A human community... not just a human race!

 What is it about that a book, a poem, an essay, a person or even a single word will seem to drop into one’s lap, seemingly from out of nowhere, yet so significant ‘it’ cannot be either ignored or discounted?

Is it synchronicity, serendipity, mere chance, fate, or something else that has no name, identity or explanation? And similarly, what is it about that patterns of tragedy, like the litany of human tragedies that have beset the Kennedy family of Boston and Hyannisport, that, once again, have no apparent origin, no explanation no name, no identity and no comprehension?

So much space, time, ink and scholarship, as well as artistic expression, have been motivated by and directed to the stirrings of the human ‘heart’, whether that has included the medical as well as the psychological, spiritual and social. We develop strategies, philosophies, tactics and institutions to “teach” young people, as well as adults, about the mysteries of human existence. We anatomize, categorize, compare, measure, describe, inflate (for e.g. with electron microscopes) and then bounce our findings off the findings of others, in a highly sophisticated, highly disciplined, highly controlled and monitored highly defined professional process to search for whatever truth might emerge.

All the while we are engaged in these processes, we have to be aware that whatever the findings of our work, there will be more questions needing to be followed, with ever more sophisticated equipment and ever more nuanced equations and theories, all of them magnetic stars in search of ‘astronomers’ (researchers) to pursue.

It is the dramatic difference between that kind of rigorous pursuit of truth (scientific, empirical, positivist) and the pursuit of centuries of ramblings deep in, among and through the labyrinths of the human “relationship” with God, that begs many questions. Reading books by church fathers, speculating on the divinity of Christ, the significance of the parables, the stories of parting seas, and tablets from a mountaintop with “rules” to live by…these are all foundational to the pilgrimage of those who “seek God” to borrow a phrase from the founder of the Benedictine Order of monks.

Many stimuli lie at the root of such a motivation ‘to seek God’ including those less honourable, and less heroic and less moral and ethical that one might think. Some of those stimuli are deeply embedded in the proverbial ‘man lying in the ditch’ without hope, without friends, without energy and certainly without love. “When the world has ‘trashed’ me, where can I turn?” runs the phrase that serves as a nexus of thousands of transformations of lives that have ‘gone off the rails’ so to speak. Humans, generally, are highly reactive to stories of failure, unproductivity, meaninglessness and despondency that seem to have taken over a life without apparent cause or purpose. We number the homeless, as a blight on our clean and safe streets; we number the opioid overdoses and deaths, as another sign that ‘something is wrong’ in the lives of those men and women, and while we work diligently to help them ‘recover’ and regain consciousness in many cases, we are not fully able to discern the root of their affliction. Similarly, with the highly successful white-collar professional who extorts millions from clients, without apparent need, without apparent aberration or cause, we deploy complex resources to investigate the ‘crime’ and to bring such a person to ‘justice’ in the firm cultural conviction that such acts of investigation and ‘law enforcement’ will deter others from committing similar infractions of the legitimate rights of others.

We are a culture obsessed with searching and finding deviance, abnormalities, individuals who do not fit into the ‘normal’ definition of how humans are to behave in our safe and secure communities, to demonstrate, at least in part, that ‘we have things under control’. Because having things under control, as in banks that are not robbers, and lives that are not murdered, and women who are not preyed upon and attacked, and houses and businesses that are not destroyed by vandals or terrorists…these are all legitimate protections that we have built into the web of social protections.

And yet, as the weight of how we have structured our way of valuing humans, through hiring and wages commensurate with training, experience, contacts and references, we have abandoned thousands to the multiple ditches of despair. It has not been a conscious, willful and malicious ‘trashing’ of a targeted population (except perhaps in Canada, our indigenous populations and communities). We have not set up structures and institutions deliberately to cause people to stumble into ditches of desperation, or tunnels of torment. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands, and the numbers are growing, seem to be shoved aside, or they perceive that they have been shoved aside, given the statistical data.

To champion the “will” as Leni Reifenstahl entitled her triumphant film on Hitler, (Triumph of the Will) or as Ayn Rand has done in her several books by sacralizing the virtues of selfishness, and to nest that triumph in the most narcissistic, affluent and extravagant bed of luxuries ever available in human history, is inevitably going to generate two very different results…the highest number of billionaires in history, as well as the highest rate of homelessness in history. We too often speak about a bi-polar person, denigratingly, as if to indicate that such a person is ‘sick’ and thereby is rendered unemployable, unworthy of inclusion, and dispensible from the circles in which we engage. And yet, it would seen from this perspective, that we have fallen into the trap of generating a western culture that venerates success and disdains failure, as we define those outcomes.

The human will, while considerably powerful, cunning, creative and resourceful, is also vulnerable. And, if and when one’s will seems to have wilted, bent, or even broken, through any number of tragic traumas, some of them resulting from a commitment to ‘serve’ some cause or institution like the military, the church, or even the corporation, we discover the limits of our capacity to keep on keeping on. Those tragic traumas, war, divorce, death, firing, bankruptcy, corporate politics like out-sourcing, serious medical illness or accident….these are all an integral and potentially life-altering dynamic in an individual life, as well as in the life of a family, school, church, community…and taken together, these traumas are embedded in the cultural norms and perspectives and values we both wear and embody.

