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.
_____

© 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/.

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.
_____

© 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.

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

Personal Reflections with Respect to the Prospective Second Trump Administration

Posted on December 7, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

First, an apology.

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

Anyway, ….

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

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

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

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

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

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

At any rate ….

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

The three seat majority in the Senate is an illusion given that “Republican” senators Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska have clearly demonstrated their antipathy for Mr. Trump in the past and are likely to do so again and Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky is a true libertarian maverick who may well oppose not only financing of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia but also Israel’s genocide throughout the Middle East. Given the foregoing, when James David Vance assumes the vice-presidency in January, he may have his hands full breaking senatorial ties, especially with respect to confirmation of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.

The narrow majority attained by the Republican Party in the House of Representatives is also illusory, first, given Donald Trump’s selection of important members of his administration from the incoming Republican membership in the House, albeit from apparently secure districts likely to elect Republican Party members as replacements, and, because of the infighting among traditionalist and libertarian factions within the Republican members of the House. Unlike the House members from the Democratic Party who vote as a monolithic block under strict control from party leaders, Republicans tend to stand by their sometimes conflicting ideals and are clearly divided between traditionalists who have more in common with their Democratic Party colleagues than they do with Mr. Trump, Tea Party Trump allies, and ethical independents. The GOP majority in the House of Representatives will temporarily be reduced from five members to one due to the presidential nominations and anticipated appointments and despite the historical fact that the districts from which they come have large Republican majorities, it can be anticipated that there will be a massive influx of “temporary” Democratic Party affiliated residents who will seek to vote in the related special elections, as occurred in Georgia during the 2020 special runoff elections for the Senate, thus putting the results of the special elections to replace the Republican congressmen entering the executive branch into question.

The federal judiciary has been packed with politicized judges loyal to the Democratic Party (as are judiciaries in states controlled by the Democratic Party) and many of them, enough of them, can be counted on to do that political party’s bidding rather than to function in an ethically neutral manner. Then again, partisanship is no stranger to Republican Party members of the judiciary. However, as demonstrated by the large scale lawfare attacks against Mr. Trump and his allies during the past eight years, judges and prosecutors loyal to the Democratic Party are much more likely to abuse their positions for partisan purposes. The unconstitutional usurpation of power by federal judges from both parties through the issuance of injunctions that apply beyond the territorial jurisdiction of their courts poses an additional weapon likely to be used to obstruct policies that Mr. Trump will seek to implement in his second administration.

The federal bureaucracy at all levels and in all departments is riddled with moles planted at the direction of former presidents William Jefferson Clinton, Barak Obama and now Joe Biden who will leak like sieves and do everything in their power to obstruct the implementation of Trump administration policies and to make Trump loyalist seem like the incarnation of evil. That is especially true with respect to the intelligence agencies which have more and more directly controlled the United States government since the mid nineteen forties and which orchestrated Mr. Trump’s ouster from government in 2020, and in the ill named Department of Justice. They are, in all probability, not chastened by having been forced to come out from hiding and then having been rejected by the sane among us in the last elections. Frank Church; where are you when we need you?

Notwithstanding having completely ignored or ridiculed, the allegations by Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer, that while a Senator, Mr. Biden had raped her, and then, that the Biden Justice Department had hounded her into seeking asylum in Russia, allegations involving even consensual sexual activities involving men associated with Mr. Trump will once again become salient and the moribund #MeToo movement, like Lazarus, will rise from the dead. Witness the successful attack on Mr. Trump’s initial choice to lead the Department of Justice on the current attacks on his nominee to lead the Department of Defense.

Last but not least, the media, designated as either mainstream (a fallacy), corporate or legacy, and the owners of the Internet’s major platforms with the exception of X (formerly Twitter) will obstruct Mr. Trump at every turn, except, perhaps when he is doing the bidding of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) by which both the Democratic and Republican parties are controlled.

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

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

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

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

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

A Satirical Trumpian Fairy Tale, Twice Removed

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

Trumpets please!!!!

Ladies and gentlemen, we present this sort of satirically sordid tale for your amusement and entertainment. It may or may not be based on fact, that’s a matter of perspective, and the names may or may not have been changed to protect the innocent. Or the guilty. Once again, a matter of perspective.

