The Ides of July, 2025, an All Too Personal Introspection

Posted on July 16, 2025 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

The Kalends and Nones have passed and now the Ides have arrived. In a week, I’ll start the last voyage around our star, Sol, of the eighth decade of my life on Terra. A lot has been crammed into those almost seventy-nine years, much of it difficult, some unpleasant, too much perfidious, but I’ve seem to have somehow managed to cope with it all and, a great deal has been undeservedly positive, amazingly so.

It appears, at least to others, that I’m unusually healthy for someone almost seventy-nine years old, unusually active with unusual stamina. I still play tennis and when I do (three times a week), it’s for at least two hours, sometimes followed by an hour’s walk. And my hair, though streaked with silver is both plentiful and still dark. After a long life in the United States, I’m back where I started, in a celestial city high in the central range of the Colombian Andes, living on the tenth floor of a large and comfortable apartment only a few miles from where I first entered this world. Still, slowly and intermittently, strange aches are making an appearance and, in addition, strange observations are occurring to me such as that “Jack Bunny” (or perhaps “Bugs Benny”) would be a fusion of Jack Benny and Bugs Bunny, and would make an awesome character: as “frugal” as he was witty and droll while concurrently being penurious and ever so lightly pernicious. I confess that I loved them both although those who remember them tend to be fewer every year.

I’ve succeeded in many things, many of them unexpected. I’ve taught American History and Problems of American Democracy, among many other things, to citizens of the United States, observing to myself the irony involved in that being done by someone who started life as a young boy from Manizales and that, as a serious historian and researcher, I’ve found that, more often than not, what I taught as a young historian was utterly false. Indeed, while many feel we’ve recently entered the post truth era, to me, it seems that we as a people have been there since we invented language. Not something of which I am proud although I’m proud to now understand that history has little to do with reality but a great deal to do with ever-present propaganda, and that “news” reporting has a lot to do with that. It’s not for nothing that journalism’s most prestigious awards are named after Joseph Pulitzer, an entrepreneur who felt that fiction, presented as news, was an extremely profitable art form and, in that, he was not the first. Not by far. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon mythos bequeathed to the United States by the United Kingdom.

Since the early 1970’s I’ve been focused on issues involving the blatant hypocrisy with respect to the two “world” wars of the twentieth century and the related so called “cold war”, as well as on the myriad invasions of foreign countries by the United States to enforce a colonialist economic system deceptively labeled capitalism, amazed at to how easy it’s always been in systems falsely labeled as “democracies” to deceive the populace into accepting what should be unacceptable. Today, that is especially obvious as the purported victims of the Nazi “Holocaust” engage in a holocaust of their own, one against the Palestinian people, a holocaust fully supported by the United States, the United Kingdom and their NATO allies, a “project involving attempts to implement the Zionist goal of a “Greater Israel” throughout the Middle East and I have consequently come to suspect that too many of the lives lost on every side of most of the conflicts since the dawn of the twentieth century in one way or another involve that hideous Zionist project. As a young man I was horrified by the Nazi Holocaust and reflected a great deal on what I would have done to protect its victims, had I been born a few decades earlier than my birth in 1946. After a good deal of reflection I naively concluded that it would have been my ethical and moral responsibility to have done everything in my power to save as many of the victims as possible. Well now that responsibility is squarely on my shoulders, on our collective shoulders but, no matter how hard those of us who seek justice, equity and peace try, our efforts are nullified by the worst among us and I am coming to understand how the German people, previously among the most moral, ethical and socially conscious people in Europe, indeed, the ones who most fairly treated Europe’s Jews, so permitted the perversion of their values. It seems, as the old refrain goes, “the more things change the more they stay the same”. What a depressing realization. Perhaps that realization is what metaphorically led the Hebrew Archangel Hêl él (inappropriately identified with the Roman god Lucifer) to futilely rebel against the vicious YHWH.

In addition to history I’ve taught comparative mythologies and comparative religions, comparative politics, comparative political systems and comparative constitutions; I’ve also taught democratic theory, international law, human rights law, constitutional law and the history of political ideas. And I’ve written and lectured as a political analyst and commentator about United States and Colombian politics and about international affairs, about justice and injustice and about the futility of the antithesis of Kant’s perpetual peace. For a while, I practiced law in New York and then in Florida, admittedly not all that successfully, and I’ve engaged in political consulting devising unusual solutions to mundane problems. Notwithstanding the foregoing, I’ve not really succeeded in those things that most mattered to me, in my personal relations, although, during the past five years I seem to have finally experienced domestic bliss. Hopefully, this time is the charm. I’ve lived with too many women, too many of whom I’ve hurt although, in at least a few instances, failed relationships have matured into warm friendships. And, in at least one case, a special relationship has lasted for more than six decades.

