It’s late May, 2022. In the Republic of Colombia, the presidential electoral process starts on Sunday with the possibility of change (at long last) in the air. Possibly a real progressive populist evolution that will obviate the need for an eventual revolution. In the United States, the antithesis reigns: a country divided against itself and at war with too much of the outside world, a country currently orchestrating the massacre of the Ukrainian people in order to teach the Russians a lesson, and to assuage hurt feelings in the Biden administration with respect to its Afghan fiasco, and Coronavirus response fiasco, and its economic fiasco, and its electoral prospects.
The world is full of devastating problems but, ironically, even more full of potential solutions. No one need go to sleep hungry, or be denied access to a complete educational cycle, or fail to receive required medical treatment or medications, or lack adequate housing or clothing or food, or lack income adequate for an acceptable albeit not luxurious lifestyle, or live in fear of violent conflicts. Yet most of the world’s population suffers from each of the foregoing maladies while a tiny fragment lives in incredible luxury, a fragment whose wealth would be sufficient to ameliorate all of the world’s physical problems. But even if that privileged, elite, micro-minority was too greedy to share its ill-gotten (in most cases) wealth, all funds required to guarantee every human being a decent lifestyle could be obtained if we just minimized our war and hegemonic related addictions.
Why don’t we adopt available, obviously reasonable postures? Why can’t we, as a global society (or at least enough of us), wake up and smell the roses (or the coffee, I’m writing from Colombia after all)?
Unfortunately, a great deal of the problem ironically lies at the feet of the purportedly “woke” cancel cultural warriors among us, the incredibly non-productive supercilious “woke” who do more damage to the causes they espouse than do such causes’ most vehement opponents. Who instead of helping to resolve or at least to minimize the social and economic problems against which they rail, exacerbate them, exacerbate racism and misogyny; do nothing to help attain peace, or promote education and healthcare for all, or political reform. They rant against “bullying” by others, while most actively engaging in that practice against anyone and everyone who does not immediately and unconditionally accept their poorly thought out postulates. But their ranting and raving and rioting and calumny and criticism and ridicule and bullying only polarize us all and generate mass resistance to the policies needed to resolve our economic and sociopolitical dilemmas.
Why?
If they were malevolent Machiavellians it would make sense. Perhaps some are, but in general, they don’t seem cognitively talented enough to orchestrate such a strategy. Rather, they just seem inept, albeit very loudly so, magnifying their presence through expertise in trolling, bad manners and weak attempts at satire and irony. Name calling and moral posturing is their style. The corporate media, the Hollywood mafia and the Lords of the Internet love them, as does the Deep State. But the large majority of people who, at its most critical and elemental levels, make this world function (albeit dysfunctionally) are largely repelled by them, especially by their autocratic and intolerant tendencies. Incoherent tendencies such as censorship in pursuit of open discussions and the truth, the “woke’s” current mantra.
But what to do about them. We purportedly coincide in goals: peace, non-violent conflict resolution, equity, justice, real common welfare, sustainable economic development equitably and efficiently shared, minimization of corruption and impunity. But, rather than help attain any of the foregoing, they make them all less and less likely, much less likely, bordering on the impossible.
The “woke” seem to be a strange brew of old, failed activists and naïve young attention seekers, each full of misguided energy, all too easy to manipulate by cynics who see them as useful tools, tools not to affect change, but to calcify the status quo.
How to really wake the “woke” up from their misguided stupor? How not to waste their energy and good, albeit misguided, intentions. How to attain that which they and we all need and most of us seek?
Wouldn’t it be great if the foregoing were more than mere rhetorical questions? How might we harness the energy of the young, the experience of the downtrodden yearning for equity and the wisdom that age sometimes brings to make of this world something in which we can all share justifiable pride?
Hopefully, perhaps, starting this Sunday, May 29, 2022, we in Colombia can start providing some answers. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
On May 19, 2022, Consortium News published an important article dealing with the dwindling light of truth available to us as another dark age seemingly approaches (see Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 138 — Thursday, May 19, 2022 “West’s Free Speech Threatened by Ukraine War”). Please read it, … and please share it.