Those of you who prefer to see many of these traumas as avoidable, preventable and resulting primarily from personal weakness, rather than from forces beyond the scope of the individual, will already have conjured up your ‘nanny state’ argument against this ‘bleeding-heart’ rendition of human pain and tragedy. However, it is in the manner in which we establish our conventional norms, including institutional expectations of perfect loyalty, perfect compliance with the rules and regulations, the norms and the politically correct dictums that we all contribute to the unravelling of human hope and creativity and joyful participation.

Of course, there are now corporations and app’s that are dedicated to training and coaching how to “treat” workers in a humane and compassionate and empathic manner, in order to retain their loyalty and their compliance. More classical conditioning, the only human resource menu that warrants inclusion in too many budgets, is not going to generate the kind of ‘inclusion’ and ‘loyalty’ and engagement that all organizations need and desperately want. Transactional engagements, by definition are a guarantee of self-sabotage.

As we scurry about chasing after whatever problems we generate, individuals continue to be facing multiple conundrums about where, when, why and how to integrate into a culture that ironically champions the virtues of the rugged individual and watches millions fall out of the nest. However, these ‘birds’ are not mere babies, just learning to fly. These birds that fall out of the nest are grown adults facing a world in which political causes seem to have taken over the playing field in the public square. Those patterns of synchronicity and serendipity, as well as those of tragedy and trauma, both continue to have the force of underground rivers of social energy, similar to the underground floes of lava that rumble throughout time. Natural ebbs and floes, too, have their way of contributing to the gestalt of the ‘conditions’ humans absorb and attempt to cope with.

We seem to have developed zillions of ‘aids’ to address the conditions of nature, and the common cold, the sore back and the opaque eye lens, as well as the fractured femur, and the rusted car. And we have contributed human and financial resources to the issue of “protection” against emergent forces like terrorism, polio, the pandemic, and road rage.

What we have not done as well at is identifying those underground lava floes of the collective consciousness that comprise what we all know are compelling conditions that demand our shared, collaborative, consistent and formidable attention and creativity and taking shared steps to face them in the only manner that makes sense.

We cannot mediate, moderate or even slow the traumatic and existential force behind our own emissions of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere at the individual level. Nor can we face the crisis of individuals who have floundered in inhospitable ‘seas’ of despair from medicating their pain with opioids on an individual basis. We cannot resolve the human proclivity for combat solely or even primarily at the individual level. And we cannot and will not resolve the questions of racism, sexism, ageism, dogmatic and fundamentalist, literalist and exclusionist belief, faith, or ideology, solely or primarily on the individual level.

Skimming the surface of our hardwiring as ‘social animals’ through networking, nepotism, character references, schmoozing, joining the ‘right’ clubs, living in and gating the ‘upper-class’ communities, attending and volunteering in our church community, or even writing cheques to the United Nations International Childrens’ Fund (UNICEF)….none of these serve as adequate surrogates for actually embracing the far more commanding and demanding, challenging and rewarding view of the blind spot in our culture: that we really are part of a single species that cannot escape some basic needs. This is not a political ideology in search of a political party. Nor is it an incipient religion seeking worshippers. It is not another corporation seeking sales and marketing. It is not a laboratory seeking research dollars, although God knows it needs far more attention including research, dissemination, pedagogy, as well as integration into what we call conventional truth and blessing. It is not an impediment, nor can it be glossed over because it is so obvious it needs no articulation, and no underlining. We are mutually inter-dependent, as well as intra-dependent, that we all need to live in some kind of moderate, modest and safe space, that we all have talents, skills, wisdom and compassion that, when shared, open doors of insight and invention, and when closed, leave millions abandoned to any of our various ‘crimes against humanity’…

That last phrase cannot be restricted to the legal definition any longer. It has to embrace how, for example:

§  the former U.S. administration pooh-poohed the pandemic, and

§  the current lethal, cold-blooded, inhumane invasion of Ukraine,

§  the breakdown of our acceptance, tolerance and embrace of a common set of facts, itself another weapon in what have become civil ‘wars’ of reality/truth/and shared hope

§  the tolerance of excessive greed, wild-west applications of corporate and personal behaviour that trample on all of the minimal protections we all need from each other

§  the massive sycophancy to military might, the alpha male, the institutions of green-broke hierarchies of management and supervision, and the theories and strategies and tactics that uphold these anti-deluvian dogmas

§  the submission of people too frightened to confront the abuse of power when we see it

§  the denial of shared, complicated data that not only illustrates but proves to any reasonable person, our complicit responsibility for the incubator, the greenhouse, and the battlefield that we all share.

We cannot and must not be seduced by the serendipities, nor eunuched by the traumas. We are not only the ‘victims’ of others; we are intimately related to all of those currently imprisoned, those suffering from the pandemic, those who have died from the pandemic, and those millions now scrambling literally to stay alive in the face of missiles and rockets and kalesnikoffs. Our fates, and our serendipities, our immediate gas bills and our food bills, are all tied directly and indirectly to the fates of those Ukrainians.

All of the tyrants, the unleashed varmints who believe that, “because I can do whatever they want I must,” need to be reined in. And nothing short of a global effort will even begin to tackle that file.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simon's answer to the question, "Do I believe in demons?" challenges us all to a renewal of epistemology

 In his book, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, Ed Simon, posits a “demonic poetics” as a potential language to ‘address’ the question of whether or not ‘he’ believes in demons.

There are, for Simon, 7 principles of Demonic Poetics, articulated in his essay on Lithub.com, February 23, 2022. They are quoted here:

1.     Whether demons exist or not, people’s experience of them absolutely exists.

2.     The de3monic is a network of metaphors, symbols, and images that define the diabolical; they shift and interact with each other in different ways across the centuries.