Let’s begin:

Deius Clandestinius Amorphus, the eighty seventh of that designation in his dynasty, glanced languidly at his twenty seventh consort, soon to be his eighth wife, junior grade, at least for the time being. Time would tell how high she rose or how far she fell. Hard to predict at the moment as she had just turned twelve (or so she claimed, she looked much closer to fifty) and he was just short of eighty-three. He was not an emperor, or a king, or a prince, or even a duke. Rather, he was an ascendant file clerk at the small law firm of Blathers & Associates. Small but successful, a boutique firm specializing in electoral manipulation. Sly, as he preferred to be called given all the syllables and numbers in his name, was the eighth cousin, thrice removed, of Yackoff Stanton, the senior associate in the firm to whom he owed his position with its attendant salary and more importantly, its fringe benefits. Yackoff, in turn, was aspiring and constantly plotting to ascend to the position of most junior partner, a position long unfilled as the firm was bereft of any partners at all, Mrs. Blather not being keen on having to share her authority with anyone else, not since she had attained her current position upon the death of her husband, Slayton Armington Blathers, the great grandson thrice removed of the firm’s founder.

Like Kamala (that was the impending bride’s name), Mrs. Blathers had once also been a consort but had ascended to the role of junior wife from which she had clawed and seduced her way to senior wife-once-removed, further ascending to senior wife when her predecessor succumbed to a strange and inexplicable stomached ailment after tea and crumpets or some such dainty brought to her by her ladies in waiting, the current Mrs. Blathers among them, … perhaps fortuitously. The current widow Blathers did not care for tea or crumpets or for any other such dainties, perhaps because her own husband had suffered a fate similar to that suffered by her own predecessor soon after the dowager Blathers had become senior wife. Some considered it interesting that the latest Mrs. Blathers first name was Lucretia, … but that’s another story.

Sly was a diligent and dedicated employee whose principle responsibility involved the destruction of electoral records (or what for a brief instant in time had passed as electoral records), before their authenticity could be verified, which he did in coordination with numerous county clerks’ and electoral supervisors’ offices in what had once been the State of California (in what had once been a federal republic of sorts). That’s what made him such a catch and explained his numerous concubines and wives, that and the fact that he was the youngest elder in the Reformed Orthodox California Church of All Saints and Assorted Personages, Nancy Pelosi chapter. Nancy Pelosi had long been Lucretia’s favorite saint.

Because of the sinecure involved, Sly had never aspired to become even the most junior deputy associate twice removed, much less a partner. He not only knew on which side his bread was buttered, but also where the jam and honey and peanut butter and cream cheese were hidden. Sly had no children, none at all, but he did have quite a few cousins in varying degrees of consanguinity. Nor did he plan on ever having any children if he could help it. He did, however, have one cat, a very old and very cranky cat, one who mainly slept and ate nowadays, or perhaps, she always had. And snarled, snarled a lot, definitely snarled. He had, for reasons unknown or at least never admitted, named her Hillary.

Lucretia liked neither Hillary nor Kamala, being, for some reason, of a very suspicious nature, nor did she like Yackoff although he was her stepsister’s great grandson, nor did she like Sly but Sly managed to remain largely unnoticed. Truth be told, except for her admiration for St. Nancy, Lucretia did not seem to like anyone, anyone at all. And Lucretia kept no pets, she was suspicious of animals as well. She just sort of kept to herself, counting her ever increasing virtual mountains of bitcoins, a sort of female Scrooge McDuck but without that billionaire avian’s sense of adventure. She had once been eerily beautiful but now, despite numerous facelifts and other aesthetic procedures, people who somehow or other managed to navigate the complex labyrinth of security in which she was ensconced all too frequently mistook her for a rare pallid walking and talking prune (although the talking was mainly limited to “who the Hell are you and how did you get in here!!!”). Still, she was a competent albeit not a creative administrator and the firm prospered, although there were those who nervously whispered, mainly to themselves, that the firm ran itself. That, of course, was not true, it was run by a virtual artificial intelligence project, a joint project really, one referred to as “AG Holder” by those who knew of it. A joint project devised by a cabal of former intelligence agency leaders and former presidents of what had once been a federal republic.