It’s probably worth noting that in the United States, freedom of the “press” has never been about accurate information. The two major legal decisions that underlie United States journalism are the Peter Zenger case in the Crown colony of New York in 1735 and the 1964 United States Supreme Court decision in Sullivan v. The New York Times. Both cases dealt with the inalienable right to slander with impunity. While that sounds terrible, and perhaps it is, the idea was that the interchange of ideas, whether right or wrong, was essential to functioning democracy, and that no one should be trusted as an arbiter of the truth, other than the citizenry itself. The ill-named Democratic Party in the United States has destroyed that concept in its efforts to attain and retain political power in the name of the Deep State and its conflict-based empire. Conflict internally through racial, gender, ethnic and religious polarization, and externally through the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace, our history of perpetual war. Only a few brave souls, real journalists like Julian Assange, the late Bob Parry, Chris Hedges, Joe Luria, Caitlin Johnstone, etc., stand in the way, and they are being bled to death with a thousand small cuts, not all tiny. Among us, Julian Assange’s martyrdom at the hands of the United Kingdom and the United States stands out as the most egregious symbol of perfidy, but every citizen who votes for Deep State candidates, those villains or dupes who keep us in the dark, who have always kept us in the dark, … is an accomplice.
It is impossible to be an accurate historian in this context and I now question everything I’ve been taught and which I in turn once taught, other than those things I experienced in real time. Things which, notwithstanding such experience, the corporate media and corporate historians, both nothing more than narrative managers specializing in destructive (as opposed to creative) fiction, assure us are too complex for you and I to deal with, so we should just trust them in the manner ridiculed by the old joke, “who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes”?
Real historians would leave nothing untouched, regardless of how vile and horrible it may have been presented as being, and regardless of the purported “facts” we have been “ordered” to believe. The times in which we are living have taught me, as George Orwell once suggested, that yesterday’s monsters may be today’s saints, and tomorrow, who knows?
I find myself wondering what the real truth was about the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century. Even superficial history discloses that the United States Civil War was not fought to free the slaves (as is now taught as irrefutable dogma), and that the American Revolution was not fought to guarantee the right to democratic representation in legislative decisions. It turns out that the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions in which most of the world places its faith are largely based on falsehoods as well. So what is left of those professions which purport to exist to glean truth from the chaff of the elitist propaganda which keeps the vast majority of us in a state of velvet lined slavery?
Well, at the very least, if nothing else, to support those who oppose censorship of any kind, and oppose with all our might those who seek to silence dissident voices. And to do it now before it’s too late, although that Rubicon may already have been crossed.
Something on which to ponder and deliberate, but most of all, on which to act. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Atrophying, withering and finally decaying, ties that once bound fade and perish, only the worst memories remaining, only the mistakes and misunderstandings, until it’s too late, as is so habitually the case. The quest for purpose perdures but its objective seems more and more nebulous, more tenuous, ephemerally ethereal, slowly waning, goals becoming less and less visible and concurrently less and less viable.
As a child, in a form of waking dream, I would deliberately delve deeper and deeper into realms of disembodied emotional terror towards a singularity from which escape would be impossible, testing my limits. I’d always just escape, fighting to wake. A seeming exercise to enure myself, perhaps against the future I’d all too soon have to face. And it seems that future is upon me now.
Today, I dream of a variant of immortality where I am utterly alone after times end, when all matter has disintegrated everywhere and gravity and entropy have died in a mutual embrace. Where I have, by default, become the singularity, self-sentenced to eternal boredom and loneliness. A melding of Heaven and Hell. But I do not shy away from that infinite improbability. Rather, I face it with determination as a sort of self-decreed fate.
Self-delusive hubris imposed as propriative atonement.
Manipulable mass hysteria is the incoherent albeit pervasive characteristic of mankind’s collective consciousness. It explains the power religions of any kind hold over their adherents, regardless of how illogical and incoherent their premises and how inconsistent with such premises their practices, both collective and individual tend to be. A bitter illustration involves the pleas made to the same deity by opposing warring factions, both seeking divine intervention to rain death and destruction on their co-believers. But it is far from only in the religious sphere were collective incoherence and delusion reign supreme. Nationalism is a closely aligned phenomena, sometimes involving multiple individual states as part of a multistate collective, and within such states, multiple political associations vying for power in a perpetual quest to control governance. For example, the Hispanic nation comprised of almost thirty different states and within each such state, myriads of political parties and movements. Or the German nation where the same phenomena arises (i.e., Germany, Austria, and parts of other regions in Central and Eastern Europe), or the Slavic nation, witness the current intra-Slavic conflict between the Ukraine and the Russian Federation, historical Siamese siblings.
