Monthly Archives: December 2024

Bobby and Me: an Ode to Old Friends

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It’s Christmas Eve in the year 2024, an eventful year although not for reasons we will be proud to remember, especially in the Middle East.  But it’s still that special season that has been honored wherever men have roamed since we became sentient and noticed the seeming miracle of the twin solstices, the one in the North, with the longest night, and the one in the South with the longest day.  The equator is currently not far from where I live in a wonderful city high in the Central range of the Colombian Andes.  Here, spring reigns eternal.  It’s a city at the southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere.  I guess that at the equator solstices and equinoxes coincide.  I have often wondered what it would be like to live in a home that straddles the equatorial line, one concurrently both real and imaginary.  It must be a magical place.  But, at any rate, for me, solstices as well as equinoxes have always seemed days for introspection and this year I’ve reflected on my friend Bobby, and on the special parochial school in Hollis, Queens, in New York City from which I graduated in late June of 1960, St. Gerard de Majella (we just called it St. Gerard’s).

So, about Bobby. 

I can’t recall his last name.  He’s not in the picture above, he didn’t graduate with me from St. Gerard’s.  He lived with his family over a candy store on Hillside Avenue in Queens Village, New York, between 215th and 216th streets I think.  I recall sharing “chocolate egg creams” there.  I lived in the Abbot Arms apartment complex across the street (at least I think that’s what it was called).  We were briefly “best” friends during the 1960-1961 academic year, a very difficult year for me and not just because hormones had kicked into high gear.  That was the year Bill Mazeroski broke Mickey Mantle’s heart, … and mine.  Bobby was Italian and his family was very kind, very warm; very full of joy.  I loved some of the food his wonderful mom made for us but not all of it, not the bull’s balls, … yuck!!!  But I ate them just the same. 

Bobby was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  He helped me through a rough time.  As had happened all too often, I’d switched schools in the middle of the 1960-61 academic year, having been transferred over my protests by my parents from Jamaica High School, which I really liked and where many of my friends from St. Gerard’s had gone, to Martin Van Buren, a relatively new school where I knew no one.  After almost yearly changes in schools, this was one too many and I finally rebelled.  I informally refused to accept the transfer, instead, riding the New York City subways all day until I was finally caught.  I remember that I’d planned to emancipate myself by becoming a comic book artist and had sent DC Comics an idea for a new super hero I’d drawn, “Ultraman” I think I called him.  Their rejection letter was polite: “they had enough artists and did not generally hire fourteen year olds”. 

I remember that chief among the delights of Jamaica High were two girls, Karen Luckhart (I think that was her last name but I’ve probably misspelled it) and Mary Bakanskas (ditto on the spelling), and I also had a host of other good friends.  One’s name was Tommy Scott, a classmate from St. Gerard’s; we used to hang out together before classes started.  There was also a very pretty sophomore named Cindy who sometimes deigned to join us freshmen at our early morning gatherings.  I remember that she smoked and seemed very mature and somewhat wise.  Smoking created impressions like that back then.  Now, not so much.  And then there was a sort of friend, Johnny Eckelstein, a sort of rival.  He was on Jamaica High’s track team.

I don’t remember anyone from my short stay at Van Buren. 

At the end of that academic year I was off to the Eastern Military Academy in Cold Spring Hills, New York, overlooking Cold Spring Harbor, an old whaling port.  It was my choice and a wise one.  Eastern provided me with an Island of stability as my family fell apart.  My mother and stepfather separated then divorced in 1962 and my younger siblings, my sister Marina and my brother Teddy were also sent to boarding schools, Marina to Sag Harbor and Teddy to St. Basil’s in upstate New York.  Eastern was the first school in my life where I remained for more than two years.  I graduated from Eastern in 1964 and returned to teach there for a decade after college at the Citadel. 

I never saw or heard from Bobby after I left for Eastern but I never forgot him either.

I frequently wonder what happened to all of those people with whom I shared a bit of friendship in that strange year.  I wish there was some way to reconnect but until recently, not even Facebook has helped.  I’ve tried.  I especially tried with respect to those who graduated with me from St. Gerard’s in June of 1960.  Most especially with respect to one with whom I may never have shared a single word.  Patricia Maher was her name and this time I´ve got the spelling right.  I’ve posted on a Facebook page for St. Gerard’s (which ceased operations in 2008 but whose chapel still survives) but have yet to receive any responses.  I’ve heard that former governor Mario Cuomo also went there.  He was one of my law school professors, the one I most admired although his sons have sullied his name.  I think of St. Gerard’s every time I watch Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in the Bells of St. Mary’s (which I try to do every Christmas).  

I recall the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s at St. Gerard’s and the special message that the Virgin of Fatima had supposedly delivered to a young girl in Portugal, Lucia dos Santos was her name then.  She’d turned the message over, sealed, to the Vatican, and Pope John XXIII was supposed to finally unseal it as 1959 turned to 1960.  I recall the rumor that when he’ read it, he’d passed out and that the message was so troubling that after we’d waited for half a century to hear it (well, not us specifically, we’d only waited thirteen years), we’d just have to keep on waiting.

I remember St. Gerard’s and love it more every year and wonder what ever happened to my classmates, hoping that they’ve all enjoyed happy and productive lives.  But Bobby, I remember him best.  I hope he’s thriving and that he’s had a great life. 

I wonder if he remembers me as well.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

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. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

A Nostalgically Melancholy Christmas Carroll[1]

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[1] To the tune of Joan Baez singing “There but for Fortune” and Simon and Garfunkel’s version of “The Seven O’clock News/Silent Night”.

An introspection dedicated to Billy, Alex and Edward, to Marina and Teddy, to my mother, Rosario who’s been gone now for a third of a century, and to her sisters Carola (who joined her a while ago) and Livia who is blessedly still here.  To long gone “Pop” who left us in 1972 and to our matriarch, Juanita, who after having lived a bit more than a century, determined, on her own, that it was time to go.  And, of course, to Natalia.

