Had an interesting conversation with Richard Silverstein the other day concerning legitimate comparisons of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to the behaviors of the Nazis and relevant censorship. His article “Jerusalem Day = Nuremberg Day” is well worth a read (as well as follow-up article of recent days.) It was 2012 I was banned by the UK’s Guardian for daring to point out Israeli (especially ‘settler’) behavior towards Palestinians resembles a decades ongoing “kristallnacht” or the 1938 German pogrom terrorizing Jews with murders, arson, looting and so on. My admiration is extended to Richard for daring to make a similar comparison. We did NOT discuss this following piece I had written over ten years ago taken down (censored) by Scribd, and Richard cannot be held accountable for anything having to do with my work. But our conversation recalled [to myself] this piece and in my view this work is as relevant today as when first written:
The Enemy of my Enemy
Cognitive Dissonance/Grotesque Reflex: How the philosophy ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ makes for ludicrous bedfellows & twisted agenda:
About this absurd religious right ‘the Jews murdered Jesus’ thing .. if that were the case, shouldn’t they rather be grateful for being “Covered in the blood” of Jesus [St Paul quote] as they make money hand over fist covering the planet in blood with war profiteering, all the while in swoon over misogynist hate monger Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion of the Christ”, the church made myth of a man they love to pretend is ‘God’ incarnate so they can engage in cannibalism every ‘Sabbath’ with a ‘Communion’ of eating Jesus flesh and drinking Jesus blood? Y’know, if people really knew how to think for themselves, there would be no such necrotic fantasies and resultant criminal civilization .. just a thought, but meanwhile:
The paranoid Jewish Zionists embrace rabid anti-Semitic Christian Zionists who fully intend the Jewish Zionists will become extinct one they’ve finished the dirty work of retaking the West Bank for the Christian Zionists necrotic vision of a road to Armageddon, meanwhile the Jewish Zionists label the non-Jewish anti-Zionist as anti-Semitic when in fact most of the non-Jewish anti-Zionists are the bitter foes of the rabid anti-Semitic Christian Zionists momentarily embraced by the Jewish Zionists
Now, in the mix of all of this, the anti-Zionist Jewish personalities are in an impossible state of being forced to play a game of ‘shut the fuck up’ or get blasted by all Zionists, Jewish and Christian, while the non-Jewish anti- Zionist is attacked by the paranoid Ashkenazi, who became paranoid and Zionist, on account of the pogroms of anti- Semitic Christian Zionists. These people bite the hand of people who’re actually doing them a favor by taking on the rabidly anti-Semitic Christian Zionists, personalities who intend as soon as the partnership of convenience is over, all those clinging to Judaism will be tossed into a lake of what will almost certainly amount to man-made nuclear fire
Meanwhile, the Sephardic Jews who’d lived for nearly one and a half thousand years in peace and tranquility in the world of Islam (notably excepting that period when they’d fought on the side of the Muslims during the Crusades) have become an extinct species in the Arab countries, not in the least because of both Jewish and Christian Zionism via policy and settlement in the West Bank and the incredibly nasty treatment of the Arabs there. Israeli Zionists have enabled this social injustice together with American Zionists, including countless conservative Christians, have bankrolled these policies abusing the Palestinians. All this came about because of Jewish Zionist paranoia of living in countries with a majority Christian Zionists and history of pogroms, yet are (for reasons of the social psychology phenomena of inter-generational violence) behaving towards the Arabs like the Christian Zionists had treated them, in turn setting up the present cycle of anti-Palestinian pogroms, based on behaviors Jews learned from Christians, now approaching a scale of nukes & nations
It only gets more ridiculous:
The Sephardic Jews who’d relocated to Israel as a result of fallout in the Arab world from Zionist policies are absolutely 2nd class citizens- pointing to the anti-Semitic tendencies of the conservative Ashkenazi Jews, a race based oxymoron of Jewish anti-Semitism. This is obviously as clear as it is ludicrous and self destructive, when a Jewish person in Israel cannot be equal, because this Jew has the appearance, language and customs of an Arab
I think a moral to this story could be: Any Zionism that is literal Zionism (unlike the benign Zionism of Bob Marley) is a loser. Perhaps this could be the idea behind the UN Resolution equating Zionism with Racism?
Inter-generational hate and violence is a known and understood phenomena of social psychology. Many people have not risen above this malevolent infection of the psyche that is imbued in a very literal sense of the Torah or Pentateuch: ‘the child inherits the sin of the father’ (or the sins of a xenophobic & nationalist stepfather)
In the larger picture of nations, relating to this inter- generational violence, should it not be the responsibility of several national leaders to stand up and state to the Israelis, whether the leaders of Russia, Spain, or (especially) Germany, examples given, ‘do not treat the Palestinian as our Christian has treated the Jew’
If only because it is the responsibility of leadership to demonstrate responsible attitudes in relation to the acts of nations. And crucial, is that nation which had transgressed most egregiously in historic times should demonstrate this courage to again confront the worst of these infantile and irrational behaviors, if only to remind the USA, not only Israel, do not dare to go down this road, do not dare to become the Nazis…
The Israeli ‘nationalist step-father’ (based on the principle of “inter-generational violence”)
“Following the transition from foraging to farming, hierarchical societies and, eventually, tax-levying states have emerged. These states played a crucial role in economic development by providing protection, law and order, which eventually enabled industrialization and the unprecedented welfare enjoyed today in many countries”
Yep. In short other words, rich nations versus poor nations.
“Only where the climate and geography favored cereals, was hierarchy likely to develop. Our data shows that the greater the productivity advantage of cereals over tubers, the greater the likelihood of hierarchy emerging”
The lowly sweet potato, turnip, beet, carrot -these stayed in the ground until time for preparation and consumption- none of which led to the ‘hierarchy’ crucial to the rise of civilization where people like Elon Musk dream of leaving a ‘hierarchical development’ called a trashed Earth behind (with all of its’ poor, doomed schmucks abandoned by the elites once enough stupid people have been sacrificed to sort the technical aspect.) They ‘hope’ for ‘escape’ before the war-mongers weapons sales propping up billionaires bring on World War III (noting if weapons sales were halted tomorrow, the Western economies would collapse.)
“We challenge the conventional productivity theory, contending that it was not an increase in food production that led to complex hierarchies and states, but rather the transition to reliance on appropriable cereal grains that facilitate taxation by the emerging elite. When it became possible to appropriate crops, a taxing elite emerged, and this led to the state”
Yep again. In short other words (again) when the theft of foodstuffs became an option, this enabled the sociopath rise to rule.
“Suitability of highly productive roots and tubers is in fact a curse of plenty, which prevented the emergence of states and impeded economic development”
Right. In effect, this “curse of plenty” amounted to a ‘pre-civilized’ clean environment without means of mass destruction, no oligarchs, no 1%, no world wars, and no need to escape a trashed planet (an escape that is little more than a fantasy in any case.)
“The extension of the empire has meant the growth of private fortunes. This is nothing new, indeed it is in keeping with the most ancient history” -Gaius Asinius Gallus (from Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome)
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow, a Review
The “Dawn of Everything” is a Western anthropological tome that will see few Native American readers outside of that peculiarly Western, politically correct, academic institution euphemistically called ‘Native Studies.’
This book review sets out to challenge what those in academia might not.
What the book got right: Ancient matriarchy was decentralized and (by comparison to patriarchy) non-violent, yet capable of governing large polities. What it may have got wrong about that: the suggestion we can get back to this from where we’re “stuck” for the simple reason today’s patriarchy shapes the mentality of women to point of they’re not really women in any sense of what that had meant prior to the Western mentality’s ego-individuation. [1]
The book is audacious, and in the same moment, pretentious & myopic. The cultural bias is stark; in a presumed self exam of failed assessments by anthropology, in effort to grasp how Western civilization has come to be stuck in a murderous hierarchy of the present day, there is little exploring of the literature exterior to mainstream. Rather this work, although interesting in many respects, uses a deck of old cards to posit an alternative future.
The work credibly sets out to identify commonality in the roots of male hierarchy across the world; with some success in near Asia and Europe would be my presumption (I’m no expert in these areas, probably just a bit better read than your average passing interest) and this was interesting reading (for myself, at least.) Where the book goes off the rails altogether is in the Americas, particularly in North America. What the authors cannot have known (and more than likely their historical sources as well) is, outside of ceremonial context, oral histories are given in euphemisms and figures of speech. The cultural point of this is, is to negate any possibility of drawing the attention of the past into the present in a somewhat literal sense among peoples who saw the power of speech in far greater terms of causality than Westerners.
In fact the abandoned Mississippi River ‘civilization’ of Cahokia was not “erased” from the oral histories, rather some subjects are so sensitive, they were not spoken outside of certain ceremony at all. The example I would give is, in the historic Blackfeet heartland there is a geographic-ceremonial location called “Bear River” whose location is argued over by anthropologists to this day, after two hundred years. The precise location is known to myself, courtesy of an oral historian (an elder woman) in a ceremonial context/relationship.
Of my many years acquaintance with, and interactions in (40+ years), Native American communities, 25 years were more or less immersed (10 of these years were full immersion) with peoples of the native languages of Plains culture, where I had encountered, on numerous occasions, oral historians who fluently spoke Blackfeet (Amskapi Pikuni dialect), Chippewa (Plains Ojibwa), Cree and Metis. Nearly all of their kids spoke only English, reflecting the end of the oral histories era. I witnessed this end of era, at least in the communities I had been familiar with. My understanding is, this is an accelerating process of loss that has been underway for a very long time. In some areas, where the language ‘survives’, it is so modified away from the ancient (original), it would be more than a fair question to ask; would the ancient speakers even recognize the same words use in modern dialect? In languages of what had been observation of process, nouns were nearly unknown. In the ‘new’ dialects, Western thought is encroaching to point an Indian born 200 years past wouldn’t understand what his great, great grandchild is talking about, without some significant difficulty. Nor would the descendant easily grasp this close ancestor’s mental process.
This goes to the book’s sweeping (and absolutely absurd) assertion all languages share the commonality of nouns. This is a serious mistake and a very telling one. To be the ophthalmologist in this case will be take us a bit roundabout but we’ll attempt to arrive at the penetration of this Western cultural bias (ethnocentric myopia) with a gift of sight.
