Historians and anthropologists tell us the human race was once a cave-dwelling, surly, filthy lot who eked out a miserable life for ourselves with crude tools made of wood, bone, and stone.
Here’s something they rarely mention – the caves where we dwelt. Let’s have a look…
Here’s a basic cave structure in Nepal. Undoubtedly very ancient, they have not remained intact over the centuries. There are such structures all over the world.Here’s a cave structure in India.And one in Kazakhstan……this one in Russia looks like Anasazi cliff dwellings in the US Southwest……and I don’t even know what to make of this one in China……these caves in Capadocia, Turkey are still being used by the locals. As storage areas, to keep livestock, and even to live in. Some have even been made into hostels and taverns. More are being discovered.
As mentioned above, there are also caves of this sort present in the western hemisphere, from Nevada in the US to Patagonia in South America. And people are finding more all the time.
At some point in the past, the human race decided that life on the surface of the planet was too dangerous, and they burrowed into cliffs and mountains all over the world.
What happened, and why aren’t we hearing more about this? Don’t you think our ancestors have something to say to us about climate change?
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there.” – George Santayana
Don’t defend what you have been taught in a school system designed to make you docile, befuddled, and marketable. We know that much of what the education industry forces onto us is crap. And the useful stuff is usually presented in a way that does not make it relevant to the student. The end result is a piece of paper which certifies a former student as being docile and obedient enough for employment.
What do we know about the past? Mostly what we’ve read in books. How much should we trust this stuff? What if it was all make-believe? What if actual historic events have been jumbled in time and location, repeated as fact in several places, over centuries? How would we know?
There have been dissident scholars in the past, over several centuries, who have pointed out that kings of different countries – with different titles and names – were in fact the same person. There are scholars from the 19 th century into contemporary times who believe that the stories we’re told in daily and Sunday schools have been so convoluted as to make more than 1000 years of history irrelevant; a fantasy presented as reality in order to indoctrinate people into submitting to lives of servitude.
To grasp these possibilities as anything more than paranoid conspiracy, I have to ask the reader to keep historic events in mind in a particular era, during which humanity was enslaved by ruthless, savage raiders from Eurasia, for the enrichment of their aristocracies. This time includes the seizure of the commons in England, the discovery of 4/5ths of the world by the Christian kingdoms, the obliteration of cultures and civilizations worldwide, and ends with the inquisitions, which wiped out generations of accumulated folk wisdom, libraries, and the living memories of people who had seen some of the other land’s actual cultures, prior to their destruction.
After all this had cleared the slate, so to speak, Christian monks began writing much of what we think of as recorded history. Many supposedly ancient documents do not survive today in any form older than this period. As mentioned above, entire libraries were burned over the years. And during the inquisitions in Europe, many books – a much rarer commodity in those times – were burned as well, oftentimes along with the owners and authors. Some fields of science, particularly related to medicine and healthcare, are only now recovering this knowledge in the West. Mostly by learning from the few folks traditions that have survived into modern times.
Before continuing, I just want to add that these cycles of plunder, genocide, and obliteration of indigenous peoples and their cultures haven’t ended.
The famous Roamin’ Aqueduct in Segovia, Spain. In the enlargements below, it ‘s easy to see which parts were made by skilled craftspeople and which were made by slaves.
To further obfuscate what is presented as historic fact, the calendar system used by the West has been “adjusted” several times. There are many, many instances of astronomically aligned stone circles, all over the world, that still accurately depict the passage of time and the cycles of the seasons. This means that thousands of years ago, people could accurately track time, but hundredsof years ago, the calendar had to be “adjusted.” What went wrong? My first guess would be religion.
Literacy in Europe during the time when Christian monks were laboring away their lives by writing out documents and copying manuscripts, was likely somewhere around 2 percent of the population; the clergy, a few of the more intelligent members of the aristocracy, and just enough of their subordinates to make life even easier for the ruling elites.
But – as happens in every long-standing slave-owning society – once a few of the underlings learn to read, next thing y’know, everyone’s writing a book. And with the new-fangled printing press available, the Master Race needed to get their story straight. Then they could impose their bullshit stories by force, on anyone unfortunate enough to be born into their domains.
One of the most obvious examples of make-believe history is the Roamin’ empire. We are told that Romans built a great empire and brought civilization to Europe. They are reported to have built great temples, roads, and aqueducts – all across their domain.
Rome was likely a prosperous trading city before it became overrun by pirates from the Tyrennian sea. It was also the primary place of worship for the goddess Cybil (known as Ninhirsag by the Sumerians) in Europe. These pirates came inland, looking for a good place to hide out from their enemies on the seas and shore, moved in and took over. They likely killed off or enslaved the men of the city and their neighbors, then changed the name of the city to Rome and made up some bullshit story about the city’s founding, before consolidating their power through a kingship.
Romans didn’t really build stuff. They were plundering, raping scumbags who only knew how to kill. They were so adept at it, they were able to build an entire state around it. First as conquerors, later as mercenaries.
The only real industries found in Rome were in pottery, and that was mostly repairing. They didn’t make their own weapons, but bought them from the finest craftsmen in Europe. They didn’t make their own armour, they had it made by Hebrews in Palestine.
Ever seen genuinely Roman-built structures? Made of piles of stones or simple bricks, you can tell it was built by Romans because it is in ruins. Their finest temples – in Rome – are small replicas of magnificent temples elsewhere in the world. Romans were completely incapable of making things like the temple of Ba’al in Baalbek, or the temple of Zeus in Athens. Even their own temples – in Rome – were built by slaves, though they did sometimes think to enslave master stone masons to do the work. And killed them once it was finished to ensure someone else couldn’t one-up them with something even grander, made by the same hands. Then the Roman could brag “There will never be another like it!” As far as Roamin’ aqueducts go, there are such structures all across Rome’s alleged empire. And up into Russia. And in South America. Wow – those Romans roamed a lot, didn’t they?
All of these Roamin’ aqueducts were already there, built by civilizations far older than we’ve been told there were civilizations present. You know how you can tell? Because the basic structure and foundations were built by master craftspeople who didn’t even use masonry to bind the giant stone blocks together. The stone was prepared so precisely, they fit together and stacked up well. There were even elements to these building techniques that enabled the structures to survive all but the strongest earthquakes.
Look at the size of those blocks of stone! Still stacked neatly together, without mortar or concrete binding them together. Below, you can see what Rome was capable of doing with slave labor, at the top. They could repair things, at least.
And another thing – where did the Roamin’ legions learn engineering? There were no universities or other centers of learning and knowledge in ancient Rome.
Architecture during Rome’s alleged empire had devolved to the point that they needed external buttresses in order to hold up 6-story brick-and-mortar walls in the 8th century.
As stated above, the Roamin’ people who were setting up a hide-away to live lives of splendor, far removed from their enemies, moved up the Tiber river from the central-west coast of Italy. Very likely they were Etruscans, as these were the predominant
pirates and settlers in the area at the time of Rome’s “founding.”
We don’t know much about Etruscans. Which is odd, because a great many artifacts from their culture have come down through the ages. Coins, tablets, and murals with inscriptions are available in abundance from the Etruscans. But – gosh-darnit! – linguists,
anthropologists, and other scientists just can’t decipher the alien script. Unless they are familiar with early, proto-Cyrillic alphabets and can read modern Russian.Then, they don’t even have to be a scientist, they can just read it, no translation needed.
Seriously. Ancient Etruscans used an archaic form of Cyrillic and spoke a language similar enough to modern Russian to need no translation.
Why? Why the pretence of ignorance, which persists even now, despite overwhelming evidence that the Etruscan script is rather blatantly easy to read? This is creepy.
Want another example of blatant falsification? Ever heard of the Book of Enoch? Enoch was a patriarch of the early Hebrews. Supposedly Noah’s grandfather, Enoch was a high priest and scribe for one of the primary gods of Mesopotamia. The one who allegedly genetically engineered homo sapiens-sapiens, and made his and our species interbreedable.
Enoch left us a book of “wisdom” and doom. He is categorized as a prophet because he foretold events that later transpired. The main event being the flood which almost completely destroyed human civilization.
He secured for Noah a design for a ship that could survive the raging torrent to come, and told him to keep a few of whatever livestock and wild game he valued.
But the point I want to bring to your attention is that much of the alleged “wisdom” of the new testament – particularly in the letters and acts of the apostles – are absolute plagiarisms of the Book of Enoch, which the Hebrew scribes included in their liturgy, whereas most modern Jewish clerics do not. This includes a stand-alone comment condemning women to second-tier status. There is no context for it, Enoch (or Noah – part of the book is dictated in Noah’s voice) just offers that women are not so great, when all is said and done. He wasn’t listing duties and responsibilities for women, nor giving women instructions on upright behaviour, he just suddenly blurted out: “I assure you, no woman has ever ordered a mountain to move and a mountain has obeyed.”
This seems to be the sole pre-biblical justification for eliminating the place of women in the priesthood. Until the Abrahamic faiths arrived on the scene, high priestesses were often living incarnations of the goddesses they venerated. They bestowed kingships, gave birth to demigods, interceded with the other gods on humankind’s behalf, sometimes ruled as warrior-queens, and could elevate a mortal to godhood, as Cleopatra allegedly bestowed godhood on Julius Ceaser. Enoch did not elaborate on this topic, just made a quick aside and went on with his narrative.
In the 1883 translation of the Book of Enoch, by Richard Laurence, there are 9 pages showing side-by-side examples of plagiarism by the author(s) of the new testament. And I’m certain there are more that aren’t as blatant. The author, after all, was a believer.
The last example of historic shenanigans I want to bring to your attention is Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.
In the 1600s, a French scholar traveled to Egypt to have a look at it’s ancient wonders. He described the pyramids of Giza as being in such fine condition, they appeared to have been completed within the past few years. In short, they looked like newly-created structures.
I’m not trying to imply they are not truly ancient in origin, rather they were well-preserved into the 19th century. Then Napoleon came in with his army and had the pyramids dissembled, their stone facings used to enhance his own constructions.
He also had a regiment of soldiers line up in front of the Sphinx and fire their guns at its face for an entire day. What a looney!
History is a complete sham. It’s all a load of crap, and we have not been given even a faint glimpse of what the lives of our distant forebears resembled. But, thanks to dissident scholars and the internet, this information is seeping out. We should take this opportunity to research and publish evidence of these lies, and refuse to follow the lead of the lying scumbags who make their livelihood by forcing their bullshit upon us. I doubt the Master Race is going to allow the free flowing of this type of information sharing to continue for long.
if you want to really blow your mind with some alternate history books, i cannot recommend the works of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko highly enough. i can’t say i agree 100 percent with his work, but his series of books History: Fiction or Science? will cause you to doubt just about everything you’ve been taught about the story of human experience on planet earth.
“At five hundred pages, Black Flame is widely considered the first major (non-anthology) anarchist work in some time — perhaps ever — to provide a global historical account of anarchist movements. Many viewed the work as a kind of “Anarchist Bible,” or what Immanuel Ness, a professor at City University of New York and author of New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism(PM Press, 2014), had described as “perhaps the most important contribution [to] the global history of working class movements from an anarchist perspective.” – About Schmidt: How a White Nationalist Seduced Anarchists Around the World (Chapter 1), by Alexander Reid Ross and Joshua Stephens
Black Flame‘s“core theses” include the propositions;
“the global anarchist movement emerged in the First International,
syndicalism is an integral part of the broad anarchist tradition,
this tradition centers on rationalism, socialism, and anti-authoritarianism,
the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin are representative of its core ideas,
and this ‘narrow’ definition is both empirically defensible and analytically useful.”
A striking feature of Black Flame is the argument that “‘class struggle’ anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary or communist anarchism, is not a type of anarchism … it is the only anarchism,” and so it does not include ideas sometimes called individualist anarchist, identified with figures such as William Godwin and Max Stirner. Regarding the so-called “philosophical, individualist, spiritual and ‘lifestyle’ traditions,” the authors say “we do not regard these currents as part of the broad anarchist tradition.” – from wikipedia’s glowing review of Black Flame, in the section on Platformism.
It just so turns out that at least one of the authors of Black Flame is a white supremacist, and has been using his influence within the Syndicalist movement to keep Anarchism firmly rooted in an exclusively Euro-centric worldview.
I can’t understand why anyone, much less anarchists, would want to keep their personal worldview so firmly rooted in the 19th century. Over the coming months, I’m going to be writing extensively about WHY it’s ludicrous to ignore technological and observational developments, and thus refuse to adjust to the many, many ways they have altered our society – and what we know about the worlds we inhabit.
The huge trainwreckBlack Flame has caused in the anarchist movement proved to me that conservative, rightwing bigots are not the only white folks who yearn for a simpler time, when white people just WERE the superior race, no questions asked, or they’d KILL your miserable, savage ass!
“Blacks incapable of other than the basest service to the Revolution.”
This is not surprising to me in the least. As I’ve written before, Syndicalism is only one very, very short step away from Fascism, and Fascism almost always includes racism. (see my review of The Friends of Durutti, from Anarchy; a Journal of Desire Armed, which i will post online, soon as i can acquire a copy.)
In the Mexican revolution, Anarcho-Communists and Syndicalists were allowed to organize as labor unions and militias, so long as the militias were under command of Huerta’s junta, which was governing Mexico City at the time. These units were used as artillery forces against the advancing armies of Pancho Villa. Meanwhile, other unionistas were sent against Zapata, though I believe they were mostly held in reserve. In both cases, when the militias were no longer needed, they were disbanded, and many of the workers were eventually executed or imprisoned.
Too much of the leadership of Spain’s legendary anarchist unionists CNT urged the rank-and-file membership to disarm and support the republic. This in return for ministerial positions at the national and regional levels. The workers responded by collectivizing everything that was not nailed down, and forming autonomous militias. These militias would later rescue Madrid from a fascist offensive.
Much of the same can be said for anarchists in Russia, though to be honest, the peasant militias and autonomous villages had mostly been annihilated before many anarchists accepted favors from the vicious Soviet government.
In addition to the tendency of leadership to sell out both their own rank-and-file and to take arms against genuine people’s movements, there is also a tradition within Anarcho-Syndicalism to gestate personality cults and go outright fascist. Mussolini and Mao are the two most famous examples, though there were many others.
I’ve never read a Syndicalist tract from the Anarchist canon which does not advocate for some type of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” What can be expected from a tradition that has as it’s stated end goal a dictatorship? Concentrate power into a single group or institution, and someone will take it over for their personal aggrandizement. Always and forever, this has been true. That’s why some anarchists do not wish to create more of the same, but would prefer to create societies very unlike the ones we’ve inherited. There is no need for self-serving institutions.
I’m just saying, do what you want. But what DO you want? Do we want self determination? Or inclusion in the colonial system?
