chronicles 177
How War Began (1)
© Eso A.B.

The religious nonsense propagated by the Vatican and allied religious organizations was initially concocted in Paris by an agency that served a goal similar to the one that the NSA http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining  and CIA http://consciouslifenews.com/dark-thirty-review-glenn-greenwald-cia-hagiography-pernicious-propaganda/1146532/ serve in Washington and Brussels today.

Of course, the name of the proto-Vatican agency, originating most likely in an office in the Court of Charlemagne, is long lost (deliberately erased), transferred to peripheral areas to attract less attention, and become Potemkin village-like facades overgrown with several layers of moss. The topic of how to transform mere ‘surveillance’ (spying) to ‘heretical’ and counterproductive ‘activism’ is well illustrated in the stepping stones that led to the tinkering with spirituality (the fiasco of modern ‘art’), to 9/11, and to the recent ‘Boston Marathon Massacre’. What is yet missing, but what we may expect to appear shortly, is a CIA financed armed neo-Christian revival. The Christian mercenaries fighting in Syria have been but a prelude, a sort of trial run.

As we learned in the previous blog (176), the argument the Vatican uses in defending God, ‘religion’ and “life”, came by way of its mouthpiece, re: Cardinal Ravasi. Ravasi claims that "Religion celebrates life, but here [in the figurine of St. Death] you have death." Ravasi’s statement acts as an opening salvo in the Vatican’s call for a ‘New Evangelization’ campaign http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/new-evangelization-you-must-be-kidding , which will be financed, just as the Polish Pope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II , was financed by you know who.

The first and foremost rebuttal to Ravasi is that his ‘religion’ of life, has nothing to do with God, who is a creation of the community, the ‘One Big Roof’ or 'Big Other' the community needs to stay bonded in brother-sisterhood. The ‘life’ that Ravasi describes as the initiator of his religion, has nothing to do with Ravasi’s or any one of our ‘lives’, which are all singularities that came into the world with the birth of each one of us.” The phenomenon of ‘Life’ is well enough explained by the physicist Erwin Schroedinger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F.

It is interesting that the Vatican’s emphasis on ‘life’ and not the community. This coincides perfectly with the interests of the novus ordo seculorum headquartered in Washington.

Since this blogger has been advocating the displacement of the ‘Vatican story’ of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, with the story of JesusTheBogomil in Byzantium (Tsargrad or Constantinople), the future promises us an interesting literary tussle between the West and East.

The challenge of the East to the West may begin with the East pointing out that the ‘Vatican story’ or version of the New Testament is a False Flag, a story rewritten by the Vatican from a Christianity [Cross + Road] of much earlier days than the Vatican allows. I discuss the two different versions of the story in my Jesusthebogomil.blogspot.

As for the Vatican (re)evangelization campaign:

If we study old creation myths, most of them mention a Creator God or Goddess, Who sacrifices Him or Herself to realize or make real His-Her creation. The theology contained in old myths has little to do with ‘saving’ individuals, but everything to do with regenerating the community. [The NSA and CIA are of course interested in weakening such a community in favor of rule by Washington.]

Let us take an old Aztec myth. Incidentally, the Aztecs were well known for making human sacrifices, which inspired great fear and terror in the witnesses. I take my quotes from a book by David Carrasco, “City of Sacrifice”, Beacon Press, pgs. 73-87. The Aztecs had a special word: “…regeneration was called teomiqui, to die divinely or ‘dying like a god dies.” In other words, we may interpret from this that at the beginning of time the old Gods of the region later conquered by the Aztecs, sacrificed themselves. There is no mention that the old Gods of the Toltec nations of earlier generations made human sacrifices. Human sacrifice was a later invention of the Aztec conquerors.

The Aztec conquerors did not feel secure in their conquest of the old indigenous Toltec tribes round about today’s Mexico City, but ruled over them with great violence. The Aztecs are said to have originated from a wandering people from the north, who went West (they held the South to be on their left) and then turned south http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/46981/Aztec . As the invaders settled into a more sedentary way of life, they began to ritualize their violence.

Accustomed to getting their way by killing their opponents, but having come to a land where such violence was not common practice (see above: regeneration,  teomiqui, self-sacrifice), the Aztecs gave the old tradition their own violent interpretation: they substituted the self-sacrifice of former Gods-rulers with human sacrifice. To have humans to sacrifice (finding no volunteers among their own community), they waged war on their neighbors to capture prisoners, who were then brought back to Tenochtitlán , where they were sacrifice on top of Templo Mayor, the great temple at the heart of the Azted capital city.

The ritualization of violence by the Aztecs was a development that paralleled the rebuilding of the shrine to the Aztec God Huitzilopochtli by the Aztec king Moctezuma http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/275172/Huitzilopochtli . The reconstructed shrine was then rededicated as the Templo Mayor. However, not all of the conquered people were happy to collaborate with the Moctezuma in the rebuilding of the temple of a God, who claimed to have killed all of the four hundred previous Gods.

