The Nazis are scapegoats for a Western heritage of mass slaughter, as if genocides in the Americas, Africa and India are mere historical footnotes. In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.
‘Such a Bright Future’ — by Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges
in Cairo, Egypt
ScheerPost
It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Parked in the arid sands in the northern Sinai of Egypt are 2,000 trucks filled with sacks of flour, water tanks, canned food, medical supplies, tarps and fuel. The trucks idle under the scorching sun with temperatures climbing into the high 90s.
A few miles away in Gaza, dozens of men, women and children, living in crude tents or damaged buildings amid the rubble, are being butchered daily from bullets, bombs, missile strikes, tank shells, infectious diseases and that most ancient weapon of siege warfare — starvation. One in five people are facing starvation after nearly three months of Israel’s blockade of food and humanitarian aid.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has launched a new offensive that is killing upwards of 100 people a day, has declared that nothing will impede this final assault, named Operation Gideon’s Chariots.
There will be “no way,” Israel will stop the war, he announced, even if the remaining Israeli hostages are returned. Israel is “destroying more and more houses” in Gaza. The Palestinians “have nowhere to return.”
“[The] only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip,” he told lawmakers at a leaked closed-door meeting. “But our main problem is finding countries to take them in.”
The nine-mile border between Egypt and Gaza has become the dividing line between the Global South and the Global North, the demarcation between a world of savage industrial violence and the desperate struggle by those cast aside by the wealthiest nations.
It marks the end of a world where humanitarian law, conventions that protect civilians or the most basic and fundamental rights matter.
It ushers in a Hobbesian nightmare where the strong crucify the weak, where no atrocity, including genocide, is precluded, where the white race in the Global North reverts to the unrestrained, atavistic savagery and domination that defines colonialism and our centuries long history of pillage and exploitation.
We are tumbling backwards in time to our origins, origins that never left us, but origins that were masked by empty promises of democracy, justice and human rights.
The Nazis are the convenient scapegoats for our shared European and American heritage of mass slaughter, as if the genocides we carried out in the Americas, Africa and India did not take place, unimportant footnotes in our collective history.
In fact, genocide is the currency of Western domination.
Henry Howe (1816-1893) – Page 108; Historical Collections of the Great West: Containing Narratives of the Most Important and Interesting Events in Western History. Publisher: Cincinnati, H. Howe -1852 (Wikipedia)
Between 1490 and 1890, European colonization, including acts of genocide, was responsible for killing as many as 100 million indigenous people, according to the historian David E. Stannard. Since 1950 there have been nearly two dozen genocides, including those in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.
The genocide in Gaza is part of a pattern. It is the harbinger of genocides to come, especially as the climate breaks down and hundreds of millions are forced to flee to escape droughts, wildfires, flooding, declining crop yields, failed states and mass death. It is a blood-soaked message from us to the rest of the world: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you.
The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality. He warned that this absurd positivism is perpetrated by oppressors to disempower the oppressed.
“All atrocities of the victor, the long series of his attacks are coldly transformed into constant, inevitable evolution, like that of nature… But the sequence of human things is not inevitable like that of the universe. It can be changed at any moment.” Blanqui warned.
Scientific and technological advancement, rather than an example of progress, could “become a terrible weapon in the hands of Capital against Work and Thought.”
“For humanity” Blanqui wrote, “is never stationary. It either advances or goes back. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.” Further, he wrote, “I am not amongst those who claim that progress can be taken for granted, that humanity cannot go backwards.”
Human history is defined by long periods of cultural barrenness and brutal repression. The fall of the Roman Empire led to immiseration and repression throughout Europe during the Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth through the 13th century.
Louis Auguste Blanqui photographié par Ernest Charles Appert. c. 1880. (Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris/Wikimedia Commons)
There was a loss of technical knowledge, including how to build and maintain aqueducts. Cultural and intellectual impoverishment led to collective amnesia. The ideas of ancient scholars and artists were blotted out.