Christmas has often seemed nostalgically melancholy to me.  It involves an anniversary, each anniversary different, sometimes very different.  My happiest were when I was surrounded by family, first as a young child with my younger sister Marina, then with Marina and my little brother Teddy and with my mother and my stepfather Leon.  Then, eventually, much later, as a parent with a wife and one, then two, and finally three sons.

My first recollection is when Marina and I were very little.  My mother and father had separated and he was probably with his family in Barinas, Venezuela while my mother had started her adventure in the United States.  We were left in my grandmother Juanita’s care, along with my wonderful aunts, Livia and Carola.  My earliest Christmas memory involves my grandmother’s annual Christmas event for the poorest children in the City of Manizales in Colombia.  My grandmother owned a hotel, the Hotel Roma, which included a wonderful restaurant with a large dining room and, for Christmas, she’d pile the dining room with a small mountain of gifts which, on that occasion, I, in representation of baby Jesus (I was three at the time) was charged with distributing to the many dozens of very poor young children present.  It should have been a beautiful event except that I misbehaved.  I kept a toy I liked for myself and when my grandmother found out, my baby Jesus role was over forever.  She said I’d behaved more like baby Satan.  My transgression that evening, even as young as I was, impacted me profoundly and since that time I have always tried my best to be kind to those less advantaged than I.

My next set of memories were after I and Marina had joined my mother in the United States and we had formed a new family with my stepfather Leon (who I always called “Pop” at his suggestion).  We didn’t have very much back then but we didn’t know we were poor and Christmas was full of presents, or so it seemed. For me, usually toy guns, toy guns that became more and more realistic (that not being politically incorrect back then) and, on two occasions, electric trains.  I can’t recall what presents Marina and Teddy received except on one occasion, Christmas of 1956, an eventful year.  We’d been living idyllically for over a year in Charlotte, for once in a house rather than in an apartment, and even had a housekeeper but, in a flash, it was all gone and we were headed back to Miami Beach, to a tiny apartment again, and worse, my stepfather was not with us having been injured in a serious car accident.  We had virtually nothing except a bit of charity from my stepfather’s sister, my aunt Mary, and my mother was understandably a wreck so that a good deal of family “management” had devolved on eleven year old me, and Christmas was around the corner.  I’d arranged for small presents for Marina and Teddy so that they’d continue to believe in Santa, comic books for Marina as I recall, and perhaps a football for Teddy (which I too could use) but, on Christmas Eve, as twilight fell, in walked Pop, his arms loaded with gifts.  The relief I felt was intense and the happiness awesome.  The best present ever.  We had each other.  ….  Until we didn’t.  Not quite.  Not in the same way.  Five years later, in 1961 our family abruptly fragmented as so many, indeed most, do now.  As the one I was to lead in the future many decades later was to do as well.  I recall our last Christmas all together, it was in New York, in Queens Village, and it had snowed, and I recall that Marina, Teddy and I along with other children made snow angels in the yard of the small apartment complex where we then lived on Hillside Boulevard between 215th and 216th streets.  Abbot Arms it was called, as I recall.

After that I was in a military boarding school, the Eastern Military Academy, and then in college at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, and I usually spent Christmases with friends at their homes.  Pleasant times, even wonderful times, but not the same.  And after college, I returned to the military academy from which I’d graduated, the one that had become home to me and where I spent almost a decade as a teacher and administrator.  The Eastern Military Academy was a magical place, indeed, it was a real castle (Oheka Castle nowadays), and Christmases were interesting, almost always white.  All the students were gone and the resident faculty members gathered to share the season in front of roaring fires with special egg nog and shared meals.  Christmas then was communal, shared with special people.  With Susan Metz with whom I lived at the time and with the literary scholar, Roger Hamilton, and with the LaForges and the Coffeens, and especially with the wonderful Greene family, David, the patriarch and his wonderful wife Jane, and their children: Robert (who was to become my best friend) and Laurie who passed away much too young.  They were family but, of course, a very different sort of family.

My second “real” family, the one I founded as an adult, also shared what to me seemed beautiful winter holidays and that was as true when we could afford anything any of us wanted as it was when, occasionally, very briefly, we had practically nothing.  Billy, Alex and Edward, my sons, always made Christmas very special, no matter what.  Indeed, my most beautiful memory involves a time when, after a country hotel and restaurant we’d bought in Laurel Hills, North Carolina (the Echo Mountain Inn) had failed and we’d lost almost everything, we were spending Christmas morning in the Florida home of George and Agnes Chamberlin, the wonderful parents of a childhood friend, and presents were being opened.  One came packed in a series of boxes to the utter delight of my second son, Alex (then about three years old).  Alex was very excited as every present was opened (even though most were not for him) and, when the gag box within a box within a box package was being opened, he kept exclaiming, “a box; a box”.  I also very fondly recall when some years later, at a time when our fortunes had vastly improved, my sons’ mother Cyndi and I climbed the roof of our large comfortable home to plant replica reindeer tracks so that my three sons would continue to believe in St. Nicholas, or at least to remain open-minded on the subject.  Open mindedness reinforced by their mother’s refrain of “if you don’t believe you won’t receive”.  A persuasive argument.  I also recall the time some years later when I combed the country looking for a just released video game console my sons were desperate to receive (am Xbox as I recall), one which a business partner in upstate New York finally located for me.  And I recall how pleased I was with myself for having been able to find it, the best present of all for me having been being able to please my sons.