3.     3. As symbols, demons can mean variable and often contradictory things.

4.     There is no clear distinction between categories of the aesthetic and the occult, and demonic poetics is an interpretive frame that understands the literary and the magical as fundamentally the same thing

5. Some demons are always more symbolically ascendant in a given epoch.

6.     Demons exist at the crux of the transcendent, the numinous, the sublime; they are by definition evil, but they are also by definition an aspect of the sacred. There is a something at the core of being that encompasses both the divine and the diabolical, but our language to describe it is always contingent.

7.     A history of demonology is by necessity a history of the world.

From the beginning of human history, humans have spoken about, written about, and drawn on the walls of caves about creatures that exaggerated traits of goodness and beauty, as well as demonic and sinister forces. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, William Blake writes:

Rintrah* roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air/ Hungry clouds swag on the deep”

(*Rintrah is a character in William Blake’s mythology representing the just wrath of the prophet, first appearing in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

Karen Armstrong, in her book, The Case for God, writes:

In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking and speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos.  Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each has its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mxi the two. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logo was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it has its limitations; it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth’….In popular parlance, a ‘myth’ is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather, like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, of fighting monste4rs, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly8n influence our thought and behaviour. People had to enter the warren of their own minds and fight their own personal demons. When Freud and Jung began to chart their scientific search for the soul, they instinctively turned to these ancient myths. A myth was neve inte4nded as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that has in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time…..But a myth would not be effective if people simply ‘believed’ in it. It was essentially a program of action. It could put you in the correct spiritual or psychological posture, but it was up to you to take the next step and make the ‘truth’ of the myth a reality in your own life. The only way to assess the value and truth of any myth was to act upon it…..(Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, Knopf, New York, Toronto, p. xi)

“The Eden Story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race. In Eden, Adam and Eve are still in the womb; they have to grow up, and the snake is there to guide them through the perplexing rite of passage to maturity. To know the pain and to be conscious of desire and mortality are inescapable components of human experience, but they are also symptoms of that sense of estrangement from the fullness of being that inspires the nostalgia for paradise lost. We can see Adam, Eve and the serpent as representing different facets of our humanity. In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition. Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions. The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life. Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm. The rabbis of the Talmudic age understood this perfectly. They did not see the ‘fall’ of Adam as a catastrophe, because the ‘evil inclination’ (yeytzer ha’ra) was an essential p[art of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements….The Eden story is not an historical account; it is rather a description of a ritual experience. It expresses what scholars have called the coincidentia oppositorum in which, during a heightened encounter with the sacred, things that normally seem opposed coincide to reveal an underlying unity. In Eden, the divine and the human are not estranged but are in the same ‘place’: we see Yahweh ‘walking about in the garden at the breezy-time of the day’; there is no opposition between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural,’ since Adam is animated by the breath of God himself. (Armstrong, op. cit. p.28-9)

Whether natural and supernatural, or good and evil were ever separated, is neither a mute question nor really warranting much debate. For our purposes, each half of the duality is an intimate and integral part of the other half.  Humans, it would seem, live on the razor’s edge that connects/separates them. And while the language of practical sense, (Frye’s Educated Imagination) uses words descriptively to “separate, and to divide’ and to analyse and to parse” the language of the imagination is essentially a language of bringing disparate things into unity. The deployment of metaphor, similar, personification literary devices, while not discussed as part of the vernacular of the public square, are the bridges that mirror and also ‘lamp’ both our ‘interior world and our exterior world, as well as their mutual inter-dependence. It is often repeated, by politicians, ‘we campaign in poetry and govern in prose’…And even that epithet is a reductionism, confining the process of selling themselves and their policies into a transaction to solicit votes, first by carefully crafted and even potentially seductive images, whereas the process of governing grapples with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of unemployment numbers, inflation numbers, pandemic cases, deaths and hospitalizations, deficit and debt numbers and Consumer price indices (CPI), GNP (Gross National Product)…etcIn Ancient Chinese philosophy, yin and yang (dark-light, negative-positive) is a concept that described how obviously opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another (Wikipedia)

In the west, currently primarily occupying a “logos” culture, deploying the alphabet STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) as a social, cultural and pseudo-religious mantra, we are at risk of abandoning some of the inherent qualities of the numinous, the incomprehensible, the ineffable and the effable, And we risk not only abandoning those qualities, but of actually collapsing our “world view” into various files, programs, algorithms and formulae for which we may apply demonic names, evil spirit names, gods or dragons of infamy or the underworld.

Simon’s diligence and sensitivity in depicting, describing and denoting a demonic poetics, while extending many of the qualities of the ancient mythologies, is a contemporary and honourable and insightful and imaginative rendering of a detailed explication of his answer to the question of whether or not he believes in demons. Belief, in a time of drowning in correspondence theory epistemology, has become almost erased from our linguistic encyclopaedia. Just as truth has suffered decapitations from purveyors of political propaganda (trump, putin et al), so too has belief suffered from the slings and arrows of the anemic world view of literalists, and their dark-side counterparts, the denialists.