The United States is, in many senses, sui generis, an amalgam of immigrants from diverse nationalities that sort of coalesced on an ethnic, then regional, then religious, then racial, then gender basis into something similar to quasi-internal-polarized nations, perpetually at war with themselves but capable of uniting so as to be perpetually at war with outsiders (and of course, with the original indigenous population).
Yesterday (April 16, 2022) was “Holy Saturday, commemorating Yeshua’s brief sojourn in Gê-hinnōm (really around thirty six hours rather than three days as usually reported), and I chanced to read an article in Consortium News written by Patrick Lawrence entitled “The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine” (see Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 105 — Saturday, April 16, 2022). As so often happens when I read that rare source of accurate information, it set me off. The fact that such “holy” day is so ludicrously incoherent may have helped. The article dealt with how easy it seems to be to manipulate the well-meaning among us in order to secure their support for anything under the sun, regardless of how antithetical and opposed to our purported values. The case in point dealt with the Nazi reincarnation in the current Ukraine which the United States is not only vigorously supporting, but which it in fact gleefully orchestrated with the unwavering support of its corporate media (i.e., the 2014 Ukraine project orchestrated by Obama’s assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland as recorded in her infamous call to United States Ambassador to the Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt; see transcript provided by the government owned British Broadcasting Corporation at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957). As Clinton supporting Arkansas hog farmers might exclaim, “Soooeey!”. Their own sweet sonata, to which we might add the qualifier, “generis”.
The omnipotent if hardly independent and certainly not free “corporate media”, a consolidated branch of the United States entertainment industry that operates not so much for fun as for the “profit” of those whose brainchild it is. A brief historical lesson is probably in order. Hollywood, the California version, was turned into an arm of United States and British intelligence during World War I (the War to End All Wars) by George Creel on Woodrow Wilson’s instructions, and it never really looked back. We are a thoroughly manipulated People, not only through Hollywood but through every aspect of our culture, education and sports, all of which both direct our perception and emotions and distract us from the realities under which we live and which we help impose on others. And I say that as a Yankees and Jets fan (they tend to balance out) who has come to realize that the energy I expend on sports as a fan and as a participant desensitizes and distracts me from realizing serious goals, such as my autonomy, my quest to do what is correct and honorable, my quest to separate truth from the narratives to which all of us are constantly subjected.
So! Paraphrasing Yakov Smirnoff “what a media!” It can accomplish almost anything. Think of it, by labeling opponents to their manufactured narratives, almost always false, as “Big Liars” and their honestly held assertions as “Big Lies”, both terms repeated constantly, they deflect meaningful evaluation, and, by censoring any other opinions, they hide uncomfortable truths (e.g., the misadventures of the Biden and Clinton and Obama families, most recently staring Hunter and Jimmy and the Big Guy).
Can you imagine if the original Nazis (or any of history’s worst villains) had enjoyed the benefits of today’s Deep State narrative managers? Why, if they’d wanted to, they could have founded a Zionist Nazi Party in Israel, although there are those who believe they did. We Americans have been bred not to question the carefully crafted narratives we are fed on a 24/7 basis. Bred and trained like Pavlov’s dogs, the stimulus of choice, not a bell, but our mass-produced pseudo culture. In our Hollywood, no ties to any sort of reality are worthy of respect and that philosophy has been successfully transplanted to the fecund territory of our news media a/k/a pseudo journalism. Or perhaps the transplantation evolved from the opposite direction, after all, the purportedly free-press in the United States was founded on the precedent established in the famous Peter Zenger trial held three centuries ago in the Royal Colony of New York, a decision premised on the absolute right to calumny and defame (truth being merely an inconvenient irrelevancy; ahhh, the joys of liberty. Ring that bell!!!).
We have been bred to accept without question the incredible profits available as a result of massive violence, domestically and abroad, perhaps a residue of the ancient Viking glorification of pillage and rape as a valid economic model, but in our case, oxymoronically fused with delusion and denial. Consequently, as Patrick Lawrence observes in the cited article, most of us are indoctrinated to reject reality and are thus virtually oblivious to our record levels of incarceration, oblivious to our record levels of local mass shootings, oblivious to our record levels of foreign interventions, oblivious to the hundreds of millions of resulting deaths. To us, they are all irrelevant abstractions or justifiable collateral damage. Compared to our penchant for pillage and slaughter hidden in plain sight, the Vikings and their Nazis descendants were pikers. But we came about it honestly, the British taught us how to do it, the British of the infamous Opium Wars, and of course, of our own quasi-Revolution.