It also comes as no surprise that the authors were able to find people around the world, and from every race, who they could point to as examples of “diversity” for their unified, uncompromising, very limited, Eurocentric (of course) definition of what Anarchism is – and isn’t. Who among the people cited did not grow up in a Eurocentric, colonial society? Who did not have the option to support their families through any other means than wage labor? Who did not receive a Eurocentric education? Not one. None of the many people the authors cite from around the world ever advocated for the destruction of the Eurocentric social order and the creation of something more along the lines of how people lived who had never been conquered by white folks.
BF‘s authors also spend considerable time explaining why useless forms of protest and organizing are preferable to armed rebellion or insurrection. The authors advocate for a “gradualist” approach to achieving the goals of working class empowerment. Voting, participating in the political process, and possibly forming a party and running for office were presented as the reasonable, rational approach to social change. Led by white folks, of course.
Again, no surprise, since the authors are more interested in steering anarchists into inaction than they are in creating revolution. As white supremacists, they are more invested in the current social order that creates austerity for the North, and bombs for the rest of the world. And as infiltrators in the movement, I’m fairly sure part of the reason they wanted to keep Anarchists firmly tied to ineffectual Leftistism was in part to make themselves look like cowards, as opposed to the “bold street fighters” of the National Anarchist movement – a transeuropean Fascist organization which has openly advanced a racist agenda from its inception, and uses street violence to lure in bullies and other assholes who just want to knock heads.
Mike Schmidt, “Politico-Cultural Dynamics of the South African Anarchist Movement”
“…platformism is too advanced for the black working class and poor…”
The doctrine of discovery; establishment of the rule of law in the land of liberty.
ROMANUS PONTIFEX, JANUARY 8, 1455 – the doctrine of discovery
“[W]e bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes…intrepid champions of the Christian faith…to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and…to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate…possessions, and goods, and to convert them to…their use and profit…“
There you have it, spelt out in fairly clear language – His Excellency, Pope Babyraper the Umpteenth, authorized his co-conspirators to go out and rob, murder, rape, and plunder in every land which had not been “saved” by J-Zeus, the dying/resurrecting sun diety. At the time of the edict, that was around 80 percent of the inhabited world.
It’s easy enough to dismiss this document as an out-dated relic of a long-gone era.
The problem with that is, this is the SINGLE, LEGAL DOCUMENT that created the court systems of the US, Canada, Australia, much of Latin America and the Caribbean, the Philippines, most of Africa, swaths of Asia…
This single document is cited by the US Supreme Court when considering matters of copyright, property, regulation of corporations, and trade agreements – including the current bankster wetdream, the TPP. Yeah, all that bullshit about separation of Church and State…just window dressing. Without this Roman Catholic doctrine, the foundation for rule of law by the court systems in just about every nation on earth goes straight out the window.
Ever heard of a place called Latin America? No one spoke fucking Latin in the god-damn 14th century. Except for the Catholic Church clergy and Lawyers. Who established the court systems that preside over these places to this day. And that’s why it’s referred to as Latin America, because of their Latin legal systems.
Think this is a ridiculous over-simplification (I get that a lot)? Ever read a US law book? See all the Latin phrases? When exactly was it that Latin-speaking people inhabited the US? Isn’t US law supposed to be based on English court systems? And just what is the foundation of English law? Again, written in Latin. Little known fact – “Empress of the Holy Roman Empire” is one of Queen Lizzie the 2nd’s titles.
INTER CAETERA, MAY 3, 1493
“…in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and everywhere increased and spread…and that barbarous nations be overthrown…”
This Papul decree is so much a part of the Great American Mythology that it was referenced by none less than US Chief Justice John Marshall in an 1823 decision, JOHNSON v. MCINTOSH, 21 US 543 to assert American authority over indigenous Peoples. His decision legalized exploitation, theft, and genocide by establishing that indigenous Peoples were indeed not quite people, not being Christians and all, so anything done to or against them is all good and well, and the Good Lord’s work to boot, hallelujah!
And why should it be overturned? It’s necessary to dehumanize indigenous Peoples in order to rob, rape, and murder them wholesale, even over the objections of the more squeamish members of the invading society.
This notion that indigenous Peoples must be “saved” from their ignorant, savage existence by having the gifts of religion and poverty bestowed upon them fuels wars even in the 21st century. This idea has been enacted through many expressions over the years: saving souls, bringing them civilization, educating them, making them into citizens of the state. This is the doctrine of Manifest Destiny – that god almighty has given Europeans superior weapons in order to subjugate other Peoples. Most of whom were not warlike, and almost none of which had standing armies.
This is the notion of Progress. Lands previously untouched by the foul hand of the West had to be incorporated into the European legal systems in order to rule over them, for the benefit of the Europeans. It is solidly, irrefutably white supremacist to the core, an excuse to commit genocide and feel good, even proud, for doing it. There sure is a long list of names – venerated in every nation overrun by Europeans – of murdering, ignorant scum who slaughtered indigenous Peoples and later became well-respected members of the communities where they dwelt. Some of these genocidal pieces of shit are Saints in the Catholic church.
This Progressive ideology has never been refuted by anyone with a Eurocentric worldview. It enables people who depend on markets for everything they need for personal survival – but who must first find a master to serve in order to access markets – to think of indigenous Peoples as poor, filthy, ignorant savages. Even though the indigenous Peoples are able to hand craft everything they need. Food, clothing, shelter – what they can’t do for themselves, was often available from others, as sharing is much more widespread in Peoples who do not have the notion of “poverty” in their lives. They mostly live in abundance.
Hell – right now, pharmaceutical corporations are falling all over themselves to get at indigenous healers in the field. They are making billions of dollars off of the knowledge and experience of indigenous Peoples, then they have the audacity to cry about “intellectual property rights.”
And to FINALLY arrive at the main point I want to make here – Socialism and Marxism are not in any way different from any of the other ideologies of Progress. Indeed, Marx himself stated that indigenous Peoples must submit to proletarianization or disappear from the world. Anyone who did not slave for a master for monetary gain was a lumpen, and Marx saw them – always the majority of the population in industrialized nations – as reactionary and enemies of the working class. He used much the same rationale we hear today from the far-right. Lumpen want to take our jobs (scabs). They are criminals. They are no-good layabout alcoholics and drug addicts. They are ignorant. As someone who has spent much of his adult life either homeless or in prison, but always struggling against the coercive forces of elite rule, I gotta say a big, ol’ “Fuck you!” to orthodox Marxists.
There are Marxists I have some respect for, though – libertarian and autonomous Marxists are at least breaking from the orthodoxy of building a Party to centralize power. Some groups that started out as Marxists have evolved to the point that they no longer spout fiery working-class rhetoric. Instead, they humbly ask the communities they rely on for support what their group can do to help them. The trend in anarchy in the 21st century is for revolutionaries to focus on building autonomous communities instead of taking over industry. Except, of course – in the industrialized West.
In Europe and North America, the white working classes are terrified of losing the few precious scraps of privilege they’ve been allowed until now. Still clinging to their notion of Progress, orthodox Marxists, Anarcho-Communists, and Syndicalists refuse to let go of racist, outdated 19th century ideas that see them – the true and only revolutionaries – as the saviors of the world. Anyone who dares to challenge them to join the rest of humanity in the 21st century is silenced as “ignorant” or “reactionary” or “fascist.”
I’ve written before that Marxism’s main failure was that the working class never seized control of anything. I’m more of the opinion these days that their greatest failure was in only offering substitutions for the social order they were allegedly opposing. Substitute the Party for the working class. Substitute a Chairman for an emperor. Substitute expansion of the revolution for economic expansion. Substitute “safeguarding the revolution” for “protecting investments.” In short, Marxism has never offered anything but more of the same horrors, with just slightly different jargon. In function, the fascist state is little different than a communist one, and neither system is much different than Western-style democracies or republics. They all seek to divvy up the world’s resources for the enrichment of very few people, with treats for their lackeys, jails for the complainers, and bludgeons for the impoverished.
A few notes about this alleged “progress” of his(story)
It took the old European colonial powers centuries to overrun the entire planet and install court systems acceptable to their aristocracies. But it pretty much took until the 20th century for whities to look around at the places they had conquered and think “hmmm – wonder what all that stuff is?”
Naturally, being the superior civilization and all, they had no need for anything the heathens had. Not their medicinal herbcrafting. Not their stories and legends about geological events. Not their ambitions, thoughts, and dreams. Not their extensive written histories which receded far, far past the time when the Christian book of lies was written. And especially not for their heathen technology, which was the work of demons, after all – amen.
Many of the civilizations annihilated by the invading savages were far superior in every way to what existed in Europe at that time. There are irrigation systems in Peru that are thousands of years older than many historians are willing to admit there have been people in the americas. Megalithic ruins all over the world suggest there was a one-world culture of sea-faring people who built magnificent cities globally, until just after the end of the last ice age, when climatic chaos destroyed many coastal areas. Thus, the universal flood myths in people’s written and oral histories. I can write this with confidence because much of this is readily – even scientifically, if that’s your religion – verifiable now. As a matter of fact, it’s getting to be common knowledge. This may well be one reason why education systems are being undermined. There will be no way to keep this knowledge out of textbooks unless there is such tight control of publishing and the educational institutions that traditional narratives remain unchallenged. Religious institutions worldwide depend on this forgetting of the human saga.
Almost all the great dietary “breakthroughs” constantly in vogue in the US have come about as American consumers somehow found out about ayruvedic and naturalpathic medicinal traditions in Asia. As mentioned before, pharmaceutical corporations are scouring Amazonia and Africa, looking for new drugs and other biological knowledge from shamans and traditional healers. That’s not Progress, that’s just more plunder. We could accumulate this knowledge ourselves by TALKING TO PEOPLE and LISTENING WITH RESPECT TO WHAT PEOPLE FROM OTHER CULTURES HAVE TO SAY! Fucksake…
I’m gonna go ahead and put this out there; some people suspect that a one-world, seafaring culture still existed, here and there, until fairly recently. Until the era of conquest. Their civilization had collapsed, for the most part, and they had to rebuild. I’ll write a lot more about this in the future. The points I want to make here are:
Polynesian Peoples sailed thousands and thousands of miles of open, uninterrupted seas at times.
The Hopi and some Australian aboriginal Peoples claim to have sailed to their continents around 30,000 years ago.
Most of the older ruins in the Americas are along the Pacific rim.
Mayan civilization had a written history that covered 30,000 years, including daily records.
Tenochtitlan, the capitol city of the Mexica, was an engineering marvel unmatched by the West: huge stone plazas and gigantic, megalithic pyramids built on a swamp.
There are irrigation systems so old, there are no records of their construction, nor memories; in SE Asia, Russia, Australia, South America…
And even the approved annuls of history tell of the constant attack on knowledge. Libraries burned by invading forces, almost always from the Eurasian steppe; in Alexandria, Heliopolis, Persepolis, Babylon…We will never know how much was destroyed in the era of conquest. How far back did that put the human race, as far as accumulated knowledge? So much for “progress.” Most of this knowledge was lost forever to us, some of it we are actually rediscovering.
One civilization succeeded in preserving some of this ancient knowledge in Buddhist temples, written in archaic forms of Sanskrit. If it isn’t being destroyed by some goddam government or another, that’s where we could find a lot of details about the things i’ve mentioned above.
The history we’ve been force-fed is so much just a load of bullshit, i’m not sure if we should believe anything written up until the end of the last century. EVERYTHING the education system has indoctrinated us into accepting is wrong. Fucking goddam Everything. I hope I can convince enough people in the anarchist movement of this that we can actually band together and use the new knowledge – the stuff being rediscovered – to our advantage.
to make things very clear;
the idea of “progressive” history is racist to it’s very core. not to mention complete Bullshit. anything coming from that tradition is nothing more or less than white supremacist propaganda. not just including Marxism, but ESPECIALLY Marxism because of its failure to understand that industrial society is not the Ultimate Achievement of humankind. Free living people do not have to be enslaved through employment in order to find liberation.
As for myself, i want no part of this wretched deathculture. it’s built on lies, fraud, genocide, rape, and plunder. we are capable of creating something so much better. we should get on with building it. now.
THE OBLITERATION OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION – PART 2
It’s difficult to destroy an entire continent full of highly cultured Peoples’ knowledge when most of it was handed down from generation to generation through oral traditions and hands-on apprenticeships. Very few people were literate back in the day, mostly religious scribes, priests, and a select few aristocrats and their highest ranking servants.
After 200 years of slaughtering literate and skilled tradespeople, there was still much killing that needed to be done in order to wipe out any knowledge or traditions that were not condoned by the – by that time – very powerful Christian Churches. There were several different branches of the faith in the middle of the 7th century. Most of them were not obsessed with seizing state power or empire building, the way the Roman sect was. In order to bring about an end to the squabbling over who’s way was most Christian, Pope Worship-me declared himself to be the ultimate holder of divine authority on earth, and demanded all other Christian patriarchs and bishops were subservient to him.
To keep the peace, and because Rome was no longer a threat to middle-eastern lands, most agreed to this arrangement, but continued to conduct themselves as they desired. As you can well imagine, the pope had plenty enough Church business to keep him occupied, without the fuss of prolonged civil wars over who’s doctrines were most Christlike.
Meanwhile, in northern France and the British Islands, a new dynasty was emerging which would provide Christendom’s greatest strongmen of that era – the Pepins.
The Pepins were rule-from-the-shadows kinda guys who lived in what today is northern France.They preferred the life of military plunderers and ratbastard murdering scumbags over that of palace life. Still, they valued scholarship. All the moreso because knowledge had been outlawed and all ancient teachings destroyed. Anyone who produced a book in those days could pretty much write anything, and there was no way to fact-check. Which explains a lot of the stupid-wacko things the Christian Churches passed off as knowledge.
To ensure that future generations would be able to share information across the lands Romans had conquered, Pepin the Short’s son Charles Martel (his true name was undoubtedly Pepin, but he became known by the honorific Martel, which means “the hammer”) came up with two astounding innovations.
First of all, Martel invented the English language to serve as the common tongue for all the lands he subjugated. And by “invented” i mean “codified into written language.” His grandson, Charles the Great – or Charlemagne – was the first ruler to keep a journal in English.
Secondly, Martel founded his own Church – the Catholic Church. His descendants would later force the Roman Church to adopt this abomination; a religion dedicated to slaughter, pillage, and the enslavement of the human race. They also devoted an incredible amount of time and resources to burning people alive as sacrifices to satan (a word that means “adversary”).
Charlemagne trying to torture gold out of Saxons.
The Catholic Church was not much interested in saving souls or otherwise acting in accordance with the teachings of a pacifist Jesus. The Pepins were completely devoted to plunder and bloodletting. Of course, they would look to their newly invented Church to provide divine inspiration for their actions, and the Church (often under the rule of one of the Pepin’s family, or their business partners), would issue proclamations, papal decrees, and even forge documents to give the Pepins what they wanted.