Writes Carrasco: “… the independent community of Chalco refused to participate, and was declared in rebellion of the Aztecs. A ferocious war was launched and eventually the Chalcans were defeated. Their captured warriors were brought to the Templo Mayor and, along with other prisoners of war, sacrificed at its rededication. This pattern of celebrating the expansion of the Great Temple with warfare and the sacrifice of enemy warriors was followed by subsequent Aztec kings who increased the sacrificial festival as a means of controlling resistance and peripheral territories.”

On one occasion as many as 2300 warriors were sacrificed at Temple Mayor. It is unlikely that this pretentious ‘sacrifice’, so similar to the pretentious (hubristic) killing of hundreds of thousands, even millions of people in our day by those who would globalize human culture on our common planet under their aegis is anything but a manifestation of spiritual failure and an attempt to institutionalize a hollow God.

The self-sacrifice of the original Gods and rulers of the Toltec people is best illustrated by the story of how Nanauatzin (the Pimply Populist) threw himself into a fiery pit to encourage and ensure the birth of the “Fifth Sun”.

Eso’s Chronicles 176
The Moneytheist Commons (VII)
© Eso A.B.

I am among those who believe that God is not a particle, but a wave. To apply the Heisenberg solution to the God problem, enables one to view God as both a wave and a particle, but to prove that He-She is one or both, one has to make the ‘quantum jump’ and jump over an awesome crevice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZJJ99jETLI . That is to say, one has to die to find out.

Because nature knows that this test is inevitable may be one of the reasons why it causes one to age. After all, only when one is old (enough) and has seen what life has to offer, physical exhaustion may make one even eager to see what comes next—even if it is no more than a look into the face of Emptiness https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg73QPQLTJIvHL6e0MymkUyP_o8-7ECrj0wDlzJI0ks5URdriVVi-XIryCjijdlrdct7ZHu1jHuy9fzdsojSQhyeYK0JT6YwcgdT8rNrAOGHriiw8P3yy3mlflzERKqmlsdXoDpUZjScac/s400/picture-15.png .

The neo-Christian Church is vociferously opposed to such a perspective. In the following link, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Ravasi http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22462181, tells that worshipping Santa Muerte (blog 175) is a "degeneration of religion".... Cardinal Ravasi said the practice was "anti-religious". "Religion celebrates life, but here you have death," he said. "It's not religion just because it's dressed up like religion; it's a blasphemy against religion", the Cardinal continued.

Whose ‘religion’ is Ravasi talking about? His own, no doubt. He hits the nail on the head if at the back of his head, he allies his ‘religion’ with  capitalism, which is whence its chief support, ever since Charlemagne decided to remove the spiritual centre from the East and move it to the West, comes from.  Catholicism (and its offshoots), which stand for the exclusivity of human rights for the wealthy (originally the French Princes), which have ever since tried to fool the poor and uneducated that it is their ‘right’ also. The last is a peculiar assertion, given that historically the Vatican has but choreographed empty ceremonies. How did this ‘religion’ become the ruling ideology? “By incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of the oppressed,” says one philosopher”.* There is no shortage of those who are fooled.

The claim by Cardinal Ravasi that religion celebrates life is simply untrue. At least it was never true before Catholicism tried through yet another Cardinal, one named Peter to impose such a ‘truth cum lie’ on behalf of the wealthy on the poor http://i.qkme.me/3p345z.jpg . To understand the nature of this ‘truth’, we have to take another look at the ritual known as the Last Supper, in which the elders of a given community share in a sacred pie within which is hid a piece of the ‘body of the Gods’, a piece of coal. It was Jesus’ fate to draw this piece, whereby he became a Sacred King.

It was this archaic ritual that ensured (the Last Supper occurred before Jesus arrived in Jerusalem) that their community was ruled in the most ‘democratic’ way possible. Because no one is free of mistakes, knows this, and is prepared to pay for any trespass with one’s life, the community is ever forgiving. This commitment was the reason why the secular lords wished to seize and kill the Chosen One. They could stop the tradition only if they discovered who had drawn the sacred piece of coal before the people learned of it. This is why they arranged with Peter, who acted as the purser of the traveling court of the Sacred King, that he would pay Judas, one of the twelve who acted as Basil’s servants, thirty pieces of silver to kiss Jesus, and indicate through the kiss who had drawn the St. Death card. Foreknowledge gave the authorities time to fabricate a crime with which to blame Jesus. For example, the two ‘thieves’, later said to have been crucified on either side of the heretic ‘King’, were important ‘witnesses’ to the crime. This is what makes it likely that it was the thieves who were taken down from the cross early and recovered, not Jesus), whom they tortured and made beg for his life to escape the pain.

Before the arrival of neo-Christianity, religion used to manifest itself through a Festival celebrated by the whole COMMUNITY. Catholic Christianity succeeded in toppling the Festivals by imposing on people the meme of hubris through the dogma of individual immortality. In this way, the ruling clique succeeded in fracturing communal solidarity by kaleidoscoping into one the ritual of self-sacrifice and the ritual of public execution, and topping it with a promise of immortality. The meme of immortality has been in the ‘works’ for over two thousand years by our time, and has replaced the yeast that raised the dough of the old commons with a community bonded by no more than waterproofed paper Money.