One of the books claims is the absolutely correct thesis Native Americans were a significant source of ideas motivating and moving forward the Enlightenment philosophy. Throwing out the male gender and substituting “The Mystery” for Deism & God (I’ve tinkered with the following passage), the enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine’s description of our existence could have come from the mouth of any Native orator addressing Jesuits:
“The Mystery needs none of those tricks and shows called miracles to confirm our faith, for what can be a greater miracle than the creation itself, and our own existence? There is a happiness in The Mystery, when rightly understood, that is not to be found in your system of religion. The system you describe to us have some things in it that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to us, and we, if we think at all, must stifle our reason in order to force ourselves to believe them. But in The Mystery our reason and our belief become happily united. The wonderful structure of the cosmos, and everything we behold in this system of Mysterious creation, prove to us, better than any book can do, the existence of what cannot be known in its origins, and yet at the same time express its’ attributes. It is by the exercise of our reason that we are enabled to contemplate The Mystery in its’ works, and imitate it in our ways. When we see The Mystery’s care and goodness extended over all the creatures, it teaches us our duty toward each other, whilst it calls forth our gratitude to the whole of it” [2]
The book’s authors altogether miss (or avoid) this (immediate preceding) contribution to enlightenment thinking, rather focusing on personal “liberty.”
I will not argue there was significant contribution of Native American notion of liberty to the Enlightenment; but this contribution is a perverted understanding of Native American individual liberty; sans the crucial aspect of self-restraint (gone missing) in the European semi-grasp of native philosophy.
“thinkers who do seek to knit together the findings of specialists, to describe the course of human history on a grand scale, haven’t entirely got past the biblical notion of the Garden of Eden, the Fall and subsequent inevitability of domination. Blinded by the ‘just so’ story of how human societies evolved, they can’t even see half of what’s now before their eyes”
The authors themselves miss the one half of European thought, that is to say they focus on ‘the fall’ but entirely ignore the other half of it; the out-sized influence of Plato. Where is Plato? Considering their astute observation that modern society is ‘stuck’ in our current predicament, one should consider Plato versus indigenous ‘integration’ to consciousness of their respective cosmos (environment) or objectivity versus theoretical physicist d’Espagnat’s observation consciousness (demonstrated via experiments in quantum mechanics) demands one cannot be separated from environment or surrounding awareness, whether the ‘objects’ of the house you’re in (including the house itself) or a boreal forest or savanna. Here is the glaring omission:
[Plato’s] “The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment” -theoretical physicist Bernard d’Espagnat [3]
Plato’s invisibility in the text (but visible in the approach) determines certain conclusions are correctly radical (excellent cultural self-criticism) relating to ‘the fall’ and in a paradox are also quite conservative in Plato’s European tradition and thusly observations in overall context remain highly limited from certain indigenous American view; for the fact their material must be drawn practically 100% from the tradition of Plato’s objectivity, whether ‘mainstream’ archaeology or Western interpretation of indigenous narrative.
The book jumps willy-nilly across the globe, hither & thither and back; when contrasting a presumption of matriarchy; but whether Minoan Crete versus Greece might be cast in the overthrow of the Titans & and the end of Gaia (victors wrote the ugly history of Gaia’s children as monsters) are events which do not enter the picture and it does not occur to the authors to search ‘mythology’ of Western history depicting the overthrow of matriarchy on the European side. Had this found its way into the text it should contrast well to aspect of Native American matriarchy which purpose is the absolute prohibition on the emergence of ego in any form (ego being essentially diagnosed as a mental disorder.) The purpose of the near universal Native American ‘god’ (deliberate small ‘g’), the trickster, is euthanasia of sustained ego or what the Western psychology calls “individuated ego” (better described as ‘ego-priapism’ from the native side.)
The Mississippi River city of Cahokia, and abandoned surroundings, is correctly inferred as a rejection of a philosophy of life but this was not a ‘self-rejection’ of lifestyle by the city’s inhabitants; in fact the oral histories had NOT been silent (the authors’ presumption is “erased” from the oral histories) but in fact Cahokia presumably erased from the oral histories points to the Western anthropological sources ignorance of ceremonial story-telling; you cannot speak of the great evils except under the protection of a ‘shield’ (to prevent notifying or calling forth ‘ghosts’ much effort had been made to banish.)
Cahokia’s founding date coincides with oral histories timeline of an inter-tribal ‘peace chiefs’ alliance establishment; that is when an international warrior/priesthood became emissaries opposed to deviation from the way encountered in cosmology of integration to natural determination as dictated by a greater gnosis of (emanating from) environment, not any individual (and especially ‘ego-individuated’) humans. Cahokia was ‘rubbed out’ quite literally by a far-flung alliance of tribes determined to eradicate a spreading cancer correctly inferred (in the book) as originating in the region of Central America (Blackfeet oral historian Floyd HeavyRunner had narrated to myself it was these peoples had strayed farthest from the “true way.”).
The peace-chiefs’ inter-tribal diplomacy corps were initially formed as a result of determination by surrounding peoples to make Cahokia vanish from the surrounding peoples’ (multiple cosmos) proximity. After, their purpose morphed into that of healer-teachers intended to get the associated, culturally deprived peoples (survivors) back on track in the proper direction.
The Osage descendants of Cahokia having experimented with constitutional reform on multiple occasions simply exhibits a series of fits and starts (basically fumbling) their way towards reintegration to the original indigenous concept of cosmology or becoming integral to a natural order where their place is one of pruning, and away from the destructive nature of plowing (plowing here is certainly not meant to be literal but employed as a metaphor.) In this case, it would have happened the allied peace chiefs had, subsequently, instructed the Osage in recovery of the way or reintegration to a natural order of things; and clearly this ‘peace order’ would have stopped short of explicit instruction of how the Osage should determine their own cosmos arrangement; pointing the way and arrival are distinct things. To point the way in sense of process does not determine outcome at arrival, where each tribe’s adopted (or newly adopted) territory constitutes a cosmos expressing the respective ‘real peoples’ who must establish a niche in peer relationship to the ‘others’ (other manifestations of life) in the natural order of things. The established cosmos must accept the people, i.e. grant permission to occupy the land, the people do not determine this.
In fact one of the arguments dismissed by the authors is nearly spot on:
“If the indigenous peoples of North America aren’t being imagined as living in a separate time, or as vestiges of some earlier stage of human history, then they’re imagined as living in an entirely separate reality (‘ontology’ is the currently fashionable term), a mythic consciousness fundamentally different from our own”
They ‘disprove’ this preceding by pointing to the narrative skills of the indigenous orators in making comparisons to Western thinking; not realizing there was an entirely different ability to think on the indigenous side; an ability to think entirely failed by Western language with no working grasp of an aboriginal system’s vocabulary that compares well to modern quantum reality. The ‘nearly spot on’ (or near miss) is the idea of “mythic consciousness”, this a rank fail. There would be no sense of ‘mythic’ at all in practical application of this ‘other’ way of thinking on the native side; it is scientific, realizable and would be perfectly comprehensible with modern tools of understanding except for the wall of ‘objectivity’ or legacy of Plato:
“…the Diné are just as capable of thinking objectively as Western people and of using their language to make objective statements. However, they are also always aware of “an intrinsic subjective relationship which is not nullified by an objective statement [..] The capacity of intra-subjective knowing is not done unconsciously or automatically, and it does not preclude Western ways of knowing. It is an added capacity of awareness, not a primitive one” [4]
Western anthropology and archaeology would be incapable of grasping this prior to the 20th Century at earliest (with the conceptual vocabulary of quantum mechanics) and have yet but to dance about the edge with radical genius co-opted by none other than Western myth-making; Benjamin Whorf’s ‘linguistic relativity’ as related to David Bohm’s ‘rheomode’ has been hijacked by new age persona and westernized ‘Indian’ novelists. [5], [6], [7]
And there you have the wall… the Western (and ‘westernized’) peoples cannot know what (through language, particularly) they have no capacity to understand. All of the European expectations demanding explanations solely in objective mode from the native side must fail for the fact there is no capacity to grasp the intra-subjective knowing by the (limited to objectivity) ego-individuation structure of the modern European mentality.
Here it should be noted archaic terms like ‘ghosts’ actually refer to ‘energies’ in a sense of string theory (the universe is made up of tiny vibrating strings that resonate; in the native observational sense of a spider’s web) and this is why the idea of archaeology is abhorrent; vibrating past (perverse or deviant, negative) energies into ‘life’ (again) is counter to intelligent outcomes & positive present and future. Digging things up is tantamount to causing wounds in time and allowing the past to bleed into the present.
Certain, specific ceremony (sometimes using relics), on the other hand, is a safe means of traversing time that doesn’t disturb (when properly functioning) those many phenomena best left alone when/while in pursuit of cultural continuity. [8]
At the end of the day, ‘The Enlightenment’ got 1/2 the picture of Native American liberty; missing altogether is the individual self-restraint demanded by these native nations’ original understanding; the fact they merely occupied a niche integrated into a cosmos demanding a sentient-aware natural environment is constructed to include what should be seen as environment integrated to peers (in effect, everything else) might be gardened but never dominated. European folk traditions of terror notwithstanding, let’s not forget wolves live in a practical matriarchy whose purpose is to prune, not plow. The land was not ‘communally owned’ at all except that one were to include the practical grasp of native science indicating ‘the whole of it owns itself’ supporting d’Espagnat’s assertion opposing Plato’s doctrine:
“The knowledge and use of any or all the powers of the objects on Earth around us, is as liable to lead a man wrong as to lead him right, because it is merely power, with no way of knowing how to use it correctly- except that spirit is with a man’s spirit for the light” -Red Tomahawk, Sioux (1918.) [9]
Red Tomahawk’s ‘spirit’ (relates to “naaks” in Blackfeet) is the sentient awareness of collective creation, our very surroundings are intelligent expression integrated via consciousness to nature, or one might say (in Western terms) omnipresent god. When he says ‘spirit is with a man’s spirit’ (for the light), we are looking at what d’Espagnat stumbles upon nearly 100 years later; recognizing an innate consciousness embodied in our surroundings plays in everything we can experience. Moreover, Red Tomahawk is discriminating between a sole, intimate knowledge of any single object’s raw power, and an understanding of the larger purpose concerning the nature of that very object, recognizing these are distinct things. His understanding (different to the European concept) opens to the possibility of allowing for the trees, stones, or for that matter (again), everything surrounding us, to possess consciousness and to ‘know’ purpose exterior to the European self-centered or ‘individual’ cultural shaping and resultant ‘imperative’ perception. It is only when the ego-individuated concept of the European mentality is overthrown will this larger Native door of understanding be opened, where we can know how to listen, to intelligently ‘see’ our way through the intra-dimensional nature of our existence. In retrospect, who are the primitives? The tribal people? Or the people who, if they were to work out honest equation, must discover their ‘advancement’ & ‘progress’ via method of sustained development exploiting, desecrating one could say, the omnipresence of what amounts to the living mystery expressing us through creation, must point to our ceasing to exist and nullify awareness? Jesus admonished “Know you not you are gods?” What sort of gods should we propose to be? Those who put creation to death through the arrogance of the individuated ego? That would be the effect of sustained development, globalism, the international oligarchs’ and not least, the Western science enabling it all, a cancer (a larger concept of empire) on the very expression sustaining us. The authors of “The Dawn of Everything put their toe in the water here, and as Westerners, deserve great credit for that, but they haven’t yet learned how to swim. Plato’s objectivity is the problem. As a matter of fact, for the simple phenomenon of the missing “intra-subjective knowing” capacity, the Europeans could not have accurately reported on Native mental process, not yesteryear or now.