Charlemagne once had 4,500 Saxon villagers tortured; entire families murdered – many by being disemboweled alive, in front of their loved ones. He had invaded Saxon lands and found them filled with prosperous communities who thrived by farming, hunting, fishing, and foraging. They also had some fairly amazing craft, as well as mad metallurgical, skills. They built sturdy structures which lasted for generations with little need for maintenance. To ill-tempered, blood-thirsty tyrants like Charlemagne, these people HAD to be RICH. There was no poverty to be found in their lands! And those wretched people just REFUSED to hand over ALL THEIR GOLD! No amount of torture, no crimes against human dignity, no horrid acts of brutality could convince them to bring out their treasure. The reason he’s known as “the great?” He set the greatest precedent for how Christians were to treat non-believers, and his partners in crime, the Catholic Church, were anxious to issue edicts to bless these atrocities. Papal treasuries don’t fill themselves, y’know.
Charlemagne was so important to the Catholic Church that it began to date documents from the start of his reign. Previously, Church documents were dated according to the presiding pope‘s enthronement. Sometimes there were several, competing popes at the same time. Sometimes there were no popes at all. Which accounts for the histories of these times being quite convoluted. Again, this suggests a ripe area for future investigation.
The Church legalized slavery for non-believers. It codified how much land and treasure would be shared when heathen lands were over-run by the Church‘s mercenaries. Burning people alive as offerings to “satan” was sanctified. Before igniting the sacrificial pyre, the presiding official would say “I commend thy soul to hell!” Jesus sure as fuck did not command that people be burned to death.
Centuries of warfare between Celtic and Germanic Peoples against Roman invaders, and a fanatical obsession with slaughter by the Church, had left much of Europe destitute and under-populated. Which did not leave much for the marauders to pick through.
Mercenaries, Marauders
Reconquista: un teatro sangriento de la fantasía
Everywhere in the Christianized remains of the Roman empire, centuries of civil war and religious bloodlust reduced entire regions across north africa, the levant, and central europe to desolate wastelands, with ruins of villages depopulated through war, famine, and plague being overgrown – pastures becoming meadows, farmlands becoming prairies; abandoned, often burnt-out houses overgrown with moss and ivy.
This is the era when the idea of “the Commons” was developed. Even the nobility – much of it just more ruthless than their subjects, not wiser or more capable – had suffered much during times of plague and famine. There were far fewer people around, and the miserable survivors huddled together to share work, common resources, and their lives. In some places, Commoners were able to live unmolested by rulers or priesthoods for generations, until the elites had recovered enough to seize their lands and force them into wage labor.
In the lands today known as Spain and Portugal, Visigothic Nobility had invaded and set up their reign before the Moors came along. As an illustration of just how badly things were going in the Christian world at that time: in just one battle against the Muslims, much of the ruling Gothic nobility was wiped out, including the king. The battle was a long-lasting defeat, as the Visigoths were a divided and feuding people. They were unable to present a united front to defend against the invaders, and many of the Iberian people who lived under Gothic nobility saw the Moors as liberators.
Christians -vs – Muslims: the forever war
Many of the poor wretches left alive in the wake of the various calamities of the era clung desperately to their masters, and chose to live in squalid camps surrounding the manors and castles of the Masters. Once settled in, they could try desperately to make themselves of service to their overlords.
Insolence was not tolerated. Unquestioning obedience was demanded of the peasants, literacy prohibited, and being raped by priests and nobles just one of many indignities codified by law.
Priests were allowed to rape the brides they had performed wedding ceremonies for, before their husbands were allowed to take them home. The local aristocrats were allowed to pleasure themselves with any man, woman, or child who crossed their paths. This is the reason why rich males and the Catholic Church are opposed to abortion. They needed the bastard children they spewed all over the peasantry for propaganda purposes; to remind the peasants where they fit into the grand scheme of things. The elites also needed them for future wars. And – who knows? – one of them might turn out to be an asset. A huge, bullying rapist, for example, could be valuable for tax collecting. And an intellectually competent person might be of use for the local lord’s manor, particularly if such a person was petty and ruthless.
The depopulation of Europe did not go unnoticed in the ancient world. The conquest-driven religion of Islam was spreading across lands ravaged by Christian-on-Christian genocide, the local populations and ancient aristocracies unable to field enough professional soldiers to resist. Places where the Church had little influence, however, were able to fend off the invaders. The Islamic invaders made a good argument in favor of their incursions into formerly Christian lands: they were rescuing people from the vile Christian Churches and bringing people civilization.
The lands conquered by Moorish invaders in the Iberian peninsula became famous throughout Europe as places of learning, and prosperous peasants, merchants, and aristocrats sent their children to Toledo and Seville to be educated in science, letters, and math. Lebanon and Syria likewise were centers of learning for hundreds of years, while most Europeans were reduced to mucking through the mud for sustenance. This Islamic intrusion was intolerable to Church and Kings alike. Something had to BE DONE!
Pope Baby Raper issued proclamations offering free passage to heaven for anyone who died fighting against the Muslim invaders. This is generally not a great idea, as it emphasizes the dying aspect to combat, as opposed to surviving the conflict.
Later, Pope Bloody Bastard proclaimed to a gathering of Catholic Church bishops that all sins – even the most high sins of murder or heresy – could be absolved by taking the lives of heathen, non-believers. And furthermore, anything done to non-believers was neither a crime nor a sin. After preaching this for several years, and finding wildly enthusiastic support for his ideas within the Church, he demanded that the good Christian people of Europe take up arms and make a bloody pilgrimage to the Holy Lands of the bible and free them from Islamic rule. And don’t forget the Jews – they’re non-believers, too!
There was an unexpectedly huge response to this call. Rabble, cutthroats, and murderers from across central Europe gladly took up the cause.
“Who wants to kill, plunder, and rape in the name of Jesus?”
But, you know…the Holy Lands are soooo far away, and there’s these prosperous Jewish neighborhoods, just right there…so Jewish communities were wiped out in Spier, Worms, Mainz, Metz , Prague, Ratisbon, and other cities.
Though most Crusaders (or “vassals of Christ,” anointed by the pope) were satisfied with that and returned home with everything they could steal from their Jewish victims, others continued on to the rallying place for the invasion of the Holy Lands, Constantinople. Along the way, they pillaged a path through Hungary. Zemun and Belgrade were pillaged, as well as the countryside around Nis, before the Hungarian King was able to drive them out of his territories.
The pope had asked his nobles in the Church to send him men-at-arms. Instead he got a murdering, plundering horde. The Byzantine Emperor enthroned at Constantinople was only too happy to round them up and send them on their way.
Once across the Bosporus, the vile force plundered at will – raping, and murdering everyone in their path. With no real command, just bishops urging them onward to Jerusalem, there had been no thought of setting up a supply chain. This created an armed, starving mob, and there are just too many tales about Crusaders roasting and eating babies to ignore.
And all of this happened before they had even seen a Muslim soldier. When the pillaging horde pushed on towards Muslim lands, they were met by an actual Turkish army and annihilated.
Eventually, professional soldiers and low ranking nobles came to join in the pillaging, and all along the eastern Mediterranean coast, one ancient port city after another fell: Antioch, Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre, Acre. The inhabitants were slaughtered or taken as slaves, and everything not nailed down, hauled away as booty. Some Crusaders decided to stay and live in the places they subjugated, since they’d escaped from the crushing poverty and oppression in feudal Europe.
Several Christian domains were established en route to Jerusalem, which was also captured, and all the inhabitants massacred – Muslim, Jew, and Christian alike.
Jerusalem taken, all the inhabitants slaughtered.
“Kill Them ALL!”
Because there had been no clear leadership, there arose disputes over who should claim which lands, and this left the Christian domains divided, squabbling, and even making war over them. The Crusaders were also not able to offer a united defense against Muslims, who were anxious to drive these heathen, cannibalistic savages from their lands and send them back to Europe or hell, where they belonged. The Crusaders even overran the ancient Christian land of Edessa along the way, exterminating yet another Christian sect not devoted to plundering for the enrichment of the pope.
Over the next two centuries, Islamic warlords arose who would eventually drive the Crusaders away for good. Many of the subsequent Crusades were either attempts to retake Jerusalem or were actually mercenary attacks against Christian cities who the Eastern Roman Emperor or pope had a grudge against.
The most prosperous lands in all Christian Europe were laid waste by a Crusade because the highly literate people of southern France were not loyal to the pope. This was their reward for preventing Islamic penetration into central Europe from Iberia, as well as their punishment for popular literacy. This illustrates one of the major aspects to the continuation of the Roman Empire that led to a great downturn in European civilization. Once finished with a task, the vassal or servant was killed. It’s cheaper than continuing to maintain them, and in the case of architecture, once the skilled craftspeople were dead, their knowledge was gone with them, so that the owner could smugly state that nothing like it would ever be built again.
There were further crusades against Moors in Iberia, and Slavs in northern Germany. There was even a Crusader-vs-Crusader crusade, as nobles and merchants in Genoa and Venice feuded over who controlled Christian domains in the Holy Lands.
It was in the Crusade against the Cathars of southern France that the most influential edict the Roman, Catholic Church has ever pronounced was issued. Having laid siege to one of the cities in the region, the commander of the Crusaders asked the advice of the local abbot. He was concerned that, once the city was obtained, he would have a difficult time telling who were the righteous, pious Catholics, and who were the heretical Cathers Christians.
The abbot’s reply would resound throughout the ages, and is very popular with the armed forces of the Christian world to this very day:
“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”
“Kill them all, for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”
From the 2nd century AD (according to modern reckoning) until the 17th, the grotesquely sadistic, violent rulers of the West were engaged in an all-out war against the pre-existing civilizations of the world. This doctrine of total annihilation found it’s greatest advancement under the guidance of the Catholic Church.
Catholics plead for mercy from Crusaders
With Much of Europe divided between the Eastern and Roman Churches and the pope eager to unleash his obedient, ignorant armies of slaughter and genocide upon the world, the pope began a campaign of total, bloody war on his unfortunate followers.
Not to be outdone, the Eastern Church launched an even bloodier assault against the Peoples of Asia, and their Russian empire spread the genocidal religion from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific, obliterating civilizations that had stood for perhaps thousands of years. We don’t really know much about those ancient Peoples, because of the complete destruction of their cultures. What we do know is; throughout Christendom, knowledge was reserved for the Church and Nobility, and those wealthy enough to earn their favor. And if the local rulers were less concerned with learning than ruling over their subjects with iron fists, the result would be ignorant, savage assholes in power who NO ONE WAS ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE!
What were the results of centuries of murderous repression and people burned alive in public – all this carried out or condoned by a “religion” that conducted its services in a dead language no one understood, except the clergy?
An entire civilization built upon lies, greed, genocide, and rape.
Entire countries full of people who view education with mistrust, fear, and even hatred.
A civilization which views Nature as evil and unholy, to be brutalized and ravaged – despite the fact that Nature provides them with everything.
People who actually believe superstition is any type of knowledge not handed down from the Proper Authorities.
Ancient laws passed down from ancient despotic rulers, with slight modification to fool the common people into believing they were innovative.
Loss of technologies that built structures standing to this day, some of which are still being used.
A Religion of genocide which allows believers to commit any atrocity against non-believers.
Worshiping ignorant, violent jackasses as civic leaders.
An economy based on plunder and warfare.
And these are the main obstacles preventing people all over the world from overcoming – or even comprehending – the conditions of their slavery to descendants of elites handed down from ancient times to the 21st century.
via the subversion of the early Christian Church, by Roman emperors.
This is the oldest symbol for the Christian faith. It may also be the oldest symbol of divine authority in what passes as “western” civilization. There’s a lot more to say about this particular symbol, but for now let’s focus on it’s elegant simplicity.
Because it was an upstart religion and illegal in the Roman empire, Christians needed a secretive way to identify one another. So, when wanting to inquire about someone’s belief, a Christian could draw half the symbol in the dirt with a finger. If the other party involved finished it, they recognized one another as part of the Church. If not, no harm done, the image quickly erased, easy-peasy.
After the Church was decriminalized, a new symbol was bestowed upon the Romanized religion, the cross.
Constantine and Christ’s Holy Terror
The ruler of the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, Constantine, supposedly had a vision as he tossed and turned in his sleep, worried about an upcoming battle. Either that, or he was given a sign from heaven on his way there. More likely he just made this story up.
Regardless of the inspiration, Constantine was given a sign from some god or another – i’m not sure they ever specify – which he regarded as a license to kill. The two symbols combined in the new banner allegedly signify “by this sign, conquer.”
From this moment on, Christianity was not a religion of love, tolerance, sharing, and community. From this point on, Christianity was some unseen god’s holy scourge, come to rid the world of sinful non-believers with sword and fire. Ever notice how much Catholics have enjoyed burning people alive over the centuries?
The symbol of the cross eventually morphed into the more recognizable “+” form, then further transformed into…something awful.
This is the image of Jesus the ancient Churches like. It’s traumatizing. It’s meant to be.
The message sent by the authorities:
“See that? There’s your god of love for you! He’s DEAD!
If we killed your god, do you think we’ll have any mercy on YOU?”
Christians ever since have been very enthusiastic in slaughter, genocide, rape, and plunder. They are, after all, forgiven. For anything. For everything. By the way, rape is not prohibited in the holey bible. There are a number of responsibilities spelt out for rapists in the old testament, including an obligation to marry the victim. I do not believe the victim is given a say in the matter. And in the new testament, women are encouraged to be submissive to men.
War on knowledge
Constantine undertook a war to eliminate the Zoroastrian religion. Their priests were known as Magi, and were mentioned with quite a lot of respect in the telling of Jesus’ birth.
The Romans killed every living Magi, and burned or otherwise destroyed their teachings.
I can’t help but think this was done because what the Magi taught was self-directed enlightenment and inner growth. What the Christian Church had decided on as it’s doctrine – in the council of Nicea Constantine sponsored ten years prior – was batshit crazy by comparison. Constantine was eliminating the competition. He had to, because no one was going to believe the stupid shit his new Church was passing off as “religion.”
He never made Christianity the official state religion (that would come later), even after his own “conversion.” As mentioned above, this conversion affected the Church more than vice-versa. The emperor had remade it in his own image.
Constantine’s end goal was likely to proclaim himself as the sun god, sol invictus, and Roman coinage, as well as works of art and architecture, portrayed him as Sol’s companion. He never did get around to announcing his own divinity. He did, however, make Sun day the official Christian day of rest and adulation.
Subsequent emperors burned the library of Antioch, and later banned teaching of science in the entire empire. People of other faiths were prohibited from being officers in the army, and a heretical Christian sect – the Manicheans – were exterminated for providing a sane, believable doctrine for Christians.
And just to rub a little salt in the wounds of a bleeding populace, pope Dumbass I outlawed public baths across the empire. Less than century later, unhygienic conditions contributed to a severe outbreak of bubonic plague.