Needless to say, the Bible has little to say about the community. “Bear one another's burdens, and… fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2) is about as close as it gets.

Yet there are few oligarchs who have given away their possessions or taken on another’s burdens. The reason is simple:  the ‘others’ are the poor, and the burdens of poverty are hard to bear. This is illustrated by the sharp drop in prices (halving them) for the services of immigrant prostitutes in London http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22106546 , while their opposite, the neo-native American presidential penis galore swears innocence before an audience he does not have to make eye contact with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs , then uses his notoriety to make money http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/bill_clinton_paid_for_minute_speech_YVpCd5lHlDc290PUeU64zN , hand over dick, so to speak. It’s a strange, strange world, Mr. Jack Klinton! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0WvXpyufT8 Is it not?

A reader of my blogs has communicated to me that he believes that God has little to do with life, death, or community, but that the issue is rather one of monotheism vs polytheism. When I was introduced to this perspective, I was compelled to imagine God as a persona suffering from an incurable multi-personality disorder.

A God suffering from a multi-personality disorder makes sense if we remember that the Magna Charta (1209) http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/magna_01.shtml was written on behalf of princes and barons in revolt against the authority of the King, aka the Monarch. To the extent that the office of King had abandoned all pretexts to be a self-sacrificial office on behalf of the community, the revolt of the princes was legitimate. However, it is no secret, that England’s princes were not ‘reformers’ of abandoned ancient traditions of government, but forerunners to neo-capitalist anarchism achieved at the price of turning Olympus into a bank for polymorphous currencies.

Money is a flexible tool of exchange: it can be gold, silver, or paper, and it can be broken down into small change, which can be inflated or deflated according to whoever is in charge of the money printing office. In our day, the individual in charge of U.S. Moneytheism is Cardinal Bernank. Moneytheism rhymes easily with monotheism, and blends centralized power into the structure of a pyramid without difficulties.

A Moneytheistic God stands for centralized government over which those who find themselves on the periphery have little to say. In our day, the only people who are consulted from the periphery is a group known [curiously, but tellingly, as the Bilderbergs, i.e., Picturemounts of Iconic wealthy individuals].

A similar problem with regard to actualizing democracy was faced by our forebears. They solved the problem by remodeling the peak of the gold leafed pyramid into an office that symbolized self-sacrifice. Thus, the sacred oath of the Sacred King was that he would give his life. His face thereafter was portrayed as shining in gold leaf.

Unfortunately, a copy of the disciple Peter, the purse carrier of the Sacred King’s sacred Court, is today embodied by someone known as Cardinal Bernank. Cardinal Bernank has passed the kiss on to President Obama, who (in imitation of Stalin’s reaction to the kiss received from Lenin) washes his hands and passes his sacred responsibilities on to a technocratic State bureaucracy.

This buck passing gives the President the ‘legal’ right—if I insist that money today is of paper, while he insists it is of gold—to fly up to my window with a drone helicopter and fire a rocket.

Uncritical surrender to Moneytheism encourages individualism to climb and reach previously unimaginable levels of incoherence—which is where urban society of today locates us. Though the opposition to the present structure of society may be great, there is no mention of this opposition in the Moneytheistic media which has been bought up by the oligarchy.

*Slavoy Zizek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p. 153.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 175 
Saint Death (VI)
© Eso A.B.

The bonding mechanism of the community is not violence as we are taught to believe (by ‘hard nosed’ realism), but self-sacrifice and awe induced by other methods than violence. However, the desire to give, which is part of the desire to sacrifice for the good of another, is ‘theologically’, sabotaged from the word go by numerous political organizations of which the ‘religion’ of the West is one.

Our civilization suffers from at least a thousand years of propaganda supportive of military and violent intrusions into the gift giving process, by which every human attempts to transfer onto another something of his or her substance or being. Once upon a time, this mysterious substance was called ‘soul’, until the soul was unsubstantiated by capitalist realism, which made a ‘gift’ matter only if it was Money borrowed from a bank for one’s personal needs.

Though primal violence is based in hunger and survival—as when a lion chases, catches, and seizes a zebra by its throat; post-primal violence is based on a doctrine of premeditated attack on an unsuspecting ‘other’. While the tactics of projecting post-primal violence are many, exemplary examples of it in our time are the secretive campaign of the neo-Christian Church (Catholic, Lutheran, etc.) against native religious practices, Hitler’s campaign against peaceful and unsuspecting Jews, and the attacks by American drones guided by technicians of limited education and intelligence and attacking ‘out of the blue’ any native people (or ‘home country’ people) going about their business in their countryside locations. The American government has. moreover, learned to make its attacks not on the basis of ‘intelligent information’, but makes its decisions to kill on written instructions and ‘need to show’ results by showing a ‘body count’.