When Christmases were happy times, one of the things that most impacted me, in addition to being extremely grateful for my family, was the spirit of decency and goodwill that seemed to permeate the season.  The hope for peace and justice and for a better world that seemed a legacy from the Nazarene who many called “the Prince of Peace” (but in whose name, incongruously, his most devoted followers caused so much killing and mayhem and misery).  The latter reality became more obvious to me as I matured intellectually and became a more devoted historian and academic; when I eventually began to pierce the veils of delusion woven around us all and Christmas lost much of its allure, its tidings of hope receding and becoming instead, an opportunity for contrasting the stark realities in which we lived.  Realities in which a tiny few had more than they could ever consume.  Realities in which a seeming majority managed to get by somehow.  But a reality in which many, way too many, suffered terribly, both materially and spiritually.  A reality where far too many found the holiday season the saddest and most despairing time of the year.  To a greater and greater extent, the latter’s despair touched me, every year a bit more.  It touched me as our world spiraled more and more out of quilter, it touched me more and more as justice and equity were revealed as empty promises, mere delusive illusions, and it touched me more and more as I came to realize that superficial things that seem to bring us pleasure, things like television programs and concerts and movies and sports were merely temporary distractions used to maintain us tightly under control.  In that regard I remember the famous version of “Silent Night” by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel released in 1966 (the 7:00 News and Silent Night medley) at the height of the military misadventure then known as the Vietnam War, a war that claimed many of those I most loved and admired.  People like my Citadel classmates Woody Woodhouse and Ron Ashe and John Bradman and too many others to name.

Still, even then, Christmas had its enchantment.  I recall Christmas during 1976 while I was attending the graduate division of the New York University’s School of Law to earn a postgraduate degree in international legal studies.  I recall how on the day before Christmas Eve that year I drove with my wonderful friend, Robert Greene, through the neighborhood in lower Manhattan adjoining the Williamsburg Bridge which I traversed every weekday as I travelled to classes in Washington Square Park, and how from my car window we passed out bottles of Lowenbrau dark beer to the homeless men and women who congregated on our route, people who we were too poor to help on normal occasions, and I recall how pleased we were with our apparent beneficence, something which certainly did more for us than it did for the recipients of our gifts.  And then I recall that, after my classes that evening, we were off, back to our Long Island home at the military academy where we both taught, off to share tidings of comfort and joy, a time of awakening for both of us but shielded from the dark by families and friends sharing memories that would keep us warm for years to come.  That keep me warm today.

The 1970’s were a strange time, a time full of hope when we who’d come of age in the sixties thought we could change the world only to have it change us during the 1980’s.  The 1980’s when we reverted to form, our idealistic illusions fading more and more each year as we had our own families and I had my own sons.  Providing for them became the greater good and the world’s ills, and the ills of many around us became less clear, less important, at least to us.  That digression lasted through the turn of the millennium, a privileged time for many of us in many senses, but a worse and worse time for most of the world.

I remember the last Christmas I spent as part of a family with my sons and their mother Cyndi, still my wife then.  It was in 2006.  By 2007 our family had imploded and exploded and fragmented and the last traces of merry Christmases had faded until their echoes had become dissonant and I found myself among the masses of those for whom the holidays were the saddest part of the year rather than the happiest.  Not that I was terribly off, just that by 2008 I was in a different country, back in Colombia where I’d been born, in a different continent, separated from the family I had once led and which I missed very much.  And that in that loneliness, although I was not alone, I came closer and closer to understanding the darker side of our world, a darker side about which I, then a college professor, taught.  And I became very personally impacted by the seeming futility of seeking that world that the promises attributed to the ancient Nazarene proclaimed were our due and our responsibility.  And I somehow blamed him for having failed us when the reverse was much more true.

Those darker times have now largely passed, at least personally.  Since 2019 I’ve found comfort with my current wife, Natalia, a woman who, as a noncustodial parent, has also endured the loss of intimacy with her children.  Because of shared negative experiences we’re able to comfort each other and to share a new version of joy, although one tinged with maturity and reality.  One grounded in spirituality and civic activism.  One which resonates with the echoes of the homeless and the poor and with their suffering, suffering of which Joan Baez once sang “there but for fortune go you or I”.  So now, this season is neither merry nor full of despair but, at least for my wife and for me, it has evolved into a time for reflection and introspection, and for recalling memories of other days, and for watching old Christmas classics like “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and “Going My Way” where Bing Crosby, long gone, still creates the illusion of Christmas as a magical time, a time when anything is possible and, at any rate, when things seemingly turned out well.  It has evolved into a time for my own version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carroll”; a time where I welcome the spirits of Christmases past to share a cup of cheer, albeit nostalgically and melancholically as I recall happy times now receded into fond memories.

Soo, it’s that season again, but this year, this terrible year when genocide has become acceptable in Nazareth and Bethlehem and the other areas where the Nazarene whose birth we celebrate once trod, it’s a time for even more reflection and introspection than usual, and for treasuring the people, not the things, that leave us with at least a trace of hope that the Christmas dreams of our youth will someday be reflected in better, more just and kinder realities.  Times when that gentle Nazarene, were he among us, whether or not he was or is divine, would find us having been worth his sacrifice.  And with that image in my heart, an ironic refrain seems to fill the end of a movie as a portly old man dressed in red and white, in extremely good humor, shouts: “and a merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night”.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

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. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Winter Solstice

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Today marks this year’s Winter Solstice, Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  Here in Manizales high in the Central range of the beautiful Colombian Andes, we are on the Southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere.  The Winter Solstice was one of the earlier dates for Christmas prior to Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar changes in 1582 more than a millennia after the holiday had been moved to December 25 by the Roman Christian Church in order to coincide with the birth of the Persian divinity, Mithras, coincidentally born of a virgin and died crucified.

A day for balanced reflection, for endings and new beginnings.

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

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. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. 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 the Nature of Modern History

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The recording of history seems to have always belonged to the literary genres of creative writing and fiction.  It has seemingly always been, at least in its popular and official versions, more of a creative than an objective process.  It frequently has some links to actual events but its role seems to have almost always been to distort whatever is reported in order to protect the most guilty and nefarious among us.  Consider for example Abrahamic sacred scriptures including their Jewish originals and their Christian and Islamic incarnations (e.g., the Tanakh, the Bible and the Koran): slavery was just, human sacrifice appropriate, genocide a good thing (as was the death penalty for minor transgressions), animal sacrifice was required, women were inherently inferior, etc.  Amazingly, we continue to consider such “historical” (some would call them hysterical) sources as sacred and worthy of adoration while, incoherently, we consider those who actually follow such canonical laws (mainly fundamentalist Muslims) as savages.

