Category Archives: Palestine

On the Origen of the “Hebrews”

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In many senses, the “Hebrews” are an enigma.  They’re the principal cultural component of the Abrahamic cultures which encompass Europe, the Middle East and the Americas but their origins although purportedly well documented in sacred scriptures are historically shrouded in mystery.  Hebrew mythology, as improbable as any mythology, is frequently, perhaps too frequently, considered not only history but sacrosanct notwithstanding obvious historical evidence which discredits it.  Today’s Jews claim descent from the ancient Hebrews but in many instances that is clearly inaccurate as the vast majority of modern Jews are converts from Turkey, Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, especially among the variant known as Ashkenazi who account for approximately 80% of modern Jewry.  The closest genetic descendants of ancient Hebrews ironically exist, in all likelihood, among Palestinians, most of whom religiously profess Islam, albeit with significant Christian minorities.

So, about the different possible origins for the “original” ancient Hebrews who first came into historical contexts approximately three millennia ago?  There are a number of hypotheses that we will briefly examine, hypotheses because there are not enough supporting facts to qualify any of them as theories, and for purposes of this article we will label them as follows:  the Sumerian hypothesis; the Moses hypothesis; and, the Habiru hypothesis.  Of course, there may well be many other hypotheses and one of them may someday even evolve into a theory.  This is a very brief survey, admittedly inadequately documented, but which may hopefully serve as a catalyst for further objective research.

The Sumerian Hypothesis

The traditional religious view is that the ancient Hebrews are descendants of the Talmudic patriarch Noah through his purported descendant, the Sumerian Nahor, a resident of Sumerian Ur, through his son, Terach, a pagan priest of the Sumerian moon god Nanna, and an idol maker (Hebrew: תֶּרַח Teraḥ).  Terach was purportedly the father of the rebellious Sumerian expatriate, Abram, from whom all three of the Abrahamic faiths in one sense or another, mainly another, are said to descend.

Rather than following what would normally have been, at least from a historian’s perspective, their Sumerian history or mythology, Terach and his descendants are described in the Hebrew Tanakh, in the Christian Old Testaments and in the Islamic Quran as having been descendants of Noah’s grandson Arpachshad, the son of Shem, and thus “Semites”.  Noah, of course, was the purported survivor of a divinely orchestrated genocide.  That is telling given that Sumer had its own great flood epic but, rather than Noah, its protagonist was Ziusudra (also referred to in related cultures as Utnapishtim or Atrahasis), the king of Shuruppak, a primordial Sumerian city located in what is now Tell Fara.  Shuruppak was located approximately thirty-five miles south of Nippur and eighteen miles north of ancient Uruk on the banks of the Euphrates (today in Iraq’s Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate). 

Following the Sumerian version of the great flood, one visited on humanity by a council of Sumerian divinities including Enlil and Inanna but excluding Enki, the genocidal flood meant to destroy all of humanity was launched purportedly because humanity was too noisy and disrupted the Sumerian divinities’ slumber.  However, Ziusudra and his wife survived having been warned of the flood by the god Enki and were subsequently granted relief from death by a repentant Enlil who, in penance of sorts, permitted them to reside in Dilmun, the paradisiacal garden of diverse families of Sumerian divinities.  Enki had created humanity from the blood of the demon (or divinity, there frequently being little difference) Qingu, a spawn and lover of the Creator divinity Tiamat, and was thus not anxious to see his creation destroyed.  Violating his duty to his fellow divinities, Enki had warned Ziusudra in a prophetic dream of the plan to eliminate humanity, a dream with very specific instructions concerning an ark which was to be built in a manner virtually identical to the ark which Noah was charged with constructing, and for a similar purpose. 

Following the instructions provided in the dream by Enki, Ziusudra invited his family and the laborers who had assisted in the ark’s construction, as well as diverse goods and many species of animals to join him on the ark which survived the great flood in a manner very similar to the ark on which Noah and his family and their goods and many species of animals also survived.  Interestingly, those same gods, who are collectively referred to as the Anunnaki (descendants of the Sumerian divinity An or Anu), in their youth, had also been threatened with destruction for being unbearably noisy by their own progenitor, their great, great, grandfather, Abzu.  One supposes that Nahor and his descendants, assuming they in fact existed, were all well familiar with the Sumerian flood epic and they and their descendants modified it to fit their specific cultural needs.  The same is true with respect to the Biblical Garden of Eden and the two primordial sacred trees contained therein as well as the serpent who dwelt in one of them.

At the time during which Terach and his sons purported lived, the diverse city states that had once comprised the area we refer to as Sumer (the land of the black haired people) had greatly declined and its people were ruled over by Babylonia, although a segment of Babylonia may, at the time, have included the Kaśdim (כשדים; Chaldeans) whose reigning monarch, according to the Hebrews (but to no one else) appears to have been someone referred to as Nimrod.  Nimrod might, perhaps, have been Naram-Sin of Akkad, grandson of Sargon, a ruler of the Akkadian Empire.  Of course, the Hebrew Tanakh’s genealogical reference are tied to Noah and incoherently ignore the existence of Sumer or Akkad.  Interestingly though, it was purportedly Nimrod who set out to build the infamous Tower of Babel so, if Nimrod ruled at the time, at least according to the Tanakh and to some sort of logic, all humans would, at the time, still have spoken the same language.

Until Terach’s departure from Ur with sons Abram, Haran, and Nahor II, and one daughter, Sarai, the family had been longtime residents of Ur and, assuming they were real historical figures, Ur may well have been their ancestral home.  Their sudden departure may have had something to do with opposition to Abram’s infatuation with his sister, who he took as his wife, rather than with Abram’s opposition to his father’s religion and profession, although in either case, it seems odd that Terach accompanied his sons, indeed led them in their exodus from Ur heading for the lands occupied by the Canaanites, lands which a divinity unnamed at the time had purportedly promised them in exchange for their worship.  In any event, according to the Tanakh, Terach and his family initially settled in the City of Harran where Terach died, whereupon his family, then led by Abram, moved on.  In some versions of the Abrahamic odyssey, prior to the family’s departure from Ur, Terach had sought to have Abram executed for destroying the religious items Terach fabricated only to have Abram rescued by the Canaanite divinity, one of the seventy sons of the Canaanite god El, whereupon there was a reconciliation of sorts with the patriarchal role eventually passing from Terach to Abram.  In any event, Abram’s divine Canaanite rescuer promised Abram dominion over Canaan if he abandoned all the Sumerian divinities who his ancestors had worshipped (perhaps Enlil and Enki and Inanna and An, etc.), something to which Abram, apparently a somewhat disloyal and avaricious individual, readily agreed.