The root of the problem of post-primal (re modern) violence is the assertion of ‘capitalist religion’ that violence, occurs ‘first’ when the desire to give arises within the individual’s secret self. This is why one of the basic tenets of religion “…when you give to the needy [through the agency of public technology], do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing (Mat. 6:3),” is subverted by recording the source of the gift (you) on some advertiser’s list and hence the ‘left hand’ violating your privacy through so-called ‘spam’ for the rest of your life. Minor as such a transgression may seem to some, it nevertheless is a violation of you every time ‘you’ receive an unwanted communication and you react violently and dump the unsolicited material in the waste basket. We ought to remember that the word ‘spam’ stands for fatty compressed and conserved sandwich meat.

In any event, your desire to keep your ‘home community’ durable and healthy http://www.infowars.com/canadian-student-punished-for-preventing-knife-attack/ by not buying into ‘spam’, is interpreted by official (actual) capitalist religion as a traitorous, therefore violent, act against society.

The World Health Organization (WHO) calls suicide one of the major public health problems, a leading cause of death (between the ages of 15-44), even as it moralizes and calls all suicides (even obvious self-sacrifices) “self-directed violence” http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/suicide/en/. In other words, when you junk the ads from Wal-Mart, you are committing an act of subversion against the society you are born to.

At this time, one of the most visible “self-directed violence” events presented to the psyche of the American public is the U.S. government provoked hunger strike at Quantanamo Bay, Cuba http://english.pravda.ru/hotspots/conflicts/29-05-2013/124681-guantanamo_concentration_camp-0/ . The hunger strike is waged against the U.S. government by the majority of what many consider illegally detained prisoners. The UN human rights office has condemned force-feeding those on the hunger strike and calls it ‘torture’ and a breach of international law.

The allegedly authoritative opinions distributed by WHO constitute a major intrusion into the private life of the individual by a ‘health’ and pseudo-religious organization serving a seemingly benign government and elite (capitalist) interests, which are unproven and untested by time, but are sufficiently powerful to intrude, overwhelm and block independent thought processes which may include contrary opinions. Though one may welcome the aid of WHO on occasions of dire bodily distress, its intrusion into the mental process of society constitutes an unwarranted intrusion of political ideology.

There are numerous up-front ‘to the contrary’ objections to WHO’s message:

 
1)    The public health problem is not the individual’s decision to take (gift) his-her own life, but is to be sought in the (often intolerable) nature of modern society itself;
2)    The act of taking one’s life does not involve violence if the act can be accomplished without pain and without having to bear the burden of such judgments as issued by WHO;
3)    Every suicide is an act that has cause and, therefore, …
4)    Every suicide may be considered a self-sacrifice for a cause;
5)    The public is diverted by government propaganda (supported by WHO) from giving due attention to the fact that the major cause of violence is government action in war;
6)    An act that causes one to take one’s life is not an act against life, but an act that confirms the community’s objection to the kind of society that violence prone governments have created;
7)    An act of self-sacrifice is not an act against one’s life, but an act on behalf of the spiritual health of one’s society;
8)    That opinions of WHO are grounded in secular and quasi-religious opinions promoted by capitalist ideology;
9)    Capitalism is grounded in neo-Christianity, which was created by means of a False Flag operation against the people of the wood when they resisted capitalist instigated destruction of their home.

To return to Slavoy Zizek’s opinions (for similar opinions see blog 174) about the durability of capitalism and futility in opposing it: “Today, we can easily imagine the extinction of the human race, but it is impossible to imagine a radical change of the social system—even if life on earth disappears, capitalism will somehow remain intact.”*

Much as I respect Zizek’s contribution in loosening the sclerosis of thought that has developed with regard to 20^th century political events, the frozen history continues moving forward on the basis of momentum, just as television ads continues to advertise luxury goods though many lose their homes and are forced to move and live on the streets.

*Slavoy Žižek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p 149.

Informative links:

Saint Death  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22462181
Invasive acts by capitalist religion: http://www.infowars.com/scotland-every-child-to-have-state-guardian-from-birth/

Eso’s Chronicles 174

Mother of Solutions (V)
© Eso A.B.

While philosophers such as Slavoy Žižek proclaim that there is no alternative to global capitalism: “The true message of the notion of the Third Way is that there is no ‘second way’, no alternative to global capitalism so that, in a kind of mocking pseudo-Hegelian ‘negation of negation’, the Third Way brings us back in the first and only way. Is this not global capitalism with a human face?”*

What escapes Žižek is that unnoticed by the ranks of “…professional and credentialed opinion leaders, particularly journalists and academics”,  http://www.globalresearch.ca/media-disinformation-and-the-conspiracy-panic-phenomenon/5336221 (see 3rd paragraph) the recently arrived ‘new age’ of Internet Populism is challenging the status quoers at their tame song and bringing solutions to problems unimaginable to ‘credentialed opinion leaders’ (Žižek among them).