There was no rebirth until the 14th century and the Renaissance, a development made possible largely by the cultural flourishing of Islam, which, through translating Aristotle into Arabic and other intellectual accomplishments, kept the wisdom of the past from disappearing.
Blanqui knew history’s tragic reverses. He took part in a series of French revolts, including an attempted armed insurrection in May 1839, the 1848 uprising and the Paris Commune — a socialist uprising that controlled France’s capital from March 18 until May 28 in 1871.
Workers in cities such as Marseilles and Lyon attempted, but failed, to organize similar communes before the Paris Commune was militarily crushed.
We are entering a new dark age.
This dark age uses the modern tools of mass surveillance, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, drones, militarized police, the revoking of due process and civil liberties to inflict the arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror that were the common denominators of the Dark Ages.
To trust in the fairy tale of human progress to save us is to become passive before despotic power. Only resistance, defined by mass mobilization, by disrupting the exercise of power, especially against genocide, can save us.
Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans.
The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children.
I wish this was conjecture. It is not. It is what I witnessed in every war I covered. Almost no one is immune.
Conrad in 1916. (Alvin Langdon Coburn – NYPL Digital Gallery/Wikimedia Commons)
The Belgian monarch King Leopold in the late 19th century occupied the Congo in the name of Western civilization and anti-slavery, but plundered the country, resulting in the death — by disease, starvation and murder — of some 10 million Congolese.
Joseph Conrad captured this dichotomy between who we are and who we say we are in his novel Heart of Darkness and his short story An Outpost of Progress.
In An Outpost of Progress, he tells the story of two European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to the Congo. These traders claim to be in Africa to implant European civilization. The boredom, the stifling routine, and most importantly the lack of all outside constraints, turns the two men into beasts. They trade slaves for ivory. They fight over dwindling food and supplies. Kayerts finally murders his unarmed companion Carlier.
“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier,
“whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion.
But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations — to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.”
Jabalia camp destruction by Israel in Gaza, October 2024. (Al Jazeera/Wikimedia Commons)
The genocide in Gaza has imploded the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It mocks every virtue we claim to uphold, including the right of freedom of expression.
It is a testament to our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. We cannot, having provided billions of dollars in weapons and persecuted those who decry the genocide, make moral claims anymore that will be taken seriously.
Our language, from now on, will be the language of violence, the language of genocide, the monstrous howling of the new dark age, one where absolute power, unchecked greed and unmitigated savagery stalks the earth.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
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Views expressed in this interview may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
it was the Cathars who spoke of the reality of evil e, adhering strictly to the New Testament, they called Satan Lord of this World. It is no coincidence that in less than 50 years they were exterminated, in one of the many genocides perpetrated by Western power, in this case the Catholic Church which also called for crusades against them, accusing them of heresy.
Thus in the West the absurd anti-gnostic concepts of Augustine of Hippo and the other Fathers of the Church prevailed (both in the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church), and the definition of Evil as ”privatio boni”, Evil as a privation of Good:
Evil is not a substance, that is, it does not have an ontological consistency, but is a lack of being and good (defectus boni). In the Confessions we read: «All things that are, are good; and as for the evil from which I sought where it came, it is not a substance, because if it were a substance it would be a good […].”
Hence also, in Augustine, the justification of the just war and the fact that the caste of priests also have earthly powers and material riches, things which the Cathars opposed until the end.
Chris, I guess you’re younger than I am, but during the 1960s, I listened to the radio every night and heard the reports from the Vietnam War. 100 American men died every week for years. An untold number of Vietnamese died during that time. The bombing was more widespread and destructive, but it went on, day after day, month after month, year after year. There was protest, foreign outrage, self-immolation, and young men were shot down on American campuses. Yet it continued.
Empires are not good. Yet, good persons do continue to do what they can and they do make changes. The current social order will change. Either it will be reformed or it will cease to exist, along with its supporters.
”The 19th century socialist Louis-Auguste Blanqui, unlike nearly all of his contemporaries, dismissed the belief central to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality.”