The Moses Hypothesis

A further historical incoherence is presented in the Tanakh concerning the origins of the Hebrew’s monotheistic religion.  Based on the Abram-source-hypothesis, Abram was given the Hebrew’s religion directly from an egotistical unidentified Canaanite divinity but when, thereafter, Moishe (Moses) is introduced into the Tanakh, it appears that Moishe was the source of that religion, having ironically obtained it from descendants of the Biblical villain, Cain, descendants who had evolved into the Kenites (although sanitized narratives insist that the Kenites, also known as the Midianites, were really descendants of Abraham and his second wife Keturah).  In this latter variant, it was Moishe who imposed the religion he had adopted while wandering in the dessert (having fled Egypt, where he was a sort of adopted prince, after murdering a slave overseer) on the Hebrew tribes he had purportedly liberated from slavery in Egypt.

Many, perhaps most historians have come to consider the “revelations” in the Tanakh, especially the “revelations” in the Torah which comprises a component of the Tanakh, as a mythology neither more nor less credible than Sumerian mythology, noting that, based on linguistic analysis, the Torah was in all likelihood composed, not during the middle of the second millennium prior to what has become known as the “common era” (the Common Era), but rather, after the sixth century preceding the Common Era, a period referred to as the Persian[1] period following the “Babylonian” captivity, a diaspora of sorts, and that the Tanakh was periodically “editorialized” in a manner seeking to impact the tension between Hebrews who had remained in what is today Palestine and who traced their claims to ownership of the land from their purported ancestor, Abram (his name having evolved into Abraham), and the more sophisticated returning “exiles” who countered such claims basing theirs on the purported Mosaic Exodus from Egypt, traditions of the people who had taken to calling themselves “Israelites (Ska, 2009).  Ironically, that is a situation eerily similar to the current conflict between Palestinians, genetically linked to the Hebrews at the time of the Hellenic and Roman conquests, and the European and Turkish converts to Judaism since the eighth century of the Common Era who are known as the Ashkenazi and who invaded the Levant starting in the nineteenth century.

The Habiru Hypothesis

The Hebrew Tanakh is not the only source of information concerning the origin of the ancient Hebrews.  Indeed, perhaps much more accurate historical information than the Abrahamic myths is available but, for predictable reasons, is not easily accessible.  A number of historians assert that “Habiru” was the ancient term for the nomadic tribes that eventually came to be known as “Hebrews” and particularly, the term for the early Israelites of the period of the “judges” who “appropriated” the fertile region of Canaan for themselves.  According to some historical traditions (e.g., the Amarna letters, a collection of diplomatic correspondence between Egyptian rulers and their vassals in Canaan), the Habiru or (in Egyptian, Apiru) became the people we know today as the ancient Hebrews, some of whom are the ancestors of today’s Palestinians and of the Sephardim among modern Jews. 

The Amarna letters are an archive written on clay tablets primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and the Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders during a period of no more than thirty years during the middle of the 14th century preceding the Common Era (the New Kingdom era).  Most experts who hypothesize concerning the “Habiru” believe that they were more a social class than an ethnic group, a group originally comprised of diverse ethnic groups of brigands who may have at one time led a settled life somewhere but who, due to the force of circumstances, became a rootless population of roving mercenaries who hired themselves out to whichever local mayor, king, or princeling would pay for their support.  One analysis proposes that the majority were Hurrian although there were a number of Semites and even some Kassite and Luwian adventurers amongst their number.  It was probably in that manner that they first came to Egypt, either as mercenaries or more probably raiders.  If accurate, that would explain how, as described in Exodus when writing about YHWH’s demands for his arc and tabernacle, a group of purported slaves escaped from ancient Egypt laden with gold, silver, precious jewels and woods and cloth.  Thus, rather than having been enslaved, they may well have been pursued after having engaged in a series of raids similar to those engaged in much later by Vikings in Nordic regions, Europe and the British Isles.

If the foregoing hypothesis is accurate, then Abdi-Ashirta and his son Aziru (rather than the Sumerian Abram or his purported descendant Moishe) would have been the catalytic leaders among the Habiru who they consolidated from diverse roots into the social unit that eventually made its way into our history as the Hebrews.  Abdi-Ashirta was a contemporary and vassal of the monotheistic Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten which may explain religious innovations attributed to the Hebrews.  Thus, it is very possible that, rather than descendants of the Sumerian exile Abram, the Hebrews of the Tanakh were a composite group of marauders.

Concluding Observations

During the last three quarters of a century the purported Holy Land, that land purportedly taken by the Hebrews from the Jebusites and the Canaanites, then conquered by Babylon and Persia, then by Alexander and then Rome, and which subsequently became a Christian and then a Muslim domain, has been a cauldron of inequity, something not historically unusual there, but in this instance, largely based on fallacious hysterical rather than historical arguments concerning ancient ownership rights.  Turko-Europeans who converted to Judaism during the eighth century colonized Palestine during the past century insisting that the inhabitants of Palestine during the past two millennia, mainly the descendants of Hebrews most but not all of whom converted from Judaism, first to Christianity and eventually to Islam, must, at the least be ethnically cleansed but if necessary, exterminated.  Exterminated as the Canaanites in Jericho and other parts of the Levant were exterminated, men, women, children and even livestock, by the Hebrew hordes purportedly led by Joshua.  Thus the relevance of this article in raising the question as to just who the Hebrews were and who their descendants are?

That is not the case with Ashkenazi Jews, today grown from a tiny minority of Jews in the ninth century to the largest segment of modern Judaism, the segment that today controls the modern State of Israel.  They may well have little to no relation to either the purported descendants of Abram or of the Habiru but rather, may well be the progeny of Turko-European converts to Judaism descended from the Khazars[2].

But that’s another story and just as controversial as this one.

Limited References[3]:

 K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: An Introduction, A&C Black, 2001 p. 164: “It would seem that, in the eyes of Merneptah’s artisans, Israel was a Canaanite group indistinguishable from all other Canaanite groups.” “It is likely that Merneptah’s Israel was a group of Canaanites located in the Jezreel Valley.”

McNutt, Paula (1999). Reconstructing the Society of Ancient Israel. Westminster John Knox Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-664-22265-9.

Ska, Jean Louis (2009):  The Exegesis of the Pentateuch: Exegetical Studies and Basic Questions. Mohr Siebeck; Tübingen, Germany.

 Tubb, Jonathan N. (1998). Canaanites. University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 13–14. ISBN 0-8061-3108-X.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.  Paper originally published in Academia.edu.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

[1] Ironically, given today’s Middle Eastern realities, it was the Persians, the descendants of today’s Iranians, who liberated the Hebrews from their Babylonian captivity.  Something one would assume the descendants of the Persians might rue.  Of course, the same is true of Muslims.  What Americans may rue in the future is, of course, yet to be determined.