I have mentioned this war, denied and as if behind the curtains, in previous blogs (167), when I touched on the subject of the Tibetan immolators, a type of warrior not seen in the West since the days of Jan Hus, the Christian heretic unsympathetic to Christian conventionalists (proto-capitalists Catholics). In 1415, nearly 600 years ago**, Hus chose to be burnt at the stake (in Constance), rather than surrender to the dictates of the Habsburg Emperor Sigismund. That the immolator or self-sacrifice is a warrior to be taken seriously is evidenced by the fact that the government of China has threatened to stick anyone who aids or gives succor to self-sacrifice with a charge of aiding and abetting a criminal act.

As if to underscore the issue of the reappearance of self-sacrificial warriors (whether of Tibetan or other origin), a Sri Lankan Budhist monk recently set himself on fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMtBikwFvyY to protest animal slaughter http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22681763 (a crime perpetrated in the service of the inhabitants of the desert city) and the intrusion into Sri Lankan culture of minority religious faiths (such as neo-Christianity and neo-Islam), both born of and sympathetic to capitalism.

The Sri Lankan government condemns the Sri Lankan media for video taping the event and not forewarning the government about what was about to take place; and may bring charges against the video journalist. One of the reasons for the action of the Sri Lankan government is the claim (of what the BBC reporter Charles Haviland calls ‘ultra-nationalists’) that the “Sinhalese ultra-nationalist ministers in the government have praised the incident as an act of self-sacrifice for the good of the country.”

While I am opposed to immolation by fire due to the extreme pain, suffering, and body mutilation it causes, I am not opposed to waging war against government military type of violence by self-sacrifice.

Military type (gang) violence has long plagued all nations and cultures on our planet. Foremost among the initiators of this violence are governments, which enslave-recruit young men to do their bidding.

The first among overt practitioners of violence are of course they who serve in government led armed forces. These are followed by government opponents who borrow their resistance tactics from government example. Muslim terrorists who arm themselves with strap-on explosive devices, and while sacrificing their own lives in the act, know of no or have no moral qualms about slaughtering innocent people who happen to be nearby as a result of chance. While ostensibly fighting on behalf of Islam and the traditions of Islamic nations, the Islamist terrorists ultimately fight for but an Islamic form of capitalism, which as such will not bring any better solutions for Islamists than Christians.

What is the solution?

The solution stares us practically in the face. Put simply, it is a radical change in methods of fighting war. The method puts an end to violent attack or defense, and is replaced by fighting war by means of self-sacrifice. The war employs no bullets or explosives that are used against others. There are no burials of the dead accompanied by honor guard rifle salvos. Indeed, there are no grave yards, but everyone who sacrificed his-her life has their name and a short bio entered into a permanently available internet scroll accessible through a special ‘spot’ on the menu bar on every computer.

One of the missing links in the Tibetan Budhist self-sacrifice effort is the failure of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan community to provide for all to see a memorial scroll for its not-violent soldiers. By failing to provide for their own, the Tibetans fail to bring the message of their method of fighting a war to the attention of the world, at the same time as the community fails to significantly change the world for the better and do the missionary work that needs to be done.

The platform for the honor scroll can be provided by any already existing platforms, and such a platform may, beginning with the UN and the support of all ‘AntiWar’ platforms, have an almost an infinite number of sponsors representing many causes of civil society.

The sole bonding mechanism, so to speak, however, should not be the cause, but the not-violent and self-sacrificial method used to fight for the cause. Ending war as we know it, is in itself one of the great causes. However, before this can happen, humans need to change their attitude toward death.

*Slavoy Žižek, “The Universal Exception”, Continuum, p 149.

**Jan Hus was imitated by Jan Palach, who immolated himself in 1968, protesting the Soviet invasion of Chehoslovakia.

Link of interest:

Venner suicide: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22620143
Women immolate http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22697399

Eso’s Chronicles 173  
Dominion Theology & Democracy (IV)
© Eso A.B.

When it comes to subjective sympathies, I back gold. When put in the context as an enhancer of the Divine, there is nothing like the color of gold to transmit the right aura and sentiment. There is also such a thing as a Golden rule or proportion. However, when it comes to gold as a substitute for fiat currency, I am not so sure about the ‘precious’ metal. While I am sympathetic to the arguments of the ‘gold bugs’, I am not sure that there will be enough of the right stuff to buy when the time of emergency becomes actual. I am of the opinion that capitalism has exhausted the organic resources of our planet—even if its core were of solid gold not iron.

Remember the time when the power grids shut down in the U.S. Northeast and people were shitting in the hallways of high rise buildings in New York? Though the smell is not the same smell as when corpses rot, it’s right next to it, it is almost as if.

Or imagine that you are downtown San Francisco visiting a friend in a high rise apartment http://kristenbornemann.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/san_fran_view_0.jpg . The building shakes. You look out the window and see the Golden Gate Bridge fall down. Then you fall out of bed, because the city has been struck with the long overdue earthquake. The quake measures 8.3 magnitudes on the Richter scale. Though the building did not fall down, and you only fell out of bed, the building has, nevertheless, taken a twist, and the elevator shaft is out of order. What do you do?