Professionally I’ve enjoyed impressive successes and devastating failures although in neither case were the results deserved, not really. I started my professional career after graduating from both the Eastern Military Academy (where I also taught) and the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, firmly convinced that our government was beneficent and that the sacrifices it demanded of our best and brightest were really for the common good in a quest for justice, equity and peace. Unfortunately, as I eventually discovered, I could not have been more wrong. I found that out when, being true to the honor systems in which I’d been raised, I sought to expose government corruption only to find that corruption is the rule and that it does not take kindly to being exposed.

You know, naiveté, when it impacts others, is as much a problem as is corruption. Still, on reflection, my setbacks are the things that most improved me as a human being, the experiences that evoked wisdom and growth and an understanding of the reality in which we live and brought me closer to becoming the person I always hoped I would be: a person focused on others, on justice and equity and fair play, on compassion rather than on conspicuous consumption (although the gravitational well of conspicuous consumption still exercises a strong draw on my fantasies). In those fantasies I’d be immensely wealthy but dedicated to philanthropy, to providing shelter and food for the homeless, education and healthcare for all, and the opportunity for everyone to attain everything of which they are capable, I would manage to assure a world free of violence and to minimize suffering, although I would still live more than just comfortably. I wonder how many of today’s greediest billionaires once shared similar fantasies.

In reality though, my greatest fantasy has always been to return to the past and to correct my errors, albeit a return preserving everything I’ve ever learned. Not at all likely. An unrealizable chance to have been a better son and a better brother and a better husband and a better father and a better friend and a better teacher and a better lawyer, but not to have been quite so naïve or so trusting, or, with women, not to have so often been so cavalier. Still, I seem to have learned from my mistakes and while still far from the person I’d like to see looking back at me in the mirror, I’m now perhaps the best version of myself that I’ve ever been, and that’s something not all of us achieve as the years grow heavier on our shoulders.

I’ve written quite a bit during the past two decades since the demise of my marriage to the mother of my three sons and among the things I’ve written is that, if there’s a karmic afterlife along Abrahamic lines, something in which I do not believe, then in order to attain a paradisiacal afterlife, two things would seem necessary (and perhaps only two things), two things somehow echoing a portion of what has come to be known as the Lord’s Prayer: first, to have forgiven everyone who has wronged me or caused me harm, intentionally or not, and second, to have received sincere forgiveness from everyone who I’ve harmed in any way, intentionally or not. Unfortunately, I fear I would fail in both respects. Most of us, unfortunately, would which is why, if a heaven and hell exist, heaven would be tiny and hell enormous.

My atonement for such failure, in another nightmarish fantasy, would be to be left as the final guardian of the omniverse, to live on and on, alone, incorporating everything that ever was or ever would be, reliving it from the perspective of every being that had ever been or ever would be, over and over again, but absolutely alone, the only remnant of everything that had ever been or would ever be, but without the capacity to attain insanity. To become infinitely bored and alone. Totally and completely alone.

Yuck!

I sometimes speculate that, if the evil Abrahamic deity in fact existed, something I cannot believe, an experience similar to the afterlife I’ve just described had turned it into the vicious deity reflected in the Tanakh, the one against whom Hêl él rebelled, the one who revels in genocide and demands ritual castration of its male followers and seems to enjoy deceit and trickery and the blood of sacrificed animals and murdered human beings as well. And if that were the case, I wonder how it escaped the punishment that turned it into what it became, speculating that perhaps the creation in which we find ourselves is just its nightmarish fantasy. But then I wonder if it’s all my own nightmarish fantasy and I wonder if perhaps I’m not already serving my sentence as the final guardian of the omniverse.

I think not. I certainly hope not.

I believe that I still have quite a while to live. That’s something I’ve promised my much younger wife, my very special wife, my wife who seems the embodiment of everything positive, a source of beneficence to everyone with whom she comes into contact, the woman who somehow or other found me and seems determined to love me and even to admire me. To trust me and to have faith in me. And that has made me a better person than I’ve ever been before even if it’s a lot to even try live up to.

What a strange life my life has been. Like Pablo Neruda’s, although not as nobly, my life has been much too full and with quite a bit of time still apparently left. Which leads me to wonder just who and what I am and what my purpose in having lived has been, and what purposes still remain to be fulfilled.

Anyway, ….

Seventy-eight bottles of beer on the wall, seventy eight bottles of beer … and still counting. As a seventy-ninth bottle seems about to arrive.
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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/.

Reflections on an Easter Sunday

Posted on April 20, 2025 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

While I am admittedly not a believer in the divinity of any being born of a human woman, or perhaps, of any divinity at all, I am not a “non”-believer, acknowledging that anything is possible and that I have yet to discern the truth, though I have searched for it during eight decades so far. Nonetheless, I have had a lifelong fascination with the Palestinian born in Nazareth whose personal name was probably Yešu and who would perhaps be most non-confrontationally referred to as Yešu of Nazareth, although he was purportedly born in Bethlehem, both Palestinian villages.