[2] Zionists detest references to the Khazars as the ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews claiming that such references involve antisemitic plots to discredit the current State of Israel and, who knows, in today’s atmosphere were verity is an irrelevance, they may or may not have a point.

[3] It is unfortunate that a great many references originally available on the Internet seem to have been removed or drastically modified, especially with reference to the Khazars, since politicized sources attained growing control over most media and Internet platforms during the past several years.

Zionism, Antisemitism, Jeffrey Epstein and the Purported Protocols of the Elders of Zion

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No matter how frequently stakes are driven into the heart of the claim that all Jews are part of a sinister plot to enslave all non-Jews, a plot intricately woven into the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which seemingly refuse to die[1], related suspicions and rumors resurface.  It is worth analyzing why.  Most recently they are resurfacing on a worldwide basis as a result of the impunity with which Israel has conducted a campaign of land theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine as well as throughout the Middle East, a campaign that has lasted, not since October 7, 2023 but during the past three quarters of a century; but now, even more given the ghastly revelations concerning the depredations of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices, almost all of whom were devout Zionists.  Recent related events have exacerbated the problem due to the facility with which Israel has manipulated the United States, and indeed, most of Western Europe since the end of the Second World War to engage in a series of armed conflicts in the Middle East on Israel’s behalf[2].  Indeed, the roots of that issue precede the First World War, you know, the one that was originally referred to as the War to End All Wars, and the role in all of the foregoing of a small group of Jewish atheists (sort of an oxymoron) and Christian adventists (with a small “a” to distinguish them from the denomination of that name), both identifying as “Zionists”.

The so-called “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” have been characterized as fraudulent for over a century.  They were likely initially written by Russian anti-Semites to slander Jews. Ironically however it seems that Zionists[3] may have used at least some of the suggestions contained therein as mechanisms to become the world’s most powerful group, one reveling in related impunity.  Disturbingly, Zionists actions now reflect some of the most horrific calumnies attributed to Jews during past millennia because Zionists in Israel engage, not only in genocide and ethnic cleansing, but apparently in the ghoulish harvesting of human organs from involuntary “donors”, in the wholesale murder of women and children and have praised rape as a legitimate instrument of social control.  An indicia that not all Jews are Zionists and indeed, that many strongly oppose Zionist atrocities was recently illustrated when the Israeli army’s chief legal officer, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, resigned and was subsequently arrested (earlier this month for leaking a surveillance video that evinced the brutal rape of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military detention facility during 2024.

What an irony. 

Unfortunately for non-Zionist Jews who reflect real traditional Jewish values, while the Elders of Zion, at least as reflected in the purported Protocols, may well have been fictional, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) certainly is not nor are the numerous Zionist billionaires whose atrocities are reflected in the so called Epstein files.  Nor are AIPAC’s Zionist counterparts in the United Kingdom which destroyed the political career of statesman Jeremy Corbin, replacing him with Keith Stammer, and in France, gave us Rothschild protégé Emmanuel Macron and, in Germany, Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz as well as German Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen in the European Union.   

In the United States, AIPAC exercises de facto veto power over all the presidential and most of the Congressional candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties, choices most voters would rather not support, but the AIPAC controlled portion of the national media constantly convinces us that there are no other choices and manages to keep us too divided and polarized to do anything but accept AIPAC’s dictates, no matter the cost to us in taxes diverted for Israel’s benefit, or the cost in human lives lost or destroyed, both here and abroad in senseless military adventures and interventions.  Zionist media control is growing as illustrated by the recent acquisitions by Larry Ellison and his son David, two of the world’s wealthiest billionaires[4] and passionate supporters of Zionism, of Israel and of AIPAC who have recently consolidated their media influence through a series of strategic moves, most notably through the Paramount-Skydance merger which provided them with control over the Warner Bros. Discovery and its CNN news network and a significant portion of TikTok’s U.S. operations, one of the few social media platforms that have previously permitted broad uncensored criticism of Israel.  Furthermore, the accelerating evolution of artificial intelligence, especially as used in Internet browsers and search engines now also “coincidentally” censors comments deemed “unfairly” critical of Israel, AIPAC or Zionism in general, an area in which the Ellisons have also recently invested heavily.

Given the Jeffrey Epstein related horrors being revealed daily which include not only pedophilia but unimaginable vampiric blood drinking rituals and cannibalism by world economic and political leaders, it seems to many people all over the world that we are in a hopeless downward ethical and moral spiral and that instead of the perpetual peace envisioned by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, we are trapped in perpetual war engaged in primarily to generate profits and that, to a great extent, that downward spiral is led by Zionists.  And that such downward spiral continues with circuses, if not bread, keeping us carefully anesthetized, circuses like sports and television programs and cinema and concerts, and fake news.  Arenas where we can futilely rail against each other, wasting our energy but somehow feeling as though we’ve won something, perhaps even as if someone had heard us and acted. 

And “someones” have seemingly heard us, and they have acted, just not who we think or in the manner we hoped, and certainly not in the manner we need.  But the foregoing does not mean that terrible the status quo will continue without meaningful opposition.  Increasingly, younger people all over the world, the United States and Western Europe, many of them Jewish, are protesting against the perpetual war we have been involved in seemingly forever, including against the genocide, ethnic cleansing and massive violations of human rights being orchestrated by the government of Israel, supported by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany.  A number of countries have taken affirmative actions to minimize the new holocaust taking place by filing complaints with the International Criminal Court in Rome and with the International Court of Justice, as well as by formally recognizing the existence of a Palestinian State and by restricting or even breaking off relationships with Israel.  While such opposition, to date, has been no match for the political, financial and cultural power amassed by Zionists, both Jewish and Christian[5], and by the billionaire class in general, perhaps the all-pro consummate politician, Abraham Lincoln, had a point when he asserted that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”, and to an extent, that hypothesis may be proving at least partially accurate.  However, the growing reaction to Zionist atrocities and abuses is not without significant danger of its own.  It may well lead to abuses as malign as those it is initially seeking to eliminate.  Rather than a temporary moral and ethical awakening, it appears that a reactive increase in the age old immorality of antisemitism is also occurring.  And that solves nothing.  It never has.

It is essential therefore to forcefully acknowledge that neither AIPAC nor Zionism in general represent all Jews and indeed, to note that Zionism was founded by atheists rather than religious Jews, and that Zionists, rather than being descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or even of the Jews who inhabited Palestine at the dawn of the Common Era, are, for the most part, descendants of Turkish, Kazhar and Russian converts to Judaism who today primarily comprise only one segment of Judaism, the Ashkenazi.  And it is also essential, notwithstanding the insistence by Zionists that they represent all Jews and notwithstanding the reality that the creation of Israel in Palestine against the wishes of those who had inhabited those lands for millennia was a travesty, especially in light of the judgments of the Nuremburg Tribunals, it is critical to acknowledge that Jews and Judaism have been a force for decency and tolerance for millennia and have positively contributed a great deal towards Western civilizations. 