For us, the denizens of the “Land of the Free” and the “Home of the Brave” (epithets made famous by that famous champion of slave owners, Francis Scott Key), “mass murder” is and has apparently always been a growth industry (just ask the original inhabitants of our continent). It is our most important crop, a gift that keeps on giving. We sow death and profitably so. We glory in armed conflicts at home and abroad, but without the disadvantages of victories which might insure accursedly unprofitable peace; that would devastate us. So we need to keep our enemies at least on life support lest we have to go to all the trouble of creating new ones. That may explain why our country has not won a war since World War II, with the notable exceptions of the invasions of Grenada and Panama; but it also explains why our government cynically created and funded Al Qaida terrorists in the Middle East, terrorists we created to fight the Russians but whom we eventually found to be useful allies, kind of like the Romans with the Visigoths, etc., albeit those proved to be alliances they eventually very much regretted. That explains the 2014 Ukraine project orchestrated by Obama’s assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland; a “project designed to assure the 2022 Russian Special Military Operation, the bonanza that we needed for pillage based economic survival.
Of course, not all our leaders have wanted to be mass murderers. During my lifetime, two United States presidents refused to play ball with the evolving Deep State, that military industrial complex against which Ike warned in early 1961. But both were overthrown, even if what passes for history and news portrays their demise very differently. One was forced to resign to avoid impeachment, and the second, well he was impeached twice but conviction was unsuccessful, nevertheless, well, you know about the 2020 election, the first perfect, absolutely no fraud election in United States history, despite evidence that would seem to indicate otherwise (given all the technocratic meddling, the “pandemic”, etc., the free flowing ballots everywhere, where the “honor” system worked to perfection to assure the absence of sales and related fraud, but, after all, we are a capitalist society).
Despite their character flaws and insecurities, in both cases reflected above, it was the inclination to work towards a world without war and specifically their desire for positive relations with the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union, now the Russian Federation, which proved anathema. In each case, the presidents appeared to enjoy widespread public support for such policies, but rather than insulate them, that exacerbated the “problem”, rendering the situation intolerable to those who really run our “Western” world. Thus, today, we are blessed with the ultimate good old boy as “president”, the ultimate Deep State crony, a guy who, if you pay him (or his family) stays bought because that is his unwavering concept of honor (ask the credit card industry, or well, … the Ukraine). And of course, hurray for the Ukraine, that bastion of liberty and democracy, notwithstanding the imprisonment of all political opponents and closing of all “unpatriotic” media outlets and slaughter of 14,000 residents of the Donbass. Hunter, in any case, is ecstatic. Lucky that Obama made the Big Guy proconsul there.
And of course, again referring to the Ukraine, now we have the great little war we needed after the Afghan fiasco to assure the economic welfare of the very few who rule us, one where we are not directly involved, except for the massive defense expenditures being authorized in what now looks like a perpetual stream. As planned, “defense” industry stocks are zooming so who cares about the rest of the markets and the economy and inflation and scarcity, or Ukrainian lives and infrastructure, so long as the Russians are debilitated.
We the People of the United States, especially those who ironically believe that they share liberal and progressive values and abhor violence, racism, sexism, uncomfortable history and uncomfortable journalism, are just fine with plenty to criticize in order satisfy our need for faux moral outrage against others (which makes us feel good), but without really rocking our comfy boats or changing the way things are, the way we’ve been indoctrinated to believe they should be. The way things will remain as long as we keep finding troublesome people against whom to vote, even if we have to settle for “lesser” evils like Joe Biden, the Obamas, the Bush family, the Clintons, etc. One wonders what plans Hunter has for a future presidency, after all, he has huge experience in avoiding the consequences of past mistakes and still remaining in good standing as an honorary victim. The latter being essential today.
Just some things on which to reflect as another Easter flows by, flows by obliviously, a holiday in honor of the Prince of Peace in the name of whom so many, many wars have been fought and so many, many lives have been crushed, and in the name of whom so many people have been and continue to be enslaved.
If Yeshua (the purported Christ) has truly risen after his brief sojourn in Hell, what might he be thinking?
Probably that it’s as if he’d never left his former colleagues in Gê-hinnōm. And probably wondering, somewhat confused, about Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Santiago de la Cruz Osorio was not monogamous, but he was honorable and he refused to compromise his principles, thus, he did not surrender to his libidinous instincts when he was involved in a relationship much though they called to him He was not gamophobic either, rather the reverse, which women sensed. So he became a serial monogamist who all too quickly became infatuated, sure each time that the results would be different given that the object of his affection was surely the eternal love for which he’d always longed. But always, despite his best intentions, he all too soon became disenchanted, but trapped relationally by his premature commitments.