It was ironic that given the reality that with the demise of that once-upon-a-time federal republic, elections had no meaning and thus, there was really no need to manipulate them, but the firm’s success had been deemed a work of art and a natural treasure (in California), and thus, elections continued to be held and, as sure as the fact that the sun was likely to both rise and set, even though it could rarely be seen through the California smog, electoral results were artfully delayed for longer and longer periods of time, time during which Sly and his coterie of county clerks and electoral “supervisors” danced their dance of many veils.

As the nuptials for Sly and Kamala approached, Oprah, Sly’s current senior wife fretted. She always fretted concerning her weight which seemed involved in a mysterious game of give and take, but now she fretted about Kamala, until recently her latest “bestest” friend. A “bestest” friend who certainly paid well for being befriended.

“What if for some reason or other the wedding was called off”? How, wondered Oprah, would that affect their blossoming relationship?

Elsewhere, similar thoughts were occurring to Kamala.

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“And Perhaps” …. An Exercise in Positive Wishful Thinking

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

Dateline, November 6, 2014

I did not support Mr. Trump’s aspirations to return to the house from which he was evicted four years ago, perhaps improperly so, we’re not likely to ever know. But I certainly did not support the continuation of the tyranny under which so many in the United States and abroad have been forced to live during the past four years. I am and have been a political independent for many decades although I have supported third party candidates, including candidates from political parties with very differing philosophies, political parties like the Libertarian Party and the Green Party and various socialist movements. In truth, like Albert Einstein and Noam Chomsky and Nelson Mandela, etc., I consider myself a democratic socialist philosophically. Thus on the day after the presidential electoral victory of Donald J. Trump, I watch public reactions with interest and, I confess, a bit of ambivalence. I especially note with a bit of sardonic humor how, furious, president-elect Trump’s Deep State critics in the media and the Democratic Party seek to sow panic and more discord, whining that he will now seek revenge for all of the trauma they sought to cause him and many other opponents through abuse of the legal and penal systems during the past four years. Hell, during the past eight years.

Their fear is understandable, a rapist fears angry parents, angry siblings, angry spouses and police and prosecutors too. And that fear is well earned. And perhaps it’s justified if not justifiable. Perhaps those who have abused the justice and penal system so flagrantly during the past four years are in for a taste of their own medicine. But perhaps not. During his first term in office Mr. Trump, after all, did not seek to prosecute the Clintons or their allies, even after the Steele Dossier affair.

There are other possibilities.

Having been the victim of tyranny in action and abuse of power by the Biden administration, not only against him but against thousands and thousands of ordinary citizens, against Jill Stein, Cornell West and Robert F. Kennedy, against thousands of patriotic Americans who protested on January 6, 2021 in a manner much less flagrant than did American “heroes” in Boston Harbor centuries ago or opponents of police brutality against African Americans just five years ago, perhaps his attitude will surprise even those quacking in their boots in fear of chickens coming home to roost.

Perhaps his administration will focus on critical issues such as sane electoral safeguards, safeguards like easy to obtain voter identification with photographs, fingerprints and other verifiable forms of minimizing fraud while concurrently seeking to assure that participation in electoral processes by all eligible voters is facilitated. And perhaps he will recommend legislation to Congress outlawing censorship and other means of threatening the exercise of freedom of opinion and freedom of expression, whether by public authorities or by the monopolistic private entities that have gained control over the infrastructure most of us now use to communicate. And perhaps he will propose additional legislation to Congress and state legislatures that will outlaw and severely penalize the abuse of the penal and judicial systems for partisan political purposes, eliminating related immunity which leads to impunity. And perhaps his solicitor general can convince the Supreme Court to overturn the egregious decision in Sullivan v NY Times which has facilitated the death of objective journalism in the United States and facilitated the character assassination of so many, including Mr. Trump. And perhaps Mr. Trump will propose a constitutional amendment that will outlaw legalized bribery through political contributions and generous fringe benefits such as free travel, etc., and seriously regulate the utterly corrupt lobbying industry.