As an aside, it is incredibly frustrating and sad that the three branches of the Abrahamic faiths have proven so internecinely fratricidal and that, rather than sharing Abram of the Sumerians as their founder, they all seem to be offspring of the mythical Cain.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

[1] I most recently reencountered references to the purported protocols in an Instagram post I found at https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOko_JjjmpG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link (but which may have been removed).  That post led me to write and share these observations.

[2] Recent revelations, although circulation has been limited due to de facto media self-censorship, indicate that a great deal of Zionist power may be the result of blackmail and extortion activities targeting political, military and business leaders such as those which have been attributed to the abuse of underage girls and boys orchestrated by Jeffery Epstein, possibly acting on behalf of the Israeli Mossad and perhaps even United States, British and French intelligence agencies. 

[3] Note, it is essential to emphasize that not all Jews are Zionists nor, as described above, are all Zionists Jews.

[4] Studies indicate that while the Jewish population in the United States is approximately 3%, Zionists represent 40% of its billionaires.

[5] There may well be more Christian than Jewish Zionists, especially among “fundamentalist” Christians in the United States.

On the Organic Ancestry of MAGA and of Its Ironic Incoherence

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The “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Trumpian political movement[1] within the United States Republican Party, is hardly original.  It is merely a reflection of the profound xenophobia that has characterized the United States since well before its founding; at least since descendants of English invaders[2] deemed new German immigrants during the colonial era unworthy of sharing the colonial society the English were in the process of founding.  But MAGA has a more direct historical ancestor: the mid-nineteenth century “American Party” (better known as the Know-Nothing Party).  The latter was a name it proudly applied to itself based on a pledge required of its members to preserve secrecy concerning party activities by answering all queries with the phrase “I know nothing”, a phrase ironically adopted by a comic character in a sitcom set in a German prisoner of war camp over a century later[3], rather than in praise of ignorance (although a pretty good case might be made for the latter).

The American Party was an outgrowth of secretive groups like the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner[4] (which somewhat explains its paranoiac tendencies) and became a major third party political movement during the 1850s (interestingly, a time as polarized as our own) rivaling not only the traditional parties at the time (the Democratic and Whig parties) but also the emerging abolitionist (and industrialist[5]) Republican Party.  It was ideologically characterized by nativist Protestant supremacism and anti-immigrant sentiment particularly targeting Irish and German immigrants and, like MAGA today, advocated for stricter naturalization laws (proposing to extend the residency requirement for citizenship from five to twenty-one years) and seeking to keep the foreign-born, even if they had attained United States citizenship, from voting or holding public office.  They did not address the “birthright” citizenship issue as the 14th amendment to the constitution on which it is based had yet to be adopted, but they would assuredly have agreed with MAGA on that issue as well.  The party gained significant power during the 1854 – 1855 electoral period, capturing several state governments and sending numerous representatives to Congress.  Former President Millard Fillmore was their 1856 candidate securing 21% of the popular vote but winning only Maryland.  However, the party quickly fragmented into northern and southern factions leading to its collapse by the time of the Civil War.

While similar to MAGA in ideology, the American Party was a bit more coherent than MAGA in its xenophobia given the control exerted over MAGA by Israel through its American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).  AIPAC finances the political campaigns of all MAGA affiliated members of Congress who are then required to place Israeli interests over those of the United States (which would have been anathema to the American Party); however, that subservience is not limited to MAGA or the GOP given that such phenomenon equally impacts the Democratic Party.  Indeed, using the “wag the dog” analogy, there are international analysts who view the United States as a mercantilist Israeli colony, regardless of which domestic political party attains political power, a hypothesis supported by the immense transfer of United States tax revenue directly to Israel for both domestic and military purposes.

So, not much new with MAGA, just a rehash of old prejudices but this time, ironically, in the service of a foreign, non-Protestant power. 

The foregoing brings to mind the Peter Allen song published in 1974, “Everything Old is New Again”:

When trumpets were mellow and every gal only had one fellow, no need to remember when because everything old is new again.  Dancing at church, Long Island jazzy parties; waiter bring us some more Bacardi.  We’ll order now what they ordered then because everything old is new again. 

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails; let’s go backwards when forward fails and movie stars you thought were alone then are now framed beside your bed.  Don’t throw the past away, you might need it some rainy day; dreams can come true again when everything old is new again

Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails; put it on backwards when forward fails.  Better leave Greta Garbo alone, be a movie star on your own and don’t throw the past away; you might need it some other rainy day.  Dreams can come true again when everything old is new again.

When everything old is new again, I might fall in love with you again

Well, at least sort of new.  Perhaps, with an innovation or two. 

An anthem of sorts for MAGA.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

[1] One wonders whether Donald John Trump (or, “The Donald” as he styles himself) has registered intellectual property rights to the “MAGA” name?  I wouldn’t be surprised; indeed, I’d be surprised if he hasn’t.

[2] They called themselves colonists but the indigenous population of the continent saw them somewhat differently, actually, saw them pretty much in the same way as the invaders saw all subsequent undocumented “immigrants”.

[3] Hogan’s Heroes.

[4] A nativist, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant secret society founded in New York City in 1849 by Charles B. Allen.

[5] Indeed, despite its abolitionist veneer, the emerging Republican Party was largely a pro-industrial revolution, pro-capitalist political movement that sought to centralize the government in order to facilitate the consolidation of the North American continent and the imperialistic expansion of the United States.

Solstice Day, 2025

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Today, December 21st, 2025 we experience a solstice, really two: the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year, and the Southern Solstice in the South with the longest day and shortest night.  In Colombia, which straddles the equator, in its southern regions it experiences the Summer Solstice, at the equator, well, perhaps nothing at all, all days being equal, and to the North, the Winter Solstice.  As in so many other things, Colombia has it all.

Like the equinoxes, to me the solstices are days for introspection and reflection and more, so than New Year’s Day, days for refocusing and resolutions.  Our world is in terrible shape, chaos and injustice reign in a replica of what philosopher Thomas Hobbes described many centuries ago as the “State of Nature”, a phrase having nothing to do with sound ecological practices but rather, with chaos, injustice, lawlessness and impunity.  The reality is that our world has seemingly always functioned (dysfunctioned would be more accurate) this way but, we have always been successfully deluded through false and fanciful narratives into believing that there are good guys on one side who believe in truth, justice and equity, and bad guys on the other who believe in nothing at all but power and pleasure for themselves.