The trend towards massive distortion of history and journalism has become exceedingly obvious during the past two centuries and, at this juncture, has gone wild as purported journalism has become a primary source for historians.  To mangle and distort a quote made famous in the fictional Star Trek universe: journalism “is not and never has been a historian’s friend”.  There is a related saying with some truth in it to the effect that “history is written by the victors” but of course, the word “history” in that phrase must be modified with the adjective “purported”.

Recent events have made the foregoing more clear than ever.  Take the recent situation in Syria for example.  The “western” press (whatever that is) is gleefully proclaiming that Bashar al-Assad was a ruthless and vicious dictator whose overthrow must be seen as a wonderful event for justice, decency and democracy, while the same “western” press promotes Zionist genocide throughout the Middle East with the full support of “western democracies” and also support murderous dictatorships all over the world, Saudi Arabia and Israel being interesting examples.  That Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), Mr. Assad’s conqueror is a former leader of ISIS and Al-Qaida seems beside the point to such western democracies and to the journalists who help keep them and their pet dictators in power.  That Mr. Assad’s conqueror was backed by, hmmm, genocidal Israel in its quest to conquer the Middle East is also beside the point, or that the new regime is already imposing a Taliban style regime in Syria, something criticized severely by western democracies and journalists with respect to Afghanistan.  That Israel seems to be surreptitiously behind these recent events raises questions (at least to the bravest or most reckless among us) concerning the reality of the events in lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.  And, of course, we also have the situation in what was once the Ukraine (who knows what it is now).  Apparently impoverished Ukraine was directly involved in helping arm the victorious rebellion and some wonder how that was possible or what it portends.  Questions, questions, questions.  Answers will of course be soon forthcoming and had best be accepted, … unquestioned.

Today, seemingly a majority of the United States electorate as well as majorities of the electorates in diverse European countries are aware that they are being deceived and manipulated by what passes for journalism and historiography and, at least recently, many voters have been turning to populist candidates, populist in the sense of reliance on a more accurate version of democracy, one freed from the purportedly democratic institutions that are really no more than manipulative weaves designed to fleece us as surely as victims are fleeced in a traditional shell game.  Nonetheless, knowing that one is being deceived is not synonymous with discerning the truth and that is where we find ourselves: effectively manipulated by persons we know are deceiving us but who manage to impact our perceptions just the same.  Had William Shakespeare been more discerning, perhaps he would have added journalists and historians to lawyers in the famous line from his play Henry VI, Part 2: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.  As both a lawyer (non-practicing though) and a historian (among other things), that thought, while perhaps somewhat meritorious, does not appeal to me.

The foregoing admissions concerning the nature of the history most of us are taught (and teach), raise (for the relatively few of us who aspire to retain open minds and who value truth) serious and important questions about the real history of our planet, especially during the past two centuries.  For example, about the real causes of the American Revolution and the United States “Civil” War (some refer to it as the war of Northern Aggression while the more objective refer to it as the War Between the States), or more recently and perhaps more to the point today, about the causes of the Second World War and what actually took place in the countries involved during that cataclysmic epoch, an epoch whose echoes still seem to buffet us all too regularly.  We’ve been taught that fascists under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini (and to some extent, Hideki Tōjō) were bloodthirsty, racist tyrants who embodied everything evil while the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom were benign defenders of liberty, democracy, justice and tolerance, this despite the fact that the latter, like the Axis powers, maintained concentration camps: the United States in California to imprison people of Japanese descent and in Panama, for general purposes, and the British, in South Africa and elsewhere.  Indeed, the British invented the concept.  And, of course, the history we are taught presents the victors in the Second World War as benign saviors of humanity notwithstanding the fact that both the United Kingdom and the United States engaged in mass murder during that conflict as assuredly as did their enemies, albeit more efficiently, ; i.e., mass extermination not through a morbid form of euthanasia but by burning and blowing up massive numbers of human beings through firebombing of civilian population centers in Europe and Japan and, of course, in the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Interestingly, notwithstanding the purported importance of verity to the just, it is illegal in many countries to question what happened during the Second World War and why, at least if questioning raises questions whose answers deviate from official narratives imposed by the victors.  It is illegal to question official narratives even though common sense seems to squeal as if it were being tortured when such narratives are even superficially examined, and, especially, when we witness how journalism and history are tortured today by the descendants of the sources that have forced their narratives for over three quarters of a century on a weary postwar world (well, “postwar” may be a distortion given the never ending nature of armed encounters involving the victors in that conflict).  Interesting that the Zionist ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians began concurrently with the fabrication of such narratives, narratives which were relied on by Zionists to justify their theft of Palestine as compensation for the atrocities that Jews suffered during the Second World War, purportedly at the hands of the Germans (rather than, as one might have supposed, the Palestinians).  An alien ethnologist not bound by Terran penal codes might someday dare to ask: “Why weren’t the Jews given Bavaria as a homeland?”

Other questions that such daring alien ethnologist might ask but which are illegal for us to consider involve, for example, some observations that arise from admitted facts, for example, that the “Allies” (history’s good guys in that conflict) had imposed a total economic blockade and embargo over continental Europe which prevented the countries under the control of the “Axis Powers” (history’s bad guys in that conflict) from obtaining food, medicine, fuel, etc., from noncombatants and neutral states, and the observation that because of that, the populations in such countries faced starvation and their leaders were forced to make desperate decisions as to allocation of resources, including the establishment of priorities with respect to what segments of their populations were to be fed and cared for.  Were one to make such illegal observations instead of the alien ethnologist (heaven forbid), then one might follow them up wondering how many of the casualties of what has become pejoratively referred to as the Holocaust were attributable to decisions relating to the consequences of such successful total economic blockade and embargo.