Perhaps Mr. Trump will avoid the meddling in the affairs of other countries, including the imposition and maintenance of ludicrous punitive economic sanctions and economic blockades that destroy their economies and create a crescendo of illegal immigration seeking solace in the land that made them all kinds of promises if they’d only turn against their brethren, and, then, perhaps he and his political allies will support meaningful and fair immigration reform that will encourage compliance with applicable laws, not only by depriving violators of all related benefits and building walls, but by providing for prompt, fair and equitable procedures for immigration by foreigners who have a legitimate basis to seek permanent residency and then citizenship the way the ancestors of most current citizens of the United States once obtained it.

Perhaps Mr. Trump and other members of his administration and others who have been victims of the autocracy and tyranny rampant during the Biden administration, instead of seeking revenge and becoming mirror images of their adversaries, will do the foregoing, not in a mean spirited manner but in a manner that will heal wounds, minimize polarization and really “Make America Great Again”, but internally, not in an adversarial manner against the world. That may not be likely but Mr. Trump is rarely predictable, and he is not always wrong. And only someone who has been made to suffer what Mr. Trump was made to suffer during the past eight years can really understand why the foregoing changes are so essential for America’s quest to someday attain the promises laid out in the Declaration of Independence, hypocritical though they were, and the premises set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution.

Like many Americans, I have lost faith in both major political parties and in the institutions of government, at least at the federal level, but if Mr. Trump would follow the path described above (unlikely, I know), he would earn a place on Mount Rushmore even higher than that occupied by the four deeply flawed former presidents enshrined there, all men who, notwithstanding their shortcomings, nevertheless seem to have made a positive lasting impression.

Perhaps an exercise in wishful thinking but “if our reach does not exceed our grasp, then what’s a heaven for”?
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Reflections and Prognostications with respect to a First Tuesday Following a First Monday in November

Posted on November 3, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

Dateline: October 3, 2024

Faith in electoral processes all over the world seems to be at all-time lows, largely because, for so long, elections in most places have been manipulated, either through distortion of information presenting false scenarios and expectations or, because of threats of economic or military castigation should voters fail to follow electoral scripts designed by their self-perceived “betters”. As last resorts, until fairly recently, orchestrated coups d’état and even direct military intervention from abroad were popular; however, new technologies, especially with respect to communications and hackable electronic voting have reintroduced a strain of subtlety. The British and the French were the past masters of such manipulation but for a century at least, it has been the United States that has taken over that function, initially through the State Department but now through intelligence agencies; and intelligence agencies acting more and more on their own. Power, of course, is the ultimate prize, economic power derived through theft of natural resources but more and more, through organized war profiteering of the kind Ike warned against as he left office.

Until recently, the foregoing did not bother United States citizens very much, even when it involved domestic electoral fraud. We were aware that domestic electoral fraud was not unusual. Bribery was a tradition as was vote buying and, when all else failed, destruction of ballots with replacements stuffed into ballot boxes. Nor unusual were the super patriotic voting dead. In any case, electoral promises were always illusory, few felt they would be kept and fewer seemed to care that they’d been deceived. Elections were a sort of game, like baseball perhaps, but of the Black Sox variant. Now, however, chickens seem to have come home to roost. Of a sudden, the United States electorate really seems to care about the results, albeit futilely so.

One cannot tell if the United States federal elections of 2020 (both presidential and for the Senate, i.e., in Georgia) were “stolen”, something a substantial portion of the United States electorate believes. We will probably never find out. But groundwork for electoral fraud in 2020 was facilitated by the orchestrated response to the Covid 19 pandemic, with electoral safeguards demolished both bureaucratically and judicially, purportedly in the name of democracy. During the past decade electoral safeguards have been minimized in the United States in a manner not seen anywhere else in the world. Almost everywhere else, at least the illusion of ballot security is maintained with voters required to establish who they are through picture identification, signatures and finger prints before being permitted to exercise their so-called “sacred franchise”. Additionally, ballots are strictly restricted to voting booths, with their collection strictly controlled. Those are the norms except in a number of states in the purportedly United States.

Electoral manipulation in the United States would seem difficult on a national scale given the nature of federalism, with important electoral functions vested at the county level, but in a society so polarized, electoral fraud need not be widespread but rather, concentrated at the points most equally divided in the states with the most electoral votes, and with efforts coordinated at the national level through sources of logistical and legal support.