Historians should know differently, as should journalists, but they don’t, or they don’t care because they’re an integral part of the problem.  Reflecting on how genocide and ethnic cleansing and the quest for lebensraum have become fashionable in Western and Central Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon world, rather than anathema (as we were told following the Second World War), I’ve come to doubt everything I was taught concerning World War Two and World War One, indeed, about the American Revolution and the American Civil War, and which I then, in turn taught others.  There were no “good guys” in any of those “conflicts”, only evil politicians and sacrificial victims on all sides, sacrificial victims who along with their families provided the fuel to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

In what we refer to as the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, being seen as the good guys seems existentially important despite the hundreds of millions of people who have been slaughtered through our elective wars and through our colonialism, purportedly a “burden” imposed on us in order to raise our cultural inferiors to our intellectual and moral heights.  The Romans of two millennia ago, prior to their conquest by Christianity, were just as selfishly aggressive as are we in the Western World, the purportedly Democratic World, but they were much more honest.  They had no problem at all in being seen as the bad guys but, truth be told, we have easily surpassed them in savagery and in a lack of respect for legal institutions, all the while insisting that we do what we do in the name of justice, liberty, decency and democracy.  In the name of our Abrahamic god. 

We are masters of hypocrisy.  For example, followers of the Christian branch of the Abrahamic triad abhor the economic theses on which their religion is purportedly based, which ironically coincide with the premises underlying communism, i.e., not only political, social and economic equality and equity, but a dedication to lift up the poorest and most humble among us while preventing the accumulation of massive wealth by the few (remember the camel and the eye of the needle).  Among the followers of the Judaic branch of that triad, people who for millennia were victims of intense social and legal injustice, post-eighth-century Eurasian converts today purportedly acting in the name of all Jews have become oppressors and mass murderers in an apparent quest for political and economic hegemony.  The Islamic branch meanwhile looks on: Palestinians (descendants of real Jews) are sacrificed while wealthy Arab leaders pretend to care but at best, do nothing and at worst, secretly collude with Christian and Zionist Islamophobes.  Ironically, the atheists among us are those most inclined to avoidance of state sponsored murder and most supportive of equity, equality and social justice.

Reflecting on the foregoing on this day of solstices, a movie from the late nineteen thirties, the old movie version of the Wizard of Oz, one of the first to use color, comes to mind, specifically with reference to one of its final scenes.  The scene in which its purported villain, Elphaba, the fictional Wicked Witch of the East, exclaims (after she was accidentally soaked with water by the heroine, and began to melt), “what a world, what a world”!  That metaphor was certainly prescient, not only with respect to today’s world, but to our world since significantly before history was first recorded, perhaps since we first evolved as purported Homo Sapiens.

Anyway, … enough reflection and introspection.  What about resolutions?  Is there anything we can do to change the inequity that surrounds us? 

Well, maybe not.  But we can at least try.  The strange thing about we humans is that in large collectives we tend to be horrible while individually, although some of us are indeed horrible, the majority are decent albeit incredibly gullible and all too ignorant.  Thus, perhaps the first thing we need to do is to help each other shed our blinders by realizing that virtually everything we’re taught is false and then, by following our more humane instincts, for example, the so called Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, rather than its perverted analog, “do unto others whatever you can get away with before they do it unto you”.  Perhaps then, hopefully blinder free and well intentioned, we can reject leadership by all those who seek dominion through violence and deception, and who follow the creed of perpetual greed and perpetual war, albeit in disguise.

Anyway (again), … these are my reflections after a good deal of introspection on a shortest day and a longest night high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

Reflections on Thanksgiving Day 2025

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I am drawn to the concept of giving thanks rather than asking for boons from the divine.  It was something I felt strongly at times of spiritual longing while I was still more of a traditional believer, times long gone.  I am still drawn to the concept, albeit in a more generic form while concurrently more specifically.  While reflecting on towards what and towards whom my thanks should be directed.

A deity is evoked by most for purposes of giving thanks on this holiday, at least in the parts of the world where I’ve lived, in Europe and in the Americas.  It is an Abrahamic deity worshipped by three antagonistic branches, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and that deity is purported to possess five principle unique attributes.  He (the deity is identified as masculine for the most part) is eternal, he has always existed and will always exist; he is omnipresent, i.e., he is ubiquitous, concurrently everywhere; he is omniscient, knows absolutely everything not only with respect to the past and the present, but also the future; he is omnipotent, all powerful, capable of anything and everything without reservation; and, he is omnibenevolent, all good without a trace of evil or negativity. 

I guess, if we humans did not exist, if our world did not exist, the concurrence of such attributes might conceivably be possible.  But we do exist, our world exists, and evil certainly exists and, on this Thanksgiving Day, evil seems to predominate, especially in the so called Western World.  And that evil seems to emanate directly from the purported Abrahamic Holy Land in the Middle East.

Today and for many years, decades really, It has been difficult, actually, impossible for me to be thankful to that incoherent complex of attributes that purportedly constitute “our” deity.  Or to believe that such an entity exists.  The three attributes most impossible for me to reconcile are the “omnis”: omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence.  When effective, logic, a premise based form of analysis that purports to lead to accurate conclusions, could accept an evil or amoral omniscient, omnipresent omnipotence; or, it could accept an omnibenevolent, omnipresent and omniscient but impotent reality.  But not the confluence of all three attributes.  In general, the logical exercise in which we claim to believe and which we use, or more accurately, misuse and abuse, rarely works because, when its conclusions are put to the test and fail, rather that reexamine the premises and the analysis which led to the deficient conclusions (as tested against reality), we rationalize and make excuses.  We do so with respect to our Abrahamic concept of divinity by introducing the concept of purported “free will”, an oxymoronic absurdity when its exercise is subject to horrific and perpetual punishment.

The Abrahamic faiths are, not surprisingly given the forgoing, fratricidal, albeit usually sequentially so.  And hypocrisy reigns among at least two of them, Christianity and Judaism, the polar aspects of Abrahamic religion with Islam, strangely, being the bridge between them but, frequently, the most despised, belittled and calumnied by the other two. 