I have read a great deal about him, not only through biblical sources but also the Jewish response to the Christian Gospels, a series of alternative versions collectively referred to as the Toledot Yeshu, and I have written and published a bit on the subject which draws me to it as a means of seeking to understand myself and ourselves and perhaps, even the concept of divinity.

Today is a confluence of days holy to major branches of Christianity, the Orthodox, the Catholic, the Protestant and others, as well as part of a season sacred to Jews, a somewhat rare confluence, and it is taking place during the Zionist genocide of the Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine thus, at least to me, it is a day not for joyous celebration of a resurrection but of sad reflection on human nature, and on how disappointed in us Yešu the Nazarene would be, as hypocrisy and murder and mayhem have become the norm, although it may well be probable that such has always been the case.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Thoughts on an Equinox in the Year 2025

Posted on March 20, 2025 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

At 5:01 a.m., EST, today, the 20^th of March in the year 2025, all hemispheres on our planet experienced one of the two annual equinoxes. One would hope today’s would involve an instant of harmony and balance but, … not so.

Genocide, murder, ethnic cleansing and hypocrisy reign thanks to the monsters who inhabit Israel and to their enablers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France as well as among the diverse Middle Eastern dictatorships: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, etc.

It is instead an instant during a multiyear period when evil reigns and when, as Leo Durocher once noted, nice guys finish last, although, among world leaders, nice guys are a rare breed, as rare as are decent men and women.

As was the case when the Nazis ruled in Germany, most decent people, at least in North America and Europe, are deluded. They’re like ostriches with their heads in the sand or like the three simians who believe that as long as they can avoid hearing, seeing, or talking about the evil in which they’re immersed, they’re safe.

Those in the Global South, more sensitized by their experience with the colonialist North, look on enraged and ashamed but impotent as the phrase “never again” morphs into “as usual”.

Sad thoughts on a lonely planet spinning along in a multiverse where justice and equity are irrelevant.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Thoughts on a Winter’s Day High in the Central Range of the Colombian Andes in a City in the Sky in early 2025

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

I sometimes listen to Paul Simon’s album Graceland when I’m making my bed and arranging my bedroom for the day ahead. I tend to dance exuberantly (if not well) as I do but, concurrently, I also reflect on the context in which that album was developed and recorded. And that invariably leads me to consider much more serious issues, and it gives me hope, even in today’s world where things seem so dark, and where evil and injustice and hypocrisy rule.

The album was contextually set in the Republic of South Africa just before it transitioned from a racist, nuclear powered apartheid state into one slowly evolving towards some sort of equity and harmony and justice, still only goals with ups and downs as though a roller coaster was involved, but for one amazing instant in time, an instant impacted in part by that album, South Africa became the shining beacon on a Hill that Ronald Reagan mistook for the country he led. And that light, that spark, had a name and a history and a profundity hard to match, although other contemporaries who, to some extent shared the trials and tribulations involved, among them, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Muhamad Ali, came close.

That catalytic shining light involved was the late Nelson Mandela who, after having suffered decades long attempts to humiliate and destroy him by the white South African oligarchs became not only a leader but a unifying symbol in his heterogeneous, multiracial society, the only society to give up both its racist traditions and nuclear armaments voluntarily, and it was white leaders among the white oppressors who, somehow or other, finding a moral compass or perhaps, just coming to their senses, voluntarily albeit grudgingly surrendered their hold on power. A white society to an extent redeemed, more so certainly than the United States after its Civil War, an event historically distorted and manipulated for political ends having nothing to do with liberation of the Africans and African descendants so long held in bondage, slaves and their descendants who have, unfortunately, whether or not they realize it, merely exchanged one form of involuntary servitude for another.

Today, of course, an evil much worse than that of South Africa’s former masters dominates the Middle East with an even worse form of apartheid, one implemented through genocide and theft and rape and plunder, through calumny and deceit, one arguably even worse than that of the Nazis during the end of the Second World War, and that evil is made possible by hypocrites who claim to be defenders of liberty, justice and human rights from their safe bases in Europe and North America, the places where goods and services looted for centuries from the Global South are hoarded; the world against which Eric Arthur Blair warned us in 1948, a terrible year for justice and truth and equity, the year in which Zionism began its imitation of the Huns and the Visigoths and the hordes of Genghis the Khan. “Graceland”, an album aptly named but perhaps not after Elvis Presley’s mansion but rather, aspirationally, perhaps reflecting on how a traumatized land and its traumatized indigenous population might one day attain a semblance of grace, of freedom, perhaps even a semblance of justice even if such aspirations are not yet realities. Unfortunately, Israel’s Zionists do not seem likely to imitate South Africa’s white leaders and revert to the Jewish values, ethics and morals they purport to represent. Rather, they seek to emulate European colonists in North America and Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia who, in the name of a confused deity (at best), subjugated and virtually eliminated the indigenous populations who for millennia had peacefully occupied the territory European “settlers” coveted and to which they felt divinely entitled, notwithstanding the Decalogue’s (which they claim to hold sacred) Tenth Commandment.