Electoral orchestration has evolved from an art form to a science. Of course, implementing the groundwork for successful electoral manipulation is not enough, it must at least be flavored with plausible deniability. Thus, the same bureaucracy and judiciary that facilitates electoral creativity shields electoral fraud from being proven by refusing to seriously investigate allegations of electoral improprieties, usually dismissing most such allegations on technicalities after which, the corporate media that supported the electoral misconduct in the first place, loudly proclaims that the allegations were bogus and that those alleging the existence of electoral fraud are evil, seditious “election deniers”. That is the world in which the citizenry of the United States now lives, the same world the United States has forced on so many other countries whenever it suited the interests of those who controlled it.

Democracy, in the sense of majority rule, does not exist anywhere and never has, even absent electoral shenanigans. It doesn’t exist because most people are not interested enough in electoral participation, either because it bores them or because they believe it is futile, thus, because of inadequate participation, majorities are rarely possible. Instead, the majoritarian concept is replaced by mere plurality, i.e., were usually more votes are collectively cast against a specific candidate or proposal, or not at all, than in favor. However, for some strange psychosocial reason, both the victims and the victimizers of political fraud feel that a semblance of popular government is essential, something we perhaps inherited from the Greeks and the Romans.

In a few days the people of the United States, both citizens and in all probability a number of non-citizens as well, will again earnestly participate in an electoral charade, a futile exercise by a populace utterly polarized by a corrupt corporate media, a corrupt entertainment industry and a corrupt bureaucracy, all making us relatively easy to manipulate, although we seem to be tottering closer than ever to a breaking point as more and more people have somehow gotten the impression that their votes can make a difference. Indeed, we may be approaching a possibly violent breaking point such as has not been seen in the United States in over a century and a half, and that, despite the best efforts of the powers-that-be to create the impression that, as the Borg may someday become fond of saying, “resistance is futile”. During the past four years it has become clear that, under Democratic Party rule, protest will not be tolerated unless it is orchestrated by the right people (e.g., the “woke”), that has been made more than abundantly clear through prosecution and persecution of those who dared to express their refusal to accept what they honestly believed was a stolen election in 2020. A reality which many, too many, discovered on and after January 6, 2021. It is worth noting how different the attitude towards rejection of electoral results deemed fraudulent is when the protestors are political allies of the United States, as in the recent cases of Venezuela and Georgia (the country, not the state), as opposed to our opponents. Evidently protest abroad is patriotic when in support of United States puppets but involves terrorism when challenging those the United States places and maintains in power. At home, it’s even more hypocritical. Electoral protest in the United States against results orchestrated by those who really rule us is anathema, it is seditious and treasonous, notwithstanding the platitudes redolent in our Declaration of Independence.

As an aside, I wonder what vice president Kamala Harris will do in the unlikely event that her opponent prevails when it comes time for her to exercise her constitutional function and certify the result. An unlikely situation given my pessimistic analysis of probabilities but, wouldn’t that be interesting? The Chinese have a curse that sounds a bit like a proverb “may you live in interesting times”. It certainly seems to apply to us. To many of us, the results of the proximate elections have already been written and, unlike 2016, that script will, in all likelihood, not be subject to evasion, not even temporarily. And even if it were, as Mr. Trump found out during his term in office, the federal bureaucracy and judiciary are so riddled with moles that governance contrary to the interest of the tiny group of powerful elites who rule us as if they possessed Sauron’s ring of power, is virtually impossible. The reality is probably that, even if the election were not rigged by misinformation and electoral fraud, our future would remain bleak as we will, in all probability, continue to be led towards the Armageddon too many see as an essential way-stop on the road to paradise. Tipping points are all but impossible to reverse and we seem to have reached ours as both major presidential campaigns applaud genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid and most of the United States electorate, as German citizens once did, looks the other way; and as antagonizing powers that share our capacity to destroy everything has become a bipartisan ideal.