Insofar as the authors’ conclusion:
“Nor does our evidence support the notion that major innovations always occur in sudden, revolutionary bursts, transforming everything in their wake”
Setting aside the word “always” one would think the atom bomb & internet might have been given at least a small paragraph … and it is in this regard we’ll step outside of the mainstream of anthropology to (briefly, I promise) explore just a few of those ‘explosive’ possibilities, while noting ‘ideas’ can be infectious like disease, in our conclusion.
I will quote here the oral historian (speaker of Blackfeet ancient dialect) Floyd HeavyRunner “We know who [plural, multiple parties] arrived by sea, when they came, and who was already here when we arrived.” Considering Blackfoot oral history extends back in time to migrating with mammoth herds in the south of North America prior to the ice sheet retreat, we’ll put the Blackfeet precursor people in South America before that:
“When North America was an ice-age tundra, the first Americans were “cooking” their cultures in the tropical south, moving northward and settling as the glaciers retreated, according to new linguistic evidence from indigenous languages throughout the New World.
“The evidence suggests that humans have been in the Americas for a very long time, perhaps 40,000 years. It also suggests that most native American languages derived from Ice Age inhabitants who were isolated in the Western Hemisphere for many millennia.
“Only along the west coast do languages appear to come from immigrants who arrived after the Ice Age 14,000 years ago, a Berkeley linguist reports” [10]
Think that’s far-fetched? Then try this next, where a 2019 DNA analysis pins the Blackfeet journey as plausibly located in the region of Arizona 17,000 years ago, on what could only be on a long-term journey towards the north:
[Blackfeet tribal member] “Crawford’s DNA story suggests his ancestors came from the Pacific, traveled to the coast of South America and traveled north […] The DNA group’s closest relatives outside the Americas are in Southeast Asia […] Its path from the Americas is somewhat of a mystery as there are no frequencies of the haplogroup in either Alaska or Canada” [11]
Yeah, a mystery so long as denial of perfectly plausible 40,000 years past voyages by sea persist. It should be noted here that Floyd maintained people were already here when the remote ancestor (long before mega-fauna extinction) Blackfeet precursor people arrived by sea.
Moving on…
“I saw in this land an Indian woman and a child who would not stand out among white blonds. These people [of the upper class] say that they were the children of the idols” [gods] – Pedro Pizarro, chronicler of the Spanish conquest of Peru
“The remarks made by Pizarro as to the skin-colour of the Peruvians are very important and, probably, truthful. Today one finds people who claim to be pure Indian in blood who are very light in colour, but it is not possible to be sure that they have not some white blood” [12]
The ‘culture zones’ miss (entirely) plausibility of different cultural origins from abroad i.e. 40,000 vs 13,000 years, intervals between, and more recent pre-Columbian arrivals (other than Viking) from both West & East.
Was there a lost boatload of Phoenicians in Brazil? It’s possible. [13]
And what about that sunken load of Roman amphora found in a bay in Brazil? [14]
Did the Olmec begin at the site of a seafaring landfall? It’s a fair question. As the ‘cradle of Meso-American civilization’ was the Toltec, Inca, Maya and Aztec ‘cultural ancestry’ handed down from the Olmec? There’s a likely source of the ‘misdirection of spirit’ ultimately expressed in Cahokia
On the other coast (Peru) we have the knotted string records system of Polynesia (and China before that.) [15]
On the other hand, Tlaxcala (the Cortez allied city mentioned by the authors) exhibits a deliberative council no more or less remarkable than the original indigenous councils of numerous tribes from the Rocky Mountain Front to the Atlantic seaboard and the Canadian woodlands to the present day northern Mexico. Nothing unusual there (except for the authors wondering at it located in a Meso-American city.)
Back in the Pacific Northwest of North America, just suppose the coast Indians are a culturally Polynesian precursor people. That would explain a LOT about a group of late arrivals (by North American oral history timelines) who differ radically from the inland groups. Did they bring the identical mathematical principles of oracle shared by the Western tribes’ Native American stick game & the I Ching of China? [16], [17]
Moving on again […] well, actually, what could go on and on is already enough. Now, finally closing this out, close your eyes and listen to a music composition from a West Papua Melanesian people and hear something identical to what you’d expect to be a ceremonial sound experience on the plains of North America:
[2] Unmodified Paine quote: “The Deist needs none of those tricks and shows called miracles to confirm his faith, for what can be a greater miracle than the creation itself, and his own existence? There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found in any other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them. But in Deism our reason and our belief become happily united. The wonderful structure of the universe, and everything we behold in the system of the creation, prove to us, far better than books can do, the existence of a God, and at the same time proclaim His attributes. It is by the exercise of our reason that we are enabled to contemplate God in His works, and imitate Him in His ways. When we see His care and goodness extended over all His creatures, it teaches us our duty toward each other, while it calls forth our gratitude to Him”
[12] Note 139, page 528, The Discovery and Conquest of The Kingdoms of Peru by Pedro Pizarro in Two Volumes, Volume II, translated into English and annotated by Philip Ainsworth Means, The Cortes Society, New York (1921)
The essays collection ‘A Tribal Perspective’ (subtitled ‘Pre-Columbian Concept Translated to Modern: Radical Ethnographic Contrasts & Related Politics of Collusion’) is currently undergoing translation to both the Serbian and Russian languages. As the translations progress, selected draft translations in Russian will be posted at the Russia | Россия page here at my blog whilst noting certain selections are already posted in Serbian at my Srbija/Serbia page. The selections in Russian and Serbian will not necessarily be the same; but there will be a mirror of the essays in English at both pages. Please be patient, the Russian translation endeavor is quite recent and is work under construction in every sense.
Preface to the Russian Edition
This book is nominally about Serbs and Serbia for the fact the author’s exile finally settled in Serbia. But the gist of much that follows had been originally inspired by the Russian expats’ inability to grasp the Western mentality; as this author has seen a real misapprehension of underlying reality as concerns the USA and it’s Western European allies and their historical motivations to empire. These motivations had initially devolved upon the world via the colonial aspirations of Western Europe and finally had settled into a ‘feedback loop’ since World War II, when the Nazi meme, represented in the German Reich’s criminal intelligence apparatus, had been rescued by the Americans in a drive to counter the Soviet Union.
This Nazi seed fell upon fertile ground; the sociopathy & related legacy of ‘manifest destiny’, a spawn of Western Christianity’s John Calvin. It is in this ‘garden’ NATO was born and Europe became (again!) a lap dog of evil.
Insofar as alignment with EU and the West, Serbia’s prognosis is not good for the fact Western liberalism is actually underwritten by Calvinism. The label ‘cultural marxism’ misses the mark and is simplistic jingoism for a little understood problem; a perversion that cast off the cloak of traditional religion. John Calvin’s “predestination” is an infection that has underwritten cultural sociopathy in circumstance where in original substance it is theology that invited rejecting lived morality as a rewarded experience; you were predestined to heaven or hell no matter what you might do or how you might live your life. This perverted ideology (growing infection) invaded the colonies and spread from 1600 on and has shaped the American national character, as well Western Europe’s, throughout the liberal democracies history. Through a process of intergenerational socialization, this spreading infection had crossed every social boundary in the societies of capitalism.
The American conquest of it’s Western territories called “Manifest Destiny” profited mightily from the resultant greed integrated to amorality, little different to today’s expanding Western empire (destined to collapse.)
By the time Western science had cast off all trappings of belief, this inter-generational social mold of ‘take no prisoners’ in one’s individual ambitions had been ‘cast in bronze’ one might say. My conviction is, there is no cure. This has become a fatal social infection. A short social dissection follows:
Imagine a set of freak circumstance had landed a bona fide preColumbian mentality in Serbia; one that had become somewhat fluent in European cultural thinking as matter of necessity and survival. Then, if only for social-science fiction sake, consider this ‘primitive’ mentality grasps what should seem incomprehensible at first glance; it actually had been a matter of the Western science, prior to the discovery and development of quantum mechanics over these past 100 years, had been too primitive to accurately translate the ancient concept to modern European thought and language.
Then, toss the NATO and its’ allied intelligence agencies into the mix; desperately attempting to assassinate this freak production of the cosmos who possesses a high understanding of “Transcendent Warfare” for simple reason he would never give this information to the intelligence agencies.
Now, to a few observations on the alien world this lost Indian found himself cast adrift in, that would be Europe, over an exile exceeding 1-1/2 decades.
It was Bismarck destroyed the creative German psyche, when he’d forcibly converted all German provinces into the militarized Prussian mentality; with a lockstep, standardized education practically enforced with a fear of dissidents being put up against a wall and shot. Rules! Obey! A mere 100 years later, this gifted the world with Nazis and the idea of ‘untermensch.’
Of course, prior to application for joining the European Union (and German corporations investing in major Serbian media), every Serbian school taught the Nazis had executed a class of fifth grade children as revenge for the Serbian resistance having killed one Nazi. We can’t be certain future generations will know this, as ‘one shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you!’
Welcome to the EU, Serbia! Now, it will be your turn to be educated!
When the uniform state education had been mandated, much creative thought had been lost. Serbia had been remarkable for production of creative genius but wave goodbye to that, imposed neoliberalism via education beginning at 3 years is intended to structure children into sheep to be sheared by the state in perpetuity. Freedom to explore the world in unstructured terms to age 7 (the previous model), had been one of Serbia’s great reservoirs of intelligence. Serbia will sort that, when it’s too late.