Poetics, whether of the demonic or of the sacred, has suffered too, from these waves of cultural deprivation. We are, together, complicit in a chemical scorched-earth campaign to leave little more than burned-out metallic corpses of a once-honoured and highly venerated linguistic tradition. I witnessed the decay of both the use of and the embrace of poetics inside the ecclesial structures of the last decades of the twentieth century on both sides of the 49^th parallel. Obsessions of money and sexuality, and their barnacles of dark-blood-sucking distortions, marched headstrong over those more balletic, empathic, and sylph-like attributes of the ethics and morality of forgiveness and transformation. Empty pews, coffers and the litany of empty-and-sold-off sanctuaries testify to the emptiness and the hollowness of multiple faith communities’ having fallen into the tidal wave and the whirlpools of secular, minimalist, and anemic language dark caves.

God, too has become another character in a transactional, empirical chess-board, to whom the question, ‘what have you done for me lately?’ is asked indiscriminately and vacuously. Of course, clouds of prayers are rising through the atmosphere on both side of the Atlantic, now that another Lucifer has unleashed the ‘dogs of war’ on another innocent, self-possessed and highly courageous and obviously deeply spiritual tribe, the Ukrainians. It is and can only be a vapid hope and empty dream of the Russian wannabe-czar that he would so seduce and rape and pillage and kill,  and then hope to embrace this tribe of men and women and children.

As Armstrong reminds us, myths, including their archetypal characters, do repeat throughout human history. And their relative proximity to, relationship to and incarnation of the best instincts and aspirations and subtleties or the worst, most contemptuous, sinister, hellish and demonic potential of the full range of human capacities, in extremis, will inevitably and invariably, capture our attention. Whether that attention emerges from an intellectual, a pedagogical, scientific or a spiritual world view, depends on our unique perspective. And whether that attention seeks to embrace or to avoid, or to welcome the incomprehensibility, as another of the humbling and real contextual currents in which we all swim, also depends on our comfort level with the space in the yaw of the waves between yin and yang, between heaven and hell, and between empirical truth and a method and process of enhancing our imagination to embrace our wholeness.

It is our capacity to be willing and able to embrace that which we do not know, and those things/imps/demons/spirits/angels/gods/ that will always escape our grasp,   and our cognition, that will continually remind us that the human spirit will never die….

Faulkner’s historic speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature:

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question, When will I be blown up/ Because of this, the young man or women writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat….It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the las red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound; that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking….I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Simon’s history of demonology is another honourable work, dedicated to bridging the gap between questions like “do I believe in demons?” and the full truth and reality of any response worthy of Simon, or any other writer who take the question seriously, sensitively and substantively. The human mind and spirit, like the question of demons and gods and myths and our relationship to them, whether through the lens of cognition, intuition, experience and/or emotion, will offer new glimpses of the rich complexities of both ourselves and our world.

Thanks to Simon for his profound insight and his provocative nudge into a wider, fuller, deeper and richer explication and understanding of the most mundane of questions. Would that such a mind and spirit were extant and scurrying around and through the corridors of the Capitol, the universities, and the churches and the corporate offices, including the Pentagon and the Kremlin.

Twiggy-like epistemology can only produce emaciated offspring and in the process starve us all on its own vapid fast-food.

This madness continues unabated....

 As shells rain down on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, having been unleashed in an act of madness, reminiscent of Hitler, as one ten-year-old Ukrainian boy put it, and as Americans like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson  (and trump) laud the Russian czar wannabe, perhaps it is appropriate to note a pattern among men who have, consciously or not, squeezed themselves into a constricting mould, not of hero but of antihero.

The alpha male ought to be a legitimately endangered species, as exemplified by some of these men. From The Guardian , October 10, 2016, in a piece entitled, “Do alpha males even exist?” Dean Burnett writes:

“An alpha male intimidates, he’s unquestionably in charge, no matter what the situation. AN alp0ha male is loud, brash, doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. An alpha male says what he wants, does what he wants, wears what he wants, as long as those clothes are roomy enough in the trousers to accommodate his gargantuan gonads and don’t dissolve in response to all the testosterone constantly leaking from his pores….It’s as is the idea of being qan alpha male is very reassuring to those who lack confidence and are scared by the wider world and people in it, so want to turn the tables….Maybe the supposed human alpha male is a combination of disgruntled male wish-fulfilment and borderline-pseudoscientific justification for resorting to bullying intimidation and generally all-round unpleasant behaviour by men hope to impose their will on a world they find too complex and unnerving so revert to their baser instincts to get what they want, despite knowing deep down they don’t deserve it and shouldn’t have it.”

From the website, greatergood.berkeley.edu, in a piece about the comparison of the alpha and beta male archetypes: “As the expression goes, when all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails.” In our context, if all putin has is weapons and compliant soldiers and Foreign Affairs and national security ministers, then all he will see are enemies to be dominated and manipulated.

In a March 15, 2017 piece in The Atlantic, entitled, “What’s so American about John Milton’s Lucifer (from Milton’s Paradise Lost)?” Edward Simon writes:

Milton’s Lucifer can be read as a kind of modern, American antihero…Many of the values the archangel advocates in Paradise Lost—the self-reliance, the rugged individualism, and even manifest destiny—are regarded as quintessentially American in the cultural imagination….What Milton’s Paradise Lost…also demonstrates is what can be so dangerous about mistaking an antihero for a hero….Milton’s Lucifer is neither bestial, a reptilian Other nor the goofy incompetent of a medieval morality play; rather he’s a conflicted, brooding, alienated, narcissistic self-mythologizer. In other words, he’s a thoroughly modern man….Much as Lucifer invades Eden like the frontiersman who moved further west, he is also capable of justifying his actions with the most exalted of language. Milton writes, But all was false and hollow; though his tongue/ Dropp’d manna, and could make the worse appear / The better reason…..Lucifer’s famous assertion that ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heaven. Lucifer is not just a rebel, but also a character who has tricked himself ( and many of his post Romantic readers) into believing his very words can generate reality. Lucifer’s line is a pithy and dark summation of the American credo of self-invention….But as Lucifer discovered in his rebellion against heaven, extreme self-invention inevitably leads to the ultimate form of alienation: a radical distance from God and from fellow humans.