As a supporter of third party and independent candidates for many decades, no candidate likely to win ever enjoys my support, but that is not as negative as it sounds. Those of us who find ourselves perpetually outside-looking-in tend to attain a clearer vision of political realities, one free of the emotional price associated with passionate advocacy and of a hope to share in the spoils. Thus, from the sidelines, what most matters to me and others like me is to share perspectives concerning the greatest threats to whatever remnants of liberty remain, not many as during the past four years censorship and castigation of deviation from opinions deemed acceptable has become the norm, and of course, it is important to those of us with strong civic consciousness to share information concerning how electoral processes are safeguarded in diverse parts of the world, contrasting such safeguards with trends in the ever more autocratic United States, a country whose people, if not its governments, I love profoundly.

From the fringes, the more decent among the political class, a tiny group led by aspirants to political power like Jill Stein, Cornell West and Dennis Kucinech, look on horrified, desperately fighting against the fatal entropy that has us firmly in its grasp, while the universe, disinterested, spins on its merry way. So, don’t be surprised when this November 6, 2024, at the end of a long evening, the elections of 2020 are once more repeated, their format now become the template with which our subjugation will be made ever more clear. Perhaps, in the future, rather than bother to deceive us, the charade will end and we’ll just assume the posture and accept the inevitable, hoping for the best, knowing that as has almost always been the case: in our own destiny we have little if any say.

So sayeth the realist (that’s what pessimists always call themselves), as from the Global South, where hope still somehow survives, an expat in exile looks North.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Reflections on Moral Quandaries and Ambiguities

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Guillermo Calvo Mahé

I recently participated in an online Zoom forum presented by the history department of the University of Massachusetts Amherst through its Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series, a series that purports to focuses on “big issues of clear and compelling concern, grounded in historical inquiry, context, analysis and experience”. The event in which I participated (as part of the virtual audience) purported to deal with the dangers being faced in academia as a result of what smells like a dawning dark age where the right to think is shrinking daily and it was supposed to compare the current challenges faced by academia with those faced in the second half of the 1940’s during the tenures of Harry Truman as president and senator Joe McCarthy as hatchet man. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the importance of the topic to me and its timeliness, I was disappointed and confess that I could not get past the introduction and first few minutes of the initial presenter’s discourse. Instead of an objective academic discourse, it seemed a partisan charade reflective only of the nature of so many who today perceive of themselves as historians, people who have spent their lives reading and researching and writing and teaching, but for whom the quest for truth seems an irrelevancy, especially when the quest is undertaken under the shadow of long held political loyalties[1].

The presenters as well as their online audience seemed completely and blindly devoted to the Democratic Party, the party ironically responsible for both the dark days of the McCarthy era (although the senator himself was a Republican) and for today’s expansive wave of censorship and curtailment of liberty, especially liberties pertaining to the right to opine. Their criticism, snide, direct and full of virtue signaling, was reserved for Republicans and the “far right”, there apparently not being a mere right wing, and thus, to anyone not part of the choir to whom they were preaching. Thus, the postures they sought to represent, postures in which for the most part I personally believe, lost rather than garnered credibility. It’s as though they’d never heard of political options like Doctors Jill Stein and Cornell West, or if they had, considered them beneath contempt, just as they consider former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for placing the coronation of Kamala Harris at risk.

Even if their goal was merely political that strategy was not very productive. Unless fund raising is the goal, “preaching to the choir” is almost always counterproductive, especially in an electoral context where attaining the vote of a majority is important. Rather than more fully convincing the already convinced, one needs to reach out to those who have not yet made up their minds. Better yet, one needs to strive to convince those who support one’s opponents that our views have merit. That is very difficult when one has “shot one’s credibility in the foot” by refusing to accept that one’s side is fallible and that sometimes our opponents may be right. Credibility is essential and it is best attained when one at least appears objective, when rather than spewing conclusions one has yet to support with facts, one at least pretends to consider opposing perspectives and examines the reasons why others hold them. And that is best accomplished when one, in fact, has an open mind rather than its mere verisimilitude.