Perhaps this tome which follows will be maddening to some; held aloft to emphasize ‘I told you so!’ by others, will anger the pious Orthodox priest in the same moment he appreciates the candor of how it illuminates certain enemies of the Orthodox world, and not least, should make some squirm in the chair, hating Gutenberg’s invention for the book they won’t put down.
So, this immediate, preceding paragraph should be meant to curry favor with the narcissism of the author; one might think. But it is merely the dutiful wish of the author, one cannot be assured of a book’s reception. It was the Serbian essayist Momo Kapor convinced this preface to Russian edition of “A Tribal Perspective” should be forthright in every element, including severe element of brutality; as Kapor’s light humor turned to black cloud of satire raining a crop-killing hail. In his closing chapter of “A Guide to the Serbian Mentality” on improving the Serb image in the Western world, where the professionals (for a one million euro fee) wrestle with approach:
“You mentioned that Serbs raped during the war?
“Yes, they have been indicted for that.
“Maybe that could be used in a positive way, for certain Western women who might want to get to know Serbian macho guys, and in light of the growing gay movement, they might see Serbia as an exceptional oasis of masculinity in an effeminate world. They might come in hordes to be raped in an exotic location.”
It was Cicily Isabel Fairfield first noted 70 years ago in her intelligence assessment masterpiece “Black Lamb, Grey Falcon” the phenomenal mix of malignant homosexuality, and its’ attending violence in the Western world recently projected onto the ‘Serb Monster’ with NATO bombs and ongoing propaganda. Nowhere in the annals of history is there greater example of rape of nations and of related propaganda projection than today’s Western empire, represented in the European Union & NATO.
Relevant to the preceding, the scientific term ‘methylated DNA’ could translated to common sense language as ‘poisoned by violence.’ In the wake of Belgrade’s having been leveled and risen from the ashes forty odd times, from an era preceding Rome, through the Ottoman ‘jerks’ to the Nazis, to the Nazis’ modern kin found in NATO, Serbian DNA is certainly the most ‘poisoned by violence’ DNA in Europe, probably is the most ‘poisoned by violence’ in all of the peoples of the Eurasian super-continent, surpasses that of colonized Africa and possibly the entire world.
The science establishing ‘methylated DNA’ is seen in your Serbian inat; an impenetrable wall often defended by irrational provocation, a wall that can be blind, deaf & ultimately stupid. This inat is aroused by anything that threatens … no matter that which threatens might, in certain instance, be that which Serbia (and Serbians) most need examine intelligently; why it is a Serb child’s first lesson is to learn to fear; how easily Serbs lie to their children; and not least, why Serbs mythologize & worship a battle they lost!
However not exclusive to the Serbs in Europe, it is this author’s observation the Serb is most extreme when making a face of perfect horror when a child takes a harmless fall; the child sees the adult’s fear and learns to cry for nothing. Later, they must overcome this fear to learn what is brave!
Of all Europeans, Serbs are easily the most relaxed and guilt-free liars, while misinforming children of the facts, when example given, presenting spaghetti with Alfredo sauce: “try this vanilla ice cream melted on gummy worms!” It follows, these children learn their parents are liars, easily learn to lie themselves and must work to overcome this to acquire a reputation for being honest! For many, defeating the lie never works; for they have learned to lie to themselves .. so it is with the majority of Serbs concerning the Battle of Kosovo. In fact, this battle was the great loss for Serbia, enabling the Sultan to finally ride the Serb like a pony in a 500 years circus freak charade. What was so great about that? Most importantly, the Catholic of the West will never appreciate the wounds inflicted on the Ottoman army by Serbs stopping the Turks’ advance, but oh, never mind, little different to Christians anywhere, Serbs can still love the pain!
“All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing … [St Paul] developed a theory of the Atonement which was pure nonsense, yet had the power to convince … This monstrous theory supposes that God was angry with man for his sins and that He wanted to punish him for these, not in any way that might lead to his reformation, but simply by inflicting pain on him; and that He allowed Christ to suffer this pain instead of man and thereafter was willing on certain terms to treat man as if he had not committed these sins. This theory flouts reason at all points, for it is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross” -Cicily Isabel Fairfield
Did inat save the Serbs from NATO? No. For who is the European Union except NATO members these days drinking together with Serbs at a NATO fraternal companions’ country club? Apply for chapter this, chapter that, and chapter thereafter, the European Union’s problem with Serbia isn’t actually corruption, it is with corruption that is in the open, the real EU problem is perception, the corruption isn’t finessed! The corrupt EU can’t allow that!
In a case where clearing certain misunderstandings might be useful to the Russian grasp of the Western mentality, this ‘tribal perspective’, born of a culture overrun by what amounts to an apocalyptic cult, should be helpful to the Serb as well. However to truly grasp the possibilities, much depends on an inner understanding of self. Taking intelligent decisions precludes ‘inat’, that unique Serbian ability to act unintelligently with a sense of spirit.
In my Blackfoot Indian peoples’ equivalent to the old Serbian gods, Veles had forced Perun into a making a peace that required a certain demeanor and ethics, on both parties part. Practicing the habits of this peace or ‘niitsitapi’ required a unity of principles that became our law of citizenship. In this regard, it is pleasing to me the Orthodox priests’ position depends on tolerating the sublimated, but still very much alive, old gods’ beliefs in the villages of Serbia; it may be an internal peace is within reach of the Serbs.
Does it not make perfect sense that a nation should be at peace within itself, little different to an individual must be, to know its’ real strengths?
My social satire and political lampoons are best explained this way: The devil on the one shoulder and the angel on my other shoulder climb into my head to make love and a satire is born .. having little to do with morality and much to do with ethics. As a writer there is no fear, no guilt, no shame in my approach, only accountability demanded of the public personas who presume to lead with lies as our world burns around us .. and making people laugh at the hypocrisies of western culture in a way steals the power of those lies and reduces their influence.
A former Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces, Ronald Thomas West is a retired investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption. Ronald had lived over thirty years in close association with Blackfeet Indians (those who still speak their language), and is published in international law as a layman: The Right of Self- Determination of Peoples and It’s Application to Indigenous People in The USA or The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole. Ronald has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background (no degree) is social psychology. His therapeutic device is satire.
This 2004 essay from my book “Penucquem Speaks, A Look At Our World From A Different Culture” is published here as a stands alone piece to counter-balance the satire “The Great Phuc Uuus Massacre” in my collection of anti-empire essays. As a Native American trained story teller (story teller trained by Native Americans in Native American technique), my adapting the cosmic joke element to personal narrative satire might be easily misunderstood for the fact of this accurate stylistic description:
“My satire in the present genre is to be honest in the Native American way; in effect, constructing a joke story closely resembling real life, a sort of collage of facts assembled from bits and pieces of diverse experience, combined with anecdotal information to create the culturally intact inherent Native wisdom found in their humor. In other words, parts of the story consist of an autobiographical facts incorporated, multi-faceted rip-off of other peoples life stories and experience. And because unlike the White world, the Native world entertains paradox in daily approach to life, some aspects are simply made up from the imagination’s fund of plausible improbabilities”
The point of republishing this excerpted essay from Penucquem Speaks is to contrast the reality to the (satirical) story-telling; however the difference might seem insignificant to some, for the fact the insanity of the common soldier’s experience in the Vietnam late stage conflict resembles nothing so much as a satire. But this narrative is precisely why the USA moved away from a conscription army to a ‘professional’ all volunteer force; establishing a mercenary army had become a necessity to maintain the present day, extra-constitutional, American “Empire.”
In this personal narrative, there is little element of the Native American joke story-telling format (deliberate entertainment, created with license.) Other than the self-satirizing (it is not allowed to be ‘holier than thou’ … one must present oneself at the level of stupidity integral to circumstance in the story-telling), it is entirely straight-forward narrative of events as they had actually happened and I had witnessed. That the described insanity can hardly be distinguished from a lampoon is, in and of itself, a damning indictment of Western culture at multiple levels; that I had emerged from the insanity as a decorated & promoted soldier, a soldier who was considered to be professional & responsible (I did a few important things), simply underscores the complications laden paradox of the Western war-addicted society that is inherently self-deceived.
A residual Native American element in narrating what follows is my allowing my former soldier-associates to maintain their perception of themselves, that is, I do not condemn their belief in what they had been doing, because everyone is entitled to their own reality is a very Native American approach, in fact this is a ‘libertarian’ pillar of the Northern Plains culture. For my real criticisms of the soldiers’ behaviors, one must return to the satire because it brings the narrative to the native, culturally correct, cartoon social perception; for the reason one’s idiocy must always be laughed at with the honest self-lampoon, no matter what personal evolution might have brought on in the intervening years. This (nearly extinct) original (pre-Western education) Northern Plains Indian personality stems from a culture which had recognized there cannot be any rewrites of history. Native American cultural integrity should demand one live this principle, the current social climate’s politically correct arguments notwithstanding.
The essay title in the book is “My Beginning.” Here I have renamed it “Metamorphose” as in fact these events, which are largely, accurately depicted (minimally ‘Hunter Thompson-esque’), are responsible for transformation at both; the personal and national level. At the personal level, the insanity depicted in paradox of an anti-war, but nevertheless war-zone environment, finally had subverted myself to a journey far, far away from mainstream. At the national level, the Empire had been ‘burned’ and consequently became even more radically militaristic.
My post-war military trajectory was from Vietnam to the 82nd Airborne Division and then onto the 19th Special Forces Group but the subversive seed of self-examination had already been germinated. Perhaps there will be more to be told of my journey towards, subsequent transition to, and rehabilitation in, Blackfeet culture, but that is for another day.
Metamorphose
Photo: The author in 1971
It was a starry night, I was lying on my back thinking in retrospect, where/what my life had come to. For the past twenty minutes, my name had been, was still being shouted, “West!” I did not care. The sky was absolutely beautiful, that is what was important at this moment. My father had returned a hero from the Pacific after the defeat of Japan.. and I was the second mistake of his subsequent union with the young woman he had met at the USO. Nineteen years and several months subsequent to my birth, an intervening period in which I seemed at times to have been an abused lawn ornament, I only wanted to understand why. Why was I here. My name was still being shouted in several directions, sometimes near, at other times farther away. “West!” That did not matter. Retrospective contemplation and the stars were what mattered. My biggest resentment was that no one had taken the time to explain things. Not ever. Not in any way that had made sense. “West!” It was getting louder, but then the shouting would become muffled under me. This had already happened several times, no one was thinking of coming up to where I was lying. Looking again at the stars, I knew nothing would ever be the same again. I would never believe in anybody, anything. Suddenly there was a slight noise close to me. Ray was there. “You have got to come down” he whispered to me. “all right” I said, with a little resignation. Then I added “Bring me a beer first.” Ray whispered “OK” and disappeared.