The Church outlawed all forms of date-keeping, navigational charts and equipment, and any reference to the world as being spherical. No one believed the world was flat and the earth was the center of the universe. People started pretending to believe it when anyone saying otherwise was burned alive in public squares.
The Church also outlawed all non-Christian schools and ordered the obliteration of all knowledge kept at the great library of Alexadria – perhaps the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled in one place. Not only did they destroy ancient scrolls, books, and other writings, they massacred everyone who had learned to read. Millions of tradesmen, artisans, and craftsmen were slaughtered. Egyptian civilization has never recovered from this atrocity.
A holocaust (burnt offering) of millions of people practicing another “heretical” form of Christianity, the Donatists in North Africa, was ordered. An entire region depopulated. Every man, woman, and child murdered.
The Oronteus Finaeus map,
showing Antarctica with ice-free coasts, mountains and rivers. It was based on older maps, lost to His-story
The church decreed that every book not written by Christian hands be destroyed.
There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.
–Augustine (354 C.E.- 430 C.E.)
Europe becomes Christian
War was declared against the cultures of Egypt and Greece. The ancient library of Athens was torn down, all the scribes and priests burned alive. Roman facades were put on ancient temples. Others were torn down and replaced with Christian churches.
Ireland was likewise invaded, but the mercenary Patrick was not up to the task and relented after merely massacring half-a-million people. He reported to Rome that the “serpents have been eliminated,” but he was really giving the Celts some time to hide their knowledge.
Just around 200 years from the time Constantine remade Christianity for his own bloody purposes, the population of the ancient European world had plummeted drastically, and human civilization set back thousands of years. Some estimates claim over 110,000,000 people had died due to conflict, sacrifice, disease, and hunger.
AND WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WAS LOST AS A RESULT. We can only guess, based on physical evidence left behind.
my homage to a place where i once dwelt…from archive.com’s wayback machine
Out in the woods, off the country road – There! Where the out-of-place welcoming sign stands beside the parked vehicles. Between the greenhouse and the garden beds, there winds the trail – a trail to adventures of the imagination, a trail into the possibilities of the moment. Go that way, up the hill and through the Douglas firs. You have found the Land of the Lost, a place for wanderers, students of rebellion, self-exiled romantics determined to make their lives their own!
The first clue for what is to come is the outdoor brewery. What can be learned about a place with no indoor plumbing, or any indoor whatever, when the first primitive pole-and-plywood structure one finds is the 40-gallon brewery?
Continue up the hill, across the stream and on to the kitchen, the gathering area where meals are shared. Notice the outdoor library. The titles are mostly in five categories: food preparation, gardening (permaculture), brewing, rebellion and fictional works of mayhem, wonder and dread.
Of course you are welcomed to stay, to linger by the creek with your books and journals, to dig in the earth, to play and create music, to drink and share stories around the fires and lanterns. You learn of mutual friends, not only around the area, but around the globe. You combat the mosquitoes and hide from the rain and cold. Each day begins with the anticipation of something wonderful coming, while the view of the surrounding mountain distracts your attention from whatever it was you had in mind, until you want just to be there, overwhelmed with scents and sights and sounds.
It’s a leisure-filled life of unmotivated afternoons and pleasant evenings. The days melt away until the world of clocks and schedules seems but a distant, disturbing memory. Yet, the time finally does get your attention. You were just passing through and have stayed longer than you had planned. There were destinations, goals, meetings to make: time demands that you depart. You leave, wondering why your life can’t always be like this, what makes the compelling reasons for leaving so damned compelling?
As the answer comes to you while travelling the twisting road out of the valley, you have one of two reactions: you vow to return for a longer stay, to learn to live this way so that one day you, too, will have your breakaway station from the oppressive world of consumption and domination. Or you speed away with the greatest haste, fleeing the seductive world you’ve found before it’s too late to turn away.
most of the court systems on this planet are based upon the religious delusions of megalomaniacal european aristocracies. how humiliating is it to be kept in servitude by figments of other people’s imaginations?
-ROMANUS PONTIFEX, JANUARY 8, 1455 - the doctrine of discovery
“[W]e bestow suitable favors and special graces on those Catholic kings and princes…intrepid champions of the Christian faith…to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and…to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate…possessions, and goods, and to convert them to…their use and profit…“
There you have it, spelt out in fairly clear language – His Excellency, Pope Babyraper the Umpteenth, authorized his co-conspirators to go out and rob, murder, rape, and plunder in every land which had not been “saved” by J-Zeus, the dying/resurrecting sun deity. At the time of the edict, that was around 85 percent of the inhabited world.
It’s easy enough to dismiss this document as an out-dated relic of a long-gone era.
The problem with that is, this is the SINGLE, LEGAL DOCUMENT that created the court systems of the US, Canada, Australia, much of Latin America and the Caribbean, the Philippines, most of Africa, swaths of Asia…
This single document is the foundation for laws before the US Supreme Court when considering matters of copyright, property, regulation of corporations, and trade agreements. Yeah, all that bullshit about separation of Church and State…just window dressing. Without this Roman Catholic doctrine, the foundation for rule of law by the court systems in just about every nation on earth goes straight out the window.
Ever heard of a place called Latin America? No one spoke fucking Latin in the god-damn 15th century. Except for the Catholic Church clergy and lawyers – who established the court systems that preside over these places to this day! And that’s why it’s refereed to as Latin America, because of their Latin legal systems.
Think this is a ridiculous over-simplification (I get that a lot)? Ever read a US law book? See all the Latin phrases? When exactly was it that Latin-speaking people inhabited the US? Isn’t US law supposed to be based on English court systems? And just what is the foundation of English law? Again, written in Latin. Little known fact: “Empress of the Holy Roman Empire” is one of Queen Lizzie the 2nd’s titles.
INTER CAETERA, MAY 3, 1493
“…in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and everywhere increased and spread…and that barbarous nations be overthrown…”
This Papal decree is so much a part of the Great American Mythology that it was referenced by none less than US Chief Justice John Marshall in an 1823 decision, JOHNSON v. MCINTOSH, 21 US 543 to assert American authority over indigenous Peoples. His decision legalized exploitation, theft, and genocide by establishing that indigenous Peoples were indeed not quite people, not being Christians and all, so anything done to or against them is all good and well, and the Good Lord’s work as well, hallelujah!
And why should it be overturned? It’s necessary to dehumanize indigenous Peoples in order to rob, rape, and murder them wholesale, even over the objections of the more squeamish members of the invading society.
This notion that indigenous Peoples must be “saved” from their ignorant, savage existence by having the gifts of religion and poverty bestowed upon them fuels wars even in the 21st century. This idea has been enacted through many expressions over the years: saving souls, bringing them civilization, educating them, making them into citizens of the state, development. This is the doctrine of Manifest Destiny – that god almighty has given Europeans superior weapons in order to subjugate other Peoples. Most of whom were not warlike, and almost none of whom had standing armies.
This is the notion of Progress. Lands previously untouched by the foul hand of the West had to be incorporated into the European legal systems in order for European aristocracies to rule over them, for the benefit of the Europeans. It is solidly, irrefutably white supremacist to the core, an excuse to commit genocide and feel good, even proud, for doing it. There sure are long lists of names – venerated in every nation overrun by Europeans – of murdering, ignorant scum who slaughtered indigenous Peoples and later became well-respected members of the communities where they dwelt. Some of these genocidal pieces of shit are Saints in the Catholic church.
This Progressive ideology has never been refuted by anyone with a Eurocentric worldview. It enables people who depend on markets for everything they need for personal survival – but who must first find a master to serve in order to access markets – to think of indigenous Peoples as poor, filthy, ignorant savages. Even though the indigenous Peoples are able to hand craft everything they need. Food, clothing, shelter – what they can’t do for themselves, is often available from others, as sharing is much more widespread in Peoples who do not have the concept of “poverty” in their lives. They mostly live in abundance.
Hell – right now, pharmaceutical corporations are falling all over themselves to get at indigenous healers in the field. They are making billions of dollars off of the knowledge and experience of indigenous Peoples, then they have the audacity to cry about “intellectual property rights.”
And to FINALLY arrive at the main point I want to make here – Socialism and Marxism are not in any way different from any of the other ideologies of Progress. Indeed, Marx himself stated that indigenous Peoples must submit to proletarianization or disappear from the world. Anyone who did not slave for a master for monetary gain was a lumpen, and Marx saw them – always the majority of the population in industrialized nations – as reactionary, enemies of the working class. He used much the same rationale we hear today from far-right racists: Lumpen want to take our jobs (scabs). They are criminals. They are no-good layabout alcoholics and drug addicts. They are whores. They are ignorant. As someone who has spent much of his adult life either homeless or in prison, but always struggling against the coercive forces of elite rule, I gotta say a big, ol’ “Fuck you!” to orthodox Marxists.
There are Marxists I have some respect for – libertarian and autonomous Marxists are at least breaking from the orthodoxy of building a Party to centralize power. Some groups that started out as Marxists have evolved to the point that they no longer spout fiery working-class rhetoric. Instead, they humbly ask the communities they rely on for support what their group can do to help them. Likewise, the trend in anarchy so far in the 21st century is for revolutionaries to focus on building autonomous communities instead of taking over industry. Except – of course! – in the industrialized West.
In Europe and North America, the white working classes are terrified of losing the few precious scraps of privilege they’ve been allowed until now. Still clinging to their notion of Progress, orthodox Marxists, Anarcho-Communists, and Syndicalists refuse to let go of racist, outdated 19th century ideas that see them – the true and only revolutionaries – as the saviors of the world. Anyone who dares to challenge them and join the rest of humanity in the 21st century is silenced as “ignorant” or “reactionary” or “fascist.”
I’ve written before that Marxism’s main failure was that the working class never seized control of anything. I’m more of the opinion these days that their greatest failure was in only offering substitutions for the social order they were allegedly opposing. Substitute the Party for the working class. Substitute a Chairman for an emperor. Substitute expansion of the revolution for economic expansion. Substitute “safeguarding the revolution” for “protecting investments.” In short, Marxism has never offered anything but more of the same horrors, with just slightly different jargon. In function, the fascist state is little different than a communist one, and neither system is much different than democracies or republics. They all seek to divvy up the world’s resources for the enrichment of very few people, with treats for their lackeys, jails for the complainers, and bludgeons for those who get in the way. Absolutely nothing has changed in the pyramidal structure of civilized societies throughout history. They are slave systems.
A few notes about this alleged “progress” of his-story
It took the old European colonial powers centuries to overrun the entire planet and install court systems acceptable to their aristocracies. But it pretty much took until the 20th century for whities to look around at the places they had conquered and think “hmmm – wonder what all that stuff is?”
Naturally, being the superior civilization and all, they had no need for anything the heathens had. Not their medicinal herbcrafting. Not their stories and legends about geological events. Not their ambitions, thoughts, and dreams. Not their extensive written histories which receded far, far past the time when the Christian book of bullshit was written. And especially not for their heathen technology, which was the work of demons, after all – amen.
Many of the civilizations annihilated by the invading savages (the conquistador’s forces were at least 95 percent illiterate, and were either kidnapped from slums or taken from prisons) were far superior in every way to what existed in Europe at that time. Some Europeans even marveled at the lack of poverty, the cleanliness and orderliness of city streets, the lack of crime, in peru, mexico, india…
There are irrigation systems in Peru that are thousands of years older than historians are willing to admit there have been people in the Americas. Megalithic ruins all over the world suggest that there was a one-world culture of sea-faring people who built magnificent cities globally, until just after the end of the last ice age, when climatic chaos destroyed many coastal areas. Thus, the universal flood myths in people’s written and oral histories.
I can write this with confidence because much of it is readily – even scientifically, if that’s your religion – verifiable now. As a matter of fact, it’s getting to be common knowledge. This may well be one reason why education systems are being undermined. There will be no way to keep this knowledge out of textbooks in the future, unless there is such tight control of publishing and education institutions that “traditional” narratives remain unchallenged. Religious institutions worldwide depend on this forgetting of the human saga.
Almost all the great dietary “breakthroughs” constantly in vogue in the US have come about as American consumers somehow found out about Ayurvedic and Naturalpathic medicinal traditions in Asia. As mentioned before, pharmaceutical corporations are scouring Amazonia and Africa, looking for new drugs and other biological knowledge from shamans and traditional healers. That’s not Progress, that’s just more plunder. We could accumulate this knowledge ourselves by TALKING TO PEOPLE and LISTENING WITH RESPECT TO WHAT OTHER CULTURES HAVE TO SAY! Fucksake…
I’m gonna go ahead and put this out there; some people suspect that a “lost,” one-world, seafaring culture still existed, here and there, until fairly recently. Until the era of conquest. Their civilization had collapsed, for the most part, and they had to rebuild. I’ll write a lot more about this in the future.
The point I want to make here is; Polynesian Peoples sailed thousands of miles of open, uninterrupted seas at times. It would be more than a thousand years before Western civilization accomplished the same. Some American and Australian indigenous Peoples claim to have sailed to their continents around 30,000 years ago. Most of the older ruins in the Americas are along the Pacific rim. Mayan civilization had a written history that covered 30,000 years, including daily records. Tenochtitlan, the capitol city of the Mexica, was an engineering marvel unmatched by the West: huge stone plazas and gigantic, megalithic pyramids built on a swamp. There are irrigation systems so old, there are no records of their construction, nor memories; in SE Asia, Russia, Australia, South America…noneof this points to savage, primitive people, as Catholic scribes and other racist apologists have told us throughout history.
And even the approved annuls of history tell of the constant attack on knowledge. Libraries burned by invading forces, in Alexandria, Heliopolis, Persepolis, Babylon, Palmyra…We will never know how much was destroyed in the era of conquest, which I suspect has been going on a little longer than we’ve been told.
How far back did all this pointless destruction put the human race, as far as accumulated knowledge? So much for “progress.” Most of this knowledge was lost forever to us, some of it we are actually rediscovering.
One civilization succeeded in preserving some of this ancient knowledge in Buddhist temples, written in archaic forms of Sanskrit. If it isn’t being destroyed by some goddam government or another, that’s where we could find a lot of details about cultures and events mentioned above.
The history we’ve been force-fed is so much just a load of bullshit, i’m not sure if we should believe anything written up until the end of the last century. EVERYTHING the education system has indoctrinated us into accepting is wrong. Fucking goddam Everything. I hope I can convince enough people in the anarchist movement of this that we can actually band together and use the new knowledge – the stuff being rediscovered – to our advantage.
to make things very clear;
the idea of “progressive” history is racist to it’s very core. not to mention complete Bullshit. anything coming from that tradition is nothing more or less than white supremacist propaganda. not just including Marxism, but ESPECIALLY Marxism because of its failure to understand that industrial society is not the Ultimate Achievement of humankind. Free living people do not need to be enslaved through employment in order to find liberation.