Not Marx. Marx wrote that without class struggle we remain in prehistory, the social structure can only be changed through organization and struggle. The only war that must be waged is class war.
“Almost no one is immune.”
Again, no, not really. Almost no one *in power* is immune. The kinds of people who get into power are the ones who are drawn to power and control and prone to use barbaric means to attain it. Most of us are not really drawn to power and control – we just want to live our own lives and enjoy our friends and family. Others may be drawn to power and control, but lack the ruthlessness to attain it. It’s power itself that is the problem, not humanity in general.
“Campaigns of mass killing unleash the feral qualities that lie latent in all humans.
The ordered society, with its laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations, all forms of coercion, keeps these latent qualities in check. Remove these impediments and humans become, as we see with the Israelis in Gaza, murderous, predatory animals, reveling in the intoxication of destruction, including of women and children.”
No, it’s the laws, etiquette, police, prisons and regulations that *enable* the mass killing and exploitation. Incarcerating millions of mostly minority people for minor drug charges is legal. Wage theft, pollution and other “white collar” crimes are all socially acceptable. It’s illegal and a breach of “etiquette” to protest against such things.
And are the feral qualities indeed latent in all humans, or are they the result of the capitalist system that rewards those qualities? Animals are not really “predatory”. They kill for food. They do not generally kill their own, they don’t hoard, nor do they ruin their own environment.
What you are ascribing as natural or human nature is instead something gone wrong with nature and humanity in the quest for “progress” and acquisition.
Chris is wrong about the Marxian conception of history, also known as historical materialism. For all I know, Hegel might have believed “that human history is a linear progression toward equality and greater morality”, but Marx certainly did not! What historical materialists believe is that human history is a secular progression (with many temporary reverses and zigsags) toward a higher degree of technical proficiency and social organization. As Chris emphasizes, better technology does not imply greater equality and morality, far from it! Followers of Marx like Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg explained that humanity today faces a choice: “forward to socialism OR backward to barbarism”.
If humanity chooses socialism then — according to this conception — it will at long last return to the cooperative relations that characterized very early human societies. This is not a linear development but a circular one, or rather a spiral where earlier forms return at a higher level of human capability and organization.
This understanding of history of the historical materialist is sterile and lifeless, for it refuses to understand history in its own terms in favour of an imaginary “progression.” I find Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History” to be a sound refutation of this idea.
hxxps://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
Excerpts:
“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”
“To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: ‘Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.’* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. […]”
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
First of all my comment was not arguing for or against any particular view of history. I was just trying to correct an error in how Chris had described the views of Marx. The same point was made in lisa’s comment.
However, since you mentioned Benjamin, I looked him up in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. They say that he self-identified as a historical materialist, but was also critical of its contemporary expression. Below is a quotation from the article. My hunch is that what he really wanted was a return to the revolutionary traditions that the SPD had abandoned. What he was criticizing, I suspect, was not historical materialism per se, but the way it had been misunderstood.
QUOTE
The political consequence of the temporal naturalism underlying the idea of ‘progress’ is conformism. For Benjamin, paradoxically, this applied in particular to the German Social Democrats’ understanding of communism as an ideal, in the neo- Kantian ethical sense of the object of an ‘endless task’:
Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the
empty homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to
speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the
revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. (SW 4, 402)
In other words, the concept of progress is demobilizing; and Marxism had become infected by the ideology of progress.”
END QUOTE
I can’t help but bring attention to the British genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginals which was deliberate and thorough re: The Black War. After it was completed, the full blood members of this unique race were no more. Yes, the last of these peoples died on Bass Strait Islands apart from some who had been forced in servitude and died later, e.g. Truganini (c. 1812 – 8 May 1876), also known as Lalla Rookh and Lydgugee.
To the best of my knowledge, this may have been the only planned and completed genocide.