My bed is now made, my bedroom is now attractively ordered, my exuberant dance is now done. At least until the morrow. I have now also read the daily news and reflect as I read about devastated Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes and homeland mourning their dead and attempting to care for their maimed and injured, at least for a few days, maybe even a few weeks. And from afar, I wonder about what the future will bring now that the genocidal Biden administration is hopefully just a terrible part of recent history and a new era is promised. Most probably a strange and incoherent era full of inequity and injustice, albeit perhaps not as evil as the dark days that purportedly ended on January 20, 2025. Who can tell? After all, even in our world miracles sometimes take place. Miracles such as the one that took place when Nelson Mandela crossed that bridge after his liberation from decades of imprisonment to assume a path towards a future like the one we are all so consistently promised. Like the future that Martin Luther King, Jr. perceived just before he was assassinated. Like the one Mohandas Gandhi also saw for his people, Hindu and Muslim alike, before an assassin’s bullet ended his life. Like the future of which so many Palestinian leaders murdered by Israel’s purported defense forces during the years since 1948 also dreamed. Like the one in which murdered Palestinian children perhaps still believed as their limbs were sundered and their skulls were shattered by Israelis using armaments gifted to them by United States, British and German taxpayers, we among them.

Times like ours have long led me, at best an agnostic, to hope that whether or not a Heaven exists, there’s a Hell, one even more horrible than the one imagined by Dante Alighieri, even as I recognize that such an aspiration betrays my belief in the importance of empathy and understanding and forgiveness, one to which I aspire in emulation of someone in whom I don’t quite believe but who fascinates me and who I love and respect, fictional though he may be, at least in the guise presented to us: that gentle Palestinian from Bethlehem or Nazareth who purportedly lived two millennia ago and whose name, Yešu, is universally mispronounced and coupled with a sort of grammatical verbal, an adjective converted into a noun, a Greek term he never considered his own.

2025, like so many others, I wonder what it will bring, some of us hoping for the best, albeit with serious doubts, while others, not only hope for the worst but feel duty bound to do all they can to assure that the next four years will be terrible so that those they follow and support can regain power, the price being no object. Lemmings come to mind and I wonder what it feels like to float in the air for a few instances before one crashes into the hard surface of a cold sea. It must at least be interesting given how many of us continuously follow such course.

So, about Paul Simon, I wonder what he thinks about Zionism and Palestine and Palestinians.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Dreams of Freedom on an Early Winter’s Day

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

I’ve been listening to the beautiful Scottish Anthem, Highland Cathedral lately. Almost compulsively so. I’m very supportive of the rights of subjugated peoples, rights to the independence purportedly guaranteed as a result of the first war to end all wars, the one we now know, after its abject failure as World War I and, to me, the Scotts are an enigma. Brutally subjugated by the English, they morphed into English tools for the subjugation of others including the attempted subjugations of residents of thirteen of England’s North American colonists, whole peoples throughout the world including the Indian subcontinent, Asia and Africa. As an aside, I wonder why India is a subcontinent while Europe is a continent when, in reality, both are parts of Asia.

Still, many Scotts are awakening and discarding the hypocrisy inherent in their subjugation. Bagpipe hymns like Highland Cathedral and Scotland the Brave bring to mind the aspiration for freedom, independence and self-expression of legendary Scottish folk heroes like Robert the Bruce, John Balliol, David II and even he who was referred to as Bonny Prince Charley, the original Charles III. Today, of course, they would be joined by numerous Palestinian martyrs.

Perhaps many of today’s Scotts are being shamed by the courage of the Palestinian people in the face of genocide, ethnic cleansing and the theft of their country by European invaders. Scottish independence. Now wouldn’t that be something. And perhaps a United Ireland. And, maybe even a free Wales. And, of course, a Free Palestine.

Highland Cathedral, perhaps an anthem for the subjugated everywhere.

No wonder it resonates so in my soul.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Thoughts on a New Year’s Eve Two Score Years after 1984

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

1984, now forty years in our past, was a terrible year for me for many reasons but, amazingly, I somehow survived. Something that did not please the evolving informal collective of unelected bureaucrats which was to eventually be grouped together with the military industrial complex, much of the judiciary, the corporate media and the Democratic Party under the sobriquet “Deep State.

Nineteen-Eighty-Four (perhaps also set forth numerically as 1984) was also a very prescient book published in 1948 (interesting numerical inversion) by Eric Arthur Blair, formerly a student of Aldous Huxley while Blair was at Eton College. Mr. Blair is better known to us as George Orwell and he also wrote the dystopian novel, Animal Farm. Both novels were highly charged with what a future anthropologist studying our times might consider “mythic” elements. Aldous Huxley was, of course, the author of the dystopian novel Brave New World. I wonder what Joseph Campbell thought of Eric Arthur Blair. Or of Aldous Huxley for that matter. Or of Kurt Vonnegut. The list of dystopian authors during the middle of the twentieth century was quite long. I also wonder what they thought of Dr. Campbell.