Is it not reasonable to connect the dots between Lucifer, trump, Hitler and putin….given their shared attempt to reinvent both themselves and their world, irrespective of the carnage and slaughter and dismemberment and devastation they have rained and currently rain down on other human beings?

One of the most pathetically ironic aspects of the current situation in Ukraine is the absolutely hollow intonation by putin that Ukrainians and Russians are brothers, while he slaughters ‘his’ very own brothers in his manic and mad dash to plant himself in history as the Russian wannabe czar who restored Russia to a former greatness. And then, also pathetically ironic, to utter the contemptible assessment that Ukraine, led by a Jewish president, is ruled by neo-Nazi fascist nationalists…one has to ‘spit’ the words from one’s mouth, they are so abhorrent.

 

Turning the world upside down and eviscerating what has passed for ‘world order’ for nearly three-quarters of a century, is nothing short of a new theatrical, political, military and unbridled  Lucifer loosened himself from all constraints that would, could, should and must apply to human of beings intent on co-habiting with the rest of humanity.

What putin is doing, and seemingly luxuriating in the doing, is not only vicious, venal and lethal, bereft of all morality, ethics, and decency. It is also so abhorrent that no one really wants to contemplate, again. It is an unpalatable reminder, echo and thundering cacophony of the Third Reich. This war which they rest of us watch, read, listen to and cringe at bring us face to face again with the horrible spectre of what humans are capable of and willing to do to other human beings, for their own narcissistic ends.

 

Mistaking an anti-hero for a hero is not exclusive to the United States. The mistake is also ‘manifest destiny’ in many other places, where Lucifer’s are rising out of the dust of public squares where the levers of power and authority have devolved into vaults of cash, and coteries of wimp sycophants.

Greed, especially unfettered and unleashed, is not only “not good”; it is lethal. Ambition unfettered by counsel, compassion and moderation is self-alienating as well as self-annihilating. However, the price that others have to pay for such unfettered greed and ambition, twins never yet separated from each other, is inordinate.

While the ‘west’ is busily engaged in providing military materiel.

 From Euronews 04/03/2022 by Thoman Duthois:

The EU would finance the purchase and delivery of arms to Ukraine totalling 450 million euros, the very first time the European Union (is) providing military equipment to /Ukraine.

Germany has broken its long-standing foreign policy of banning  all exports of lethal weapons…and will deliver1,000 anti-tank rocket launchers, 500 stinger surface-to-air missiles, nine Howitzers, 14 armoured vehicles and 10,000 tonnes of fuel to Ukraine.

Sweden, also breaking with its neutral stance, announced that it would deliver anti-tank weapons to Kyiv.

France has committed equipment and support.

(The) Belgian government promised 2000 machine guns, 3,800 tons of fuel, 3,000 additional automatic rifles and 200 anti-tank weapons.

Portugal has offered…bulletproof vests and helmets, night vision goggles, grenades and ammunition of various calibres.

The Czech Republic is sending 30,000 pistols, 7,000 assault rifles, 3,000 machine guns, and several dozen sniper rifles as well as one million round of ammunition.

Romania is providing fuel, body armour, helmets, ammunition and other military equipment. Bucharest has announced that eleven Romanian military hospitals are prepared to receive Ukrainian wounded.

The US announced a new 350 million Euro package of military aid, bringing the total military aid from Washington to Ukraine over the past year to a total of nearly One Billion Euros.

Canada is sending military protective equipment such as helmets and bulletproof vests but also anti-tank weapons systems and upgraded ammunition.

Finland announced a historic policy shift to send weapons to Ukraine, promising 2,500 assault rifles, 150,000 rounds of ammunition, 1,500 rocket launchers and 70,000field rations.

Denmark announced it would be sending 2,700 anti-tank weapons and would let Danish volunteers join International Brigades forming in Ukraine to defend the country.

Norway already announced…shipments of helmets and bulletproof vests, it would also be sending 2,000 M72 anti-tank weapons.

Croatia is sending 16 million euros worth of protective gear and light arms.

Slovenia has promised rifles, ammunition and helmets.

Italy has announced it will send military equipment but has not disclosed details yet.

On the humanitarian side, there will be estimated 4 million refugees anticipated by the UNHCR, to flee Ukraine and flow west into neighbouring countries.

From WCVB.com, a list of some humanitarian organizational helping Ukrainians during crisis:

Ukrainian Red Cross will use funds to help those in need..as well as paying for blood collection efforts; mobilization of volunteers and resources, and emergency activities.

The International Committee of the Red Cross

UNICEF…health, nutrition, HIV prevention, education, safe drinking water, sanitation and protection

International Rescue Committee

Save the Children

UN Refugee Agency

Sunflower of Peace. .collecting non-perishable medical supplies, including bandages, Neosporin, Aspirin, ibuprofen, and other supplies as well as batteries and flash lights

Keep Ukraine’s media going…fundraise to help media relocate, set-up back offices, and continue operations

Keep the Kyiv Independent going.. to bring trusted, important information about facts on the ground during the conflict

Pavlotsky family GoFundMe….