Another illegal perspective to consider with respect to the Second World War is how the overwhelmingly pro-German worldwide Jewish population during the First World War subsequently came to be despised by their formerly benign non-Jewish German neighbors.  After all, the German Empire and its predecessor, the Kingdom of Prussia, had been, for centuries, the parts of Europe most welcoming to Jews, the places where they were treated most equitably and most permitted to thrive.  There are source materials that point rather specifically at a deliberate effort by a segment of Jews in the United Kingdom and the United States to accomplish exactly that in order to promote a secular political goal known as Zionism, and that the success of their efforts, directed at colonizing and acquiring the segment of the Ottoman Empire known geographically, culturally and historically as Palestine, required the sundering of German Jews from their historical loyalty to their adopted homeland by turning their neighbors against them based on the assertion that “it was Jews who were responsible for the German Empire’s defeat in the First World War”, a feat accomplished by manipulating the United States into entering that war on the side of the Triple Entente (history’s good guys in that war).  That is a distorted assertion as it was only the small minority of Jews who had adopted Zionism who had offered to betray their brethren in exchange for the promise by the members of the Triple Entente to turn Palestine over to them following successful conclusion of that war and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire (the Balfour Declaration), but, repeated frequently and boastfully enough by Zionists, it seems that it had the desired impact, consequences be damned.

Since the foregoing considerations are illegal, they must be false and thus, no efforts may be permitted to research them and to come to contrarian conclusions and to share such conclusions.  That would obviously involve fascism, hatred for liberty and democracy and justice and equity, and of course, racism, antisemitism and white supremacy.  Anyone making related observations would justifiably be labeled a Holocaust denier!!! 

Such is the current interpretation of historical objectivity and it echoes attempts to minimize analysis in real time, with our own eyes and ears, of just what is happening in the Middle East today as hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, children and the elderly are mysteriously “dying”, dismembered.  Misguided college students, academics, researchers and non-traditional journalists who raise related questions, come to related conclusions and engage in related protests, all misguided of course, are, fortunately, being censored into more constructive reflections concerning things such as their future, their scholarships, their institutional standing, their tenure, their job prospects, all considerations certain to guide them toward the light.

After all, genocide is relative. 

When good guys engage in mass murder, such as in the case of:

  • the murder of the first born males of ancient Egypt, or
  • of all the men, women, children and frequently, even livestock in ancient Canaan (Jericho for example), or
  • of the Christians in Jerusalem during the year 614 of the Common Era; or, of course,
  • the massacre of the indigenous populations of the Americas by Europeans,

then, even though it walks, talks, sounds and feels like genocide, it is something else.  Or, in each such case, genocide is actually a positive cleansing tool designed to promote the delights of ethnic purity and to meet the “white man’s burden”.  Not so much when the former orchestrators of genocide become the victims (or represent themselves as victims), at least not until they can once more become the victimizers.  At any rate, purported victims of genocide are generally characterized by history as “terrorists” or “savages”, except, of course, if they are presented as having been victims of “the” Holocaust.

It’s a mystery, I know, kind of like the nature of the Christian “trinity”, or how there can be a square root for minus one, or how observation can impact quantic phenomena.  But that’s history for you, at least in its “official” versions.

So, how sick is our world today? 

Perhaps a more relevant question might be, where it legal to ask: “How much different is our world today than it would have been had the Central Powers (the German Empire, the Austria-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) emerged victorious in the First World War?”  One answer is: there might well never have been a second world war.  But then, things having happened as they did, so perhaps there are other areas in which we can more profitably sort of speculate.  So we might ask, were it legal: “How much different would our world be today had the Nazis won World War Two?”  We’ll never know and that may be a good thing.  Then again, given the reality that the only thing we know is that everything we’ve been taught is at best highly distorted and likely very inaccurate (didn’t want to say false, that would be too broad a generality), perhaps the world would be all too similar to our own with just the lead characters having changed roles: our historical heroes, especially Winston Churchill and Harry Truman being perceived as horrendous villains (which they were) and our arch villains, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tōjō perceived as courageous visionaries and mankind’s saviors (which they, in all likelihood, were not and would not have been).  And what about Stalin in that scenario? 

Wow!  The tune played by the defeated English armies at Yorktown in October of 1771 after their defeat at the Battle of Saratoga comes to mind.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

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. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Yešu the Nazarene; “They would not listen, they’re not listening still; perhaps they never will”

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Of all the beliefs attributed to Yešu the Nazarene, none alienated him more from mainstream Judaism and indeed, from his Roman masters than did his profound belief in equity, equality and justice, beliefs that in the economic sphere are, given the attitudes of his modern followers, especially in the United States, profoundly ironic and indeed, oxymoronic.  And they were not just beliefs but practices, both during his life among his apostles and, after his demise, in the Jerusalem community briefly led by his brother James until the movement was corrupted and perverted into the modern concepts collectively referred to as “Christianity” by Saul of Tarsus, a man who, according to Jewish lore, lore reflected in both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds but also in the series of alternative gospels known under the collective name of the Toledot Yeshu, was a Jewish mole in the Nazarene movement whose mission it was to separate followers of Yešu from mainstream Judaism, something in which Saul, better known to “Christians” as “Paul”, was eminently successful.