When my sons were in high school I persuaded them to study Latin. Rather than learning Latin as a language, my goal, they learned a good deal of mythology, something which they enjoyed and at which they excelled in statewide writing contests involving creation of modern myths. However, their award winning entries did not really deal with myths in the profound philosophical and psychological sense that real myths deserve, but rather, they involved excellent adventure stories, stories that set one of my sons on a literary path specializing in the bizarre and the terrifying. Something that always fascinated him. He’s rather good at it although I may be a bit prejudiced. You can find him on a number of social media sites usually under the “handle” (whatever that is) @alexcalvoishaunted. Sites include TikTok (assuming it’s still legal in the US), YouTube, etc. However, I have my own perspective on the nature of myths and their uses which differs from theirs.

For some reason, recalling my sons’ adventures in Latin Class at Forest High School in Marion County, Florida, brings to mind a segment in the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series, the segment called “Fractured Fairy Tales”. I loved it, as did they, and we engaged in fracturing fairy tales (as well as myths) on our own as a form of delightfully immature family entertainment. It became a family tradition now carried on by my sons with their own children. I miss Rocky and Bullwinkle and all their fellow conspirators. Boris Badenov and Natasha come to mind but there were many others. I guess the segment on fractured fairy tales comes to mind because we tend to do that in a much more serious vein with our ancestral myths and with the myths that we now mass produce.

Popular perception tends to assume that a myth is an inaccurate belief reflected in some sort of generally shared statement but that is inaccurate. Myths may or may not be partially or even wholly accurate or inaccurate but usually lack generally recognized substantiating evidence. That is especially true of myths that have existed for long periods of time, whether or not during such time they have experienced mutations. Nonetheless, myths pack significant psychosocial power. I believe that myths, like poems, should be perceived as having been inscribed on metaphorical mirrors permitting both believers and doubters to engage in reflective introspection and personal exploration based on the information conveyed in the differing versions of any given myth and thus, generating echoes permitting better understanding. Understanding of oneself as well as of others. Of course, myths as well as poems can be abused. They can be used, as many authors of dystopian novels throughout the past three or four centuries have noticed, as tools to help reinforce prejudices and to facilitate control. That, of course, is true of all means of communication, especially those focused on purported entertainment. Like so much else, consider nuclear energy for example, positive things are not all that difficult to pervert, and that is the case with myths. And that is the path towards perdition on which we seem to be embarked as 2024 becomes 2025.

We humans weave diverse webs, both figuratively and literally, webs that are either constructive or destructive. And we use them as guides on paths sometimes leading somewhere special. But, at other times, paths that merely spin us in delusive circles leading us nowhere at all. Worst of all, all too often, the metaphorical tapestries we weave, or which, more frequently, are woven for us, lead inexorably towards polarizing divisive self-destruction.

The tapestries we weave or which are woven for us are usually based on our myths, both those predicated on ancient sources and those premised on recently created narratives, and they have a profound impact on how we react to our environment and with respect to the diverse contexts in which we find ourselves. Indeed, they are the bricks and mortar of what we perceive as reality, a phenomenon which all too frequently involves delusion, especially when the weavers involved have been tasked by a privileged few with crafting a world according to their own designs, one meant to keep us artfully enslaved while convincing us that we are free and in control of our own destinies. Such tapestries all too often tend to be crafted in the Hollywood hills based on scripts ordered in Washington, D.C. and written in New York City, with input from London and Paris and Berlin and Tel Aviv and now, more and more, in Brussels. Most seem based on a perversion of the mythic Worm Ouroboros cycles, a perversion in which most of us chase our own tails like rabidly confused canines, believing that the cyclic circles we repeat will eventually lead us to a better world and that we’ll get there soon if we only stay the twisted course and increase our pace.

A metaphor comes to mind concerning “the road to hell” and “good intentions”.

I wonder why.

The reality, of course, is that such endevors only make us dizzy and very effectively confused. Confused enough to be easily deceived and manipulated. Thus, to cite an all too relevant example, we believe that Hitler and the Nazis were the epitome of evil because, despite impressive social, civic, educational and technological accomplishments, they engaged in ethnic cleansing in a quest for lebensraum which, during a massive economic wartime blockade against them, led them to consider genocide as a final solution to their problems, both immediate and long term, a consideration they seemingly implemented. Only a very few individuals doubt that the Nazis engaged in genocide and they are pejoratively labeled as “holocaust deniers” and “white supremacists”. But very few people dare to look into the context in which the Nazis actions took place. Indeed, research into the actions of the Nazis that might challenge the established narrative is actually a crime in various countries. Such restrictions on speculation are attempts to prevent the generation of related myths and involve a recognition of the power of myths. One related myth, however, is that the Nazis invented genocide and concentration camps as well and that myth is clearly wrong. Of course, the Nazis did not invent genocide, it has a long and proud history, one shrouded in myths exalted in Abrahamic sacred writing, most of all in the Tanakh, an acronym for the three parts of the Jewish Bible (the Torah also known as the Pentateuch or the “Teaching of Moses”; the Nevi’im, the books of the prophets; and, the Ketuvim, which includes the psalms and wisdom literature). One also exalted in the Quran and the diverse versions of the Christian Bible.