As for myself, i want no part of this wretched deathculture. it’s built on lies, fraud, genocide, rape, and plunder. we are capable of creating something so much better. we should get on with building it. now.
Where do we even start with this mess? How did America get to this point – where we are in danger of being over-run by the allies of a rogue intelligence agency that we are powerless against? How did the USA go from being the champion of the free world to being the greatest threat to the peace and security of its own citizens, and instant death from remote-control-in-the-skies for everyone else on earth?
It’s tempting to start out with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the story starts with the creation of the CIA and the National Security State, founded in 1947 by President Harry Truman to address the fact that, with the war against fascism over, it was time for the US government to rid itself of communists and other socialists who had poured into President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. The fear being that communists loyal to Russia’s revolutionary leader and communist party chairman Joseph Stalin would help him gradually transform the US into a communist state.
Government and business leaders wanted to ensure that there were “trusted people” in charge of things here, behind the scenes. These unaccountable, largely unknown people would be free to pursue their own agenda, without interference from government oversight and regulation. They set up fake businesses and NGOs. They hired CIA operatives to help facilitate business overseas and converted media mouthpieces to their cause.
They justified this by making sure the world knew of the dangers of “creeping socialism.” For years, the world was able to watch the Congress of the United States, along with their partners in business, destroy people’s lives by accusing them of being communists. Sometimes the accusations were merely petty acts of malice against people who had rejected the committee chairman’s homosexual advances – this happening in an era much more judgemental and less accepting of ANY expression of sexuality, much less one which many people could not comprehend.
Despite the fact that several courageous individuals succeeded in exposing the gross abuse of power of the anti-communists (even today, one of the more vocal anti-communists’ name is used to describe persecution for political gain – “McCarthyism.”), several of them retained power, and even increased this power in the decades afterwards – both Richard Nixon (HUAC) and Ronald Reagan (anti-communist president of the Screen Actors Guild) eventually took over the White House (in possession of the CIA since the intelligence/industry coup that had JFK assassinated), largely on the political clout earned in the 1940’s and 50’s anti-communist witch-hunts.
The longterm consequences of the 1963 coup has been a nation in a state of perpetual warfare. At first, the war was against the Communist Menace, anywhere on the globe (Greece, Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, the list goes on…). After the Soviet Union collapsed – as it was always intended to – the old Cold Warriors needed a new boogeyman to seek out and destroy anywhere an oil field or other valuable natural resources were in danger of being stolen from American corporations by foreigners.
However, in the 1970s a glitch in the system developed. The American people had become unwilling to finance and die for wars abroad, being fought for very unclear purposes. Two strategies were developed to compensate for this. First, blue-blood businessmen helped the CIA set up their own drug-running operations. This would give them international contacts, with people who would do just about anything for money. It would also give the CIA a ways of building a “black budget” of money from drug-running operations, with the good people of the United States and their elected representatives none the wiser.
Also, this allowed industries to develop their own private military and intelligence businesses. Both to set up their own smuggling networks, and to deal with those pesky foreigners who kept trying to utilize their nation’s natural resources for the benefit of the local population. How dare they!
This privatization and outsourcing of warfare for the benefit of multinational corporations picked up steam under the guidance of President James Earl Carter, who came up with the brilliant idea of recruiting and arming the most intolerant and violent people to be found on Earth and sending them to fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, rather than risk an outright war if the US were involved in some kind of official capacity. These mujahadeen eventually became the current crop of Afghan warlords and Opium barons. We are allegedly at war with this group, forever. We are currently arming this group. Not the exact same people, of course – but the ideology (or “theology” if you want to legitimize their insane version of Islam) remains the same. They exist to cause violence and chaos in countries not under the direct control of one of “their” Imans. There are no nations that fit this description, and the Holy Terror Army (a name i just made up and will now use to refer to any fundamentalist religion that resorts to extreme violence to impose it’s version of “god’s” law on nonbelievers) is spreading nightmarish violence around the world.
Prior to this current age of holy terror, acting President Ronald Reagan expanded the proxy wars to Angola, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Cambodia, and Grenada. His successor invaded Panama and Kuwait. And dirty old man Bill Clinton gave al Qaeda it’s biggest test, installing the CIA’s Holy Terror Army into the former Yugoslavia.
After that, the CIA/al Qaeda alliance was ready for the big time, and despite having trained, funded, and armed the Holy Terror Army, President Slick Willy justified military actions abroad by claiming they were targeting the workings of Holy Terror mastermind Osama bin Laden. This was the reason given for striking a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan being built to provide cheap prescription drugs to a continent being decimated by AIDS. Millions of Africans have died over the years due to this, and not just of AIDS – they’ve died of numerous maladies that could have been treated with pharmaceuticals, but the patent-holders demand prices that few people in Africa can afford.
Which brings us to 9/11/2001, the invasion of a country for fun and profit, and the start of a second perpetual war, the first one being the war on drugs, which the U.S. intentionally escalates by selling arms to drug cartels.
So, the CIA has assassinated an American President, set up an international drug-running operation which employs the most insanely violent people imaginable, and conducts wars with proxy armies which it cannot control, only finance. And the Government continues to use the war on drugs as a pretext to wage war on its own citizens, despite a proven will by the American public to legalize Ganja. But, this isn’t enough.
The war on terror has to be continually justified, despite a proven inability to militarily defeat a state of mind. Otherwise, it could lose its precious funding. Money is hard to come by, with the Government printing it as fast as it can in order to give it to European Banking cartels. There’s nothing left for the rest of us. I guess we are supposed to take solace in the roles left to us – fodder for their highly profitable, never-ending wars – and learn to love Big Brother.
Here in the spring of 2013, it looks as if the cycle has run its course, and the extreme violence of the late 20th century is finally coming back to its spawning grounds in North America. In the past two years, there have been numerous instances of mass shootings that were so obviously orchestrated by someone other than the “fall guy,” who usually ends up dead, that the Government is losing credibility. Washington has lost the Hearts and Minds campaign in the homeland, to the bloggers.
In addition to being nothing more than future collateral damage to our government, Americans are also guinea pigs in Monsanto’s GMO playground. They have been given immunity from prosecution for the damage their poisons are causing.
Our government is unaccountable to us. It is out of control, and the people in the positions of political power can only find solutions to the problems the banks, corporations, Holy War Terrorists, and drug cartel violence create by spreading more of the same.
If the US government continues to escalate the war of attrition it is waging against Americans, there may come a day when we welcome intervention by some foreign power. In the meanwhile, some countries may not wait for an invitation to intervene here. Just as they are saying about Syria, and like they said about Bosnia, the world cannot sit idly by and watch a violent regime continue to slaughter its own people.
It seems like our nation is doomed, and if we don’t want to go down with it, we had damn well better start envisioning our lives in the ruins of the former United States, and living our lives to accommodate the changing world around us – one that an out-of-control CIA completely fucked over. I doubt the people of Yugoslavia had much of an idea how things would go after Tito died. Their society imploded. NATO intervened. Everything fell apart. Fortunes were lost in the destruction. New fortunes were made in the reconstruction – mostly for foreign corporations. And I don’t see things turning out much differently for us.
rob los ricos
The National Security State
The apparatus of the National Security State, largely established in the National Security Act of 1947, laid the foundations for the extension of American hegemony around the globe. In short, the Act laid the foundations for the apparatus of the American Empire. The National Security Act created the National Security Council (NSC) and position of National Security Adviser, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as the Pentagon high command of military leaders, and of course, the CIA.
The first major foreign operation carried out by the National Security State, or rather, the “secret government,” was the overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Iran. In 1952, the British were concerned at the efforts of Iran’s new Prime Minister Mohommad Mossadeq, in nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, taking the monopoly away from British Petroleum. So the British intelligence, the SIS, proposed to the Americans a joint operation, and the CIA obliged.
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation in which he warned America and indeed the world about the growing influence of the National Security State in what he referred to as the “military-industrial complex”:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Eisenhower was speaking from the point of view of having first-hand knowledge of this “influence” in the corridors of power, himself as President being unable to challenge it, and unable to do so simply in the first decade of the American Empire. He was warning against the influence of the interconnected relationship and organized power of the military, government, and industry, in that the growing influence of this “complex” was so vast that it threatened to take over the government and subvert democracy itself. It was the functions of this complex that saw profit created through war and empire, and thus, there was a constant drive and impetus towards pursuing empire and resorting to war. If you build a massive military structure, you are going to use it; if it is profitable to go to war, you will go to war.
Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. “He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.”
Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can’t remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination. – from The LBJ-CIA Assassination of JFK
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it wasn’t the Joint Chiefs alone who were trying to push for war, as the “CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis,” as Kennedy had ordered the CIA to halt all raids against Cuba during the crisis, “to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency’s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration.” However, Bill Harvey, the CIA agent in charge of “Operation Mongoose,” the CIA plan which employed the Mafia to attempt to kill Castro, in brazen defiance of Kennedy’s orders, mobilized “every single team and asset that we could scrape together” and then dropped them into Cuba, “in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow.”`
Robert Kennedy became the conduit through which the back-channel negotiations took place with the Soviets that ultimately ended the crisis without catastrophe. Nikita Khrushchev recounted the situation in his memoirs, in which he explained that Robert Kennedy “stressed how fragile his brother’s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on,” which struck Khrushchev as “especially urgent.” Robert Kennedy warned the Soviets that, “If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.” Khrushchev even later wrote that, “for some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,” and that, “now he was admitting this to us himself.” Thus:
“Moscow’s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. “We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.”
Thirteen days after the crisis began, the Soviets announced that they would remove the missiles from Cuba, with the US agreeing to remove missiles from US bases in Turkey and “pledging not to invade Cuba,” which Kennedy and future presidents would honour. At the announcement of the end to the crisis, General LeMay roared at Kennedy, “It’s the greatest defeat in our history,” and that, “We should invade today!” A defense analyst at the Pentagon, Daniel Ellsberg, who was consulting with Air Force generals and colonels on nuclear strategy at the end of the crisis, remarked that after the settlement was reached, “there was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles,” explaining, “not that I had the fear there was about to be a coup – I just thought it was a mood of hatred and rage. The atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous.” – from lew rockwell, The National Security State and the Assassination of JFK
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen
Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, “Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” and “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>
Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes
American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.
Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist.– from the gaurdian, Frankenstein the CIA created
CONTROLLING THE ILLEGAL DRUG TRADE
The more one studies the dark history of the US national security state, the more transparent the CIA – Wall Street connections become. The links to the international drug trade are less obvious, but have existed from the beginning, that is, from the days of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Time and again, the same pattern has played out: US military interventions in Southeast Asia, Central America and, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, have been accompanied by a sharp increase in narco-trafficking, with all of the attendant evils. These include the plague of drug addiction, drug-related crime, the devastation of the family and as I hope to show, the corrupting of democratic institutions at home and abroad.
The morally bankrupt policies that are responsible for all of the above have had another deleterious effect: They have crippled our nation’s capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. It is no wonder that foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But US elites are oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and are quite candid about what they view as the CIA’s pragmatic “need” to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign policy goals. Their realpolitik can be read between the lines of the policy papers. Take, for instance, the 1996 intelligence report, already noted, prepared by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and for which Greenberg was nominated to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. In the paper Greenberg affirms that “the capability to undertake [covert operations]….constitutes an important national security tool.” Later, in the section titled “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” he insists that
foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of U.S. intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.
This means, over and above diplomacy, that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets, they are granted protection from prosecution for narco-trafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. In 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice actually worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which, notice, made a mockery of then presidential wife Nancy Reagan’s much ballyhooed “just say no” anti-drug campaign. At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called war on drugs. But hindsight shows that the Reagan White House badly abused the public’s good faith.
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses. The United States lost more than 700 soldiers in the war.
The foreign policy advocated by Maurice Greenberg, above, is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of narcotic addiction among our children, who have been sacrificed to the false god of national security. But the social carnage is not limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; but has since become a major problem. A similar recent explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, which, notice, is right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA. Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet, are intimately associated with US empire building. Quite simply, the US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French who, in their day, also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade. The writer Chalmers Johnson has termed this descent into darkness the sorrow of empire.
The CIA’s secret collusion with the Department of Justice gave the CIA veto over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US drug enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing was no accident. The deal coincided with the start of the CIA’s Contra war in Central America. This explains why, the next year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), under pressure from the Pentagon, closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished; in fact, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas; and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, Langley’s veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the drug trade.
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
The campaign against Gary Webb has been called “one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist’s competence in living memory.” The fawning mainstream press, always eager to do the CIA’s bidding, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct. One of the low points occurred on live TV, on November 15, 1996, when NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb’s exhaustively documented expose as “a conspiracy theory,” the kiss of death for any serious journalist. At this same time, as we know, Greenspan was busily engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the 2008 financial meltdown of the global economy. – from foreign policy journal, Black 9/11: A Walk on the Dark Side Part 3: AIG and the Linkage to the Drug Trade
when assets go bad
Phillip (alternately, “Philip”) Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.
Michael Ruppert. Mike is a former LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) narcotics officer who in the late 1970’s, trained in narcotics by the U.S. Justice Department. The CIA tried to recruit Mike to traffic drugs with them. When Mike tried to expose the corruption that he saw (the moral thing to do), he was fired without cause. As Governor Jesse Ventura says, “Don’t just go along to get along.”
Mike Ruppert has spent the last 25 years fighting the system, trying to expose the lies and tyranny of the CIA (and many other offices of our government). This is no conspiracy theory, Mike Ruppert has presented over 6,000 documents indicting the U.S. government’s involvement in decades of heroin and cocaine drug-trafficking into the cities and towns of the United States. You can subscribe to Mike’s newsletter at www.copvcia.com or go to www.fromthewilderness.com
Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
The CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan … found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to “read” than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the “reliable” partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
To this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.
“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.
The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings ….
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….
John Adams once called the vice presidency, “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.” FDR’s VP, John Nance Garner, said the job wasn’t “worth a pitcher of warm piss.”
It’s quotes like these that make Dick Cheney—who pretty much ran his own separate government from the VP’s office—all the more impressive, not to mention terrifying. For not only was Cheney out of control, he was out of control in a job that had no controls attached to it. No one had ever thought them necessary before.
Give the man credit for creativity. Cheney found even more ways to overturn the Constitution, undermine the separation of powers, and possibly make the U.S. government an accessory to murder many times over.
The New York Times broke half the story in Sunday’s paper as Scott Shane explained that “the Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney.” Congress finally found out eight years after Cheney gave the order, when CIA Director Leon E. Panetta informed the House and Senate intelligence committees upon learning of the program himself.
According to current law, when a U.S. intelligence agency is involved in a covert action, at least eight members of Congress—the Republican and Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress and of their intelligence committees—must be informed in order for the program to be legal.