Take Christianity for example.  It was purportedly founded by followers of a gentle and loving Hebraic Palestinian from the small town of Nazareth during its Roman era but in reality, the religion as it has almost always existed was the creation of a misogynistic Hellenized Jew, Saul of Tarsus who eventually used a more politically convenient Roman name, Paulus.  The original Nazarene variant was centered in a small communist community in Jerusalem led by a certain James, cognamed “the Just” and comprised of the original disciples and apostles of his brother, a certain Yešu (today Latinized to its Hellenic variant, Jesus). The bastard Pauline variant quickly deformed into a traditionalist hierarchical control mechanism used to accumulate wealth and power, so much so that it eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Today, “evangelical and other so called Christians have completely rejected the communist economic premises of the original followers of Yešu, in part, because of the distortion of a statement by the founder of modern communism, an atheistic Jew, Karl Marx, to the effect that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, a statement contextually related to Marxian dialectic theory concerning economic evolution rather than to criticism of religion by which he meant that, at a certain point in economic history, religion was essential to survival making terrible conditions tolerable in the way that modern medications and medical treatments aid in our survival.  Through distortion and manipulation, modern Christianity, at least in the United States, has become the opposite of what Yešu espoused.  It has become a selfishly capitalistic, xenophobic philosophy apparently enamored of mass murder under the guise of capital punishment and perpetual war.  Judaism has also undergone drastic devolution with a significant component splitting off into an atheistic political Zionist variant espousing genocide, ethnic cleansing and even rape as a legitimate control mechanism for dealing with non-Zionist dissidence.  To those Abrahamic variants, Thanksgiving Day has become a de facto celebration of injustice, inequality and inequity, but that is something the original celebrants of the holiday in New England, the religiously intolerant Puritans would likely have ascribed.

That version of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, the one celebrated today, Thursday, November 27, 2025, is not one I can subscribe to, although I do enjoy some of its incidentals, like football games designed to draw our attention and energy away from our quotidian problems.  Thus, while in my moments of most intensely positive feelings towards divinity during a time long ago when I accepted the traditional Abrahamic version of divinity as possible, back when I gave thanks to “whatever gods may be” (a phrase from the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley), today, my attitude is profoundly different.  Today, my thanks are limited to more tangible subjects.  To people I’ve known and to people I’ve never met but admire.  To those among the subjected and abused and downtrodden and tortured and maimed and killed who struggle to protect those they love and to stand for principles of equity and justice and compassion and generosity and peace, today something that applies most clearly to the Palestinian victims of Zionist genocide as it once stood for the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, or to the Armenian victims of Turkish genocide, or to the indigenous victims everywhere of European genocide.  To all the economically deprived parents who work constantly to provide for their families as best they can.  To the Quixotic who struggle for “the right” against invincible odds, knowing that they themselves will never see the fruits of their labors.  But also to those who, for whatever reason, earned or not, I just love.  Those special people who were my classmates at the Citadel, and those fellow Citadel graduates who preceded and followed me, the same being true with respect to the now long departed Eastern Military Academy.  But also to my former students and colleagues everywhere. 

Today I give thanks to and for my family, especially my late mother Rosario and my late grandmother Juanita and my late aunt Carola.  To the many fellow travelers in the quest for a more equitable, more just, more peaceful, more compassionate, more peaceful and more loving world; those I know and who I can call friends as well as those with whom I am only acquainted and those who I’ve never met but who I know exist, have existed or will exist.

That seems a great deal for which to be thankful, even in these truly terrible times where orchestrated polarization for fun and profit regardless of the cost is the rule.  When the United States I love, indeed most of the Global North, is ruled from abroad by an ethics free elite.  Perhaps it always been this way.  But perhaps, the wonderful has always coexisted with the horrendous among the strange life forms who now refer to ourselves as humans.

So, … about the poem “Invictus”, one of my favorites.  It seems appropriate to close out these reflections by sharing it, albeit reformatted into a more narrative, rather than verse format:

Out of the night that covers me, black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.   In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud.   Under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed.   Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the Horror of the shade, and yet, the menace of the years finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

 
Thank you William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903).

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

Reflections on a Conceivably Inept Creator

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Reflecting on religion this morning, specifically on the Abrahamic variants to which most of my religious friends adhere, friends I profoundly respect and generally find to be genuinely good people, it came to me that they appear to consider their creator inept. 

They obviously, albeit respectfully, consider the creator to have been incapable of creating a decent product.  Indeed, their worship is full of lamentations concerning how terrible they are and acknowledging that their deficiencies are inherent and unavoidable. Indeed, purportedly not a single one of the creator’s creations have been free from defects except, perhaps, for himself, as incarnated, but then again, can one really be one’s own creation?

Perhaps.

Don’t know why but Ford Edsels come to mind.

Anyway, “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” is an obligatory refrain by his creations when engaged in formal worship although, of course, logically, the “culpa” should really be ascribed to the entity, divine or otherwise, who designed such creations, especially if it was omniscient and omnipotent at the time.  Perhaps the refrain should more accurately be: “tua culpa, tua culpa, tua maxima culpa”.

Every time we criticize human fallibility, human frailty, the human proclivity to err against the divine will, we are criticizing, not only ourselves (the divine creation) but also the angelic supervision to which we are purportedly subject.  That concept of divinity posits not only an inept creator but one so full of hubris that it blames its errors on its creations, whether on us directly or on his angelic host, some of which also proved, let’s say … “deficient”.  Nephilim come to mind, as do their fathers.

Perhaps that explains the world in which we live, one where one branch of the Abrahamic faiths, the one involving the creator’s purportedly chosen people, engage, in the creator’s name, in genocide, massive and constant theft, justified rape, etc., (and not only recently, it’s a historical trend), and his more recent adherents in another branch, the Christians (originally Nazarenes and then Cristers) look the other way like the three famous simians who see no evil, hear no evil and certainly don’t expose any evil except with respect to whatever minor transgressions they themselves have engaged in, which they bemoan and chastise, … mainly on Sundays.

My reflections are, of course, blasphemous and heretical and somehow or other, probably evil.  Or, perhaps, the creator would agree that its followers are, perhaps inadvertently, being too critical of their creator.  Being very sensitive to any criticism (consider how it purportedly dealt with its archangel Hel-el, subsequently mistranslated by the abysmally ignorant St. Jerome as “Lucifer”; or how it dealt with almost all of its creations when, in a fit of temper, it drowned them all), … it may be worth reconsidering those aspects of its worship.  Just saying, …..

Still, as Elphaba Thropp, the purported wicked witch of the west, perhaps reflecting on YHWH or perhaps just on water, exclaimed with her dying breath in the 1930s version of the Wizard of Oz (the foregoing name is, however, as envisioned many decades later by author Gregory Maguire): …

“What a world, what a world!!!!”

_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

Reflections on Apples, Karl Marx and Zionist Ethics

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In Abrahamic mythology (which billions treat as revealed truth) Eve, the primordial mother, enabled herself, her husband and their descendants to discern between good and evil, for which, the petulant Abrahamic divinity punished them by afflicting them and all of their descendants with mortality and perpetual misery. 

Strange that it was so essential to the purported Abrahamic divinity that its creations remain ignorant as to the difference between good and evil but, ironically, given Zionist perspectives, both of the Jewish and Christian variant, it seems that those two groups have taken it upon themselves to correct Eve’s indiscretion and lo and behold, evil flourishes, not only in the purported Holy Land but in Europe and North America as well.  And it flourishes purportedly in a quest to re-attain the immortality once lost.  What a strange spiritual philosophy, what a weird (in the original sense of the word) form of spirituality.