Given the horrible “current events” that traumatized us during 2024, it seems worthwhile to reflect a bit on the myths associated with “genocide, the collective activity that until recently, at least for a brief while, three quarters of a century or so, we considered the greatest of all evils, and to consider how we’ve twisted the myths with which it has been associated over the past three or so millennia in order to fit our current needs. And such reflection, as usually occurs, should perhaps start with a bit of historical context.

Sooo.

The greatest mythic genocide of all was the prehistoric deluge, the one where all living creatures were destroyed (except for a select few) in a worldwide flood, a prominent Abrahamic myth but with corollaries in the more ancient Sumerian civilization and in the subsequent Hellenic mythos. Following that example, one set by diverse divinities, genocide sort of became a “thing”, especially among a group some refer to as “Hebrews”, a “thing” almost always attributable to suggestions, instructions or even orders issued by a divinity. Take the genocide involving all the firstborn sons of the ancient Egyptians (see the book of Exodus) as an example. The “beneficiaries” were purported slaves but if so, very wealthy slaves as they left Egypt, not empty handed but well-armed and laden with loot: precious metals, woods, gems, cloth, etc., a part of the myth rarely related although obvious when the related “sacred” writings are actually examined. After leaving Egypt, treasure laden, the former slaves purportedly traveled in the Sinai for four decades (interestingly, the same period of time which separates us from 1984) led by a certain Moishe, apparently, on a quest for further loot and further victims. That in turn led them to ancient Jericho where, purportedly, Joshua, the Hebrew successor to the mythic Moishe (not the subsequent King of Judea), had all of that city’s inhabitants, men women and children killed, and perhaps their livestock as well. That trend went on throughout a land then called Canaan in city after city as the former Egyptian slaves, purportedly under orders from their god, YHWH, sought to cleanse whatever land they passed through of what they considered to be human vermin. The former slaves had apparently become very clean.

Hebrew genocide was not always direct. Take for example the genocide which took place in the year 614 of what has come to be known as the Common Era in a city that had once been known as Salem until it was conquered and cleansed by descendants of the Hebrews. The Hebrews had conquered and ethnically cleaned Salem a millennium or more prior to 614 and, after its conquest, had added the prefix “Jeru” to its name for some reason. However, by 614 Jerusalem had become populated primarily by a schismatic offshoot sect of Judaism (as the religion of the Hebrews had come to be known), a sect that had taken to calling its members Christians, and the genocide in Jerusalem in 614 was not perpetrated by the Jews of that time themselves but rather by the Sassanid Empire, although perhaps at the suggestion of Jewish leaders, Jewish leaders furious with their brethren who had converted to Christianity and assumed control of the city, a city that had become sacred to both Jews and Christians and would soon become holy to a further Jewish heresy which would come to be known as Islam. A city still causing serious problems, mayhem, murder, theft and other very unholy things.

All of the foregoing examples of genocide were, according to related myths, divinely blessed. Indeed there are Hebrew terms for sacred genocide, e.g., “zavakh” and “cherem” (using the Latin rather than Hebrew alphabet). But times purportedly change and we humans purportedly progressed ethically and morally. In modern times, at least since the genocide perpetrated on Armenians by Ottoman Turks at the beginning of the twentieth century, genocide has come to be frowned upon, or at least that’s what we claimed during and after a series of trials held in the German city of Nuremburg and the Japanese city of Tokyo following the end of what is known in the so called “West” as World War II or the Second World War (but known further East as the Great Patriotic War). In that war, all sides engaged in large scale genocide but only the genocide attributed to the losers was deemed to have been “inappropriate”. Following the trials in Nuremburg and Tokyo, an international organization was erected by the five principal victors in that Second World War, erected over the metaphorically dead body of the international organization founded at the end of the First World War (originally known as the War to End All Wars). The old organization, one known as the League of Nations, had to be replaced as it was democratic and the victors wanted one that they could control in perpetuity, one camouflaged as a democracy but in reality, a tightly controlled oligarchic dictatorship. That second international organization (the United Nations) was tasked with preserving peace and guaranteeing human rights and especially with avoiding further genocide. Unfortunately, like its predecessor, it has proven an abject failure in its primary mission, or at least in the cover story cited as its primary mission. The United Nation’s ruling body to which one might reasonably refer as the “Board of Dictators” (five permanent members each with a veto power of a “security” council established by the victors to rule the world using the United Nations as its tool), had an internal falling out shortly after the organization’s foundation (which at that point might more accurately have been referred to as the Disunited Nations) and the Board of Dictators had become divided into two separate opposing camps, each vetoing efforts to enforce the sort of constitution they had forced on all other countries (they referred to it as a “charter”, the Charter of the United Nations in fact), a high sounding set of covenants, as constitutions tend to be but so internally contradictory as to make its enforcement impossible (as also tends to occur with constitutions). So, talk about myths, myth making and the evolution of myths. Wars, especially world wars and their aftermaths and the ensuing attempts to justify them are practically cornucopias for myth creation.