Your wealthy banker friend crawls over to his safe in the wall and takes out two solid gold bricks which he has stashed there. He gives you one to put in your backpack, he takes the other, and you both grope your way through the apartment to the emergency exit and stairwell.

Once you are at the ground level, you realize that you cannot get out of the building, because the waters of the Pacific have flooded San Francisco streets http://www.arturhernadi.com/Go4/2006-10-24_SanFranciscoDowntown.jpg  , the pressure of mud is earily pressing into the building and turning the turnstyle door, and no one has thought of providing rubber boats as part of the emergency kit. So, you climb back to the roof, where, hopefully, a helicopter will pick you up. Meanwhile, though you have a brick of gold on you, you have no sandwiches or water to drink.

I am aware that all chaotic scenarios when described beforehand appear engineered by a nut cake or a conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless, sometimes the ‘impossible’ happens: when you get to the rooftop, you hear the voice of the opera singer Enrico Caruso sing “O Sole Mio” (My Sun!). The sun is indeed shining.

Coincidentally, Caruso was in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake struck and most of the city burnt to the ground.

Caruso was more than happy to take the next train out of San Francisco, and though the journey back to New York was long and tedious, he had a chance to see America in all its spaciousness, ‘democratic’ brutishness and exploitativeness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting . Though the killing extravaganza of the buffaloes by white hunters and the gold rush was already over by some fifty years, the American West was still near virgin land, and deforestation still went on with exuberance and denied more cautious folk who warned that if this was but masturbatory foreplay to what praise of unbridled ‘freedom’ and ‘capitalism’ will in due course do America as a whole. The effort to put a stop to ‘democratic’ violence would necessarily include such events as ‘9/11’.

That is, all the gold in the world is unlikely to save ‘democratic’ America from joining the Titanic, ‘communist’ Soviet Union, and ‘fascist’ Germany at the bottom of the Atlantic.

So, why should America find its final resting place among such good company?

Recently on an internet blog site, I read a reader express the fear that we live at a time when religious cults such as Dominion Theologists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Theology and its suicidal Christian fanatics are not only on the loose in America, but are a major ideological force in the U.S. military services.

Because Dominion Theology presumes to have a mandate in civil affairs (to politically reconstruct society), it represents a no lesser danger to the West as a parallel theology among Muslims presents to Muslim cultures or the SS presented to the Germans, or the Bolsheviks to the Russians. Unfortunately, the American ‘war on terror’, which President Obama apparently wants to end, but has not yet shown that he can either ‘start’ or ‘end’ much of anything, contributes much to the strengthening of DT Cells within the ranks of the empire’s armed forces.

Eventually such violent neo-orthodox ‘theologies’ will go their way, but like the extremists among communists and fascists, probably not before they gain a global stage, shed blood, ‘do their thang’, fail as a consequence of suffering a defeat in war, the perpetrators are brought under control, and the future sends American ‘democracy’ to join the unmentionables in the future.

Because American geopolitical strategy involves globalizing the world for America, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrkLwLTrIg&feature=player_embedded , the conflict in process will expand and become global in nature. But unlike previous world wars, and what some call “World War III”, this war is actually a “Global War”, and it does not end with the enemy’s military defeat, but a much more devastating consequence: economic exhaustion and the planet looking like a rubbish dump, the cities making the largest of the rubbish piles.

This is where we return to our opening sentence about the value of gold, especially as a preserver of wealth.

While wealth as accident and happenstance cannot be denied as long as liberal capitalism and militarism remains in existence, two hundred years of the rule of the industrial age is proof enough that it has turned the humans inhabiting planet Earth into tattered locusts. The billionaires know this as surely as the world’s 94^th richest man, Adolph Merckle knew it.

It was Merkle’s misfortune to second guess what is no longer for guessing. His intellectual stumble (beyond anyone’s ability to anticipate) and the shame and financial losses it brought him, caused him to put an end to his life.

Merkle had done everything ‘right’—under the pre-collapse capitalist system. He had anticipated a crash of an overpriced automobile stock of which he held many shares, and had sold the shares ‘short’, which is, he would make money even if the stock fell and the company went bankrupt. But he had failed to anticipate that in spite of falling automobile sales worldwide, a failing company could be of interest to another auto company. When the ‘other’ player appeared as if ‘out of the blue’ and showed his cards, the overpriced stock took an astronomical leap upward and Mr. Adolph Merckle had to cover his shorts at an astronomical loss.  Adolf Merckle, committed suicide:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/01/06/us-merckle-newsmaker-sb-idUSTRE5055O820090106 .

Incidentally, the catastrophe now visiting our planet was begun and continues to be paved by the elites of Europe poking the barrel of a gun in our backs: Eaton students http://www.infowars.com/british-students-asked-if-they-will-shoot-protesters/ Read the question put to the students of Eaton to which they are asked to write an answer.

 

 

Esis's Chronicles 172

Origin of The Midsummer Fire
© Eso A.B.