And from today.com:

Global Empowerment Mission, in Poland using donations to buy refugees train and plane tickets to help them reach family or friends

Globalempowermentmission.org

World Central Kitchen WCK.org

Global Giving Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund

Razom for Ukraine…helping Ukraine pursue a democratic society that has civil rights for all

The latest reports have putin taking western voices off the air, such as Voice of America, and also the Duma has passed a law that would see fifteen-year prison sentences for anyone in Russia found guilty of using words like “war” and “invasion” to describe the Russsian military ‘invasion’ of Ukraine. No doubt other western news outlets will eventually be impacted by a regime so terrified of the truth, especially the truth of its own commission and omission.

The BBC, for example, has resorted to providing 4 hours daily of what they call ‘short-wave’ broadcasts of the Russian invasion, because this outlet too has been suspended by putin.

 Now waking up in the Orwellian world where ‘war is peace’ and ‘brothers are enemies’ and neo-NAZI fascists are used as ghost enemies operating the Ukrainian government, according to the Russian dictator, in what we all hope is the sunset of the first pandemic in a century, while the toxic carbon and methane emissions continue to spew into the atmosphere, and the price of gas spirals out of control, along with the price of ordinary food items, with little hope of even a slight moderation of these developments, can only evoke what our parents and grandparents were going through back in the 1940’s.

However, there was no 24-7-365 real time reporting of events, deaths, criminal investigations and refugee migrations.

It is hitting us all in the face, moment by moment, demanding that we actually turn away, find a sports game, or even a Hallmark movie as an antidote.

This is madness!

Risks of empirical epistemology, the 'correspondence theory of truth'

Now that Russia has clearly attacked and invaded Ukraine, it is not only at war with Ukraine but with all democratic countries.

Will the Canadian government immediately: suspend all diplomatic ties with Russia; recall all Canadian diplomatic staff from Russia; expel all Russian diplomatic staff from Canada; seize all Russian assets in Canada; ask the World Court to indict Vladimir Putin as a war criminal and issue an arrest warrant?　

Alexander Hukowich, Cobourg

This letter to the editor appeared in The Star. We reproduce it here because, not being in the streets in Kyiv or in Moscow, we still have a vested interest in seeing this war brought to an end. We also wish to stop a pattern of lies used to justify this war and the many other savage, reprehensible and unconscionable acts both committed and omitted by putin and trump. And the instruments, methods, pathways and agencies that might bring about the immediate downfall of putin, are seemingly rare and out of reach of the political leadership of the west.

Also, Saturday, on Smerconish on CNN, a non-scientific poll of viewers in response to the question, “Should NATO go to war to defend Ukraine?” with some 38+ thousand responses, 77% answered “YES”.  I have never even thought I would have voted for war over the last eight decades. This morning, however, I sadly throw my vote in with those who contend that this aggression, this unprovoked, unjustified and illegitimate bombing of Ukraine, a country that could not be a threat to Russia or any other country, has to be stopped.

Steroid sanctions, however, represent only steroid rhetoric, not adequate threat. And steroid sanctions, linked to a ‘hands-off’ declaration by Biden that American boots will never be deployed in Ukraine, leaves the playing field open for whatever putin chooses.

It is that range of unlimited options, being left open without effective counter-forces, that risks not only the freedom of the Ukrainian people, but also the stability of European collective body politic. And an open field for a dictator drunk on power, in pursuit of faux honour of his country and the rusted legacy of his historic reputation, will wreak havoc, kill thousands, and put the threat of nuclear weapons into the world’s shared drama.

None of those prospects, all of them on the radar of all of the intelligence establishments around the globe, and also on the screens of all of the televisions and laptops and cell phones, can be considered as only bluffing. A madman whose finger is on the trigger of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, some 6500 nuclear weapons, whose ambition is devoid of a single cell of regard and respect for human life, human dignity and human rights of any who might oppose his views and his actions, and his motives, is a serious threat to the world.

Why, for example, would Russian forces even want to take control of the site of the Chernobyl nuclear melt-down, if not to have another weapon of intimidation to deploy on innocent people of norther Ukraine?

Why would Russian police be arresting up to 2000 already, of those merely carrying signs in some 50 cities across Russia, protesting a war against a people they consider friends, as well as literal family for some? Already, we are reading reports, this morning, Monday, February 28, of a Russian strike of a nuclear waste storage facility near Kyiv, as the Atomic Energy Agency awaits report or radioactive fallout.

Why would Russian agents even agree to poison Navalny, and Litvinenko in Great Britain, as incidents of intimidation using chemical weapons, ostensibly with a degree of impunity through stealth, except to assuage their fear/contempt of putin?

Why would Russian forces in Syria shift from the occasional lethal attack on individuals or small groups, to killing larger groups of innocent Syrian citizens, on behalf of the Syrian dictator, Assad, except to demonstrate both the strength and the will to do whatever they can in the blind service of two dictators?

Why would Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov succumb to the prevarications and distortions entailed in an unsustainable argument that Ukraine is run by neo-fascists and publicly endorse a bi-lateral meeting with Blinkin, except to sustain his own luxurious, narcissistic and heavily endowed position and status as Foreign Minister?

Similarly, why would all of the oligarchs who have been propped up by putin, and who have shared in the illegitimate spoils of wealth from energy sales, and then, like putin, scurried their wealth into foreign ownership of professional sports teams like professional soccer teams in Great Britain, except that they can, and they enjoy the luxury and the power that feeds their own sycophantic narcissism?