I had been lying on top of a sandbag, steel and concrete structure that I normally lived in.. it was a bunker. I was a Jeep driver for the pilots attached to the Headquarters of the 199th Light Infantry Brigade at the brigade main base near Long Binh, Republic of Viet Nam. Just an hour earlier I had smoked an Opium laced Marijuana cigarette and I knew I was in no condition to drive anyone, anywhere. Ray had returned with the beer and I had taken a swallow and then deliberately poured the rest of the beer down the open front of my jungle fatigue jacket. Clutching the empty beer can, I stumbled a little as I entered the Fire Ball Aviation ‘CQ’ (Charge of Quarters) office and mumbled to Major Lewis “You wanted me, sir?” I was not known to drink often, it was after my normal duty hours, and I was forgiven and dismissed. The Major made a call to Headquarters and found another driver and jeep for the several Command rank officers that had flown in on short notice.
The few times I actually had drank in the several preceding months may well have saved my life. I was never a good drunk, always becoming sick, usually for at least a day, and on the first two occasions that I was sent on emergency duty as a helicopter flight gunner, substituting for the regular crewmen, it just happened that I had been drinking the night before, and the consequence was that it was decided for me by my superiors that I suffered from air sickness. I had quit drinking subsequently, but the ‘air sick’ label had stuck and I had become a jeep driver. So now I smoked dope, because if you did not drink or smoke dope in Viet Nam, you did not fit in. There would be nobody to relate to. No social life. And very few people want to be a loner. I was not yet a loner. But I was a good jeep driver, did not smoke dope during normal duty hours, was devoted to my pilots, always punctual, and on one occasion drove four of these pilots through a barrage of B-40 Rockets, exploding just short of us, without flinching. After all, we were the 199th, and a certain attitude was called for. I was promoted and given an Army Commendation Medal before I left. As a group, our 199th Fire Ball Aviation unit was awarded the Viet Nam Cross of Gallantry with a Valor Device, but that is someone else’s story to tell.
One year later I was still in Viet Nam, now with the 330th Transportation Company at the little Army Airfield at Vung Tau. In the intervening year, since the night on the bunker with the stars, possibly beginning that night, some profound psychological change had overcome me. My classmate and friend from Army Aviation School, Fred, had died, shot down. He had been assigned to the 25th Infantry Division (Aviation Support) after the 199th Brigade had redeployed to the States and disbanded. Fred and I were just short of the required six months in the war zone to return to the states and were reassigned in country. We had spent a nearly year together up to that time, trained together and shipped to Viet Nam to the same assignment. After the 199th, I had been sent to Vung Tau, a coastal French Colonial resort city that had seldom seen the war. I was still there, afraid to go home, volunteering extra time in a mythical corner of the war zone, a tiny Shangri La, already sensing I could never really know my old life, or my home again. In these days I was an E-5, equal to a Sergeant, and my life was surreal, like a movie. There was no open job that fit my rank, so I did several things at different times. For awhile I was the Non Commissioned Officer in charge of the off/on switch of a steam cleaner. I spent my days reading paperbacks, sun tanning and listening to a stereo while waiting for the privates to tow a helicopter to my steam cleaner machine so I could turn the switch to the machine on for them. I thought maybe I could do that for a few years, the war’s end seemed far away. But then I was pulled from that dream job to carry dispatches, Personnel files and Courts Martial records to Saigon, because I knew my way around that city and the intervening countryside. I used this job and its administrative passes to hitchhike around Viet Nam. I had learned from my six months in the 199th to keep a personal weapon with me at all times, and a Jungle uniform easily conceals a 45 caliber Colt automatic pistol. I never needed it.
I lived a dangerous private life in my off hours. I had rented a studio apartment in the town of Vung Tau. It was an abode unknown to anyone except myself and the mysterious Vietnamese I shared it with, Dom Tay, and the Chinese madam that rented it to us together with her daughter and the more trusted whores. There was adjacent to the bar that the madam conducted her business from, a hallway that went from one of the main streets in town with the bars that catered whores, to an alley behind the bar that was a passageway to the market street with all its open stalls, a place you never saw Americans because they could not handle the smell. Our apartment had two unmarked doors into this hallway and it appeared as though they were entries to separate flats. Sergeant West always came and went from the main street with the bars, and used the hall entry to his apartment closest to that side, not an unusual sight. Soldiers were always frequenting rooms adjacent to the bars for their carnal cares. It was totally unremarkable. Dom Tay always left and returned to the hallway via the rear alley and used the entry towards the rear of the building, nearest this alley, and was seldom ever noticed. It was in reality as though we were neighbors from the outside view. But in fact we were alter egos. Having come in from the main street as Sergeant West, I would go back into the streets via the alley and market dressed in a south Vietnamese style military uniform without rank or insignia, only my moniker translated into Vietnamese, “Dom Tay” (Mr West) embroidered on my shirt in place of the typical name tag. With dark prescription glasses hiding the lack of slant to my eyes and of short stature and dark complected, I looked something like a French/Vietnamese halfbreed, perhaps in the Intelligence Service. Nobody wanted anything to do with me downtown, the Vietnamese civilian police or the military police, Vietnamese or American. I would stare directly at them. They would look at me and keep moving. In Viet Nam, sometimes there were people you just did not want to know anything about. I was able to be one of those. I went about and did as I pleased. Viet Nam had become my personal Wild West. I had found its underbelly, I was functioning there, and it was a place seldom seen, let alone survived, by most of the Americans. The Chinese madam’s daughter was sweet on me, and I was circumspect in that relationship, I spent time learning the Mah Jongg with her together with her mother and the ‘girls’, never touched heroin and I did not sleep with the whores. There was a certain amount of respect and I am certain, protection attending my friendship with these people. It was the whores who did everything, they were runners for drugs, business couriers for criminal deals, cover for arranged meetings. But all I wanted to do there was watch what was going on. I needed to understand. What was all of this, really?
Now my job had changed again. It was mid 1971 and anti war sentiment was growing in the troops throughout Vietnam, and it was evident in Vung Tau. The Playboy Magazine had come out with the ‘Viet Nam Veterans Against The War’ membership application and tens of thousands had joined from the war zone. I did not. But there were a few dozen soldiers in my company that were no longer going to contribute to the work at hand and had become troublesome to the cadres. The logical thinking was, here is a job for West. So I got my unofficial platoon leadership, my ‘Dirty Dozen.’ This included some of the anti-war guys, a few of the junkies and the only ‘Jesus Freak’, the one guy who was straight, he did not drink, he did not smoke dope, and he did not whore around in town. He was really sweet and nobody could stand being around him. He was normal and normal was unreal. All I had to do was keep these guys out of trouble. And it was about this time it looked like the war might come to Vung Tau.
So my new job was a pain in the ass and I was rethinking staying forever in Viet Nam. But I worked out the details and it went like this.. The junkies could never be trusted to do anything, but if they had their junk, they were happy no matter where you put them. So they were sent to the helicopter graveyard, and arrangements made to supply them their junk. There they drooled and vomited with glazed eyes and seemed to see their world only in the colors of black and white, like old TV. Probably about 30% of our soldiers were addicted to heroin at this time, and I had the worst of them, the ones that were so bad they could not function. The anti war guys were all dope smokers and they were sent to sandbag detail. The deal was that only the most trustworthy of them could go to the adjacent village through the perimeter wire and bring back their marijuana and the heroin for the junkies. These guys suntanned, read books, smoked joints, listened to music and jumped up to work with shovels, sand and bags, on a signal that administrative people were sighted. They rotated the guard duty assignment set up for this signal system, intended to protect them from their own officers. Nearly everyone stayed out of trouble. I kept the Jesus Freak with me. Nobody ever seemed to notice there was little progress in the sandbagging, only that the only that the anti war guys were being forced to work at the job soldiers most hated. It was slick. But this job had also subverted my psychology further.
I was not a dope smoker before I went to Viet Nam and I have not been a dope smoker for many years. But at this time I was smoking some of the most robust marijuana in the world, like a Jamaican dock worker. This was normal in the surreal world that we lived in. I had come from the 199th where people were dedicated soldiers although some of them recreationly smoked dope, others drank, to relax from what could be an unimaginably brutal job. The courage of the men of the 199th could not be questioned, and their devotion to duty sometimes delivered them to their deaths. These were fine men, and my admiration for them is undiminished to this day. We are Americans, and one thing that is totally American is the right to follow your beliefs. These men I knew of the 199th, these titans of personal courage, saw themselves as having defended American ideals of freedom and democracy, and they are forever entitled to see themselves in that light. Because that is what they did. And I will never question that mentality in these men. But that mentality was breaking down in me. As ‘Dom Tay’, my alter ego, I had seen the corruption of war, up close. Prostitution, Racketeering, Drug Trafficking, all departments were involved, and at high levels. My own First Sergeant did not know Dom Tay as I watched him, our Mess Sergeant and our Battalion Sergeant Major, make the deals and collect the money, selling our soldiers rations downtown. Repeatedly, the food service to the soldiers was cleaned up for a day or two, as the Army inspections and visiting congressmen were brought to Vung Tau by the soldiers’ complaints. Then the good food was sent downtown again. At a meal served a couple of days after one of these visits and a few decent dinners, I took the ribs served to us outside to a starving dog. This dog only had the strength to turn 180 degrees so that his ass was where his mouth had been when I offered him the meat. A starving dog would not eat it. We all had to buy our food back at the sidewalk cafes in town to survive. The sergeants a rank higher than myself were privileged to eat in the officer’s mess and their food was fine. One of the cooks, a private, became so outraged that he made marijuana brownies for the officer’s cafeteria. As Dom Tay, I saw the food he was supposed to prepare for us sold downtown by our own superiors, who formed a mafia. As Sergeant West, I delivered this same cooks Courts Martial papers to Saigon. What else did Dom Tay discover? That American Intelligence Service officers were the source of the Heroin that plagued our army. The Golden Triangle opium crop bought by the CIA to secure the loyalty of the remote tribes against the communists was processed into heroin and marketed to the United States Army in Viet Nam. I had seen enough. It was time to go home. But I had no home.
Before the extension of my Viet Nam tour expired, and I was actually able to leave, a couple of remarkable things had happened.