Most people in the United States and Europe who consistently use the term “communism” have no idea what it entails, just as they have no idea what “socialism” or “fascism” entail, believing only that they are evil totalitarian political and economic philosophies.  That they are merely pejoratives to be indiscriminately hurled against those that they oppose, regardless of how incoherent the context.  Their ignorance is not their fault, it has been carefully cultivated by both Jewish leaders and the leaders of “Christianity”, the movement established by Saul of Tarsus which captured and distorted the movement founded by Yešu, the Nazarene.  “Communism” is the direct reflection of Yešu’s teachings to the effect that we should share what we have with those less fortunate and that no one should accumulate more than is needed, especially if doing so deprives others of necessities.  Needles and camels come to mind.  That is also the premise of socialism.  Neither communism nor socialism have anything to do with totalitarianism, or with authoritarianism, or with dictatorship, or with tyranny although, as in the case of capitalism, neoliberalism, globalism, etc., those negative antilibertarian control features have been combined with economic doctrines in order to maintain elites in power.  And Yešu’s economic philosophies had nothing to do with maintaining elites in power.  Rather they urged leveling of the playing field and equality and equity for all, with justice tempered by mercy.  Remember, he preferred the company of sinners to that of hypocrites.

Of course, Yešu’s philosophies were quickly overwhelmed and subsumed by those of Saul of Tarsus, and eventually, by those of numerous Catholic Popes and then, by the philosophies incoherently evolved by followers of Martin Luther and John Calvin in Yešu’s name, e.g., the Protestant ethic and capitalism.  How Yešu must hate that, especially if he is the being who his purported followers believe him to be.  How Yešu must despise neoliberalism and globalism and neoconservatism.  How disappointed he must be that his teachings have, for the most part, been so completely perverted.  How shocked he must be as his purported followers support genocide, and ethnic cleansing and apartheid and eschew tolerance. 

Yešu, ironically given modern perceptions, was a dedicated communist.  I am not a believer in the divinity of Yešu but I profoundly respect and admire what he tried to teach us and regret that as in the song “Vincent” written by Don McLean as a tribute to Vincent van Gogh, “…. They would not listen, they’re not listening still; perhaps they never will”.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

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. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Personal Reflections with Respect to the Prospective Second Trump Administration

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First, an apology. 

Rather than continue to concentrate on academic research, a lengthy process that takes too long and on the resulting complicated articles, frequently involving technical language and complex grammatical structure that, when eventually published, have lost relevancy as critical time has elapsed, I have, during the past decade, concentrated on more immediate journalistic-style articles, published quickly, frequently too quickly to proofread adequately, but available while they still maintain relevance.  I firmly believe that length in such politically oriented articles detracts from their effectiveness as excessively long articles, even when their length is a result of efforts to attain objectivity and provide important context, are rarely finished by potential readers.  And this article is longer than I wish it were.  A lot longer.  But, given the existentially troubling historical instant in which we find ourselves, it has kept growing and growing, almost as though of its own volition, and I can’t bring myself to cull it.  Hopefully at least some readers will find it worth the effort to finish reading.  Of course, this introduction does nothing to cut it down to size.

Anyway, ….

During the past eight years I’ve, on a number of occasions, published articles defending Donald Trump from scurrilous, defamatory distortions and calumnies by his opponents and from the Biden administration’s abuse of state and federal judicial proceedings, both penal and civil, designed to eliminate him as a political opponent and to attain revenge on him for the political humiliation of Hillary Clinton.  However, as I always made clear, I was not a Trump supporter.  Nor am I now. 

While I’ve always found Donald Trump’s personality abrasive and egocentric, that is not really an objectively reasonable basis for opposing him.  One can support people one does not like and if one strives for objectivity and seeks truth, then whether or not one personally likes or dislikes someone should not impact conclusions one reaches with respect to their abilities or performance.  Still, on a personal basis I had some axes to grind with respect to Mr. Trump and in the interests of full disclosure, I will share them before proceeding with my analysis.  Mr. Trump and I both graduated in 1964 from rival military academies in New York, he from the New York Military Academy (NYMA) and I from the Eastern Military Academy (EMA).  Notwithstanding our rivalry, members of both institutions shared deep respect and affection for each other, especially after the demise of EMA in 1979 when NYMA took our alumni association under its wing.  My personal gripe with Mr. Trump is that when NYMA found itself about to close because of financial difficulties its leaders, including leading alumni, asked Mr. Trump for assistance and he ignored their request, something a graduate from a military academy ought never to do if he or she has the wherewithal to assist.  But that is a personal choice and declining to act was his right.  Then, however, when he first sought the Republican nomination for the presidency, he elected to give his first foreign and military affairs speech at the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, from which I graduated in 1968, and there, he touted his wonderful experience with the military education he received at NYMA.  The hypocrisy offended me and I made that publicly clear at the time. Ironically, NYMA was sold in bankruptcy to the Research Center on Natural Conservation, a non-profit backed by a principal of China-based SouFun Holdings Ltd., and reopened after a two year hiatus during November of 2017.  So it was the Chinese, rather than Mr. Trump, that saved his “beloved” alma mater.

I, of course, am not the only one who finds Mr. Trump unpalatable.  He scares the hell out of the unelected classes that rule us through their control of the federal bureaucracy, the federal judiciary and the corporate media, an “informal conglomerate whose opponents, I among them, refer to it as the “Deep State”.  The members of the Deep State are terrified of Mr. Trump because he seems economically incorruptible, despite his ruthless business practices, and because of his unpredictability.  And they are terrified that his appeal to many, perhaps a majority of the American electorate, may solidify rejection of politics-as-usual and accelerate a drift from both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum towards democratic populism.  Mr. Trump is reactive and easily changes his mind as to details and his recall of past events and past statements is incomprehensible and easily distortable.  At best he seems to have an extremely “flexible” memory.  He is egocentric and abusive in his demeanor and either fails to understand concepts such as “communism” and “socialism” or perhaps merely prefers to distort them as emotionally useful pejoratives.  Indeed, to Mr. Trump, pejoratives are an art form.  But, despite his faults, he is his own man (except when it comes to emotional and family ties which, unfortunately, make him subservient to the most immoral force in the world today, the genocidal wing of international Zionism) and such unpredictability and independence is intolerable to those used to placing their own puppets in the Oval Office.