There is at least now some effort to bring attention to this and revive the aboriginal Tasmanian culture. I saw an excellent film a few years ago, “The Nightingale,” which was set in colonial Tasmania dealing with the consequences of the Black War with an Irish woman and aboriginal Tasmanian man as the leads, and featuring a reconstruction of their language palawa kani. I was unaware of any of the history before seeing it, which prompted me to read up on it.
Though I found it engrossing and with a satisfying if gut-wrenchingly dark story, apparently 30 out of 600 of those who saw the first screening walked out because of its depictions of genuine colonial violence, i.e rape and murder!
To my knowledge, there are still thousands of Tasmanian Aboriginals today, though not “full blooded,” and they are an inspiration in their fiercely still trying to hold onto their culture.
There is the religion Roman may have created just to defame the opposition to occupation and turn it into a running antisemitic version instead and a big imperial project for world religious dominance took over from there where all wars are based on some form of defamation of world cultures as evil.
Hedges once again displays the ecstasy that idealists feel at the thought of apocalyptic destruction. A weak challenge to Hegel and Marx, but at least he does not mention Stalin, gulags or Solzhenitsyn for once. I respect Hedges for his journalism, but frankly, may I recommend Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism instead of this downer diatribe.
No doubt, Chris Hedges is a long, long way from home. Fingers crossed, best wishes for you, Chris Hedges, “Safe Travels.”
……“It is 200 miles from where I am in Cairo to the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. “ Chris Hedges.
Obviously, Hedges feels @ “home” in the comfort near a war zone. No doubt, “moral excellence, righteousness, goodness,” is Hedges’ driver. Concluding, “Virtue Is Power.” IMO, VIRTUE is “The Mysterious Force That Binds,” Investigative Journalists & their f/brillant work! “Virtue” is the “Gravitational Pull” to go where MSM “circles” the war zones, war crimes & crimes against humanity, i.e., deception, destruction, death, genocide, “so quickly that they never reach the surface.”
“All hail,” Investigative Journalists, Chris Hedges, PLUS (et al)., for rock’n a moral compass! &, “Thumbs On The Scale! Keeping us in the loop.
……*“Add More Mass to Get More Gravity.” Mass, sometimes confused with weight, is the amount of matter an object contains — as mass increases, so does gravitational pull,” i.e., Gaza, the West Bank, Genocide & The “Gemini’s” $cheme:*
…… 1) “the “relocation” of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon and Libya, and ???; 2) Egypt & Jordan oppose the “Gemini’s” $cheme, 3) the Gemini’s (Trump’s) “bold declaration and follow-up moves have created conditions for a near-term collision with some of America’s Arab allies, which has far-reaching implications for Israel.” *Dan Diker & Yoni Ben Menachem Posted Feb 9, 2025.
*“Gravity and three other fundamental forces hold the universe together.” 1) The strong nuclear force keeps particles in an atom’s nucleus from flying apart. 2) The weak nuclear force causes radiation in some nuclei; and, 3) the electromagnetic force performs critical tasks such as holding a molecule’s atoms together. Although the sun’s gravity grips planets billions of miles away, gravity is the weakest fundamental force. Read More: hxxps://www.sciencing.com/gravitational-pull-6300673/
…… “WOW! “Such a Bright Future,” imo, reflects the Artist’s, Mr. Fish’s,“thumb on the scale,” Golden mushrooms fill the skies, “Once there was a way, to get back homeward. Once there was a way, to get back home. Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry. And I will sing a lullaby.” The Beatles updated version, “Golden [mushrooms] “fill your eyes. [Smiles are GONE! No one will rise]. “Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry; And, I will sing a lullaby.” The Beatles
No doubt, Trump-Vance, Inc., is “a giant corporation constantly putting their “thumbs on the scale,” using their vast resources to influence their “foreign policy” in their favor. Trump-Vance, Inc., like a slot machine, there’s no way you’re getting fair odds. Fingers crossed, I’m f/wrong!!!
TY, Chris Hedges, Mr. Fish, CN, et al., “Keep It Lit.”