But back to myths associated with genocide, a concept once purportedly orchestrated by divine command but then, well, eventually, considered a horrendous sin. Mythic cycles tend to be incoherent and confusing. Consider the reality that, after three quarters of a century where genocide was considered unsavory albeit it continued unabated in diverse parts of the world, where genocide had to be undertaken surreptitiously under cover of great propaganda campaigns, it has now come out of the closet, so to speak. During the past fourteen months and, apparently, for the foreseeable future, genocide has come back into vogue, at least when it is backed by three of the five members of the United Nations’ Board of Dictators and their allies.

A bit of context again, one as ironic as it is incoherent. Almost immediately after they had organized the United Nations following the Second World War and had purportedly sworn off violence as a means of conflict resolution, three of the members of the United Nation’s Board of Dictators had quickly founded another, purportedly compatible, international organization known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), one which, was incongruently a military alliance. And it has grown and grown and now engages in military activities all over the world, albeit in the name of peace. Ironically but predictably, NATO has evolved from a purportedly inchoate defensive union into one charged with assisting in the overthrow of any governments elected democratically or selected aristocratically contrary to the wishes of NATO’s principle member, coincidentally the de facto chair-entity of one of the two factions that sit on the United Nation’s Board of Dictators (more politely referred to as the “permanent” members of the United Nations Security Council). I’ll leave the specific identity of that chair-entity vague for the moment, although it would not surprise me all that much if many readers immediately guessed its identity.

Well, perhaps the change in attitude and related general mythic confusion concerning the morals and ethics associated with genocide is not all that recent and ironically, it sponsored by the United Nations itself in that fateful year, 1948, the year that Eric Arthur Blair wrote his most famous dystopian novel, the one mentioned above. Ironically, the change in attitude was sponsored by that same second international organization that had been founded following the Second World War in order to prevent further genocide, a phenomenon that Mr. Blair referred to in his novel as “Truth Speak” (which means lies forcibly albeit unartfully imposed). Based on the “Orwellian” concept of Truth Speak (pursuant to which convenient myths are generated, on demand), genocide is sometimes sacred, other times it is intolerably evil, and now, well it is pragmatic, a final solution of sorts to bothersome consequences involving massive theft and large scale murder, but engaged in by nice people.

For example, during the past three quarters of a century, starting in 1948, a country was “facilitated” by the United Nations in a region known as Palestine, a region inhabited for millennia by a multiethnic population of Jews, Muslims and Christians. Jews, Muslims and Christians who collectively called themselves Palestinians. The beneficiaries of that bounty, a group of Jews supported by many Christians (none of whom lived in Palestine), a group that referred to its members as “Zionists”, immediately decided that Palestine required a bit of housecleaning. And there was no time like 1948 to get on with the housecleaning, something those “cleansed” have come to refer to as the “Nakba”. The territory assigned by the United Nations to the former terrorists who had become seemingly respectable and were now referred to, at least by their friends, as the “leaders” of the new nation (sounds a lot like the ancient Egyptian, loot laden slaves discussed earlier doesn’t it), quickly realized that the territory allotted to them was really much too small for the population they hoped to import into Palestine (which they renamed Israel and at times, aspirationally including the entire Middle East, Greater Israel) and thus, unfortunately, they were forced to implement a policy based on a term made popular by an enemy they claimed to hate, one of the major losers of that Second World War to which we previously alluded. The term was “lebensraum”; i.e., living space. Something essential to all growing families. And that, of course, required “some to relinquish so that others could prosper”, and, after all, there was plenty of space in neighboring countries to which the displaced “relinquishers” could be relocated, at least until that space also became required.

