WHAT GOES AROUND…
African Americans have come a long way since “Black Power” of the 1960s and ’70s. The next move is on descendants of the slaveholders and colonizers…
The chicken comes home to roost.
There is planetary karma in an immigration crisis unmitigated after leaders of European Union nations met — seemingly only to pose for cameras, and Trump continuing to heed the right side of his brain, where cocaine residue settles and rubber cement holds in place orange fluff.
Nations on one side of the world seek to block waves of refugees traveling northerly by ship a century or two after they sent ships in waves to exploit the lands and forebearers of those people to the south.
And on the other side a nation led by a man who received three million less votes than his opponent speaks of building a wall to keep out people traveling overland under near identical historical-current circumstances.
When will northern nations acknowledge their colonization and interventions in the southern hemisphere created the world inequality that caused and feeds migration. And that the only solution is to right historical wrongs and return what was looted by diverting money being used to make global war (protecting that bounty and ill-gotten inheritance) towards a planetary basic household income?
A worldwide fund to ensure every family has the basic human rights of food, clothing and shelter; wherever they live.
To believe in God is to believe the world was made for all people, and they should be able to both live wherever they are and freely move about the planet. Ideally.
Realistically, how do you secure national borders? Make it unnecessary for people to leave their homelands for a livelihood — balance the global economic equation that was set askew by centuries of European and United States hegemony.
The problem is Europe and the United States do not seek to rectify or even acknowledge historical wrongs and evil. The ignorance and arrogance of some pirate-ship explorer reaching America and assuming he was in India because the people did not look like him continues uncorrected and unchecked — except for so-called intellectuals to use the prefix “Asian” to differentiate indigenous people in America from people who are really Indians.
Much like slavery, and there was a similar migration within the United States as a result of it, the imperialism is relegated to history books with little more than official apologies voiced or proclaimed on paper bearing no monetary value generations afterward. Much like The Trail of Tears across America, no recompense. Much like the Crusades that spanned Europe, merely a footnote on human history.
There is never a sense of atonement, a gesture towards real and lasting peace or the expression of the goodness of humanity.
Rather, we hear from twisted minds that slavery was good for the people taken from their homes in Africa, and that the Europeans who founded United States were justified for taking the land of indigenous people because they did not know what to do with it; the latter, much like the descendants of those who committed enslavement and genocide establishing the state of Israel in Palestine following the Second World War.
Word Use Matters
I find myself waiting to hear or read European and North American journalists and political officials use the word “buffoon” to aptly describe Trump.
It was a word thrown about right regularly during the latter half of the 20th Century to describe Idi Amin and other dictators on the African continent. Is it a word of racial-connotation, only to be applied by those in power to some other, specifically black or brown, people?
Or do words come in vogue and then lose significance? Like when “flamboyant” widely preceded Jesse Jackson’s name in news stories during the 1980s, or “icon” becoming a word of mainstream use in describing popular people following the death of Michael Jackson?
“Evil” is a word that gets little use in the lexicon of news media, and I remember “devil” only emerging from the plumes of smoke at the towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.
We do not see or hear those words from the news media, but we do feel them: When a government separates wailing children from the flailing arms of mothers and fathers at the southern border of the United States. When a nation has snipers shoot and kill protesters bearing only rocks approaching a wall erected by Israel to keep residents of Gaza from returning to the homeland from which they were displaced 70 years ago.
I remember a Monday afternoon a dozen years ago in the county bureau of a newspaper where I worked, a colleague who apparently had gone to Times Square or Columbus Circle that weekend and encountered some religion-deluded Tribe of Judah members proclaiming “The white man is the devil” attempted to bait me into a conversation on the subject.
The colleague was Brian Murray, who would devolve to be spokesman for former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a year ago told CNN that Christie had not lied about not getting any sun that morning on a closed beach “because he was wearing a hat.”
So, I certainly did the right thing by not engaging the reporter, with whom the conversation would have become only a back-and-forth and who probably had his phone on “record” for his bosses, although there is some validity to the pronouncements of those New York City street preachers.
We cringed when we read Elijah Muhammad calling out “the white man,” but saw his point. Ditto, Malcolm X. And when Amiri Baraka said the words “No one has seen God, but we all have seen the devil” in his epic poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” everyone knew exactly who he meant.
My most memorable scene of “The Matrix,” one of my favorite movies, is when the android Smith is trying to break Morpheus and complains about the traits of humans, essentially stating: Human beings are not really mammals, who acclimate to their given environment. Humans overrun one environment, and then move on to the next. There is another species that does the same. Humans are really a virus.”
I find that description most true of Europeans.
The Need for Honesty and Historical Transparency
It is important as a writer, an artist, a human being to be accurately and authoritatively descriptive — to be objective and not shun from conveying reality, whoever it may offend or even if it exposes oneself.
For unless it is written or otherwise articulated, there is no airing of the matter; and there can be no movement towards atonement or redemption, and no hope for peace. Without it there is no push for change, and we are complicit with the status quo.
The looming nuclear-war crisis is not about North Korea, China or Iran — but Israel. One which brings to bear religion, politics, ethnicity, racism, apartheid, human rights, freedom of speech and information, foreign aid, espionage against the United States, hacking, assassinations and, now, criminality for merely criticizing Israel.
One does not be not anti-Semitic by turning a blind eye or deaf ear to the wrongs, the evil, committed by Israel, which is going to all ends of the earth to obscure the truth of its actions and using a vast propaganda apparatus to prevent repercussions.
The key elements of this massive operation is preying on people’s reverence for the Bible and playing the anti-Semitic card in response to any criticism. If that does not work, there are media smears and technological warfare. When that fails, assassinate!
It hit home with me recently when I visited a friend’s church here in Fiji and a visiting preacher proclaimed from the pulpit that God is protecting Israel from the enemies surrounding it, and it was because of God, not U.S. weapons and taxpayers’ money, that Israel won the Seven Day War and has never been defeated. Then after the service, the preacher handed out not Bibles, but Israeli flags.
Tune to the Day Star Channel of pay television, and it is obvious all those heretic preachers have been bought off as Israel is praised more than Jesus or God. I read news reports of Israel giving money to African-American churches prior to the 2016 presidential election, and briefly boycotted my home church in North Carolina (well, I am hardly in the U.S. but did not go when there) after the pastor proclaimed “Israel has a covenant with God.”
It is just another case of the Bible being misused, much like Jeff Sessions did a couple weeks ago in quoting “government is ordained by God,” that present-day Israel is associated with the Israelites of Abraham, Moses and Jacob — of Jesus.
The state of Israel has the ignoble reality of being created by guilt-ridden Europe and the United States as a way to migrate the “Jewish problem” to the Holy Land by forcefully removing Palestinians, who although now Muslim are the Israelites of the Bible because they had always occupied that land.
It may be hitting some homes in the United States now, the Israeli power play, as laws are being promulgated making it a crime to criticize Israel or put it down in relation to other nations.
I am not a conspiracy theorist to contend Israel has gone a long way in buying off the U.S. media, government and church; facts speak for themselves and some things are exactly as they appear. As noted recently, Putin merely did what Israel has long done — at least since Republicans had Ariel Sharon go to the Wailing Wall just before Election Day in 2000 to undermine a Clinton-Gore Middle East peace plan — in meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The day is near when Israel is not only a divisive reality in the Middle East, but around the world; and people will have to do more than read the Bible or believe preachers and politicians to know the truth and have it set them free.