Mr. Trump is a man with a very public history spanning many decades and many forums.  Notwithstanding my personal negative feelings towards him as a person, I admit that in many, perhaps most respects he was an effective president during his first term and I acknowledge that his first administration was deliberately sabotaged from within and without by people whose loyalties are not to the United States but to the aforementioned Deep State; people who could not abide his threats to withdraw from the purportedly defensive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”), an institution that had not only become anachronistic at the end of the First Cold War but had morphed into an aggressive (rather than defensive) permanent threat to world peace as it sought missions to justify its existence.  In addition, Mr. Trump earned the enmity of the Deep State because of his early threats to massively reduce the enormous complex of foreign military bases that drain the American economy and promote constant United States meddling in the affairs of other countries, an action that would permit a substantial reduction in the United States’ bloated military budget, in essence a massive tax on the United Sates citizenry for the sole benefit of investors, officers, directors and contractor of the military industrial complex against which Ike warned in late 1960. 

After Mr. Trump’s surprising victory in 2026, his opponents, rather than successfully confronting him on policy grounds relating to the foregoing (they tried but failed as such policies resonated with a majority of the electorate), successfully sabotaged his administration through three principal strategies, first, from within, by a continuous streams of leaks by firmly ensconced moles planted by former president Obama to unfriendly media accompanied by a refusal to implement his policies, the foregoing accompanied by a national campaign of resistance to Mr. Trump’s policies  coordinated on Mr. Obama’s behalf by his former attorney general, Eric Holder.  Second, by claiming that Mr. Trump was secretly a Russian agent, a Manchurian candidate planted by Vladimir Putin, a strategy developed and financed by the defeated Clinton presidential campaign with the assistance of Deep State moles but third, and most successfully, it was sabotaged by the orchestrated Democratic Party reaction to the Covid 19 “pandemic”, something that now appears to have been “manufactured” (the reaction, not the disease) in order to damage the world economy in order to facilitate Democratic Party victories in the 2018 Congressional elections and the 2020 presidential election.  Not that Covid 19 was not a serious virus, just that the mandatory vaccine demands and the related closing down of commercial activities were orchestrated for purposes with little to do with public health and welfare (unless of course, you were an investor, officer, director or contractor of one or more of the entities comprising what is now known as “Big Pharma”). 

As a result of the foregoing, Mr. Trump was successfully driven from office in 2020 in what was certainly a profoundly manipulated election, one very much impacted by Covid 19 related emergency electoral strategies that facilitated the possibility of widespread electoral fraud.  Whether or not any such fraud existed or was enough to have changed the electoral results is something we will never know as all efforts at investigating related allegations were promptly dismissed as a “Big Lie”, and groups and individuals who protested against the electoral results, most notably on January 6, 2021, were labelled insurrectionists and domestic terrorists and prosecuted as such.  In order to assure that Mr. Trump did not again threaten the Deep State, he was twice impeached by the House of Representatives (but never convicted by the Senate), once, shortly before he left office.  When such legislative efforts to disqualify him from future political office proved unsuccessful, the new Democratic Party administration and its allies, especially in New York, Georgia and Arizona, launched a series of legal actions, both penal and civil, seeking to destroy his ability to run for the presidency in 2024 but, despite some success in very legally questionable proceedings, the electorate was in what Abraham Lincoln might have described as “you can’t fool all of us all of the time” mode and, imitating the mythic Lazarus and despite news reports and  political polls, he emerged victorious in the 2024 presidential elections and is once again about to take office as president of the United States, but this time, apparently much more careful as to whom he selects to assist him as members of his administration.  Indeed, to popular acclaim, he has promised to purge the federal bureaucracy of the moles who made it impossible for him to implement his policies during his initial term; something that has his opponents terrified and seeking presidential pardons from the outgoing president for crimes they may have committed and for which they might be prosecuted in the future.

At any rate ….

Donald Trump, like Grover Cleveland, will serve a split presidency but unlike Grover Cleveland, the Republican Party whose candidate he was will also enjoy the support of both houses of Congress.  The electorate has totally rejected the horrible, even malign performance of the Democratic Party during the last four years and has elected the Republican Party to lead all branches of government.  However, the perspective that Trump allies will have a free hand in governance is an illusion, a fallacy, one Mr. Trump may not perceive.  Specifically:

  • The three seat majority in the Senate is an illusion given that “Republican” senators Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska have clearly demonstrated their antipathy for Mr. Trump in the past and are likely to do so again and Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky is a true libertarian maverick who may well oppose not only financing of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia but also Israel’s genocide throughout the Middle East.  Given the foregoing, when James David Vance assumes the vice-presidency in January, he may have his hands full breaking senatorial ties, especially with respect to confirmation of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.
  • The narrow majority attained by the Republican Party in the House of Representatives is also illusory, first, given Donald Trump’s selection of important members of his administration from the incoming Republican membership in the House, albeit from apparently secure districts likely to elect Republican Party members as replacements, and, because of the infighting among traditionalist and libertarian factions within the Republican members of the House.  Unlike the House members from the Democratic Party who vote as a monolithic block under strict control from party leaders, Republicans tend to stand by their sometimes conflicting ideals and are clearly divided between traditionalists who have more in common with their Democratic Party colleagues than they do with Mr. Trump, Tea Party Trump allies, and ethical independents.  The GOP majority in the House of Representatives will temporarily be reduced from five members to one due to the presidential nominations and anticipated appointments and despite the historical fact that the districts from which they come have large Republican majorities, it can be anticipated that there will be a massive influx of “temporary” Democratic Party affiliated residents who will seek to vote in the related special elections, as occurred in Georgia during the 2020 special runoff elections for the Senate, thus putting the results of the special elections to replace the Republican congressmen entering the executive branch into question.
  • The federal judiciary has been packed with politicized judges loyal to the Democratic Party (as are judiciaries in states controlled by the Democratic Party) and many of them, enough of them, can be counted on to do that political party’s bidding rather than to function in an ethically neutral manner.  Then again, partisanship is no stranger to Republican Party members of the judiciary.  However, as demonstrated by the large scale lawfare attacks against Mr. Trump and his allies during the past eight years, judges and prosecutors loyal to the Democratic Party are much more likely to abuse their positions for partisan purposes.  The unconstitutional usurpation of power by federal judges from both parties through the issuance of injunctions that apply beyond the territorial jurisdiction of their courts poses an additional weapon likely to be used to obstruct policies that Mr. Trump will seek to implement in his second administration.
  • The federal bureaucracy at all levels and in all departments is riddled with moles planted at the direction of former presidents William Jefferson Clinton, Barak Obama and now Joe Biden who will leak like sieves and do everything in their power to obstruct the implementation of Trump administration policies and to make Trump loyalist seem like the incarnation of evil.  That is especially true with respect to the intelligence agencies which have more and more directly controlled the United States government since the mid nineteen forties and which orchestrated Mr. Trump’s ouster from government in 2020, and in the ill named Department of Justice.  They are, in all probability, not chastened by having been forced to come out from hiding and then having been rejected by the sane among us in the last elections.  Frank Church; where are you when we need you?
  • Notwithstanding having completely ignored or ridiculed, the allegations by Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer, that while a Senator, Mr. Biden had raped her, and then, that the Biden Justice Department had hounded her into seeking asylum in Russia, allegations involving even consensual sexual activities involving men associated with Mr. Trump will once again become salient and the moribund #MeToo movement, like Lazarus, will rise from the dead.  Witness the successful attack on Mr. Trump’s initial choice to lead the Department of Justice on the current attacks on his nominee to lead the Department of Defense.
  • Last but not least, the media, designated as either mainstream (a fallacy), corporate or legacy, and the owners of the Internet’s major platforms with the exception of X (formerly Twitter) will obstruct Mr. Trump at every turn, except, perhaps when he is doing the bidding of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by which both the Democratic and Republican parties are controlled.

As to specific policies, many of the policies espoused by Mr. Trump seem reasonable to me although in too many cases, they are focused on symptoms rather than on the causes of the critical problems the United States currently faces and even more so, with the problems that will confront it in the future.  His proposed appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as unpaid advisors in an informal new “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”) is an extremely timely and necessary move, as are his nominations of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, in each case, charged with reforming corruption and abuse riddled government institutions largely responsible for the loss of faith by the United States electorate in the ability of government to protect them from monopolistic abuses in the pharmaceutical and agro industries as well as for the state of perpetual war which is making nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

To me, Mr. Trump’s major drawback, and it is existential, is the control over him exercised by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but then, AIPAC controls both the Democratic and Republican parties.  It has turned the United States from at least the illusion of a beacon of liberty, democracy and justice into an accomplice in ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide as evil as that of Turkey in Armenia at the beginning of the twentieth century and Germany during the second war to end all wars (World War II).  In the latter case I note with interest that the obviously flagrantly distorted and inaccurate current mass propaganda in favor of Israel’s current campaign of genocide in the Middle East is leading some of the more objective among us to wonder just how accurate Zionist propaganda following World War II, now calcified as purported history, really was and is.  Is it possible that those who doubt the accuracy with which German atrocities have been reported have a point?  Until recently that was unthinkable.  Now?  They may be worth reexamining.  Thus, in foreign affairs, Mr. Trump’s promises present an incoherent and dangerous dichotomy.  On the one hand, he claims to oppose war and interference in the domestic political affairs of other countries but there’s a glaring exception where anything to do with the State of Israel is involved.  There, he is as subject to domination by AIPAC as are the leaders of the Democratic Party and that means full support for the Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing and lebensraum in the Middle East that has been taking place since 1948, something which, as heretofore alluded, raises serious questions with respect to most of what we’ve been taught about the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Nuremburg Tribunals and the existence of human rights and international law. 

Another problematic complex of issues involving Mr. Trump involve his penchant for international “economic” warfare using a combination of tariffs and sanctions as well as abuse of international monetary and banking institutions to attain the geopolitical objectives he espouses.  Such tactics have proven problematic in the past and have been abused in a bipartisan manner with results that the legendary “Murphy” (he of Murphy’s Law) might envy.  Reactions to economic sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies on their adversaries, sanctions violative of the United Nations Charter and international law (or what passes for the illusion of international law) have led most countries, especially in what is becoming known as the Global South, to align with China, Russia and other United States adversaries in a quest for a multipolar rather than hegemonic world order and that primarily involves abandonment of the United States dollar as the principle means of exchange in international commerce.  Mr. Trump has aggressively asserted that he intends to continue to rely on such tactics to maintain the supremacy of the United States dollar in international trade and against the rise of the “Global South” and the proposed multipolar world order, especially with reference to the evolution of the BRICS economic alliance.  All of such inclinations promise disastrous consequences not only for the United States but for the entire world and belie respect for human rights, equity and state equality in the international sphere.  Bulls rampaging in china shops come to mind.

Mr. Trump is admittedly a far better choice in every aspect as the prospective president of the United States than was Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.  And that is as true today as it was in 2020, and as accurate as it was with respect to Mrs. Clinton in 2016, but that is not synonymous with the assertion that Mr. Trump is a good or even a decent choice.  He is not.  However the United States political system, one dominated by two political parties, neither of which is independent of the billionaire class that owns them or of AIPAC which controls their foreign affairs in alliance with the military industrial complex, is, at best, dysfunctional and at worst, a force for inequity, inequality and injustice, both domestically and internationally.  As structured and protected by discriminatory federal and state legislation and with judicial decisions incompatible with constitutional guarantees of equal protection, the current United States political system assures only that the most competent and decent among us will rarely if ever attain our highest political offices.

And here we stand, for as long as “here” lasts, just as Eric Arthur Blair, writing under the pen name “George Orwell”, predicted in 1948 when he published his seminal novel, 1984.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

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. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.