Looking Back: A Century of Light & Shadow

May 8, 2007

I find now, that I have returned to the Burning Ground of Purgatory, because the people are not yet redeemed. Maybe tomorrow we’ll hear from the Bug-Eyed Aliens. In the meanwhile, we shall need to listen to the Voice of The Sphinx.

The question the Bad Kitty is asking today, is why the world considers that Germany has a genocide guilt to expiate, but Georgia, Kansas, and Arizona do not.

I am sure that you shall agree, this is indeed a Bad Kitty Question. It leads us to a big door with a padlock, and a big red and white sign which declares that everything inside is off-limits, because what is inside of that locked door is Hell.

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I look back on all the phone calls, all of the things that I did to impress her, and even on the all-too-short time when we actually were happily in love.

We should have appreciated each other more, and maybe we could have – except that the times were so desperate.

Even back then, even as the Century of Light & Shadow drew to a close, we understood that something nasty was on the back burner, and that if we did not find a way of reducing the heat & the pressure, there would be a Devil to pay.

Why have we allowed our sexual tastes to become so brutal? I am not speaking of sadomasochistic contests which are played by rules, because the existence of rules testifies to a recognition of the common domain of mutual feelings.

What I am asking is – why is it that in the sexual economy, just as in every other marketplace, we allow games to be played in which one person, or one faction, is allowed to crush all the others? Yes, we know, it is a game which used to be sponsored by Senators. So long as we remain bound up in our White-Supremacist traditions, there is just no way that we can get around the slaveholding Romans, and their “Old and Honored” institutions.

The Romans liked to talk about the human sacrifices of the Druids, but only discontinued their own sacrifices after they had conquered Carthage – probably because it was considered that if the Gods had appreciated the practice, Hannibal would have won.

But did Rome ever really give up human sacrifices? Why don’t we ask Augustine?

So why, if the Babylonian institutions have such historical stains, do the native and naturalized citizens of the New Rome persist in regarding all the indigenous cultures as headhunters bogged down by the cake of custom?

Of course, where Babylon’s lawyers are concerned, it’s called a cakewalk, and the custom is referred to as precedent.

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Remembering Briar Rose

Remembering Briar Rose

April 23, 2007

As I walk down the street of the small town with Thieu, I find myself gripped by an awareness of just how tragic the old myths that we try to cling to really are. Always, there is something incomplete and unfulfilled. The old stories always remember some sort of sorrow. But it is only as we approach the old stories with the light of science, that we begin to discover that it is not the spindle which was to blame.

The spindle, of course, was the symbol of a heresy that entered the Lands of the Lily with the return of the paladins of the First Crusade. The heretics rejected the misogyny and brutality which they found in the Old Testament and as a result, insisted that Moses could not have been a Prophet of God. They further rejected the Laws of Power & Control which had created the feudal system, and encouraged their adherents to become free tradesmen. As a result, like the people who now form the economic backbone of Sam Rainsy’s party, they became textile workers.

Curious forms of belief had always flourished among the peasantry, but this creed of the Cathars represented a moral challenge which the Masters of Power could only control by announcing that the honeymoon phase of Christian scholasticism was now over. The heretics would all be burned on stakes, and the angels would blush at the portent. The dawn of the light of reason would be turned into blood by the smoke, and the resulting enchantment would make the European renaissance sleep for at least 100 years.

But did Prince Charming really have the power to break the horrid spell? He believed that when he kissed the princess in the coffin and raised her up out of her trance, everything in the kingdom would also be revived and redeemed.

Briar Rose awakened, but the spell of the Wicked Fairy had not been entirely broken. Ever after, the people of the kingdom blamed their hundred-year stupor on the spindle. As a result, grown-ups became afraid to touch spindles, and the textile industry became afflicted with the curse of child labor.

In addition, the rumor began to be spread that anyone who worked to restore the dignity of the textile industry must be the servant of Satan. As a result, those who worshiped in the Temple of Labor, and did not contribute their alms to the Cathedral, were subjected to horrible tortures. In addition, all of the Jews and the Muslims were given the choice between being bathed in the Blood of the Lamb, or fleeing from the kingdom before the clock could strike midnight.