This blog a ‘break’ in the regular series.

Johns Eve or the Midsummer Festival in Latvia is only weeks away. Here are some reflections on the significance of the festival by one who many years ago became an afficianado of the festival and has never been able to let go of an interest in it..

The sad truth about the demise of the Latvian Midsummer Festival is that it is not the result of Soviet repression (as many allege, but a consequence of the Latvian intelegentsia smothering its own communal roots by surrendering to the neo-Christian propaganda about God being a Being out of nature.

The smothering of this ‘day of the community’ has other sources as well. One cause is an overly tight hugging of Johns as a purely Latvian festival with no relation to anyone else. I remember the poet Imants Ziedonis, recently deceased, telling me that Latvians can be proud of being the only ones who wear oak leaf wreaths on their heads. I was surprised to hear this, because a wreath of leaves or flowers is an old tradition if one remembers the laurel wreath of the Greeks and Romans and poet ‘laureates’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_wreath .

Recently, while rereading Euripedes “The Bacchae” another image and potential source for the Festival came to mind.

When Dionysus (Yahnis in Latvian) comes to Thebes, many of the city’s inhabitants, apparently mostly women (once inhabitants of the wood, now starved for nature by the desert regime that is the city), join him in a bacchanal that winds up Mt. Cithaeron to a holy communal gathering place there. The name ‘bacchae’ originates in Bacchus, who is the Roman God of wine; however, Bacchus is a late replacement for the name of the Greek God Ion

The Bacchae are behaving orgiastically and apparently lewdly. Word of this gets to King Pentheus, who (also starved for nature) imagines the event as a pornography show. To better see what the women are up to, Pentheus climbs a tall pine that grows close to the grounds where the ritual is to take place. Unfortunately, the Bacchae see him, and climb the tree to pull the King down to earth.

When the King is down, the Bacchae fall on him and tear him into bloody pieces. Then everybody rushes back to Thebes, with an elderly lady leading the runners. The lady holds in her hand by the hair the head of King Pentheus. Only when the Bacchae reach the marketplace of Thebes, does the lady awaken to the fact that she is none other than the mother of the King.

The Bacchae, realize that a great tragedy has happened, and a great communal wailing ensues. Incidentally, the word ‘tragedy’ has its origin in the greek name tragōidia, “billy-goat-song”. Taking the behavior of King Pentheus into account, he may have been thought to be impersonating a billy goat. The Latvians have a folk poem, it goes: “Kaza kāpa debesīs, Dievam sūdzēt….” (The billy goat climbed up to heave to complain to God…) There is an ancient statue of gold that shows a goat on its hind legs chewing the leaves of a small tree. http://classconnection.s3.amazonaws.com/312/flashcards/134312/jpg/c9iwf00z1316047577614.jpg

Then the Bacchae hit upon a brilliant idea. Some of them rush back to Mt. Cithaeron, and go to the pine tree which had hid King Pentheus. The Bacchae dig around the pine until they have loosed its roots. Then they fell the tree, strip it of its branches, shorten the trunk somewhat, and carry the rest of the trunk back to Thebes.

Meanwhile, the Bacchae who have remained in Thebes have dug a deep hole in the ground. This is where the top of the tree is now placed, and the tree, with the aid of pulleys and pichforks, it is pushed and pulled until it is with its roots in the air, and stands in a vertical position. A ladder is then brought to the tree. The crevices of the roots are filled with tar and resin, and to the roots is secured the head of the King. (In later years the head of the king is replaced by the head of a sacrificial goat,) The roots are then put to a flame.

One may imagine that it is in this ceremony that we must seek the origin of the image of the head of the Medusa http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/images/gal_mosaic_head_medusa.jpg and/or the Latvian Midsummer wreath http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/61207000/jpg/_61207060_man_oak_wreaths_afp624x351.jpg .

Eso’s Chronicles 171
Fascism as Deconstruction of Community (III)
© Eso A.B.

Thus (see blog 170), if proto-fascism has its beginning in a disintegrating community desiring to heal itself, for those who have the desire to heal, finding themselves being labeled ‘fascists’, further facilitates the disintegration of their community, and places the naming agent in the position of the enemy or his agent. The enemy/ agent works as a:

1) saboteur, a role enhanced by deliberate idiocy;

2) the sabotage occurs for the agent’s own good reasons; and

3) the reason for the sabotage is to access Money, because when there is enough Money, it substitutes for community; i.e., one may do without community, because one can buy an illusion of it.

4) The agent or enemy of community, therefore, is Money; because Money buys ‘freedom’ and ‘liberates’ one of the community and responsibilities toward it.

5) Money opens a new world, a wholly virtual world. As opposed to the Superego of the organic world, who projects in our dreams as a ‘medicine man’, the Superego of the wholly virtual world is a consumer item. For example, a Barbie doll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7P_0_HfTp8. Incidentally, a Barbie doll may be had only through the agency of Money, which is God for real in our time and space. Nevertheless, this money is seldom in the hands of the community, but remains in the possession of the anti-community forces: the billionaires, the millionaires, and the military forces the oligarchs support.