On my arrival in Viet Nam, as a member of the 199th, I had seen the invasion of Cambodia, professionally handled, militarily. The political aftermath of that had been Kent State however, and now the Army was in a different mood. Now, before I was to leave, I was to see the result of that mood with the invasion of Laos.
Nixon’s ‘Vietnamization’ of the war propaganda had been thrown at us repeatedly by the US Army newspaper, the Stars and Stripes. It worked well. Senior officers were now having to personally lead their troops into the field, walking the point that would be ambushed. It was the only way to get the American Army to fight. The soldiers would go along on these sorties just to see their leaders shot. Hand grenades were more often used to murder the more criminal cadres, the assholes, it happened in my company at Vung Tau shortly after I left. One of the Sergeants First Class that was part of the Cabal I had seen selling our food downtown had his toe blown off, but lived, apparently because the grenade rolled under his bed and the mattress absorbed the brunt of the explosion. A soldier I knew, Wally, did time in Leavenworth for that. So things had gone from bad to worse since the invasion of Laos. But it was the Laos invasion that was the scene of a war wide sit down strike by the American Army. At Vung Tao, when the 330th transportation company was ordered mobilized to assist in the effort to extract the Army of the Republic of South Viet Nam from a pre laid ambush on a titanic scale by regular divisions of the North Vietnamese Army, and the southern soldiers were being slaughtered like pigs in a pen, instead of loading their gear into the trucks as ordered, our company’s soldiers turned up Jimmy Hendrix Star Spangled Banner to a deafening decibel level and sat down in the assembly area clapping their hands and chanting “Hell no, we won’t go!” and they did not. Do you Courts Martial an entire Army? It happened everywhere. I learned years later that one of my former pilots from the 199th made so many trips into Laos due to the shortage of crews to the rescue, that even though he was shot down twice, managing to survive, rescued both times, he kept making trips. South Vietnamese soldiers were hanging on the skids of helicopters to get out alive. It was a slaughter brought on by Nixon’s propaganda. The war was being turned over to the Vietnamese. They would fight it. By now, the attitude of the American Army was ‘Well, let them.’ I recalled how General Lee’s deployment of the Confederate Army in the Wilderness Campaign caused General Grant to tantrum on his cot. Our allied Vietnamese army never stood a chance against the prepared and deployed line divisions of the North. Of course, the situation being what it was in Viet Nam, my guess would be that the North Vietnamese had the detailed invasion plan before the before the Southern army ever invaded. Dom Tay had already witnessed a world where all sides met and did business together. North, South, American, Viet Cong, all bedfellows, all criminal. Money could accomplish anything.
After Laos, for the most part, the 330th soldiers were no longer trusted with their weapons, they had to remain locked up in the armory. Some war huh? By this time you can’t trust your own army with their rifles! Well, this had an interesting consequence.
Thirty percent junkies, fifty percent dope smokers that sometimes used psychedelics, and twenty percent drunks, our army airfield was a disaster waiting to happen. We were receiving ‘care’ packages from the states, the people at home were being asked to support the troops, but this was a draft army, and a lot of the troops did not want to be here and in fact had been drafted out of areas that were hotbeds of the anti-war movement. So it was not unusual to receive ‘peace and love’ care packages that contained as many as one thousand doses of LSD. A C-123 cargo plane with a collapsed nose gear that had been simply dragged off of the end of the airfield runway was the ‘trip ship’, with more than 50 LSD ingested soldiers using it as a giant See-Saw- 15 or 20 men out on each wing, men sitting atop the fuselage and the rest inside trying to keep their balance. Not an uncommon sight. And then it happened one night. The unheard of Red Alert, an impending attack, the junkies did not even care, 200 soldiers high on LSD reported to the armory for their weapons, all of our senior sergeants and our Commanding Officer turned up shit faced drunk, and the guy with the keys to the armored building containing the weapons could not be found, he was passed out drunk, but nobody knew where at the time (with his whore in the village.) There actually was no backup set of keys to this building that could be located. I secured my personal weapon that I kept unknown to my superiors, plotted my escape route to the Australian compound that neighbored us, just in case I needed to be with a group of soldiers that could fight, and sat on the stair to a second floor barracks, and watched the riot that unfolded below.
Our First Sergeant simply stood frozen like a statue, and he had both pissed and shit his pants. Men were milling in panic around him, screaming like idiots, and they were easily identifiable as mostly drunks, these were our cadres, and nobody paid any attention to them at all. It was surreal under the floodlights that illuminated what was happening. But now here came a group of the LSD freaks, 20 or 30 of them, they had somewhere rounded up an utility pole, of the sort power lines are strung on, and now they had it employed as a battering ram against the door of the armored building. Again and again they slammed the pole against the door, and I could see our Commanding Officer was sobering up fast and now directing this effort, the United States Army of the 20th Century, employing a siege weapon older than Rome, trying to break into their own fortified building. Finally, someone had located the backup set of keys, and I put my personal weapon away and went to draw an M-16 Rifle.
The heroes of this fiasco were the Cobra Helicopter crews. While our soldiers were locked out of their weapons, these crews had scrambled with loaded rocket pods and mini guns. And these were the weapons that turned back the assault. After the riot from being locked out of the weapons, we received out rifles and deployed to our assigned stations, and I was hugely relieved to have a sober captain commanding our squad, but nothing happened. The attack did not materialize close to us. I was visiting with a Cobra crewman, he had come to see me particularly, after the grand riot. I had been informally working with the junkies that wanted to quit heroin for several months, I could not stand the tragedy of these people. There were no programs for them, they simply rotated out of Viet Nam and went home addicted. And the addicted soldiers that did not want this fate looked me up, I had a reputation for being willing to help them try and quit. On this occasion, the Cobra crew chief was not a junkie, but had been high on LSD while arming rockets for his pilot, and just wanted to talk about it. He said the experience made him want to examine his life and we talked about that. It had scared him straight. After this, I knew of two soldiers that did not drink or use drugs, this man, and our Jesus freak.
Just a few examples of heroin stories, people I personally knew, two Texans, Thedford and Mitchell were both heroin addicted. By the time they were due to go home, finally there was urine screening and the junkies were being diverted to Japan for hospitalization, because of the heroin epidemic. Thedford took a ’clean’ urine sample with him, along with copious amounts of heroin, he was not drying out or being diverted. Mitchell, a former Bull Rider, toughed out his withdrawals before he left, rupturing his skin which he showed me, huge blotches of red, like foot square bee stings. Darling from Indiana gave lip service to quitting, but did not have the resolve, a naive young man, innocent in the extreme, he did not even know what heroin was before he became addicted. Davis asked me what to do about his addiction on his way home and I told him just to be up front when he was out processed, tell them immediately he was addicted badly and be diverted to a hospital for detoxification. Many others known to me faced this problem. Modic had the worst luck of all.
Modic was never cut out for the Army and he saw his time in Viet Nam as a prison camp, a prison he was desperate to escape. He had taken LSD and had the idea to be someone like Papillion who had escaped the French Penal colony in South America. Modic told me he was going to re-enlist for the bonus money and desert. His plan was to take a short trip to Singapore with his money and disappear forever in Asia. I told him he was crazy. He had only a few more months to tough it out. His plan did not work. He re-enlisted, got his money and could not get out on his R&R vacation. Desperate, he tried to get kicked out by becoming a heroin dealer, very brazen, but no one turned him in. Now he began using the heroin himself, burning up his money, even his dog was addicted, he would tap a little into his dog’s mouth from the vial each time he was snorting the drug himself. Horribly addicted, Modic finally was busted. Sent to Long Binh Jail, an unimaginably brutal place, he did his heroin withdrawals there without medical mitigation, and returned a broken shell of his former self. Offered his one wish at his Courts Martial, to be allowed to leave the Army, Modic could no longer mentally function. He opted to stay in for the duration of his six year re-enlistment, the course of action he was advised at his Courts Martial hearing „would serve to make him a better man.“ I had talked with Modic on his return from Long Binh Jail. He was not even cognizant of what had happened to him. I had never met a more mentally broken man.
I tried heroin once. It was in Viet Nam. Something deep inside me told me there was something fundamentally wrong with simultaneously feeling orgasmic and vomiting.
In the middle 1970’s, I recall estimates of as many as 500,000 homeless Viet Nam Veterans were living on the streets of America. If that were true, this one half million American men should have been in the prime of their life as productive citizens. Today, in 2004, they are reduced to something like ten thousand. These were the junkies. Many of them are dead. A more certain fact is: as of this writing, more American Vietnam veterans have committed suicide than died in the war.
I had arrived in Viet Nam on April 7, 1970. I returned to the United States on November 8, 1971. I was not addicted to heroin. But I felt homeless. Like a man without a country.
My social satire and political lampoons are best explained this way: The devil on the one shoulder and the angel on my other shoulder climb into my head to make love and a satire is born .. having little to do with morality and much to do with ethics. As a writer there is no fear, no guilt, no shame in my approach, only accountability demanded of the public personas who presume to lead with lies as our world burns around us .. and making people laugh at the hypocrisies of western culture in a way should steal the power of those lies and reduce their influence.
A former Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces, Ronald Thomas West is a retired investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption. Ronald had lived over thirty years in close association with Blackfeet Indians (those who still speak their language), and is published in international law as a layman: The Right of Self- Determination of Peoples and It’s Application to Indigenous People in The USA or The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole. Ronald has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background (no degree) is social psychology. His therapeutic device is satire.
“The extension of the empire has meant the growth of private fortunes. This is nothing new, indeed it is in keeping with the most ancient history” -Gaius Asinius Gallus (from Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome)
Think about it for just a moment. The quote is 1,900 years old.
Western culture is a history of empires, preceding the Greeks of Alexander by millennia. But now, this cycle is finally exhausted in the 21st Century where colonialism, proselytizing, and seduction (consumerism) have overtaken the world but exposed the fallacy of sustained economic development (empire enabled growth of private fortunes) through conquest. There’s nothing left to exploit, nowhere else to go.
But the patrician (oligarchs) appetite for wealth hasn’t ceased. So they’ve been increasingly turning on their own people to sate their (insatiable) appetites. In the abstract, this is nothing short of cultural cannibalism.