CIA defenders insist compliance with the law is actually a gray area because “this program never went fully operational” as one official put it. And Panetta terminated the program as soon as he learned of it. But given the history of both Cheney and many in the CIA’s contempt for both Congress and the Constitution, it’s entirely possible that we still don’t know the full story. – from the daily beast
there are some flaws to this video, but it’s a treasury of good information.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of contractors reached a level unprecedented in U.S. military operations. As of March 31, 2010, the United States deployed 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in the war zones. Contractors represented 50 percent of the Department of Defense (DOD) workforce in Iraq and 59 percent in Afghanistan.
This increase is the logical outcome of a series of decisions going back decades. Force structure reductions ranging from the post-Vietnam decisions that moved most Army logistics support elements to the Army Reserve and Guard4 to the post–Cold War reduction that cut the Army from 18 to 10 divisions with corresponding cuts in support forces greatly reduced the Services’ ability to support long-term operations. Next, a series of decisions in the 1990s led to the employment of contractors in the Balkans for tasks from traditional camp-building to the new concept of “force development” that saw MPRI training the Croatian army. Finally, the decision to invade Iraq with minimum forces left the United States with too few troops in-theater to deal with the disorder that resulted from the removal of Saddam. Thus, it is understandable that the immediate, unanticipated need for large numbers of logistics and security personnel, the shortage of such troops on Active duty, and the precedent for using contractors in the Balkans caused the Pentagon to turn to contractors to fill the immediate operational needs. However, the subsequent failure to conduct a careful analysis of the wisdom of using contractors is less understandable. The executive branch has conducted numerous investigations into fraud, waste, and corruption in the contracting process. Congress has held hearings and established the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the U.S. Government has not systematically explored the essential question: Does using contractors in a conflict zone make strategic sense?
By the end of 2009, contractors reported almost 1,800 dead and 40,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the fighting in Afghanistan gets worse, contractors are now suffering more deaths than U.S. forces: “In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractor deaths represented more than half—53 percent—of all fatalities. This point bears emphasis: since January 2010, more contractors have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military soldiers.” For practical purposes, these casualties were “off the books” in that they had no real impact on the political discussions about the war. As Peter Singer noted:
there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. . . . These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.
Contractor casualties are not reported via the Pentagon, but only through the U.S. Department of Labor. Labor’s Web site notes that these are not comprehensive statistics but only represent those injuries and deaths that resulted in insurance claims. Thus, it is difficult if not impossible to determine how many additional casualties were suffered by other nations’ contractors in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
In reality, it is virtually impossible to determine the actual effectiveness of any contractors—armed or unarmed—until they begin to operate in theater (and only then if a member of the U.S. Government can observe the contractors as they operate).
Compounding the problems created by lack of quality control, the government does not control the contractor’s daily contact with abuse, intimidation, and even killing of local civilians such as the DynCorp employee who ran a child sex ring in the Balkans or the September 2007 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square, Baghdad.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
In addition to undercutting government legitimacy, the use of contractors may actually undercut local government power. In Afghanistan, security and reconstruction contracts have resulted in significant shifts in relative power between competing Afghan qawmsas well as allegations of corruption. Dexter Filkins, writing in the New York Times, notes that the power structure in Orugzan Province, Afghanistan, has changed completely due to the U.S. Government’s selecting Matiullah Khan to provide security for convoys from Kandahar to Tirin Kot:
With his NATO millions, and the American backing, Mr. Matiullah has grown into the strongest political and economic force in the region. He estimates that his salaries support 15,000 people in this impoverished prov ince. . . . This has irritated some local leaders, who say that the line between Mr. Matiullah’s business interest and the government has disappeared. . . . Both General [Nick] Carter [commander of ISAF South] and Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, said they hoped to disband Mr. Matiullah’s militia soon—or at least to bring it under formal government control. . . . General Carter said that while he had no direct proof in Mr. Matiullah’s case, he harbored more general worries that the legions of unregulated Afghan security companies had a financial interest in prolonging chaos.
Thus, an unacknowledged but serious strategic impact of using contractors is to directly undercut both the legitimacy and the authority of the host nation government. – this article was originally published as Institute for National Strategic Studies Strategic Forum 260 (NDU Press, November 2010)
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that QinetiQ, a high tech defense contractor specializing in secret satellites drones and software used by U.S. special forces, was the victim of a sustained cybersecurity breach for several years starting in 2007.
According to Bloomberg, documents released in the Anonymous Stratfor hack reveal QinetiQ was compromised as part of a cyber-espionage attack originating in China — and notes the breach was part of a much broader campaign targetting U.S. contractors:
“QinetiQ’s espionage expertise didn’t keep Chinese cyber- spies from outwitting the company. In a three-year operation, hackers linked to China’s military infiltrated QinetiQ’s computers and compromised most if not all of the company’s research. At one point, they logged into the company’s network by taking advantage of a security flaw identified months earlier and never fixed […]
QinetiQ was only one target in a broader cyberpillage. Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.“
U.S. intelligence reports ranked cyber threats as the top danger facing the country for the first time in April, but tensions have been running high about the government’s ability to protect digital assets and intelligence for years. A 2011 Department of Justice report noted that only 64 percent of FBI agents assigned to national security-related cyber investigations had the appropriate skills and expertise to handle those types of cases.
Government cybersecurity contracting exploded during the Bush Administration, with many roles traditionally filled by government employees or resources outsourced to external companies over whom the government has less oversight. The Obama Administration has made efforts to curb that trend, but that expansion, combined with a lack of cybersecurity expertise in the military and federal agencies, resulted in many cybersecurity defense operations being outsourced or completed under the heavy supervision of outside contractors. – from think progress, The U.S. Outsources Cybersecurity & Defense To Contractors That Keep Getting Hacked
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
It is now beyond reasonable doubt that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own National Security State in what was a violent coup d’état that is, an overthrowing of the legitimate elected government of the United States by force through the use of the clandestine black-ops services of the CIA, elements of the Secret Service, the US military, the FBI and organized crime.
Unless and until the United States publicly discloses to the citizenry that its duly elected government was overthrown in 1963 and that since then the replacement/imposter government has been at least technically/legally speaking illegitimate[12] it will likely be impossible to reverse the increasingly rapid disintegration of America. The reality is that since the murder of President John F. Kennedy, there has been an extra-constitutional imposter “government” in place which prior to that time existed only in the shadows. It has been given many different names including the “war party” the MIMIC (media, intelligence, military, industrial complex) the secret government, the shadow government etc. That entity or “Regime” as a result of the JFK assassination appears to have profoundly altered the trajectory of the United States by placing the country on a constant war footing and building and sustaining an enormous foreign military base presence throughout the world which serves to project American power and enlarge the “empire.” – from jericho rendezvous, After the JFK Assassination–a True Coup d’état: Is the Current US Government Legitimate?
A handful of polls conducted in the days after the Boston Marathon bombings show that US citizens are responding much differently than in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people. Not only are Americans more opposed now to giving up personal freedoms for the sake of security than they were after 9/11, but other statistics show that distrust against the federal government continues to climb.
Just one day after the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing, pollsters with Fox News asked a sample of Americans, “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce thethreat of terrorism?” Forty-three percent of the respondents said they would, while 45 percent said no. Comparatively, 71 percent of Americans asked a similar question in October 2001 said they’d be willing to give up personal freedoms, while only 20 percent opposed at the time.
A separate poll conducted by the Washington Post just three days after the Boston Marathon bombing reveals that nearly half of those surveyed say that the government will go too far in trying to prevent future acts of terrorism. The Post asked a random national sample of 588 adults, “Which worries you more: that the government (will not go far enough to investigate terrorism because of concerns about constitutional rights), or that it (will go too far in compromising constitutional rights in order to investigate terrorism)?” Days after the Boston bombing, 41 percent of respondents said the government will not go far enough, compared to 48 percent saying they’ll go too far. When similar questions were asked in 2006 and 2010, 44 percent and 27 percent said the government will go too far, respectively, signaling that for the first time in years Americans are overly concerned about a misuse of power on the part of Washington.
That isn’t to say that the Boston attack is necessarily inspiring Americans to question authority, though. Two months before Tsarnaev brothers allegedly detonated a pair of explosives near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, 53 percent of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center said the federal government is threatening their personal rights and freedoms. In November 2011, that statistic was only 30 percent. – from russia today, Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism
Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)Police and private security personel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City. (AFP Photo / John Moore)
The Syrian government has called on the United Nations to classify a leading rebel group as a terrorist organisation after its leader pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda.
The call came as the opposition accused forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad of “savage” killings in the country’s south.
Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani heads the radical Nusra Front rebel group.
In a message posted online on Wednesday he pledged allegiance to the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and supported calls for an Islamic state to be created in Syria.
The Syrian regime is demanding the UN “fulfil its role and preserve global security” by classing Nursa Front as an Al Qaeda linked entity.
just like international criminal banking cartels are too rich and powerful for the government to touch, so are giant corporations – especially those that provide the precious oil that allows international trade to be possible.
no crime against humanity or nature is so great as to be a punishable offence. not murdering indigenous people who refuse to allow oil exploration in their homelands in the amazon rainforest, the mountainous islands of indonesia, the niger river delta…anyplace the oil companies destroys through their incompetence and evil machinations – well, that’s the price of doing business. evil business.
if their wreckless disregard for life isn’t enough to convince you of oil companies’ inherent evil, the fact that WE DO NOT EVER NEED TO USE PETROCHEMICALS EVER, FOR ANYTHING, EVER should provide the proverbial icing on the evil cake for anyone with even rudimentary intelligence.
the creation of energy through burning things is pre-19th century technology. it was surpassed and made irrelevant by Nicolai Tesla over 100 years ago.
but, just as the banksters are allowed to launder drug cartel billions, while a teenager smoking a joint in his bedroom could be sent to prison for possessing the products the cartels provide, the rich are allowed to do anything – pollute the land and sea, and kill everything and everyone in the way; molest children by the thousands; steal everything that’s not nailed down – while people without huge piles of money to burn can have their lives ruined – either by being between a corporation and their potential profits, or by being incarcerated for having the exact same habits as the country club crowd has, but not having enough money to hire one of them as your lawyer.
we’ve entered a new age of corporate feudalism, with an uber-class of murderous scumbag psychopaths ruling over people too frightened, confused, misled, blinded, and/or crippled by the corporations and their minions to even know what’s happening around them and to them – much less figure out a way to cope with a ceaseless shit-train of epic atrocities ignored, or facilitated by a government led by a man who can kill with the stroke of his pen; anyone, anywhere.
i, for one, am not a serf, wasn’t born to provide scumbag psychopaths with luxury i cannot even fathom, and will not willingly consent to being treated like i owe the banksters, the government, or any profit-generating entity ANYTHING. i am perfectly willing to see all institutions of power crumble into ruins and pass from our collective memory.
and what about the economy? i’ll let you in on a little secret – until about 100 years ago, hardly ANYONE on earth needed money to survive in this world. we still don’t – we just let the media and government tell us we do.
as far as the banksters, their corporate uber-lords, their minions, mouthpieces, and loyal idiots – as we used to say in texas – i wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.
below are examples of how the courts look after the interests of foreign corporations, even at the expense of lives and widespread economic damage as a result of their shenanigans.
– rob los ricos
2013/03/16 – OWOC Gulf Flight – Taylor Energy
Three years after the BP Macondo well disaster, the Gulf of Mexico is still covered in oil and barely sustaining visible life above or below the surface. Undisclosed white matter is appearing and leakages with other drill sites appears to be problematic. With such a massive dead zone, it makes you wonder how long oil rigs have negligently been spewing toxins and the rig disaster wasn’t part of a long term plan to expand the dead zone to include the entire Gulf of Mexico; all aimed at turning the entire region into a vast wasteland of oil rigs leaking oil, Corexit and other toxic chemicals into the core engine of the oceans converter belt.
To keep the sheen suppressed under surface water, spraying Corexit is still a daily routine on behalf of BP. So, below where it mentions the Macondo well looks good after one week, it took thousands of gallons of Corexit to break up the sheen and sink the toxic goo below the surface.
Published on Mar 16, 2013
20130316 – On Wings Of Care Gulf Flyover. This video was taken with our belly viewer (the front of the airplane is to the left in this video; that’s our nose wheel showing at the lower left, because the videocamera is tilted slightly forward to give the pilot a short lead time to center the plane over the target. Sorry it looks like we’re flying sideways, that’s how the videocamera fit best into the belly port!). This is the chronic Taylor Energy pollution site, about 12 nm southeast of the Louisiana coast. Lots of rainbow sheen here today, and even some brown weathered crude floating in it near its east end, which is just west of the Nykor Energy platform (unrelated to the sheen). For more photos and videos and discussion, see the article at OnWingsOfCare.org
It’s been labeled the worst environmental disaster in world history, and rightfully so, because the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is like the nightmarish gift that keeps on giving. BP and the United States government would have the public believe that all is well in the Gulf. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crisis is not only ongoing; its effects are worsening
The April 20, 2010 the Deep Water Horizon Explosion will be back in the news again. The explosion of this oil rig represents the biggest false flag event in history; the devastation of this false flag event is still being felt and the worst is yet to come. You may have heard about the explosions near the New Madrid Fault and the thousands of generators being shipped to Louisiana by FEMA. Soon all readers of this series will connect the BP oil spill to these recent current events.
Over 34 months later, the oil spill has destroyed the welfare, livelihoods, health and futures of tens of millions of Gulf Coast residents, not to mention the destruction of the fragile ecology in the Gulf of Mexico.
Originally, BP was ordered to initiate $20 billion in restitution to the Gulf Coast victims. In retrospect, BP has never made full restitution to the victims. The overall physical health of the region has been decimated and the mainstream media and government officials reaching as high as President Obama have been complicit in covering up the geological and medical magnitude of the event. Even to this day, BP is still covertly carpet bombing Corexit in the Gulf and the much of the environmental catastrophe remains untouched by the BP cleanup crews.
BP Urges Government To Halt Gulf Oil Disaster Relief Payments For Future Losses
Oil giant BP is urging the federal government to stop making payments to Gulf Coast residents affected by last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil geyser. BP claims that the improving economic conditions among areas hit the hardest by the oil provide enough evidence to show that they no longer need to be compensated for future losses from the environmental disaster.
To date, roughly $4.5 billion worth of claims have been paid out of the $20 billion fund established by the government and funded by BP to pay victims of the oil catastrophe. Claims continue to be filed with the government seeking compensation for their losses.
BP is not attempting to halt payments to current claimants with recognizable losses – only those who are claiming that their future income will be impacted. The company released a letter to the government and to the press.
To determine if BP’s claims of economic recovery are true, all you have to do is look to the past. The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred more than 20 years ago, yet oil still coats areas of Alaska today. And the difference between the two oil leaks is that with Exxon, we knew exactly how much oil was spilled into Prince William Sound. In that case, it was roughly 11 million gallons of oil.