Sycophants kneeling under the fear, foot, thumb and even the gun of excommunication and potential assassination of a tyrant, make such tyrannies possible. And such sycophants, and such behaviour are not exclusive to Russia and putin. We have watched, and continue to watch in Washington, (and likely in other capitals if investigators were able to plumb the records with protection) sycophants grovelling at the foot of their chosen “leader,” the formeroccupant of the Oval Office. And such grovelling, under the guise of ‘protecting and serving the ordinary people’ serves only a single purpose: the perverted, personal narcissistic and oppressive will of that single leader. Money and political power in the hands of men like putin and trump, and perhaps other tyrants like Xi Jin Ping and Kim Jong Un, is potentially lethal for any with the strength, the courage and the conviction to oppose their iron and vindictive will. For many decades, in the west, there have been complaints about greedy and abusive corporations, tragically considered ‘humans’ under American law, (another American self-deception); today, we have to focus on individual narcissistic greed among billionaires. By the way, corporations, by definition, have neither a conscience, nor a capacity for shame.

Estimating and predicting the lengths to which unleashed individual human power, unopposed, will go, is a matter far above the pay-grade and competence of this scribe. In fact, it must become one of the active files of the national security agencies of each respective government: that those agencies undertake a complete, if secret and confidential, investigation of the methods and motives of their dictatorial and unprincipled and tragic terrorist leaders.

Whether or not both putin and trump are clinical psychopaths or sociopaths seems somewhat irrelevant and even redundant. Leave such questions for the clinically-trained, and with their help the doctoral candidates of the next century, whether they be in history, politics, national security, psychiatry or criminal anthropology. For the moment, the world needs to explore, unearth and perhaps even invent both means and methods that would put radioactive barbed wire, literally, and metaphorically around such men, and protect the world from their tyrannical, life-long, fantasy ambitions.

Those ambitions cannot be accomplished without the services of many neurotic dupes, the sycophants. And consequently, each and every public service has an obligation to recruit and to train and to support individuals who are unlikely to fall into the traps of treason, espionage, and secret seductions of the forces that would take over their lives, minds, hearts and bank accounts, to serve their nefarious needs. That will never be fully and perfectly accomplished. There will always be sinister, hidden forces that will be accessible to those highly seductive bobbles of money, glitz and power, on which these tyrants and their thug-gangs will both cling and recruit.

At the other end of this equation, the public has to be much better educated (not merely trained in skills) to be able to both spot and to expose those candidates for office who openly avow nefarious purposes and ends, and to discern the authentic candidates from the imposters. That, too, will be extremely difficult from at least two perspectives: first, in the education curricula, there must be histories and biographies of dictators, tyrants, their methods and mind-sets that set their path long before they entered the dark side.

As a society, in the west, we have an even more complex reality to digest, assimilate and then confront.  Writing on lithub.com, February 23, 2022, in a piece entitled, “A history of Demonology is a History of the World,” to introduce his latest book on demonology, Ed Simon writes:

Since the Enlightenment, Western Intelligentsia have been the inheritors to a rather anemic model of knowledge known as the correspondence theory of truth, whereby the validity of a statement is ascertained simply by whether or not it matches empirical reality….A fundamentalist adherence to the correspondence theory of truth, trumpeted by logical positivists and other philosophical heretics, would consign John Keats, Joyce Kilmer and William Wordsworth into a bin marked ‘meaningless’ (even though I think we can all ascertain that there is meaning, even if it‘s the ‘slant’ truth that Emily Dickinson writes about).

Much of this space, for the last decade, has tried to expose an inordinate dependence, if not obsession, with this ‘correspondence theory of truth’ and its many applications. Empirical truth, based on observable, measureable, and ‘sensible’ evidence is admittedly a significant aspect of our experience, as well as our way of knowing. We see, or hear, taste smell or touch something, and it becomes ‘real’. However, even to adopt such a narrow fence around truth has multiple implications, which need far more intellect and space to unpack than either competence or time will permit here.

However, a ‘flat earth’ of empirical reality is far more easily consigned to epithets like “I am a bottom-line person, just the bare facts please.” Those who take such a view, while focusing on only whatever it is that they consider worthy of their attention, shut out much of the context, and the multiple linkages of multiple factors in their world view. They, and the view itself, enable a far more transactional vernacular, including expectations of the other, and also responsibilities of those who have or who seek positions of leadership and power. Manipulating the superficial, empirically evident ‘chess pieces’ of numbers, and immediate causes or co-relations, consumes the public discourse, including the journalistic projects. Even investigative journalism, which digs deeper into the range and depth of the empirical evidence, much the same way a legal case is prepared, offers a proximate truth. This kind of obsession, even if it is not a conscious obsession, but merely an involuntary fixation, provides huge openings for those engaged in political discourse to drive their own obsessive behemoth trucks through. And now we have such blatant manipulation of superficial ‘data’ that lies drown even empirical truths.

Riding the wind and the waves of correspondence theory of truth, people like putin and trump and others, have a playing field bereft of poetics, and of explanations that go beyond the literal, the numerical and the observable. Ordinary people, while perhaps not either signing on to being conscripted to this level of language, perception and thought, are nevertheless complicit in allowing its ubiquity.

There are accountants, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and digital technologists who are all fully engaged in the ‘correspondence theory of truth’. And they are all making quite comfortable livings, no doubt. Empirical truth and the data that supports the concept generates both cash and opinions that have serious impacts.