Briar Rose and Prince Charming believed that they had been redeemed, but all around them, the Devil was taking cotrol of the kingdom. Romantic Love may have survived the inquisition, but it did so at the expense of losing touch with reality. That is why Miss Rose and Mr. Charming could believe that their love had conquered all, and ignore the fact that the cattle cars on the way to the slaughterhouse were filled with real humans.

The people believed, and elected to offer their allegiance to the God of the Lie, whose religion is compulsion, and whose rites demand human sacrifice. Because Ahura Mazda refuses to rule by compulsion, he had to abide by the outcome of the plebecite. And so that is why, on the same morning that Briar Rose was awakened by Prince Charming’s kiss and rose up out of the coffin, God had to lie down like a dead man to take the poor girl’s place.

We walked along, till the road began to speak with Mexican accents that remembered Medieval Spain. As we proceeded we came on a peddlar, whose donkey was pulling a cart.

His cart was all loaded with two grandfather clocks, as well as musical instruments and automotive parts. There, alloyed from various mixtures of copper and brass, were several shining hearts, which became music boxes when they were wound up.⁷ⁱ

I wound up the key, to listen to the melody. And that was when I realized that the heart that was being sold by the pedlar with the donkey cart, was mine.

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We Fight Not Flesh & Blood

We Fight Not Flesh & Blood

April 9, 2007

    It’s true, as Thieu has discovered. I always have loved the sort of women who could hurt me. I always have felt that I gained a higher wisdom from enduring the scars.

    The sickness which horrifies us when we look out on the world, is the sickness of a world where everyone is either controlled or controlling. Is this not the significance of the popular obsession with “security?” We are insecure because we understand too well that if we fail to offer ourselves as pawns to somebody’s power and control scheme, we are likely to find ourselves deprived of resources, and socially impotent.

    We gain nothing by trying to blame the Arabs or the Communists for this condition. We must examine the conditions of our own society, as well as the proclivities within us which cause us to demand that societies & relationships should be organized according to the traditional European paradigm.

    Before Hitler, before the Boer Renaissance established an Apartheid Regime in South Africa, we should have examined the way that the U.S. Cavalry shot down the unarmed Ghost Dancers who were trying to celebrate Christmas by crying out to their raptured loved ones.

    At the time the cavalrymen thought themselves heroes. The photographs that survive speak to us with the same pathos as photojournalism from Rawanda, Belsen, or Tuoul Sleng. The tide which had enabled the PaxtonBoys to massacre friendly Indians, the tide of the Legions of the New Rome who slew 96 Christian but Indian martyrs at Gnaddenhutten, the tide of the West-More-Land Movement had gone forth from Westmoreland County and was demonstrating its power to tear up the prairies of the Dakotas with the Hotchkiss Automatic Cannon.
    No wonder the prairie states are so often visited by hail and tornadoes. No wonder the good topsoil of Kansas followed the dead Indians on a pilgrimage to the Pure Land. We may forget that so many of the movers and shakers who conquered the West were perpetrators of deliberate genocide – but the souls of the victims have been given a right to stamp their stories on our memories by whatever means may be necessary. If this means sending hail and tornadoes – then hail, tornadoes, Kansas dust storms, and economic depressions are what we shall reap.
    This forgotten sin is the reason for our obsession with “Security.” The ghosts shall continue to move until we remember the ones who were not only scalped, but had their breasts and their genitals cut off so the men of the Denver Volunteers could come back withtrophies. Before Hitler we had General Custer and before Custer we had the ordained Methodist minister and Civil War hero – Colonel Chivington.