After I logged out of the event I became introspective, examining both my own beliefs and how I expressed them. And that led me to the issues that most perplex me, and to the people I’ve chosen to admire, despite their foibles. The latter are a very mixed group, both historically and during my own lifetime. I am a great admirer of the reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. but accept that sexual fidelity was not his strong point, and if that was true for him, it was also true for John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A bitter pill but one essential if one hopes to be objective. I love Nelson Mandela and admire him not because of his courage in adversity but because, after he attained the South African presidency, he managed, at least for a brief while, to bring his traumatized racially, economically and culturally divided nation together. And I love Mohandas Gandhi for his absolute dedication to peaceful revolution despite his failure, in the end, to attain it. I love Uruguay’s Pepe Mujica and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Chile’s Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, Cuba’s Jose Marti, Colombia’s Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and now Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego. None are perfect by any means, but they have all been transformational. Ironically, I am also drawn to ethically complex people like Alexander III of Macedon, Gaivs Ivlivs Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte, leaders who somehow combined good and evil successfully in order to attain transformational change, although I’ve always been curious as to why their military prowess so thoroughly overwhelms their more peaceful accomplishments in areas such as science, philosophy, education, architecture, etc., in their perception by the public.

As a political scientist, historian and researcher, albeit admittedly not a very important one, I’m deeply suspicious of those things on which we are not allowed, either legally or socially, to reflect, and I believed that that would have been one of the topics to be dealt with in the Feinberg lecture I’d been invited to attend, but I was very wrong. Today’s tacit support by so many of genocide on the one hand and the pillorying of Donald Trump on the other, both massively driven by peer pressure, and attitudes towards the current conflicts in the Ukraine and in the Middle East, made me again wonder concerning the “verboten” subject of what World War II, the second war to end all wars, was really about, and just how evil the villains and of just how virtuous the victors really were; the victors responsible for the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the colonization of Africa and the Middle and Far East. There was recent outrage among netizens of the corporate media concerning an admission purportedly made by Donald Trump that Adolf Hitler might have done some good things in Germany, something quickly (and distortedly) interpreted by Trump opponents as praise. More than anything, that reaction to Mr. Trump’s honest observation made me acknowledge (after reflection) that like most others, I lacked the courage to agree with him despite the rarely admitted reality that, excluding his international bellicosity, racism and lack of respect for the sanctity of life (obviously huge faults), domestically, during the period from 1933 through 1939, Hitler in fact accomplished very positive things domestically in Germany, and that in turn made me wonder if we will ever be capable of an objective analysis with respect to that very complex man, a man who in his worst aspects, seems ironically similar to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a popular hero today not only in Israel, but in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

All of the foregoing seem dangerous themes on which to focus, or even to consider, but is it ethically and morally correct to ignore them and to permit what passes for imposed truth to just “lie” (a double entendre) comfortably abed? That observation then led me to reflect on the morally ambiguous issue of issues. There are issues where, to me, every position seems wrong and worse, where most of those who hold a strong position do so incoherently when contrasted with their positions on related issues. For me, one of those involves the profoundly polarizing conjoined issues of abortion and the death penalty.

It seems incoherent to me that the postures of most people with reference to the foregoing seem to involve, on the one hand, a belief in the “right” to an abortion while simultaneously opposing the death penalty, and on the other, the position of their opponents who reject the right to abort unwanted fetuses while concurrently supporting the death penalty. To my mind, one either respects the “right” to life or one doesn’t, both of those postures leading to logical conclusions: If one respects the “right” to life, then both abortion and the death penalty should be anathema. If one does not respect that “right”, then both abortion and the death penalty are acceptable options. However, the topic involved is deemed so “existential”, that most of us have a very strong opinion in one direction or the other while strenuously opposing the “right” of others to have an opposing position, something that to me seems to require amazing moral ambivalence and hubris. The issue is fraught with irreconcilable moral quandaries and yet, most people have no problem in taking one side or the other, and make it the principal basis on which they select whom they will support politically. To top it off, most of the people who presents themselves as electoral options, loudly championing one side or the other, tend to be pure pragmatists for whom the only importance of the issue involves how it will mobilize their political bases.