*“Assessing Egypt and Jordan’s opposition to Trump’s Gaza plan,” @ hxxps://www.columbusjewishnews.com/jns/assessing-egypt-and-jordan-s-opposition-to-trump-s-gaza-plan/article_c3d96703-7b00-56b6-9ba7-9e542ca3d77d.html
The savage, immoral murder of Gazans, day after day, can only continue because of the inaction of the cowardly U.S. Congress. How many voices do we hear coming from them to denounce this genocide? Life goes on with meaningless events like the Met Gala, with its glittering excess, while children in Gaza waste away. Let them eat cake, indeed. The Dark Ages truly are upon us.
The details of our human history and the motivations of the moment that seem so important as explanations are driven by the our primate biology expressing through our evolved cognitive capacities; our species is not a tabula rasa. Until those with the greatest influence on and over human action have an effective understanding of this fact, all of us will remain in servitude to it.
While we must give attention to the details of events and processes, as Hedges does with reason and wisdom, the underlying forces moving our behaviors must be calculated into any attempts at improving outcomes. Here I disagree with Zaremba; it is not Christianity, but politicization of the religious process writ large. Capitalist Christianity simply happens to be in power; the underlying force is the biological hierarchical system from our origins operating in dangerously over populated conditions, populations supplied with incomprehensible material power. No shifting of ideological perspective will be sufficient or effective without real action responding to that reality.
HEAR! HEAR!!! “Hedges does with reason and wisdom,” 100%.
…… “While we must give attention to the details of events and processes, as Hedges does with reason and wisdom, the underlying forces moving our behaviors must be calculated into any attempts at improving outcomes.” James Keye.
TY. “Keep It Lit!”
It takes courage to face the darkness. It takes faith to see the light.
European Values are the values of the era that we call the Dark Ages. That’s when the European template got set, and it has been reluctant to move beyond that, and now appears to be heading back to those old Dark Ages when Europe was Great.
Authoritarian rule is the European tradition. Democracy was back under the Greeks, and nobody in Europe wanted to have anything to do with it until the peasants revolted. The English pulled a fast one, and gave their peasants “Liberty”, but kept a strong class structure that meant that the Upper Class stayed in power and kept the Lower Class in its place. Today, despite the trappings of a fake democracy, the UK is a highly unequal society where the upper class rules. An elite upper class ruling from the castle on the hill is the core of European Values.
And of course, European history is a history of wars out the wazoo. This is the people who have a 100 years war and a 30 years war on their books, and the was known as the Seven Years War which intersected American colonial history was a relatively short one for the Euros. The one thing that is core to European Values is killing everyone else. British history is one of centuries of pure hate towards whichever continental nation was on top of the heap, shifting from Spain to France to Germany and now Russia. A long series of wars.
Killing in large numbers, oppression, authoritarian rule by selfish elites … these are core European Values that trace straight back to the Dark Ages. If Europe ever left the Dark Ages, it was a short trip, and they quickly got homesick.
Marx and Engels were right. Hedges is wrong. The driving force behind the destroyers of the western hemisphere and africa were CHRISTIANS. It was CHRISTIANITY that drove these hordes to slaughter native populations and enslave them. And is continues to be CHRISTIANITY that supports this bestiality on the part of those who support and enable Zionism. In fact, it was CHRISTIANS who supported the Zionist cult in the first place. Read Ilan Pappe, for one.
Christianity, as taught by Jesus Christ, only lasted a few hundred years. By the time Emperor Nero made Christianity the state religion of the Empire, it was doomed and changed forever. The religion of the slaves and the lower class and the occupants of the catecombs beneath Rome was different from a state religion. And you see the conflicting messages soon appear. The focus shifts from how to build a better, peaceful life among us, to some future reward that one gets after a lifetime of loyal slavery.
By the Dark Ages and the Crusades, we see the seriously anti-Christian notion of a Christian Warrior going off to fight the infidels. By the Dark Ages, Christianity had become an oppressive religion at home and a force powering wars across Europe. First against the more advanced Arab civilization, and the after Martin Luther, against other Christians for being different.