All too soon as well, his fantasies dealt, not with physical intimacy, but with how he might, without compromising his principles, regain his freedom. Fantasies that were frequently morose and dark, fantasies where he imagined himself a widower, or a cuckold, or just the subject of rejection by his paramour of the moment who’d decide that he was not really the person she’d sought. The latter was the manner in which, through careful planning and meticulous execution, he managed to re-attain his lost liberty, his paramours believing that they’d just somehow grown apart and would be better off preserving their beautiful friendship. Ironically, endings generated feelings of intense joy similar to those at beginnings.
Eureka!! For the moment at least. Still, inevitably, he’d lose his freedom again, and the cycle would repeat, and his frustration would increase.
He’d disastrously tried an open relationship based on honesty and ironically, a variant on fidelity, but it hadn’t worked, it hadn’t worked at all though he’d met the elaborate conditions on which they’d agreed. He was now considering that perhaps relationships were not for him and he’d be best off with a myriad of ever varying friends with mutual benefits, something some of his less serious friends espoused, although their “associations” seemed somewhat akin to “leasing” the verisimilitude of love.
Unfortunately in a fortunate sense, or fortunately in an unfortunate sense, his partner of the moment felt he was perfect for her and it seemed unlikely that she’d ever leave. And, in fact, he was getting on in years and most people believed he’d been incredibly fortunate in having become espoused to such a perfect mate.
Thus, Santiago de la Cruz Osorio found himself confused and bored but not unhappy. Just frustrated and grateful concurrently. Iconic irony orchestrated by good old Murphy who loved a good laugh. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
In a dark and humid, albeit blisteringly hot, olfactorily offensive region outside of time and outside of space, the former Roman deity associated with light and truth (but demoted via Abrahamic synchronicity to his present sad state) speculates. Today, in the temporal realms, is a day fraught with incoherence disguised as meaning, a more and more common phenomena but still special, at least to the spiritual descendants of ancient Abram.
Just what relation, if any, he wonders, does the biblical Netherworld have to the Netherlands (recalling Puritans, he is not fond of the Dutch), and, in either or each case, might it involve the divine’s posterior excretory orifice, assuming he, she it or they have one? Would that mean that Sheʾōl or Gê-hinnōm, Hades or Hell or, well, you know, whatever, is located somewhere in a divine gastric system, the stomach perhaps, or the intestines, large or small, or even the colon — semi or whole? That would certainly explain the pejorative “Holy Crap!
He is obviously curious as to where he finds himself, perhaps contemplating an escape.
Where then, or what, may Heaven be? Or Purgatory?
Something on which to reflect (assuming heresy and blasphemy do not deter you) on a sad Sabbath, recalling another sad Sabbath almost two millennia ago, when the purported Son of Man spent a brief sojourn in an uncomfortable waiting room anticipating transport to his Dad’s place.
Was transport delayed because of Sabbath imposed restrictions?
Paraphrasing Gandalf while still “the Grey”:
“Good Sabbath? Do you mean that you wish me a good Sabbath. Or that it’s a Sabbath on which to be good? Or that it is a good Sabbath whether I like it or not. Of course, it is probably not ever good to spend Saturdays in אוֹל – Sheʾōl or Gê-hinnōm or Hell.” _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
Vaporous, time flows down illusory rivulets, only seemingly linear and unidirectional, most obscured, each rivulet an individual, each a personalized instant.
Each perceiving and perceived in an idiosyncratic manner.
Haze hiding each of us from every other in an infinite variety of collective suspensions.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
“Ecce Homo”! The phrase purportedly uttered by Pontius Pilate on the first “Good” Friday as he presented Yeshua to a crowd allegedly demanding his execution for blasphemy, unsuccessfully washing his hands of all responsibility for what was to follow. Perhaps it is even more fittingly a phrase for our times and for what we have become: oxymoronically incoherent, awash in orchestrated poetic orthodoxy belittling empathy and keeping us chaotically in line. “Ecce Homo”! The collective image we would probably see were there a mirror large enough to encompass us all.
A mirror that would reflect fear and hate in the name of love and tolerance. Race, religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality, class, history and philosophy all perverted in order to divide us and set us at each other’s throats in orgies of faux self-righteous indignation. Exuberant hate exalted.