The right to bear arms is another issue that strikes me as ludicrous, if not as existentially and morally problematic as the right to life. I understand the second amendment to the United States constitution and the context under which it seemed essential. It reads: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It is absolute in its prohibition, unless one examines its premise, “a well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”. However, the philosophical context in which that statement was drafted was centered, not on defense from foreign aggression but on the importance of avoiding domestic tyranny and that in turn was premised on three important assumptions: first, that instead of standing armed forces, the “free State” anticipated would have a citizen army comprised of state militias in which most adult males would serve; second, that the armed citizenry would hold a preponderance of the power necessary to avoid tyranny and sustain its “free” status; and, third, that “freedom”, rather than mere security, would remain the priority. None of those premises hold true today. The state controls the overwhelming balance of power, both internally through its police forces and externally though its professional armed forces (and the military industrial complex against which Ike warned during November of 1960). If the right to bear arms were to be effective today, citizens would have to enjoy the right to own and operate nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, air forces, etc., and, as importantly, the ability to financially afford to obtain and maintain them. We don’t and we shouldn’t and we couldn’t. As to the importance of “freedom”, today it’s mainly an illusion bound in red tape with the state in control of most of our actions, a state not controlled by the citizenry but through bureaucrats imbedded throughout our bloated governmental systems by a tightly knit group of selfish billionaires, with the assistance of their tools in the megalithic media-sports-and-entertainment industries, industries whose job it is to keep us polarized and distracted while our pockets are picked. So at best, “freedom is an illusion, an opiate in the same sense that Karl Marx described religion.

Of course, we’ve deluded ourselves with the concept of “rights”. A concept ideal for “virtue-signaling” if little else. Purportedly, “rights are inherent, universal and eternal, not granted, rather, at best discovered. As purportedly eternal, they have supposedly always existed and will always continue to exist. They are supposedly the emanations of the individual sovereignty and autonomy to which every human being is entitled. Given the foregoing definition, rights may not be conditioned by others, even where those conditions are eminently sensible and indeed, essential for life in the collectives in which we live, collectives which range from the family, with or without children, through our diverse polities and eventually, encompassing the human species and perhaps, even every species and the planet as a whole. If “rights” are inherent and unconditional, they must be impossible to violate. However, no human interaction encompasses those requirements and further, as more and more rights are discovered on a purportedly generational basis, they become diluted in the sense that they are more and more impossible to attain. Instead, today’s purported rights are, at best, aspirations as to how we should prioritize our resources and organize the diverse aspects of governance by others in our lives, but with no ability to enforce any such aspirations, however laudable they may seem. They are promises impossible to keep and those who make them and most vigorously proclaim them are at best self-deluded, albeit in most instances they are merely frauds. And yet, we willingly sacrifice our lives and the lives of those whom we most cherish, we sacrifice our honor, our morality and our ethics in their purported defense. Thus abortion and the bearing of arms are but irrelevancies useful in keeping us divided and thus, easy to manipulate and control.

Not that “rights” would not be awesome if they could be attained, maintained and enforced, but they can’t, at least not while we remain a deluded species, one which on the one hand abhors the purported Nazi holocaust while on the other, applauds, supports and makes possible the holocaust perpetrated by the descendants of the Nazis’ victims against Palestinians and other Muslims (the only people who ever actually treated them with real compassion and respect). Not while we accept the accumulation of massive wealth by actors and singers and sports stars as well as by corporate executives, directors, and, most of all, by the heirs of those who illicitly accumulated huge fortunes, while children, indeed while anyone starves to death, bereft of shelter and health care. But we do. And it seems that, at least for the foreseeable future, we’ll continue to do so.

[1] Contextualizing the foregoing, I am a political independent although during my lifetime I have been a Republican, a Democrat, a Liberal, a Conservative, a Libertarian, a Democratic Socialist and a Green Party supporter. However, I was always uncomfortable pledging my allegiance and my sacred honor to any political party, especially with respect to supporting policies with which I was either not familiar or with which I was not in total accord. During the past decades I’ve taken to criticizing the United States duopolous political system and both principal political parties and my electoral activities have revolved around doing what I could to let voters know that there were more than two choices, more than two political parties, and that a lesser evil is always evil. I am also an academic and the former chair of a university political and juridical science department as well as of political science, government and international relations programs in the Republic of Colombia. In my youth, I taught history and chaired the social studies and, for a brief time, the foreign language departments at a military high school in the state of New York.

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Guillermo Calvo Mahé

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

Category Archives: The Chaotic Contrarian

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On the Nature of Modern History

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

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“And Perhaps” …. An Exercise in Positive Wishful Thinking

Reflections and Prognostications with respect to a First Tuesday Following a First Monday in November

Reflections on Moral Quandaries and Ambiguities

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