When we see the Dark Ages, we see Priests loyal to the King telling the peasants that they can never revolt against the King, threatening the peasants with excommunication. Which would deny to the peasant the eventual reward that the peasant has earned by a lifetime of suffering and oppression and fighting the King’s wars. We also see a highly corrupt Rome collecting payments for selling indulgences and divorces and the like. We see Crusades of conquest and loot and anti-semetic pogroms along the journey. None of which is anything like the religion that Jesus once taught. We see the opiate of the masses instead of the salvation of creating a peaceful world where we all live long and prosper working together. And yes, we see by then the “religion” that powered invasion, conquest, colonialism and imperialism and taught the true believers that somehow God and Jesus wanted these evils.
As an afterthought to what I wrote. True, real Christianity, by its nature, is always an underground religion. To truly believe in Jesus Christ and try to put into practice his teachings in this world, will always put one in opposition to rulers who always have other ideas and big egos and plans. Thus, while I have little use for organized Christianity that is associated with rulers and bosses, I have met real Christians. I have admired them, and they have inspired me.
Of course, many of them had prison records. I’d imagine a fair number of them had FBI files. A number of FBI files over the years would have included a title such as Father, Sister or Reverend. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. famously among them. Father Roy Bourgeois highly likely does as well.
So, I do recognize the difference between organized Christianity, and the real underground Christians that one can still meet and find in this world. Or at least I could back in my day. If you want to try to search, look for protests that have a moral basis to them. Protests like anti-nuke or anti-torture or anti-war worked for me. Given the epidemic of homelessness in this Christian Nation, a homeless shelter or a food bank might be another place to look. Stay away from rich churches though. Given the number of needy now, any real Christian church will be wanting to give away much more than they have to give. A rich Christian is always an oxymoron, similar to a rich socialist.
And we could say that so-called Christianity is just an offshoot of a Jewish cult. With all due respect to Marx and Engels, I defer to George Carlin and the classic “Religion is Bullsh!t” rant. Coming from a working-class background, I relate to Carlin’s use of language that is unambiguous, that everyone clearly understands.
And don’t forget the so-called Muslims who have collaborated with the genocide, and even aided the genocide. And everyone else (except “the Houthis” in Yemen) who sit by do nothing to stop the genocide.
IMO, The current situation has nothing to do with religion (just a BS excuse for silly hominids to try to “justify” evil)
Humans are not designed to live in our (post) capitalist (post) modern mass societies. They evolved for millennia living in small tribal communities, based on cooperation, in order to survive and perpetuate the species. To be crude (and some might say cynical) : the power of the ruling classes in mass society is so great, it is like giving a Chimpanzee a loaded gun (or nuclear weapons). Human evolution has not caught up with the power to destroy. Nuclear war, environmental collapse…
As an atheist I am inclined to despise religion, but I hold special hatred for Christianity. I disagree with your idea that humans were only designed to live in small communities. Evolution means change. We are not hunter-gatherers. Millions of years separate us from those primitive societies. But it is true that we only survived by cooperation. If we had not cooperated we would not have lived up to now. We would have killed each other off long ago. I would say that most people are not in favor of war and violence. Unfortunately, those who do have taken over, but their numbers are not as great as those of us who want peace and a good life for everyone.
I can only agree.
Carolyn Zaremba,
……“Smears don’t have much staying power on their own because they deviate from the foundations of reality (what actually happened). They require constant energy from our opponents to keep going. The truth has a habit of reasserting itself.” Julian Assange
Famous Last Words, 1) Karl Marx, German political philosopher, March 14, 1883, “Go on, get out—last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” (To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity); &,
2) Voltaire, French writer & philosopher. As he was dying, a priest asked him to renounce Satan. Voltaire, quippy even in death, said: “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”
Onward & Upwards. Ciao.
Well, I am a Marxist, so I can support what he has said. And Voltaire was as sharp as his quill.