However, there is no precise measurement of how much oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico, but the best estimates say that it was as much as 184 million gallons of oil. It is highly unlikely that all of this oil disappeared or washed up on beaches. When this oil eventually turns up, claims will continue to be filed by those affected.
But it isn’t just the economy that BP is saying has recovered; they also make the claim that the fishing industry is back to pre-spill health.
BP has sued to block what could be billions of dollars in settlement payouts to businesses over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The London-based oil giant accused the court-appointed administrator for the settlement, Patrick Juneau, of trying to rewrite the terms of the deal. BP said Juneau violated the settlement in the way he used a complex formula to determine the payments to businesses.
Last week, BP warned investors that the settlement’s price tag will be “significantly higher” than initially estimated.
“Although the ultimate exposure is at this time inestimable, it grows daily and could cost BP billions,” the company’s lawyers wrote Friday.
U.S District Judge Carl Barbier appointed Juneau and has upheld his decisions for calculating payments. Juneau’s spokesman declined to comment on BP’s lawsuit.
Attorneys who worked on the class-action settlement with BP said the payments to businesses were spelled out in the agreement.
“Simply put, BP undervalued the settlement and underestimated the number of people and businesses that qualify under the objective formulas that BP agreed to,” attorneys Steve Herman and Jim Roy said in a statement.
“At the same time BP lauds its efforts for restoring the Gulf in the media, it blames others in court for its own mistakes to avoid responsibility for its own conduct,” Strange said in statement Thursday.
Strange said that if BP underestimated how much it would owe under the terms of its agreement, that is BP’s problem, not the citizens’.
“BP cannot undo a settlement it wrote and signed, just to avoid its consequences. The courts should not allow it,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier in New Orleans has scheduled an April 5 hearing on BP’s request to prevent payments of what the oil company calls fictitious or inflated claims that are being made as part of the settlement.
Separately, BP filed a complaint against the settlement program and its administrator, Patrick Juneau, alleging breach of contract. The complaint doesn’t seek monetary damages, but it does ask that Juneau be ordered to change how he interprets the agreement so that he complies with what BP believes the agreement says.
And Strange said in his statement that “a legion of BP attorneys wrote and negotiated the terms” of the agreement.
“But now, BP is objecting to the terms of the agreement it signed. This challenge is not surprising; it is consistent with BP’s past behavior,” he said.
The Revolution continues not to happen, despite the presence of many revolutionary organizations in this country. Or is the presence of these groups actually inhibiting revolutionary activity here in the US? I don’t want to examine this point too deeply now, but I do wish to address the first point above, and that is the failure of allegedly revolutionary organizations to gain any following amongst the masses they always discuss at their meetings and in their literature.
The main activity of most revolutionary groups is to educate people about the need to rise up and overthrow the capitalist system which oppresses them. No doubt, they are sincere in this desire to reach out and organize the masses.
Despite appearances to the contrary, most people are too cynical to blindly follow self-appointed leaders — unless they see there is something immediately rewarding to them, personally, in doing so. The difficult part for the revolutionaries is not the actual educational aspects of this form of organizing, but is to be found in the challenge of educating people while not awakening in them a sense of empowerment.
Sure, every revolutionary group would like to see people arise and set alight the Powers That Be – but only if the resulting revolution would result in the rise to power of their revolutionary organization. To this regard, they are not to be seen as enemies of the system, but as yet another faction in contention for State power. The revolutionaries don’t want to smash the State; they want to be the State. This is why so few people – college students, mostly – fall for their schemes.
It’s all but impossible for people to live in this era and not have an opinion about the legitimacy of authority. Almost everyone has run afoul of some code of conduct, law or regulation at some point in their lives, and almost every one of these instances very likely convinced the transgressors of the unfairness of the enforcing authority’s power, or the idiocy of the rule/law/code transgressed. With few exceptions, authoritative power is seen as something rather arbitrary by most people.
This distrust of authority can become a knee-jerk reaction that is difficult to unlearn, as it tends to burn itself deeply into the psyche of the person who it has transgressed. Why do you think we have to attend school for so long? Definitely, it is because we must be trained in obedience. This is why so many kids detest school. They do not desire to submit to an authority that is pre-existent, which they were given no voice in establishing.
Sometime in a person’s life, she must learn to handle the fact that she must recognize some entity’s power over her, whether that power emanates from a religion, school, family, or workplace. This generally does not make the person happy. To most people, it is humiliating.
Looking for a job, for instance, is possibly the least favorite activity most people experience during their lifetimes. Since almost all of us are forced to work by the economic structure society imposes upon us, we manage to struggle through the pain and humiliation as best we can, often with some combination of booze, drugs, pharmaceuticals, religion and sex.
And when we hear someone speak about the need for revolution in our country, even when sympathetic to the message, folks generally tend to hope that someone else will take up the challenge, seeing as how they don’t have the time or energy, or think they don’t have the strength and courage needed to fight against the authorities. This is the weakness the revolutionary groups seek out in their intended victims. If there is a general feeling of something being very wrong in our society, but people feel helpless in the face of the overwhelming task of overthrowing the social order, the revolutionary group has at least a slight chance to convert some of the population into followers.
But, here lies the trick: how does one awaken another person’s sense of indignation at the ills of society, while maintaining that person’s willingness to submit to the group’s purpose? lt would be so much easier for the revolutionaries if they could hypnotize their intended followers into accepting the group’s leadership. This is, of course, precisely what the revolutionaries attempt to do.
By ceaselessly bleating the same slogans, the group can entrap their intended victims into believing that their group is much different than the many other tiny revolutionary groups. Some gullible people will accept the group’s message and begin to adopt that party’s doctrine. If the hypnosis doesn’t take effect, the revolutionaries can always try to use guilt, try to shame people into submission. This works particularly well on people who were raised as Catholics, by the way.
It’s quite a difficult trick, trying to move people to action, while keeping them docile enough to be herded around by the leadership of the revolutionaries. No wonder revolutionaries find so little success in these endeavors. Most revolutionary literature is more boring than can be tolerated. And it is often written in some obscure idiom that is only decipherable to the initiated, much like the Bible. Indeed, the revolutionaries often offer the same thing as the bible-thumpers: salvation!
By joining their movement, people are told, together they can save the Nation, the Earth, the Blue Footed Booby – depending on the focus of the group. Still, there’s that knee-jerk reaction to authority that most Americans never seem to fully outgrow.
Why awaken to one scam, just to be lulled to sleep again by a different one? Why choose Boss 13 over Boss A? This changing-of-the-guard has happened so often that its futility is glaringly obvious, even though this is not bluntly stated in textbooks. The combination of boring obscurity and the spectre of yet another authoritarian regime the wannabe revolutionary groups represent is not a winner in many people’s hearts and souls. In a nation obsessed by the mythology of self-reliance, it’s difficult to sell doctrines which require blind obedience. Not to the people most likely to arise with the rage needed to achieve any drastic changes in the systems that oppress us. In the marketplace of ideas, then – although the System gets much of the blame for what is going wrong – the revolutionary’s attempt to take over State power, rather than overthrow the System and disperse power into the population, does not gain a wide following. The revolutionaries are content to sit on the sidelines of history, and only make a fuss when some weakness in the System presents itself — like the current economic depression.
Inevitably, they will attract a number of people with their own ideas about what should be done about the situation at hand, and the revolutionaries will patiently explain that only their leadership can provide the proper solutions. Maybe not in this lifetime, though.
During the Bush II regime, Junta leaders demanded that leftists, environmentalists, and scientists never condemn the American Way of Life. That is to say, they were willing to go to war in order to secure oil and gas for Americans to use for whatever purpose they desired. As long as American citizens are willing to send their children to war in distant lands to ensure the flow of petrochemicals to the Fatherland, we can rest assured in knowing that there will be plenty of gas for our commutes to work, trips to the mall, and riding lawnmower races. Rather than criticizing consumers about the incredible amount of damage their lifestyles are inflicting upon the biosphere — as the revolutionaries often do — the Bush Junta insisted that it was inexcusable to suggest that the American Way of “Life” was in any way wrong. Which message do you think most people wanted to hear? That their over-consumption of the world’s resources must end before we destroy our planet’s ability to support life, or that everything’s just fine the way it is? Yes, Americans, like most people, are guided more by immediate self-interest than they are by wisdom gained by introspection and observation. This is what the revolutionary groups recognize as well. They do not call for a drastic change in the way we live our lives, they just want the ability to collect and spend the tax money we pay to the government in order to do so. It would be wonderful to think that the emergence of radical environmentalism would have produced some sort of alternative vision for our collective future at this point in the (end)game, but it hasn’t – and perhaps can’t.
Here we are, 30-odd years after the first Earth Day, and the most extreme change most people can envision in their lives is to drive hybrid cars to their wretched, demeaning jobs. (Just for the sake of enlightenment — there are regular, internal-combustion engine cars that are more fuel-efficient than hybrids. You IDIOTS!)
Youth are at least acknowledging the horrors they will have to face during their lifetimes, but even though they are questioning the consumerist lifestyle, what they generally come up with is more of the same – like riding bikes to their wretched, demeaning, collectively-owned-and-managed jobs, with some recycling thrown in along the way.
It’s clear to me that what we are suffering from is a failure of imagination. We cannot envision a world, or a way of life, that is vastly different (personally rewarding, nurturing, co-operative, gentle on our planet) because it is beyond the reach of our imagination.
At least part of the blame for this is the prevalence of Pragmatism in most educated people’s minds. Pragmatism is a way of thinking that is meant to defeat imaginative thinking and stifle creativity. We are told to be “practical” or “realistic.” This is a way of thinking that is inherently submissive. It is how a slave justifies her continued obsequience to her master, or a person trapped in an abusive relationship rationalizes her consent to remain in the relationship. Pragmatism discards the immense possibilities for the future in favor of those more immediately obtainable.
In this era of dwindling resources, Pragmatism is the logic of gradual, mass suicide, which rejects life and its infinite potential. Few of us find any meaning, comfort, or reward in our present lives, yet we cling to them. It’s all we know. Pragmatically thinking, there are powerful forces in place — economics, religion, police, and military, to name a few — which enforce consumerism, to ensure we do not wander astray of the Ruling Powers’ plans for our lives. This is a philosophy of fear. We are afraid of what will happen to us if we turn away from economics as our source of survival. We are afraid of how the police will treat us. We are afraid of the concentration camps and prisons our government is busy building to contend with the future unrest which will arise as the economy continues to take more from the majority of the population and hands it over to those already massively wealthy. But, by abandoning the workers here in favor of cheaper labor overseas, the Ruling Powers have left us little choice but to look for answers elsewhere, often in black markets. Their economic models just do not work, and require government intervention every now and then in order to continue to exist.
While preaching to the voters that it is tragically inappropriate – even evil – to suggest the government provide healthcare to its people (the way almost every nation on Earth already does), the public mouthpieces of the monied elite demand taxpayer money to protect their investment swindles. When the current economic meltdown began to spiral out of control, the voting public expressed their disapproval for any sort of bailout for the embezzlers and con-men responsible for the mess. Most public officials acknowledged that their constituents were voicing their opposition to such subsidies by a margin of 10-1. Yet there was never even a hint of doubt that the swindlers would get the funds they demanded. The needs and opinions of the general public mean nothing to the people in power in this country. Money — huge, mountainous piles of money, inaccessible to the vast majority of the population – is what this economy is all about.
And where is the outrage over this debacle — the greatest single instance of theft in recorded history? The public has moved on to other issues, mostly because they have to work so much harder in order to maintain their standard of living. Also, many of them were suckered into believing that a changing of the guard in the White House could potentially lead to a re-assessment of priorities by the government. What most people desire is a fix to the economic ills the nation is experiencing. They want what they see on TV. They desire to purchase the good things in life — a home and everything that makes a home life comfortable and desirable. They social change without having to sacrifice their privileged positions as first world consumers in order to achieve it. If we are not capable of envisioning a lifestyle vastly different from the one handed down to us, or the one depicted in advertisements and sitcoms, it’s because any sort of alternative vision of how to organize our lives has not been presented to us.
The one model we have now (Work or Starve!) was originally forced on people through overwhelming military force. Where people did not acquiesce to such a lifestyle, campaigns of genocide were – and still are to this day – conducted until the resisters are unable to continue with their ways of providing for themselves outside of Western economies. Instead of radically transforming our lives so that we can meet our needs without over-taxing what our environment can provide for us, even the Visionaries among us can only seem to envision more of the same — only “New and Improved,” or “Sustainable!” This society is horribly sick and twisted.
Even now, as our elected (or self-appointed) leaders demand human sacrifice (the war in Iraq, the War on Drugs, etc.) to the god of the marketplace, many people refuse to question the values that shape our society. And how can we, when so many of us require pharmaceuticals, booze or other coping mechanisms in order to function in our day-to-day roles?
Our consumer-driven way of life is destroying us as human beings as well as our planet’s ability to support life, yet we still reproduce our places within it, day after wretched day. What the fuck is wrong with us?
This may sound silly, but it’s something that bothered me as a child and pisses me off to this day: Some of the iconic cartoons I grew up watching on Saturday morning served to re-enforce consumerism in the viewers by presenting it as both natural and never-changing. From the Flintstone’s Stone-Age to the futuristic lifestyle of the Jetsons, the lives depicted were little different from the lives being lived by the viewers. The level of technology may have changed from one show to the next, but the consumerist lifestyle was never any different: Work, buy, try to get ahead, buy some more! How can we break out of this cycle, when every element of society forces us to accept it as some sort of natural occurrence?
It’s not enough that some of us attempt to think outside of the proverbial box. We have to think beyond the means used to produce boxes.
The imperative we face now – those of us who can see beyond the mechanisms of the Ruling Powers – is to enact our visions of very different ways of relating to the places where we dwell. In order to do so, we must band together with strong-willed and like-minded people in order to produce working models of how we think life could be, were there not coercive forces severely limiting our options. It’s also important that more than one model of a different society be created. There should be as many as there are people committed to making their visions manifest in reality. There are, after all, many different ecosystems here on Earth, and each provides different challenges for the people who desire to live within them, based on their unique attributes, as well as the amount of damage industrialism has inflicted upon them.
It is not difficult to live on this planet. It has nurtured an astonishing variety of such ecosystems capable of providing for every imaginable need a human population requires in order to thrive. Everything we need is available almost everywhere, if we only know where (and how) to look for it. The greatest danger and difficulty will be found in the struggle to rid ourselves of the control the Ruling Powers possess in enforcing their lifestyle upon the rest of us.