The concept of lebensraum actually involved an older concept known in some places as “Manifest Destiny”. Manifest Destiny is synonymous with “genocide” but, as in the case of the genocide committed by the ancient Hebrews, is viewed positively, except, of course by its victims and their descendants, but they don’t really count. For reasons which an alien anthropologist would probably never fathom, as opposed to the genocide purportedly perpetrated by the Nazis against descendants of the ancient Hebrews and others, Manifest Destiny was mythically described as a beneficent and cleansing, divinely ordained task, one related to a similar concept referred to by Europeans during the nineteenth century as the “White Man’s Burden”. Manifest Destiny involved the ethnic cleansing of North America by European colonists who found themselves in need of “lebensraum” and were thus forced to “suggest” that those already inhabiting the territories into which they were migrating move in order make space for their new neighbors, although perhaps “make space” was not exactly the correct phrase. The wonderfully brave and enlightened colonists had been forced, against their will, to deal with the intransigence of the indigenous population by pretty much “wiping it clean” (a euphemism for “terminated” or otherwise “ethnically cleansed”). Pretty much the same occurred with respect to the White Man’s Burden in Africa and parts of Asia where brave and farsighted European colonists likewise found themselves forced to ethnically cleanse areas they just had to have, for one reason or another.

Is it any wonder then that European Zionists found such examples for dealing with the issue of lebensraum perfect for the situation in which they placed themselves in the former Ottoman area known as Palestine? Indeed, upon reflection, Zionists may need to admit that it was their own ancestors who had first discovered the principle of lebensraum back in their good old Canaan days. Indeed, the Middle East in which Palestine is located was actually the same land that they had ethnically cleansed millennia before. Thus, in a sort of summary, myths associated with genocide and lebensraum, etc. are good, indeed divinely inspired when engaged in by Hebrews, their descendants, and by Anglo Saxons and their descendants (as well as by the French) but horrible when engaged in by Germans, the Japanese and, at times, inhabitants of the Italian peninsula.

The foregoing would seem to be a bit complicated for descendants of the Hebrews for two reasons. First, those they now seek to ethnically cleanse and exterminate are also descendants of their ancient forbearers, fellow Semites; and, second, those with whom the Zionists are now relying for support are the descendants of those who, for millennia, sought to contain and ethnically cleanse their ancestors under a theory referred to as “antisemitism” (except perhaps in a place called Germany, but that’s another story, definitely for another time). Ain’t life strange? One never knows when ancient enemies will become teammates, and visa versa.

It’s good to have understanding friends during trying times. Friends with shared experiences, shared aspirations and shared values. Friends who are willing to rearrange attitudes towards diverse myths, as “appropriate” to changing circumstances. And who cares if there’s a bit of hypocrisy involved. That’s the way it’s always been. Just study ancient myths, and modern myths as well. We’ve actually got a factory for the creation of useful modern myths. Actually a number of factories. One group of such factories was founded by a guy named George Creel during the First World War and is headquartered in Southern California, a region located in a State which the descendants of its old inhabitants keep trying to sneak back into, a place the world knows as Hollywood. A second group is more dispersed, dispersed among universities all over the world and whose primary purpose seems to be to keep rearranging information through purported research, and then disseminating it to vulnerably malleable young minds, and, a third group seems omnipresent, centered in diverse groups collectively referred to as media, each charged with providing us with creative fiction on a daily (make that hourly) basis. Each of the foregoing groups is charged with manufacturing the new myths which will either replace, modify or supplement older myths, as required, in order to explain just how fortunate we all are to be living in such wonderful times. Somewhere, I sense Eric Arthur Blair sadly smirking and wonder just how one “sadly smirks”.

Well, wonderful times for some of us although perhaps not so much so for Ukrainians or for Africans or Libyans or for Lebanese or Iraqis or for Afghanis or most recently, for Syrians, and of course, not so pleasant for the Palestinians that are still around, and perhaps, not so pleasant in the near future for the Iranians or the Taiwanese. Indeed, perhaps only pleasant for a tiny minority of us and highly unpleasant for most of us, but, as someone once purportedly told Humpty Dumpty, “one can’t make omelets without breaking eggs”.

Another very useful myth.

Remember, myths are not always inaccurate, that’s a serious misperception. Or if you did not realize that, well, … now you know. As I indicated at the inception of this sarcasm filled end-of-year diatribe, myths are easy to interpret, easier to misinterpret and not that hard to manipulate, although when properly dealt with, they are windows into our souls.

As I conclude my rant, a complex character comes to mind, a former railroad lawyer (the equivalent at the time of a corporate lawyer today) who became a president of the United States and managed to engage in large scale genocide while maintaining a saintly public image. He was an avowed racist who is perceived of as the liberator of oppressed races. He is the epitome of an ideal myth maker. He claimed that although you could “fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”. And yet, there he sits his visage atop Mount Rushmore and sitting in a special structure in Washington, D.C., sanctimoniously frowning down on us as though he were the YHWH of Hebrew, Christian and Islamic mythology, sort of proving the opposite of the final part of the quote I just shared.

Thoughts two score years after 1984 ad eight score years after 1864.
_____

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

Bobby and Me: an Ode to Old Friends

Posted on December 24, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

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 215^th and 216^th 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.

A Nostalgically Melancholy Christmas Carroll[1]

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

[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 215^th and 216^th 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”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

On the Nature of Modern History

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

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.

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

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

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

Author, Academic, Political Analyst, Political Commentator, Poet, Linguist

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

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