Like big fish eating little fish of the same species, of too many examples of this necrotic cultural phenomenon of modern Western civilization’s cannibalism to list, we’ll go to the recent, largest scale ever, ‘dining out’ so aptly anticipated in 1968 by George Harrison:
Everywhere there’s lots of piggies living piggy lives You can see them out for dinner with their piggy wives Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon
That’s what’s going on with Big Pharma & Covid; and the straw man argument of whether to open up (waive) the covid vaccine patents. Oligarch Bill Gates both 1) opposes (together with Angela Merkel) violating the ‘intellectual property rights’ of corporations that if ‘waived’ would see any competent pharmaceutical lab in the world begin to manufacture covid vaccines. But some of the politicians (e.g. Joe Biden or whoever is standing in for his dementia on any given day) are becoming uncomfortable over the issue of Big Pharma vaccine patents making ungodly amounts of money as they (the politicians) bungle handling the pandemic with its politicized ‘medicine’ (e.g. Dr ‘Faustus’ Fauci.) All of this preceding is a straw man argument foisted on a panicked public.
Meanwhile, going to the real issue, recalling Oligarch Bill Gates is the second largest donor to the World Health Organization (Gates’ foundation is the largest WHO donor after the USA) and the World Health Organization has refused approval of an effective, cheap, generic drug, Ivermectin, as a treatment for covid that should render the vaccination hysteria moot (stamp the pandemic out), look at these six graphs:
Ivermectin in Czech Republic:
Ivermectin in Slovakia
Ivermectin in Mexico:
Ivermectin in Panama:
Ivermectin in Peru:
Ivermectin in Delhi:
“The West, as I thought of it extending thousands of miles beyond the setting sun, was astonishing in its corruption, in its desire for death, and in its complacency towards its disease” -Cicily Isabel Fairfield
The ceremonial investment of Biden as President of the United States is little more than theater along the lines history’s crowning a new ‘Holy Roman Emperor.’ After this ‘investment’ show, any honest president’s “State of the Union” address should cover important points underlying the current state of the USA’s social psychology. The USA most certainly will NOT be provided this honest assessment but simply more & growing transparent political lies underpinning greed that ‘secures’ empire.
What certainly will be missing is, the fact that since the National Security Act of 1947, ‘rule of law’ in these ‘United States’ has been transformed into ‘color of law’ where constitutional principles can no longer be squared with the laws as made and applied in fact. The oath to uphold the constitution has become a caricature that is patently meaningless.
Conservative America more largely, and America’s liberal dissidents in lesser numbers, sense this judicial perversion and it is the conservatives are the historic keepers of those constitutional principles most departed from in this ‘new age of national security.’
The USA is in a state of the nation’s anti-federalist heritage, primarily, having been usurped. It was supposed to be both, a constitutional balance of the federalist & anti-federalist philosophies, or that is to say a central government with solid checks, not one or the other in the extreme that is tyranny or anarchy with leadership gone off the rails.
It follows, in a case where the people have been so pervasively lied to, for so long, there are now two entirely separate & artificial realities, with either side incapable of grasping neutral facts beyond the borders of their own cultural myths. That’s the fruit of irresponsible ‘free speech’ in a corporate monopolized modern mainstream media where political lies possess so-called ‘constitutional’ protections. For this fact, neither side, conservative or liberal, can correctly read those foundational principles that should have, if only they had been adhered to, prevented the “security state’s” overreach, which is a complaint of the one side on one day and the complaint of the other side on another day, depending solely upon who is in the cross-hairs of proposed and/or enacted legislation.
Mutually exclusive historical revisionism accounts finding their way into the social fabric are part and parcel of these isolated (divorced from reality) cultural myths in the two alienated camps of the present body politic. For instance the Evangelical wing of the Republicans have rewritten the First Amendment’s history concerning separation of church & state to favor the Christian church particularly; while the Democrats have consistently misrepresented (done away with) the Second Amendment’s original purpose as a ‘check of last resort’ on state tyranny.
The 1st of the preceding threatens devolution into a large segment of an armed populace propping up what amounts to anarchy-like or mob rule led by ‘Christian ayatollahs’, whereas the 2nd of the preceding threatens a disarmed populace with whatever a corporate (1%) tyranny’s whims demand in any given moment.
The current ‘divide & conquer’ tensions play out in unbridgeable social dynamic where the red states’ conservatives are being driven to a deeply superstitious conservatism of a distant past due to a real subliminal fear of a ‘liberal’ cultural revolution being imposed upon them; while the blue states’ liberals are becoming radicalized into intolerant ‘woke’ because they perceive a revanchist conservatism threat imposing what they consider are archaic social values on themselves in turn.
The George Bush mantra “You are with us or against us” is now employed in domestic politics, whether called forth in the attitudes of Pelosi and Shumer or their allies represented in the “Never Trump!” Republicans, this is recently a threat aimed indiscriminately at a large section of the American public. Claiming Trump is the leader of the USA white supremacist movement is like claiming Biden is the leader of LA’s MS-13 gang. Trump is a perfectly imperfect hope or expression of 1/2 of an electorate desperate to escape ‘business as usual’ in DC opposed to Biden and Biden’s “Never Trump!” Republican support or the corporate establishment’s determination to never cede power back to the people.
“You are with us or against us” is no longer a threat thrown solely at the “homeland’s” foreign ‘provinces of empire’ in circumstance where domestically the Republican Party is broken and the Democratic Party is terminally ill with the disease of corruption. These times find the levers of power have been invested in what amounts to a coterie of reactionary, radically ignorant leaders (includes the moron Trump surrounded by ‘prosperity gospel’ corporate minions who could not altogether control him, not only the radical ignorance of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden & Harris.)
With little or no middle ground left, and middle ground is the only way forward that would see the state’s institutions secure over the long run, is there an avenue available to the alienated parties to sit down and talk?
In the present circumstance, the plain answer is “NO.”
Culminating in the treasonous SCOTUS decision “Citizens United” any pretense the people’s representatives actually answer to the people at the ballot box is dead. Politicians answer to corporate wealth that is the billions pumped into buying elections (especially military-industrial related corporate billions) and any (practically all) political career(s) become dependent on this corporate wealth and are incapable of responsibly responding to or serving the will of a now fatally divided electorate.
With the American Congress having morphed into a 21st Century science fiction monster’s corporate exoskeleton, similar to JRR Tolkien’s giant, malevolent spider Shelob, but now representing American empire rather than Mordor, the spine of democracy has been dissolved from the inside. It isn’t/wasn’t the Russians, China or Iran. The many acts of a corporate ‘axis of evil’ are clearly an American internal affair, and there is no one left to fix this mess in any genuine sense of ‘democratic principles’ that factually no longer exist; because water cannot be drunk from a mirage.
A logical conclusion would be empire puppet & ‘police state champion’ (Patron Saint of Incarceration) Kamala Harris had been the consensus choice of the neoliberal wing of the military/industrial corporate state; because demanding the ‘nuclear trigger’ be removed from a “deranged” Trump (beware of the false-flag with an apocalyptic Pence finger on the button) within the last two weeks of his presidency, only to hand it to Biden who’d plainly been entering a state of senile dementia from the 2020 campaigns’ inception, is an oxymoron too great, a reach too far.
Biden has been nothing more than a vehicle to ultimately put this multiple primaries loser on the throne. Because she is black and a woman, no doubt Harris’ ‘masters’ hope the ‘woke’ libtard electorate would follow her off a cliff like so many lemmings. That’s the real nature of psyops.
*
Note for whitey: Before you jism in your pants with a misreading of the concluding paragraph, intelligent expression means everything to me, the color of one’s skin means nothing. Check out “Native Americans & Race”
A former Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces, Ronald Thomas West is a retired investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption. Ronald had lived over thirty years in close association with Blackfeet Indians (those who still speak their language), and is published in international law as a layman: The Right of Self- Determination of Peoples and It’s Application to Indigenous People in The USA or The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole. Ronald has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background (no degree) is social psychology. His therapeutic device is satire.
Decolonization as envisioned by the United Nations is (in real effect) little more than a self-serving Western propaganda ploy; assuaging ego where there is in fact little wider social consciousness of what (and what has not) been accomplished. To achieve de facto (authentic) decolonization, to begin, this should require the decolonization of the psyche of those ‘indigenous’ populations educated into Western way of thinking. This would be no mean task!
When the colonizing powers ‘withdrew’ and ‘lip-serviced’ (should sound like political fellatio) ‘the right of self determination of peoples’ … they left intact unnatural colonial borders that in any case DID NOT respect the purported right of self-determination, rather put in place multiple Western infected national psyches within so-called ‘indigenous’ leadership determined to (more often than not) behave like Whitemen (Western European mentality.) This has further created numerous cases of social friction across the globe, particularly concerning so-called ‘minorities.’
The related ‘meme of democracy’ has accomplished the following few examples of too many examples to list in one short article:
The largest stateless ‘minority’ in the world (5,000,000 compared to ‘sovereign’ Montenegro’s 500,000), that is the Kurds, are in (varying degrees of) conflict with Iran, Iraq, Syria and (not least) Turkey, due to persisting colonial borders. This leaves the Kurd population open (across several vectors) to murderous geopolitical (read intelligence agency) manipulations in endless iterations (most recently by the USA & Israel.)
In the so-called ‘international law’ (a Western developed concept) Azerbaijan is allowed an Azerbaijani majority exclave, Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, separated by the territory of Armenia, but Armenia is NOT allowed an Armenian majority exclave, Nagorno-Karabakh, separated by the territory of Azerbaijan. Common sense calls this hypocrisy. Common people adhere to common sense and the Armenian common sense is cynically exploited in Ottoman imperial style geopolitical machinations:
So, what would be the point of common sense (a gift of our creator) in the view of those who propose to rule us? I doubt they could answer this question in any sensible (read honest) way for the fact there is no sensible or (especially) altruistic justification of the preceding. Any honest answer would have to take in account incompetence, greed & political-cultural narcissism (imperial arrogance) often prohibits the de facto right of self determination of peoples, any pretensions of decolonization at the United Nations notwithstanding.
In light of the preceding, just suppose (a laughable fantasy) the West were to take up Russia on an offer to repeat the plebiscite in Crimea with international observers; a plebiscite is the most democratic of all democratic principles. The obvious outcome would be (and why the ‘democratic’ West would never agree to this proposition) Crimeans would overwhelmingly (again) exercise their right of self determination to join the Russian Federation. Furthermore, the whole (majority ethnic Russian) East of Ukraine might then demand equal right to determine its own future and wellah, suddenly Putin’s Russian borders extend West to the Dnieper River. The Western states insistence Crimea remain a part of Ukraine is a case of the West maintaining a stance of ‘democracy for me, but not for thee.’