They will use every method of coercion and violence available to them to either force us back into the vast herd of their docile servants, or kill us if we will not be enslaved. As it stands now, they seem to be poised to jettison the bulk of humanity, as tremendous numbers of us are no longer required to fulfill their needs. To use the U.S. as just the most glaring example: Our standard of living has (just in my lifetime) gone from being equal to or above that of any nation on Earth to being “better than Somalia.” The U.S. ceased being a First World nation when it was crushed under the heel of the Reagan regime. And the bottom of this downward trend is nowhere to be seen. Food prices continue to rise, while people’s ability to purchase food continues to erode, even among those still legally employed.
What we truly require in these times are courage and resolve.
We must turn away from slavish obsequience to this dead-end society. Since we are all but blind to any other vision of a society, there is no blueprint or pathway prepared for us to follow in order to establish a radically different method of conducting our lives. But we must turn away from the one we are trapped in now. In doing so, we will suffer – and not a little. But not to do so is suicide.
We can create options for ourselves and our offspring— human beings are clever and adaptable creatures – and we need to do it immediately!
The one issue that continually comes to my mind is the abolition of economics. At the very least, the use of money as a means of exchange and accumulation should be abandoned. There is absolutely no sane argument for continuing along that path. It has only brought about severe limitations in the way most people conduct their lives, while rewarding thieves, thugs, warlords and swindlers. If that is not readily apparent to you, you should remind yourself every day that during this economic debacle, where over one-third of America’s accumulated wealth has evaporated in less than one year, the oil corporations and their subsidiaries are recording unprecedented profits. Then, ask yourself a question: Is this something worth the sacrifice of our children?
“For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work – or, if working produce deviant effects – there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest within and without, for life, which the brain will take for “meaning”. Coerced into the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living death; and if any considerable number of the members of a civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have passed.”
…Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 4: Creative Mythology
Mythology, according to the late Joseph Campbell, serves four major purposes:
To reconcile our individual consciousness to the mysteries of life as it is – that is, as it exists without our interpreting it or trying to relate it to our existence;
To make sense of the universe in a context our contemporary minds can grasp;
To enforce the moral order of the society we are born into;
To encourage us as individuals to grow, both inwardly and socially, in a manner that respects our relationships to ourselves, our culture, the greater world around us and the infinite mystery of being.
Leaders of Western Civilization long ago recognized that their mythologies weren’t working. So, they launched a reign of terror to destroy all the forces threatening the ancient order so many emperors, high priests and prophets had so long suffered to create, rather than admit that the world and its many societies, climates and ecosystems could not possibly be crushed into a single, all – encompassing, tightly controlled social entity.
The brutality of these attempts to conquer nature and reduce human existence to soul-destroying drudgery has left us shocked into numbness and psychotically clinging to literal interpretations of Bronze Age mythology that no one back then believed, knowing as they did the cosmological tale-between-the lines that gave these myths meaning at a level unapproachable by factual historic tales.
The only new mythology to have arisen since the bloody death-throes of the ancient religions is grounded in the all-too-human theory of historical progress and its dual doctrines of economic development and scientific knowledge. Too busy chasing after income to experience life, much less reflect on one’s place in the infinite mystery of being, the westernized person is left hollow by the bankruptcy of her society’s spiritual disconnection to the rest of the universe.
“The profession of views that are not one’s own and the living of life according to such views – no matter what the resultant sense of social participation, fulfillment, or even euphoria may be – eventuates inevitably in self-loss and falsification. For in our public roles and conventional beliefs we are – after all! – practically interchangeable. “Out there” we are not ourselves, but at best only what we are expected to be, and at worst what we have got to be.
The intent of the old mythologies to integrate the individual in his group, to imprint on his mind the ideals of that group, to fashion him according to one or another of its orthodox stereotypes, and to convert him thus into an absolutely dependable cliche, has become assumed in the modern world by an increasingly officious array of ostensibly permissive, but actually coercive, demythologized secular institutions.
“A new anxiety in relation to this development is now becoming evident, however; for with the increase, on one hand, of our efficiencies in mass indoctrination and, on the other, of our uniquely modern occidental interest in the fosterage of authentic individuals, there is dawning upon many a new and painful realization of the depth to which the imprints, stereotypes, and archetypes of the social sphere determine our personal sentiments, deeds, thoughts, and even capacities for experience…”
(J.C., ibid.)
When a young person enters the workforce, she is expected to have achieved a state of detachment from the consequences of her actions. Yes, cars cause pollution, but she has to get to work. Fertilizers and pesticides are destroying entire bioregions, but organic food is too expensive or hard to find. And so on.
Older societies and cultures encouraged youth to take inward and actual journeys in order to find their place in the world, not – as our culture does – shut themselves away from themselves and their sense of empathy for and connection to other living entities. In the place of a feeling of at-one-ness, we are given a few limited social roles to perform.
A young man named Kip Kinkel walked into his high school one morning, armed – the day after he’d shot and killed his parents. He opened fire, wounding and killing dozens of his fellow students. Weeping as he surrendered to the police, Kip – when asked why he had done this – could only repeat over and over “I had to, I had no choice.” An awkward, shy boy, Kip’s parents were both educators – his father athletic, his mother scholarly, his sister both. Unable to match his sister’s performance in the classroom and unable to live up to his tennis coach father’s expectations, Kip was continually forced into categorizations he could not fit. And rather than allow Kip the freedom to explore his own potentials, his limitations were continuously exposed. He could not be what his parents tried so patiently to make him. Kip saw two options; to be seen as a complete failure while surrendering his life to other people’s worldviews, or to fight back in self-defense. The many other school-related massacres and the high instance of teenage suicides in the U.S. are indications of how greatly our cultural mythology fails to induce even so much as a perception of meaning to our lives.
A universal myth of earlier societies concerns the questing hero. The hero is caught up in some circumstance which requires a journey, during which she is presented with an array of challenges that she overcomes and leads her to some sort of gift – a magic object or an extra-ordinary revelation- which will bring to her people peace and prosperity.
In our spiritually dead society, such tales are seen as stories of a time long ago lost to us.
To living, dynamic people, however, these stories serve as instructions and preparation for their very own adolescent journey of quest, when an old child ventured into the wilderness for a time and upon returning, would have been transformed into an adult, ready to take her place in the community. This is such a momentous change in the person’s life that she usually takes a new name – a name suggested by her experiences during her wilderness quest. She has experienced the cycle of death and rebirth, like the seasons and the waxing and waning moon.
Human beings have the longest period of childhood of any animal on Earth. This is good in that it provides an ample time to learn and grow, to explore one’s self as well as one’s society and one’s relationship to it. Unfortunately, this lengthy period also provides us with time to flounder, to lose our way and to become disoriented and misinformed about our society, our communities, and ourselves. Indeed, this is the goal of our education system – to indoctrinate us into the belief that the world is progressing from an age of superstition to an age of scientific rationalism. The results of this blind faith in cold machinery and learning which denies inward growth are so profound now that few people are anymore able to turn a blind eye towards them. More people are beginning to doubt the validity of our society’s goals and our roles within it, and still more people are turning away from them altogether.
This is a time of human development that will define us as a species for all time. Will we redefine our lives in such a manner as to regain our place in the organic nature of this splendid, living world, or will we go extinct and take most of our fellow creatures along with us?
“Today the walls and towers of the culture world…are dissolving; and whereas heroes then could set forth of their own free will from the known to the unknown, we today, willy-nilly, must enter the forest…and, like it or not, the pathless way is the only way now before us…
“In this life -creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, the courage to let go of the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within…
“Thus, creative mythology does not come from authority (like theology)…but from the insights, sentiments, thought and vision of an adequate individual…it corrects the authority…left behind by lives once lived…it restores to existence the quality of adventure …that is no thing but life, not as it will be, or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is – in depth, in process – here and now.”
how many times do we have to keep pointing this out before it sinks in? this is the greatest on-going event in human history, and it’s happening right now, all around us. tell me you haven’t noticed price increases at the grocery store.
Henry Kissinger once said that whoever controls food controls people. In other words, everyone surrenders when they see their children starve. That is how the U.S. government subdued the American Indians defending their lands, by exterminating the bison that provided them food and instead handing out food on reservations. The British government did the same to subdue the Boer republics in South Africa by forcing the Boer civilian population into the first concentration camps ever and letting them starve.
International cartels now use their control over the global food supply to make huge profits. There are six major corporations that control the purchase and sale of agricultural products: Cargill, Kraft, Bunge & Born, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), Nestlé and General Mills. Food prices are set at exchanges in Chicago, New York and London.
Some countries shield their population from commodity speculation on basic foods by restricting the export of their agricultural staples until domestic demand is satisfied. This has a clear and legitimate purpose: to stabilize domestic prices and ensure supply for their own people. Domestic prices are also an uncomfortable testimony of real prices and temper full international market control over pricing.
On January 22, agriculture ministers from 50 countries met in Berlin, to examine the rise of international prices of commodities during the second half of 2010. Before the assembly, World Trade Organization (WTO) director, Pascal Lamy, earned merits with the global food cartels by attacking export restrictions. No doubt hoping that the cartels will hire him when he loses his present position, Lamy attributed the record high international prices of agricultural products to the export limits that some countries apply. His claim was a classic case of sophistry—a distortion of the truth with a false arguments.
“Export restrictions are a prime cause of current and recent surges in global food prices, and countries should find other ways to secure domestic supplies,” the WTO chief said. “Export restrictions lead to panic in markets when different actors see prices rising at stellar speed,” he added. Mr. Lamy illogically ignores the fact that a sudden rise in agricultural commodity prices, as reported three weeks ago by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), cannot be attributed to controls that have always been there. Those controls, as he acknowledges, are imposed to assure supply to the population of the producing countries and, although Lamy did not say it, also to stabilize national and to an extent, international agricultural prices. This last point is very annoying to the cartels that dominate international food trade.
After attacking export restrictions, Mr. Lamy stated that exporting countries seek other ways to assure their own national supply. But here his proposals for a different approach are misleading. Lamy called for an increase in global food production, “more social safety nets, more food aid and food supplies and …humanitarian aid exempt from export restrictions.”
do you see their game? the WTO says publicly that governments should increase social services, but cuts off their funds funds if they do so. the policies of the IMF/WB demand that services be cut and/or privatised, or no more loans. the only countries that are not seeing food costs sky-rocketing are those who reject WTO and IMF/WB policies.a document released by wikileaks shows that governments are willing to starve people in order to force boitech agriculture upon people unwilling to adopt frankenfoods.
On January 11, Senators Charles Grassley and John Thune, together with the Deputy Chief of Mission, AgCouns and EconOff, met with the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade,s Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General Alfredo Bonet. Senator Grassley emphasized the importance of science-based decisions in the agricultural biotechnology context. Mejia said that Spain had a relatively “liberal” view with respect to biotechnology. However, even in Spain the technology was controversial and faced NGO opposition, albeit not as strong as in some other EU member states. Senator Thune asked what influence Spain could exercise in Brussels on this issue. Bonet noted it was very difficult to get a qualified majority for biotech approvals in the EU Environment Council so in the end the Commission was taking decisions in favor of biotechnology. Both Mejia and Bonet noted that commodityprice hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotechimports. (emphasis added)
soaring food prices are creating unrest across the world:
and these are just a few examples. most news reports, and even the UN, talk about the many factors that have caused this sudden rise in food prices worldwide, but these factors are always present, and food production is at an all-time high. it’s clearly not food shortages causing hunger, but food PRICES!
The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the 2008 world financial meltdown are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food and causing misery around the world. As food prices soar again to beyond 2008 levels, it becomes clear that everyone is now being affected. Food prices are now rising by up to 10% a year in Britain and Europe. What is more, says the UN, prices can be expected to rise at least 40% in the next decade.
first-generation biofuels — chiefly, ethanol made from corn or sugar cane, or biodiesel made from vegetable oil — have provoked intense backlash. They have been blamed for causing unintended environmental damage and for displacing production of food crops, which may have helped raise world food prices.
Amid these attacks, the political momentum of biofuels has slowed in the last couple of years. In principle, biofuels offer a huge advantage over fossil fuels. The source plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air as they are growing, and consequently, the carbon dioxide that is released when biofuels are burned does not represent a net addition of that greenhouse gas to the atmosphere. In practice, some fossil fuels, especially natural gas, are consumed in refining today’s biofuels, one source of controversy about them.
when biofuels were first proposed as a source of renewable energy, many people warned of the way this would affect food prices. adding billions of hungry engines to food demands was a catastrophic mistake.
finally, i have to mention that as i researched this online, some of the articles i had bookmarked as references were no longer available. many no longer turned up in searches. someone’s fucking with the internet, someone with loads of money and resources.
The colonies are self-destructing – it's a scorched earth policy, a war of attrition, so the survivors are left with NOTHING!
racists: Lumpen want to take our jobs (scabs). They are criminals. They are no-good layabout alcoholics and drug addicts. They are whores. They are ignorant. As someone who has spent much of his adult life either homeless or in prison, but always struggling against the coercive forces of elite rule, I gotta say a big, ol’ “Fuck you!” to orthodox Marxists.
![Prescott Bush, the father of GHW Bush, later wrote Clover Dulles, the widow of Allen Dulles, in 1969, about his meeting with Allen Dulles after JFK had canned him in fall, 1961. "He [Allen] tried to make a pleasant evening of it, but I was rather sick of heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedys that brought about the fiasco [Bay of Pigs]. And here they were making Allen to be the goat, which he wasn't and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them." Note the last sentence of Prescott Bush. His son George Herbert Walker Bush says he can't remember where he was on the day of the JFK assassination, despite his being a US Senate candidate staying in the Dallas, TX Sheraton the night of 11/21/63 and being in Dallas on 11/22/63. GHW Bush helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion and I think he was involved in the JFK assassination.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170316224555im_/https://roblosricos.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/bushjfkbookdepo2.jpg?w=474)
I must emphasize that, meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects, at every point in the chain: from the formulation of the policy to its implementation to the phony packaging of the policy for mass consumption. In fact, we only know about it, today, thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb, who published a groundbreaking series of articles in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s. The series, appropriately titled “Dark Alliance”, was one of the first big stories to be carried on the Internet; and later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he lays out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb’s series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on the drug issue; and which compelled CIA director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the agency simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
This lack of quality and tactical control greatly increases the impact of the third major problem: the United States is held responsible for everything the contractors do or fail to do. Despite the fact the United States has no effective quality or operational control over the contractors, the local population rightly holds it responsible for all contractor failures.
but, just as the banksters are allowed to launder drug cartel billions, while a teenager smoking a joint in his bedroom could be sent to prison for possessing the products the cartels provide, the rich are allowed to do anything – pollute the land and sea, and kill everything and everyone in the way; 
“For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work – or, if working produce deviant effects – there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest within and without, for life, which the brain will take for “meaning”. Coerced into the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of living death; and if any considerable number of the members of a civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have passed.”
domestic demand is satisfied. This has a clear and legitimate purpose: to stabilize domestic prices and ensure supply for their own people. Domestic prices are also an uncomfortable testimony of real prices and temper full international market control over pricing.