    By the turn of the century, old pioneers and the new breed of real estate speculators would gather in the Barbary Coast Saloons to lament the death of Manifest Destiny. They would send the young men East with the stories which would confirm their heroism, and the book would be closed. The book was closed, and nobody paid any attention to the writhing and squirming class warfare that was going on under the covers, until the Second Coming of Westmoreland.
    It was not until readers began to realize that they had been reading about General Westmoreland every day for month after month, that the ealy harbingers of culture began to waken to the horrific realization that the old God of Manifest Destiny was not dead at all. He had been stunned for a moment by the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, but now he had learned how to cross. He was marching West again, and was massacring the brown villagers ofthe hamlets of South-East Asia with new and improved types of machine gun.

    Things have gotten so bad, it is common to hear people say, it is impossible for anyone to succeed in this world until he has made some private peace with the Devil. The Support Group has arisen from the necessity of correcting this all-too-popular assumption. The ground of the Support Group is the understanding that the Devil is our own shadow, and that we need to support each other in our struggles to avoid being possessed.
    Thieu and I walk out in the evening, to a place where the campfire is burning. In the bright light the shadows are flickering, as the survivors tell stories that go all the way back to the times when the first support groups were being formed, way back in the ‘60’s.
The spirits are watching from the crackling flame – spirits who found peace by embracing The Rapture, when the repeating rifles and early machine guns has been brought out to silence the voices of the Natives.
    The wood in the fire crackles with pops that resound like gunshots. The smoke brings tears to our eyes. We are humbled, witnessing how we are redeemed by the martyrs who were raptured because the conquering “Civilization” lusted to destroy everything that was red.

Just an Umayyad

Location -- in the Turkey Mts., above Las Vegas, NM.
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Thieu and I have driven out to a rural farmworkers’ cabin in the foothills, to enjoy more intimacy.

      I feel the anger of the spirits who are stirring the dust of the Staked Plain. The wrath we feel blazing in the collective soul now bursts forth in the lightning on the mountaintops.

      In the shadows that are made by the stormclouds, the thunder is speaking in a language which has now become almost extinct. Atop the anvil crest of a thunderhead, an Apache warrior looks down with contempt on the so-called “civilization” which has dispossessed his people.

     “I shall tell you why the blood is boiling in your veins,” he proclaims with the voice of thunder. “Many years ago, so long ago that most people have forgotten, the enemies of The Prophet conquered the Iberian Peninsula. When Mullahs rose up to teach the pure truths of the Qu’oran, these Umayyads changed their religion, but still called themselves ‘Cids.’ (a dialectical pronunciation of Si´yid) They became Christian Conquistadors who terrified the decent people with warlike excesses.

      ¨There was not room in all of Spain for these conquistadores, so they built black ships and came to despoil the Pure Land. They conquered the advanced cities on Turtle Island, and burned alive anyone who resisted conversion to their religion.

      “They claimed that they were serving God, but their true aim was to enslave everyone, so that they could live like the Caliphs their ancestors had been. In the process they destroyed the knowledge of great civilizations and drove grace from the earth. They taught a stern morality of cruel abstinence, but their own lusts they did not deny. The women they conquered knew no love, but only the pain of giving birth to the children who had been conceived through rape.”

     “No wonder the Mexicans say, that it is the Devil who commands the affairs of this world!” shudders Thieu.

     “There is a curse which falls on the heads of the conquerors,” continued the Apache in the clouds. “This curse does not act swiftly like a sword, but slowly and insidiously, and eventually brings down those who in their pride thought that they were the Lords of the Earth.

     “And so it came to be,” he continues, “that just as the Umayyads were driven from Arabia and Iran, from Syria and Africa, the Spaniards who acted like Umayyads, and whose kings were actually descentents of Abu Sufiyan, found themselves driven out from many of their dominions by the English colonists. But just as the Abassids demonstrated that they could be as cruel as the Umayyads, and just as merciless to the true descendents of the Fatima, so we who were native to Turtle Island discovered that that the British-Americans could be even more ruthless than the Spaniards.