Meanwhile, the crude Spanish judicial system (dominated by judges aligned with the Popular Party, a political legacy of Franco) has jailed and continues to bring to trial those Catalan separatists who dared do what? They held a plebiscite (that most democratic of all democratic principles) to separate Catalonia from Spain (a state that has historically treated the Catalans as lackeys only fit to lick the Spanish boot.)
To keep this short, we’ll jump to Kosovo; where the Western states (NATO & the EU) has determined Serbia is not fit to govern a minority (of ethnic Albanians) on their own territory but the now purported (by the West) independent Kosovo is fit to govern a minority (of ethnic Serbs.) Never mind the inconvenient fact that recent Kosovo ‘leaders’ are being arrested and delivered to international tribunal for crimes against ethnic Serbs (includes organ harvesting), also not to mention the 250,000 Serbs driven from Kosovo in an ethnic cleansing pogrom following the NATO bombing of Serbia. Hey! Isn’t that just the sort of act the bombing was supposed to stop? NATO ‘just allowed’ that to happen when they’d grabbed control? Huh. Maybe that Albanian ‘majority’ wasn’t statistically big enough to justify an independent Kosovo (and secure Kosovo a ‘right’ to host Camp Bondsteel.)
All of this follows on a few historical facts overlooked by the Western propaganda machine; Eastern Orthodoxy’s majority Serbian population in the region of Srpska Krajina recently (90s Balkan Wars) ethnically cleansed from Catholic Croatia by “Operation Storm” (never mind the Serbs have been made the boogeyman for everything that went wrong with the breakup of Yugoslavia), as well the fact unnatural ethnic borders have been enforced in relation to Republik Srpska, ensuring there will be ongoing tensions within Bosnia on the border of Serbia and not least, the remnant Serb majority region in the North of Kosovo is denied their right of self determination to join with Serbia, ensuring perpetual inter-ethnic conflict that serves only to weaken the institutions of state via ongoing radicalization of both populations, Orthodox Christian Serb and Muslim Albanian. Europe couldn’t do a better job of promoting a war of civilizations if it had actually tried, if one were to presume it is mere incompetence derived from ego-narcissism has birthed this circumstance into the present. But maybe it is more than that, a weakened state with artificial borders is ‘low hanging fruit’ posing possibility of consolidating control over a region culturally tied to Russia (as well historically coveted by the Catholic headquarters at Rome.)
Finally, it must be noted that, similar to the Sioux Indians had founded their culture upon a spiritual relationship to the Black Hills of South Dakota from which they had been expelled, Serbia’s relationship to “Old Serbia” (Kosovo) is little different; but imperial ambition had seen the Serbs ethnically cleansed by the Albanians on multiple occasions, first under the ‘patronage’ of the Ottoman Turks, then the Albanians were backed in further pursuing pogroms against Serbs by the fascist Axis powers of World War II (similar to Croatian Ustasha persecution of Serbs during the war) and finally a coup de grace of sorts was delivered by communism under Tito, who forbade ethnic Serbs to return to their homes in Kosovo following 1945. [1]
The epilogue to all of this would be the colonizing of Serbia by the European Union at the point of a gun:
^ Ursula von der Leyen
Maybe the title of this piece should have been ‘Recolonization.’
*
“In any democracy, ethics, self restraint, tolerance & honesty will always take a second seat to narcissism, avarice, bigotry & persecution, if only because people who play by the rules in any democracy are at a disadvantage to those who easily subvert the rules to their own advantage” (Ronald’s Maxim)
“I Said No”
The Self-Deceit & Defeat of Aleksandar Vucic
“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime” -Thomas Paine
Serbia’s President Vucic met Trump at the White House and came away with a ‘small victory.’ Or so he seems to think. This self-annointed, clueless king needs a new vizier:
“I said ‘no’ at the toughest place in the world.
“Now I can officially say that I said what I said regarding recognizing Kosovo at the most difficult place in the world. In the room where I was sitting, there were Pence, Kushner, Johnson, Grenell, O’Brien, a hundred times more powerful people than me. This was a problem for them. I’m not interested in form and chairs” -Aleksandar Vucic [1]
Well, I think Vucic should have been interested in the visual message of the ‘chair’ he’d sent around the world when his “No” had (in actuality) multiplied into entirely too many cases of ‘Yes’ recalling this next image:
^ Aleksandar Vucic meets ‘Trump in drag’
In short, Vucic was out of his league and got ‘played.’ Now he has to explain away what he had signed:
What Trump’s cabal of criminals perfectly understood when they invited Vucic to Washington was, that Vucic would absolutely be required (a small matter of domestic politics) to say “No” to the constitutionally prohibited explicit recognition of Kosovo as an independent state. [2]
After the Americans placing precisely that (recognition of Kosovo as an independent state) in the initial draft, the ‘bait and switch’ was delivered; Vucic got the ‘Point 10’ or explicit recognition of Kosovo independence removed, only to be provided a document with thinly concealed recognition of Kosovo as an independent state or (that is to say) a document with multiple cases of implicit recognition of Kosovo independence. Then, our ill-advised King Vucic was so relieved at Point 10 having been removed, he signed it. His Vizier failed him.
Now, let’s have a bit of a closer look.
Implementation of joint infrastructure agreements (highway, railroad ect) with a political entity that presently controls, and seeks the independence of Kosovo, equals implicit recognition of an independent Kosovo; the legal point here is, this act confers legitimacy on a political force in violation of the Serbian constitution but nevertheless subjects Serbia to principles of international law. Much of what follows would be subject to the same principle where one cannot do any ‘de jure’ business with an entity and subsequently claim that same entity has no legal competence (the international law’s ‘rule of reciprocity.’) [3]
Joint operation of the Merdare ‘common crossing point’ will be read (in future) as a strong indicator Serbia recognizes Merdare as an international border crossing per the principle laid out in the preceding paragraph (reciprocity) for the simple fact the administration on the Kosovo side considers itself an independent state.
Serbia and Kosovo separately joining the ‘Mini-Schengen Zone’ is outright de facto recognition of Kosovo as an independent state. In a case where Serbia did NOT recognize Kosovo’s independence, Kosovo could only enter the ‘Mini Schengen’ as a part of Serbia with Mini Schengen consisting solely of Albania, Macedonia & Serbia. Mini-Schengen is proposed as a trade association of independent states. Serbia agreeing to sign on to Mini Schengen as a peer to Kosovo is practically a recognition of independence given to Kosovo.
Accepting the US Department of Energy to draw up plans to “share” Lake Gazivoda is a strongly implicit recognition of Kosovo’s independence, because as a matter of fact a nation-state does not ‘share’ its water with a territory on peer terms except that territory were an independent state. If Serbia were sovereign over Kosovo, it would not ‘share’ but ‘assign’ water to that province.
Agreeing to refrain from any action communicating to other nations that Kosovo should not be recognized as an independent state speaks for itself.
Other points:
Diversifying energy supplies, example given, sets up possibility of taking business concessions from state controlled corporations like Gazprom and giving them to utterly uncontrolled and ruthless outlaw Western corporations like Chevron (the language is too broad & non-specific.) [4], [5]
Giving an “An international, US International Development Finance Corporation full time presence in Belgrade, Serbia” accomplishes two things, neither good for Serbia. 1) this will give the American corporate oligarchs an inside track on the privatization of what remains of Serbia’s state owned assets and 2) will give the Central Intelligence Agency a parallel track to penetrate every aspect of Serbia’s economy; pointing to the US International Development Finance Corporation is a USA government subsidiary of USAID. USAID is at the nexus of American ‘color revolution’ policies and firmly grounded in CIA history where the clandestine ‘Operations Division’ does NOT support American democratic principles (the USAID cover story) but in actuality supports acquisition and control of resources & markets by major American corporations. [6], [7]
Demanding Serbia dismantle its 5G is the USA using Serbia to stick a thumb in the eye of China.
Enhanced airline passenger & crime information sharing with the Pristina criminals who should be in a cell at the Hague, together with the entity (USA intelligence services) that created al-Qaida, is nothing short of a bad cosmic joke. What crime groups will that information be shared with? How will it compromise Serbia’s security structures?
The next bad joke is the idea there can be sincere “interfaith dialogue” with Salafi & Wahhabi radicals, currently free to proselytize throughout Kosovo. [8]
The bad joke after that is a double: concerning locating missing bodies, do you suppose ‘Pristina’ is going to locate and repatriate bodies of Serbs disappeared and harvested for organs? Who would believe that? The other problem with ‘reconciliation’ is the idea dislocated Serbs are going to be welcomed back and their properties restored; this had already been a demand of the UN for two decades with practically nothing more accomplished than ongoing abuse of those Serbs who did not (yet) leave Kosovo. [9], [10]
^ It’s not the ethnic Serbs in helmets & masks with weapons
The Western model that legalizes homosexuality practically demands ‘gay evangelism’ that radicalizes conservative societies into opposition. Serbia should be careful with Richard Grenell’s pet point; it is one thing to be tolerant, it is another thing altogether to push homosexuality in a culture’s face, a habit of numerous Western societies. Serbia risks unnecessarily alienating other nations with this agreement’s paragraph made with a gun pushed against Serbia’s back. And the joke element: what fool would believe for one millisecond that Kosovo’s growing Salafi society will do anything but de facto criminalize homosexuality in actual social practice? [11]
Certainly Serbia’s nasty reputation for trafficking weapons to proxy terrorist organizations should not benefit Hezbollah (or otherwise benefit any de facto warring party in the Middle East) but there is a magnificent hypocrisy in the demand by the USA that Serbia must ban Hezbollah, when it was the USA created al-Qaida (which splintered, one faction becoming Islamic State), with the USA now dictating who is a terrorist organization. [12], [13]
Finally, Serbia’s reward that came with Vucic agreeing to move Serbia’s embassy to Jerusalem was delivered within the hour of his signing; when Israel recognized Kosovo as an independent, sovereign nation and the humiliation was complete. [14]
I don’t doubt Soros funds (and more) are behind fanning the flames of the USA street violence over the murder of George Floyd, there’s no doubt in my mind societal anger is cynically manipulated in what amounts to a deep state internecine war that could lead to civil war. But there is another side of this story, the story of the USA’s endemic racism. Here are three voices:
Dave Chapelle:
Glen Ford:
John Oliver:
In fact, I am not aware of any egalitarian deal inclusive of Blacks in American history other than the pirate culture where escaped slaves, both Black & White (Whites were slaves under the euphemism of ‘indentured servants’), elected their own ship captains and equally shared the spoils.
Ronald Thomas West 