Items 4) and 5) provide the reasons why capitalists sabotage a community’s effort to reestablish itself. The sabotage is accomplished by diverting the healing effort toward self-destructive ends and then call the result ‘fascism’, a word of such evil potency that the victor ‘democratic’ State forbids it to be ever mentioned again.

Among the negative consequences of communities efforts to recover are two gigantic icebergs: Hitler’s fascism and Stalin’s communism.

At their beginning stages, both fascists and communists had enormous popular support. If they had not had such support, they could hardly have succeeded in rising to their eventual dominant positions.

There were, however, forces embedded among communalists, which sabotaged their good cause and earned them ridicule and a bad name for a long time thereafter. In short, in so far as now bygone communism and fascism represented forces of the community that rose against its destroyers, the community in the end became a worse loser than when it had begun its recovery effort. The community was further diluted than it had been at the beginning of the uprisings. By our day, the community no longer exists as a tangible entity.

What has replaced the community is a wholly artificial megalopolis, a centre for the creation of virtualism, which is held together (zusammen) not through personal relationships, but through everyone’s dependency on Money. Money itself is ‘democratic’, in so far as it can be divided among community members more or less equally, but which ‘equality’ fails to become a reality, because the enemies of the community desire to keep the Money, most of it, for themselves.

It is at this stage of political developments that the leaders of the community (not having been forewarned) succumb to the temptation of either 1. Money or 2. Power (a Money substitute). The only way to then continue forward is to divert the attention of the members of the community from the ‘real’ enemy on to a scapegoat.

In the event of Hitler’s community organization, it discovered the enemy in the “Jews” (or gypsies, polaks, russen, homosexuals, avant garde artists, etc.). Because among all the above were certain anti-community factors and phenomena, the untutored have-nots were readily persuaded to turn on one or all of them. The persuasion was given roots when it was conjoined with permissive and officially overlooked killing.

Of the enemies, the community of Jews, the most cohesive community among the above, turned out to be the one which communitarians could be caused to hate and kill most readily. The reasons for why are many, but the most apparent one is that anti-Semitism was not a new phenomenon, but was grounded in an antagonism many centuries old. This ‘old’ antagonism was, in turn, grounded in the unresolved Great Schism that went back to the Civil War among Eastern and Western Christianity, its high point being the so-called Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204.

The Crusade was nominally won by the West when it sacked and plundered Constantinople, and transferred the centre of Christianity from the Byzantine Empire to Rome, Italy. The physical address change was accompanied by a power shift from an autonomous Eastern priesthood, which was rooted among a people familiar with prehistoric shamanism (hence autonomous), to a priesthood rooted as a bureaucracy under the wing of a Western secular king, turned Christianity on its head.

Eastern Christianity, known as Orthodox Christianity, was forced to adopt a Western or Catholic Christian story of the nature of the Son of God. The Orthodox or Eastern version of the story was associated with the Kabalah and the Old Testament, which texts likely had their origins in Jewish of Khazaria http://www.oocities.org/tmajlath/khazaria.gif . Needless to say, the Eastern Christian story of the Son of God differed considerably from that of the Western story. In the Eastern story, the king of Eastern Christianity is burnt by the traitorous Byzantine Emperor Alexius I at the Hippodrome in Constantinople about 1118, whereas the Western story was pure theatre and spectacle.

The community movement led by Hitler took advantage of Western Catholic bureaucracy’s (The Habsburg Empire was Catholic and centered in Vienna, Austria) antagonism toward the Jews, and subsequently identified the movement with Italian fascism, which took its name from a bundle of fascio (hazel) sticks as disciplinary tools.

Community building by Lenin and Stalin took an opposite tac, when it found its enemy not in the Orthodox priesthood (though it killed thousands of priests), but in the tsarist oligarchy, its sympathizers among the Russian bourgeois, and a peasantry (Kristi-yan) that had risen to a ‘kulak’ http://www.britam.org/pics/KhazarEmpire.jpg  status.

What was missed by Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler was that neither the ‘community’ of the Germans nor Slavs identified with industrialized workers community. What the proto-Revolutionary and disintegrating community wished for was an organic community, the one they and their forebears had had for centuries, except it had become demoralized by those seeking wealth and progress as the only way to overcome the repressive princes, boyars, and barons.

As everyone knows, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Reich did not fulfill the dreams of the community movement, but the community movements in Europe and Russia (aided by American capital) met with a catastrophic defeat instead.

The answer for the causes of this defeat is indeed to be sought in Western capitalism, which built itself on the idea of a ruthless exploitation of our planet’s natural resources and made a huge investment in advertising and evangelizing militant capitalism. Additionally, defeat of the community was facilitated by the fact that none of the community leaders and no one in their bureaucracies or churches came to think that the rebuilding of a community requires of the leadership an ultimate self-sacrifice and that its goal is a subsistence, not capitalist, economy. The leadership of the community then and now remains all too attached to its own well being.