The price of our folly in declining to exercise our better judgment, permitting ourselves instead to be manipulated through fear rather than embracing the courage of our convictions. Bacchanalias deifying purportedly lesser evils. Illusions of a democracy we’ve never attained.
Another message from Cassandra’s archives. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.
Maundy Thursday represents a transitional day in the Yeshua myth, legend or history, depending on your perceptions and perspectives. A day full of humility, generosity and a sort of nostalgia and melancholy on the one hand, and perhaps betrayal on the other. Although rather than betrayal it might have instead involved fulfillment of a terrible task imposed by destiny, one that led not only to Yeshua’s passion and death but to millennia of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism Yeshua would obviously never have countenanced.
What does that say about destiny’s prescience? Or that of destiny’s purported author, יהוה (yodh, él, waw, él; to whom we refer as YHWH”? Or what does it say about us?
Something on which to reflect during this strange annual epoch of pain and sorrow imposed by יהוה on innocent Egyptian families to punish their autocrat, and imposed on Yeshua as a human sacrifice, and then imposed for millennia on the Jewish people as a whole, but celebrated joyfully by all three branches of the Abrahamic faith in one way or another. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.
This morning, April 13, 2002, Scott Ritter published another important article. “Twitter Wars—My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Ongoing Assault on Free Speech” (Consortium News, Volume 27, Number 101 — Tuesday, April 12, 2022). “Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of [weapons of mass destruction]”.
As usual, Scott’s article made me think and reflect, both on the current history we are busy making and concurrently distorting, and on the history which I, as a young academic, once taught. The phrase “the Deep State’s own Twitter” popped into my mind, a kind of parody of the way British regiments are named, “the King or Queens own” followed by the name of a subjugated people; oxymorony at its best. The article led me to imagine myself as a “real” historian in the future, one realizing how utterly false almost everything the United States government proclaims turns out to be. For some reason I wondered how, assuming there will ever be “real” historians with access to accurate data, they’ll view the Second World War. Clearly the narrative concerning Japanese perfidy was utterly distorted if not outright false. It’s turned out to have been very much like the situation today with Russia and the Ukraine. In the Japanese analogy, the United States and the United Kingdom schemed and manipulated until the Japanese were left only with the choice of attacking or being attacked themselves. The United States National archives contains a telegram instructing MacArthur to either goad the Japanese into attacking or attacking them himself as the United States need an excuse to gain popular support for a war the People did not want (see John Tolland’s “The Rising Sun”). Pretty much the same scenario was used by young Winston Churchill in the First World War, then known as the War to End All Wars, when as first Lord of the Admiralty, he arranged for the sinking of the USS Lusitania in order to draw the United States into that war.
It made me wonder what really made the administrations of Richard Millhouse Nixon and Donald John Trump so despicable and whether it wasn’t Watergate (mow the norm) or Russiagate (an orchestrated farce) but Nixon’s Glasnost and outreach to China and Trump’s desire for a non-interventionist foreign policy and decent relations with Russia and China all of which were the unforgivable sins which farsighted Ike warned would not be tolerated by the Deep State he foresaw?
Given our own experiences with reality turned inside out and upside down, can we really take for granted all we’ve been told about things now as orthodox as the evils of Germany and the Nazis? Remember, demonology was an invention of the Catholic Church, as it turns out. It is illegal in most countries to question official narrative as to World War II which to real researchers, ought to make it all the more questionable. It is devastating to even consider that much of that narrative may not be wholly accurate, but even if it is, how “credible” will it remain given the postwar conduct of the United States and Western Europeans and their corporate media. How much of the history we’ve been spoon fed can we believe if gathering accurate information critical to learning from the past in order to avoid its errors is our goal. Not everything a liar says is necessarily a lie, but it all certainly becomes suspect when we realize that someone in whom we believed turns out to have had no value for the truth. The little boy who cried wolf, on a massive scale.
I recall watching “cowboys versus Indians” entertainment genre as a young boy, where white hatted cowboys were always the good guys, before, as a historian, I learned of President Andrew Jackson and the Cherokees’ Trail of Tears. Or when Columbus Day celebrated something positive, rather than physical and cultural genocide. Or when the United States invaded and occupied countries all over Latin America to make the world safe for democracy, but democracy turned out to be the United Fruit Company, a practice expanded worldwide starting with the Spanish American War in 1898. I even remember when watching television “Father Knew Best” and “Amos and Andy” were just happy go lucky friends.
Oh what a twisted web we’ve woven! I wonder what its ultimate price will be. _______
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.
Guillermo Calvo Mahé 