     “The Spaniards were ruthless in the pursuit of their lusts, and intolerant in the matter of religion, but their lusts could be soothed by the attention of women, and their fanaticism could be turned to advantage by los Indios who were willing to convert to their faith. The British-Americans, on the other hand, claimed to be ruled by secular laws, but their laws did very little to protect the Natives. From the villagers of Gnaddenhutten to the Ghost Dancers of the 1890's, many Natives adopted the faith of Jesus and called the Pale Invaders their brothers. But the British-Americans were colder than the Spaniards; they gunned us down even when we adopted their religion, and their hatreds were only inflamed when they looked upon the beauty of our women.

     “The new invaders invented something they called a Theory – a myth they called Manifest Destiny. They thought they had created something new – but Natives recognized it as the same old faith in human sacrifice which has haunted this land since the first pyramids were raised. They put such store in their faith that they were the most evolved thing on the earth, that when we called them brothers, it aroused the same passion of Auto-da-Fe that their Spanish predecessors had displayed when anyone had dared to doubt their Holy Trinity.

     “We learned to our sorrow that when we addressed them as brothers, we aroused their worst fears. We saw them respond in a murderous rage. It offended them to think that we were humans just like they were, created by the same God, of the same intelligence, with the same capacity for spiritual inspiration, and that we had simply made other choices. It drove them to rage to think that the institutions which had been forced upon Europe by the Christian Inquisition were not the only forms of social order, and might not even be the best. And they were horrified when they were confronted by societies in which men did not control their women. It was true that sometimes our Native men loved more than one woman, but this was never because we herded them together like cattle. Our women were powerful in their own right, and sometimes a man needed another woman that he could run to. This is how it is when you love what you cannot control. And I believe that this challenge, of learning to love what he could not control – I believe that this is what frightened the European the most.”

The Jungle Within

The Jungle Within

Mar. 30, 2007

As I drive out into the mountains with Thieu, I find that I am burning in impure sympathy.

    Most of us have experienced times when we found that we were obsessed with the question: “To Be or Not To Be.” What we have not wanted to acknowledge, is that we have reached a point in human evolution at which this question has become a collective one. With the development of nuclear weapons, we have reached a point at which we must make a definitive decision in regard to the question of collective suicide.

    This is the ultimate meaning behind the Poison Tree.

    We have got to overcome the idolatry which would  delude us into thinking that we can advance the interest of one individual, one race, or one class, by suppressing, killing, and committing atrocities against all of the others. We have seen the fruits of this poison tree in Tuoul Sleng, Auschwitz, Sreblinka, and all of the places where the aboriginal populations have been subjected to massacre and enslavement.

     Where did this Poison Tree come from? How did these mighty paranoias put on their armor, preparing themselves for a conquest of the earth, through which they would be able to crush out our sense of common humanity?

     Thieu and I leave the car and hike up intro the mountains, where we can look down on the Staked Plain. Far beyond us, the creeks that rush down from the Rocky Mountain glaciers will make their way into rivers like the Pecos and the Canadian, empty into the Gulf of Mexico, and eventually wash up on the shores of Caribbean islands like Cuba and Haiti.

    Above us in the clouds, we can hear the voices of discontented Arawak spirits, who are singing:

"Let us have done with the White Man's God --

(Harrum. Are we going to harmonize? Let's hear it.)

Hummm: Let us have done, have done with the White Man's God

For He is a mechanical insect

Flying in the sky just ten feet overhead:

Let us have done. Let us have done. And we

Are done with the Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese God-squads too.

“Then where then did the stars hide?” asks Thieu. “And where was the rose?"

“Remember,” the Cloud-Maiden explains to Thieu, “that when your ancestors first came to the Land of the Mekong River, they called themselves Nagas. They called themselves Nagas, because they were led by priestesses who danced with snakes.”

     “We have seen the result of the efforts of the French and English to reduce everything to cold reason,” Thieu explains to me. “Those results have been preserved – a mountain of skulls and bones, the remains of so many who have been tortured to death. Those remains can be witnessed by anyone who cares to make the pilgrimmage to the death camp that was called S-21.

     “But why,” she turns to cry out to the spirits who ride in the clouds, “have you allowed all of my family, except for a small remnant, to be drained of their lives in such a horrible way by people so lacking in culture as the Khmer Rouge?”