It makes some of us wonder at what motivated Karl Marx to postulate that “religion was the opiate of the masses”, today a deliberately misconstrued reflection as, when it was uttered, opiates were considered a positive blessing that permitted those afflicted with painful diseases to survive, rather than, as suggested by critics of Marx’s economic and political perspectives, as a criticism of religion.

The problem with opiates is, of course, that they distort perceptions of reality and make users numb to pain.  Does Zionism do the same with respect to morality and ethics?  Has the reflection concerning divinity by Karl Marx attained added relevance given the current Zionist proclivity for genocide and ethnic cleansing, for theft of Palestinian lands and assets, for rape of Palestinian hostages as a legitimate instrument of control and even for the involuntary harvesting of Palestinian’s human organs and skin, all purportedly in the name of a promise made by their strange divinity, although not to them but to their victims?

Or is it perhaps past time for a new mother Eve, in her gnostic variant this time, to arise and to feed us all apples?
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

Reflections on an Unremittingly Ludicrous Situation

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Republicans are absolutely correct, the Democratic Party is horrible but, then again, so are Democrats, the Republican Party is awful.  Interestingly, both are subservient to the same master and it is not the United States’ citizenry.

The second Trump administration is a disaster, domestically and internationally, but, in all honesty it’s not a worse disaster than the Biden administration, and, internationally, while terrible, it is no worse than the prior Obama and Clinton administrations which planted the seeds for so many of today’s problems (think of the Ukraine, and Libya and Syria and Yemen, etc.).  And of course, the administration of George W. Bush was as terrible and inept as any of them, although, in each case, “inept” is measured only with respect to how such administrations benefit United States citizens.  Each was highly apt as far as the billionaire class was concerned and with respect to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The sad part is that Mr. Trump’s inane behavior, rather than usher in a real independent and pro-United States administration comprised of people like former Congressman Dennis Kucinich or former Senator Jim Webb, real statesmen, it is very likely to usher in a new Democratic Party administration led by the Clintons and the Obamas and Pelosi, etc., also foreign owned, rather than one dedicated to world peace, domestic tranquility, prosperity and freedom from AIPAC domination.  Thus, the more things purportedly change, the more they stay the same and it is our fault, yours and mine, both individually and collectively, for being so consistently gullible.  Of course, things don’t quite stay the same as each subsequent administration becomes more vitriolic and more seriously abuses our civil liberties and constitutional rights, more thoroughly perverting and subverting the institutions and customs meant to preserve and protect us while the previous administration hypocritically laments the sad state of affairs.

For decades public opinion polls have shown that the United States electorate would prefer a political administration other than one controlled by either the Republican or Democratic parties but every election, thanks in large part to the AIPAC controlled corporate media, we are convinced that those are our only two choices and that voting for third parties or independents is merely wasting our votes, and that we thus have to vote for one of the two AIPAC owned political parties so that the other does not attain power.  Thus, rather than voting our conscience and with our intellect, we tend to vote from artificially induced fear.

The stupidity involved is incredible!  Albert Einstein would have described it as insane.  But it is constant and consistent and anyway, it’s probably already too late to change things since, as may well have occurred in the United States already and as is occurring in Europe west of the Caucuses, electoral manipulation through distortive news reporting and, when that is not enough, electoral manipulation through abuse of the judicial system (as recently occurred in Romania) or, as a last resort, through electoral fraud involving destruction of inconvenient ballots (as was apparently again the case today in Moldavia) and through manufacture of necessary ballots, or else, through the hacking of electronic voting equipment will prevent changes opposed by the alliance of Deep States that makes a mockery of even the illusion of democracy.

For decades, especially since Eric Arthur Blair (writing under the pen name George Orwell) in his dystopian epic 1984 (published in 1948) warned us, we have been completely manipulated, duped, and our intellect and ethics have been insulted.  We not only “should” know better, we in fact “do” know better, but somehow, that makes no difference.  The genocide against which we purportedly fought a world war has now become acceptable, although, the reality, when one examines history, is that genocide has always been acceptable, one need only note the celebrated instances of genocide in the Tanakh (Old Testament), e.g., Jericho, or much more recently, the genocide perpetrated against indigenous Americans by European colonists, the genocide in the Congo perpetrated by the Belgians, the genocide in India and Africa perpetrated by the British, the genocide in Armenia perpetrated by the Turks and the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the second war to end all wars, thus, the genocide engaged in by the Nazis was apparently only horrendous because the Nazis lacked sophisticated public relations such as those employed by Zionists and, of course, the Nazis lost a major war.

So, … we rush towards Armageddon, many Christion Zionists with open arms in the hope that Yešu the Nazarene will deem it prudent to return and reward slaughter and mayhem with his holy presence.  We rush towards Armageddon oblivious, polarized and incoherent but, apparently, blissfully so.  Or, perhaps, we’ll just blissfully remain enslaved to our betters who apparently deserve to use us as they will.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

Shadowy Sepulchral Echoes

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Or perhaps, the title should be “echoing sepulchral shadows”, or “echoes of sepulchral shadows”.  For some reason, a melody with the phrase “lions and tigers and bears, oh my” comes to mind but that was from an allegorical fairy tale translated into film, first black and white and then in color, and this is quite a bit different, and not allegorical at all.  Nor is it metaphorical.  Indeed, at least in parts, it’s clearly historical.  At least in part, it’s inspired by some of my son Alex’s work, although not by his novel The Old Breed: Haxan.  A shameless plug, I admit it.

The place name “Jericho”, apparently originally “Yəriḥo” (although the concept of “originally” is, of course, as suspect as it is relative), is believed to derive from either the Canaanite word “rēḥ” meaning fragrant or from the Canaanite lunar deity Yarikh once worshipped there.  In Jericho, in the land that during more recent millennia has been called Palestine, in the part of Palestine now referred to as the West Bank, within a cavern, there’s a special spot, perhaps ten meters square (although it’s actually sort of round, or perhaps sort of spherical might be more accurate), “sort of” being the operative element.  It’s reputed to be the oldest place continuously inhabited by Homo sapiens on Terra although not necessarily inhabited by the living.  A number of places in Africa, however, would surely dispute the foregoing, as might a number of places in Asia and in the Indian Subcontinent.  Perhaps even in the Americas.

Be that as it may, that special place within the confines of Jericho is deemed sacred not, only to adherents of the three fratricidal branches of the Abrahamic family of religions, but by the shades of what might have been among the first humans to imagine and thus empower proto-deities tasked with protecting us, … mainly from ourselves.  Thus, truths better left untold may well dwell there, … muttering. 