     In answer, a sheet of lightning illumines the clouds in the east. After a few minutes of silence, a roar in the sky carries the wail of plantation slaves:

     “Now you need not keep shocking the Zombie! You done just killed his brain! He be dead enough now already!"

     Then, as we look up, we witness Madame Erzulae, dressed only in a skirt of green palm leaves, with cowries round her neck and nut-brown breasts looking like sea animals sacred to the Gods.

     “My dear children,” she patiently explains to Thieu and to me, “revolutions must come, because the leaders of men and the captains of high finance have made a plaything of the admonitions of the Prophets concerning the Last Judgement. They are stubborn in refusing to confess, that these warnings are meant for them, and that there shall be a tribunal in which their crimes against the people shall be examined. They have imagined that they can use God’s teachings to frighten the people into submission, and that there is no Higher Power which cares. So long as the captains of the nations are so heedless there must be revolutions, because these revolutions are the shadow on earth, of the Last Judgement which all shall encounter, as we progress towards the Higher Existence.”

     The trumpet of the thunder has called forth the cloud-armies of the North., who are descending from Siberia and the islands of the North Pacific. Snow is beginning to fall on the Eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Another flash of brilliance illumines the horizon to the north. We look up into the descending snowflakes, and see the White Rose of the North.

     “Hello there,” smiles Tokyo Rose. “Do you not understand that every war begins as a war against women?”

     From the South, a chorus of Arawak women with snakes dangling from their belts responds in antiphon:

• 
  
  Insofar as women have a collective interest, it lies in creating a world that will be a safe place for their children.
• This leads to a concern for those who are left out of society; we fear that the system which denies them will also hold the sword of denial over the heads of our children.

I feel chilled by the unseasonably late snow, and wonder at the portent.

     “It is now time,” proclaims Madame Erzulae, “to examine the pollutions which have been left upon the land by past crimes. Until these old crimes are addressed, the stain shall continue to taint the land, and the flowers of love shall be blighted.”

“I once was the emblem of the Tokagawa clan,” smiles Tokyo Rose. “But when they came to power they became proud men, who decided that they would rather have wives who were wealthy and submissive, rather than beautiful and intelligent ones. And so they kept my flower, but cast me down into a well, so that I would die.”

I look up at her, and see the face of a beautiful woman. Her long black hair hangs down, covering one eye and one cheek. When she laughs and pulls back her hair, I can see that the left side of her face has been savagely wounded. Indeed, her cheekbone is bare, and the injury is horrible to see.

“The Tokagawas kept me prisoner in that well, as a suspected spy,” she continues. They stole my voice, and made me broadcast their propaganda over the radio. Now that I am becoming free, I have vowed that I shall become the enemy of those who think their wealth and power gives them the right to bury the voices of their women.”

As her musical voice sings across the late March snow, the lightning illumines the sky one more time. In the thunder that follows, we hear the sound of African voices:

So many have been abused!

Whole populations have been exploited

By men whose only ethic

Is to ruthlessly grasp for power!

“Come,” declares Madame Erzulae, “let us walk into the jungle, so that you may witness those pollutions for which the land must expiate!”

She leads us down a wooden sidewalk, between military-style barracks that used to house Japanese prisoners. From time to time we see bodies that hang from the trees, as if they were overcoats hanging from pegs.

“Look closer,” smiles Tokyo Rose. “What color are the bodies?”

When we look closer, we can see that these used to be the bodies of Black Africans. Some have been slashed and mutilated; some of them are missing their genital parts. Some of them are burned beyond recognition. Many of them have the initials “KKK” slashed into their chests.

Their eyes have been plucked by the birds, yet they sing as they sway in the wind:

Let us have done with the White Man's God --

(Harrum. Are we going to harmonize? Let's hear it.)

Hummm: Let us have done, have done with the White Man's God

For He is a mechanical insect

Flying in the sky just ten feet overhead:

Let us have done. Let us have done. And we

Are done with the Japanese and Korean and Taiwanese God-squads too.

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