Within that tiny circle resonate the primordial shades of presences who consider themselves a “family” of sorts.  Guardians of beginnings and of endings.  Of many, many beginnings and of many, many endings, although, many of the endings are indistinguishable from beginnings and many of the beginnings seem to meld into earlier endings, kind of like a spiraling Worm Ouroboros.

It’s a comforting spot for the souls of ancient gods and for the spirits of their ancient priests and priestesses and for the ghosts of the select among their ancient followers.  In short, it’s a comfortably haunted spot, haunted by souls and spirits and ghosts who, in some cases, realize that their former hosts have expired while in other cases, they refuse to acknowledge their expiration.  Still, generally, it’s a friendly sort of haunting, more like a cohabitation. 

Dreams there tend to be astounding and hard to forget whether one would want to forget or to remember them.  Lately though, they’ve tended towards hyperbolically apocalyptic themes featuring trumpets blaring and four terrible dark-winged equestrians charging.

Dead gods sometimes corporeally congregate there.  Indeed, all but one of the seventy sons of divine Ēl still meet there in Divine Council from time to time, although sometimes, they merely gather to play and wrestle and gossip.  To gossip about the incomprehensibly irreconcilable doings of their sons and daughters, and of their sons’ and daughters’ sons and daughters and so on, ad infinatum.  And of the course, they gossip about the deranged conduct of their missing sibling and about the echoing conduct of his purported followers.  That particular sibling struck out on his own a bit longer than three millennia ago and, asserting that he is a “jealous god” has done his best to eliminate all echoes of divinity other than his own.  Rumor has it (although with rumors one can never vouch for their accuracy) that the remaining members of Ēl’s Divine Council have taken to heavy metal music although melded with ancient Middle Eastern rhythms.  Could be I guess.

Anyway, “ancient” is a relative term there. 

To many of the elder gods, the most ancient of the primordial echoes we the living sometimes recall are still little more than the yelps of young interlopers.  What the eldest of all gods think, the ones who were hoary long before the advent of divine Ēl, none living elsewhere now know, although there, in that primordial habitation, echoes of their voices still sometimes seem to resonate, to resonate among the darkest shadows.  Dusky shadows from somewhere beyond the realms of time and space. 

Interlopers have always arrived there in waves.  They still do, as though drawn by a primordial gravitational well.  Indeed, for many, many millennia, many interlopers have found themselves trapped there by a strange event horizon and then, have found themselves drawn into tiny but very complete universes, or perhaps multiverses, although the correct term may be more akin to a sole omniverse.  Evidently some sort of spell is involved, or magic, or miracles, or arcane laws of physics.  Those concepts are difficult to distinguish there, primarily differing, like beauty, in the eyes of the one doing the beholding.

Syncretism plays there at times.  Meddlingly melding echoes of personalities long gone into new souls, souls that then scatter to the four winds, left free to find their own mischief, mischief bereft of memories and of guidance.  An amalgam that may explain why we find ourselves where we now seem to be. 

But who knows. 

The “family” does not share its secrets, or its intuitions or its suspicions.  And if any of its members dared to do so, no one would believe them or, perhaps more accurately, very few would believe them and they would probably be considered no more than peculiar conspiracy theorists by their peers.

In Jericho: where the genocidal Hebrew leader Joshua once murdered so many and where mayhem and murder echo still.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) 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/.

Reflections on the New York City Electorate and, Secondarily, on the Mayoral Candidacy of Zohran Mamdani

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Like Zohran Mamdani, but more like Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Pepe Mujica and many others, I define myself as a democratic socialist.  That is very different from authoritarian socialists, “social democrats” and very, very different from a supporters of the ill-named Democratic Party or of the GOP although, with respect to the latter two, I find the Democratic Party much more hypocritical, despicable and dangerous.  I am not a Trump or MAGA supporter, far from it, but nor am I afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome.  Trump has many faults but all are shared by the most prominent Democrats, Democrats like war mongers Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden to name just a few, especially with respect to their primary allegiance to Israel, allegiance bought and paid for by AIPAC.  My primary regret with reference to Mr. Mamdani’s candidacy is that it is Messrs. Cuomo and Adams who are running as independents and Mr. Mamdani will be the candidate of the utterly corrupt Democratic Party, although its leadership has not only rejected him but is actively opposing him.  More than anything, New York City, New York State and the United States need new political alternatives whose loyalty is to the United States and its citizenry rather than to a foreign government (Israel) or to the billionaire caste (it’s more a caste than a class).  But no such luck.  At least not yet.

I find the article entitled “Debunking the Myths about Mamdani’s Candidacy” written by Stewart Lawrence and published on August 13, 2025 in Counterpunch (available at https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/13/debunking-the-myths-about-mamdanis-candidacy/) not only interesting, but reflective of a hopeful sign, i.e.,  that the young may prove significantly less naïve and less subject to media manipulation and much more cognitively competent and ethical than most of their elders, a bit strange given that my generation, the Baby Boomers, shared many of their values when we were their age. When purportedly, “the Times they were a ‘Changing”.  That is a double edged sword, though, as my generation permitted its idealism to be corrupted in a quest for financial security as soon as we became parents.  One wonders if that same affliction will also contaminate the best of Generation X and Generation Z, etc.

While I share some, perhaps many, perhaps even most of Mr. Mamdani’s values and beliefs, there are postures I feel are simplistically addressed by him.  For example, those dealing with issues like immigration and law enforcement which, while very important, are more complex than what he perceives.  And, I’m concerned that beneath it all, he’s a partisan Democrat who suffers from the obligatory Trump Derangement Syndrome and who, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”, a moniker I find presumptive) will, if he is elected (a near certainty, sell out his values in exchange for acceptance by the same old power brokers who have always controlled everything and that he will all too soon permit himself to serve as little more than a deceptive token.  A cynical view, I know, but one well earned.

Still, for now, Mr. Mamdani is a breath of fresh air and much more importantly, those who are drawn to him, especially those among the young and among most of New York City’s Jewish population seem to have had the cobwebs removed from their eyes and their ears and their mouths reflecting a political awakening that may help lead us away from the Deep State’s perpetual wars and thus from the edge of the apocalyptic abyss. It may center us on the importance of spending our hard earned tax revenue on positive things, items like free universal health care, like free education for all at all levels, like affordable housing for all, like adequate nutrition for all, like all of the things, including the foregoing, available to Israeli and European citizens, who our government subsidizes. 

Wouldn’t that be something? 

Especially if the New York City electorate has really woken to the realities facing us, especially if they reflect not just a New York City phenomenon.  Especially if they can reject “woke” triumphalism and virtue shaming which, rather than draw others to their idealistic goals, just turns them off.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; 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/.