Simon continues:

That the correspondence theory of truth doesn’t even match its own exacting prescriptions  to what is legitimate or not is a bit of self-referential absurdity best passed over; concluding that as a model it’s clearly ineffectual in describing whole swaths of human experience is sufficient enough….Of the approaches that the modern person has in considering demonology, there’s obviously blunt literalism, equally blunt denialism, and then a sort of vast middle that reduces demons to ‘metaphors’ or ‘symbols.’ Concerning those who think of demons as being as ‘real’ as the dog in the yard, little can be said.  Such fundamentalism is its own capitulation to the exigencies of modernity; it’s as positivist as anyone adhering to the correspondence theory of truth, it merely chooses to ascent toward that which anyone can see is an absurdity. Those who adhere to this contention may think that they’re taking part in a venerable spiritual tradition, but they hold to the same epistemological framework as any rationalist or skeptic, they just choose to believe in something demonstrably wrong….Denialists are a different species, to harp on the nonexistence of demons is to miss that point in the same way as the literalists but toward a different direction. Smugly emphasizing that demons aren’t real seems about the same as arguing that “Truth is beauty, beauty is truth’ is an absurdity because it can’t be reduced to symbolic logic; those who expel poetry in favor of the syllogism live a shallow existence. Most obnoxious of this type are those who reject anything that to them has the taint of the spiritual, the divine, the transcendent about it, consigning millenia of human experience and expression into the trash can because it doesn’t conform to a model of truth that has only existed for a few dozen generations.”

And it is not only Simon’s dilemma in attempting to answer the question, “Do I believe in demons?" that arises. It is the foundational question of how western culture can and will be able to cope with “reality” and truth, given that we seem to vacillate between fundamentalists and denialists, not only about demons but about most of our other complex existential and shared questions. 

War is not without its historic context, nor can we escape its clutches

 

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty and democracy? (Mahatma Gandi)

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. (Leo Tolstoy)

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. (Martin Luther King)

In times of war, the law falls silent. (Cicero)

If we don’t end war, war will end us. (H.G. Wells)

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. (John F. Kennedy)

Men make war to get attention. All killing is an expression of self-hate. (Alice Walker)

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause. (Chris Hedges)

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy. (Henry Kissinger)

There are so many people who have penned their thoughts, cogently, succinctly and penetratingly about war….and yet, war leaves us all gaping, speechless, confused, and desperate, seemingly hopeless and also angry.

Being taken for granted, ignored, silenced, patronized, condescended to, and writhing in the pain of loneliness, alienation and despair are feelings and experiences every human being knows intimately. And when a leader of a country takes it upon himself to define the emotions of his nation using those emotions, and to assume and to presume that, in order to continue to lead that country, to earn and to sustain the trust of his people, he must go to war to repair those national feelings of ‘nothingness’ and abject humiliation, he makes himself something he can never be, a legitimate symbol of and for his country. Humiliation, sadly, even tragically, can only be real for those who have succumbed to its erosion.

Russian humiliation, tragically, and even ironically, is embedded in the mask of wealth, power, opulence, tyranny and autocracy that has taken over the agent of that humiliation. And the Russian people, now in the streets in some numbers, just as any self-respecting people anywhere, know the difference between the puffery n nand the ‘huffery’ of a hollow, straw-filled man and his words, and do not want their country to be seduced by the delusion. Rounding up those who protest, just as firing missiles through the night into Kiyv, is another act of desperation. And it is always, inevitably and predictably the most desperate who have to do both: wage an unprovoked war and then imprison those who speak out against such a war.

Cornered, rabid animals in their own kind of ‘white heat’ not only are unpredictable, they are lethal. They know not what they are doing, or what they are going to do. They are like a diseased, emaciated, desperate dog that has no friends, has had no food for a prolonged period and who is ‘fighting for his life’ as only he can see the situation. While anesthetizing the four-legged kind, to put them out of their misery is a method and gift of mercy, occasionally, such animals have be silenced permanently.

Mr. Putin, while not precisely a rabid, desperate and diseased animal, is behaving in ways that bring such images to mind. And, predictably, when words and face-to-face talking are no longer tolerated, some form of violence erupts. It is, however, not the failure of language, it is the failure to recognize and to acknowledge a broader range of options than killing, pillaging, lying and robbing others of their dignity, their honour and their self-respect in order to fill the vacuum of a frozen-solid heart.

Man has always had a deep and profound need for instruments, tools and weapons that, he has argued for centuries, “protect” him and his clan from the dangers of the ‘outside’ world. And the larger the arsenal of the most lethal weapons, ironically and even pathetically, the more confident and protected and more self-assured such men seem to be. Neither Russia nor the United States has, as yet, been unshackled from such a false premise, belief and near religious dogma. The manufacture, design and refinements of hard power, as a defining trait of those seeking to be and to remain the ‘top dog’ paint a path that has been used to portray confidence and safety and security in the glib vernacular of practical sense, to borrow from Frye.
yesterday Admiral Stavridis, former supreme commander of NATO, noted on MSNBC that NATO outspends Russia, out-mans Russia, and therefore will be able to protect and defend those countries that are members of NATO, should Putin extend his military reach beyond Ukraine. We have all know, forever, that the United States has had, and continues to have the largest military arsenal in history, funded by the largest military budget in history, and filled with the most sophisticated weaponry known to man.

Putin himself, is now threatening to use weapons the world have never seen before, and whether that denotes advanced design or nuclear weapons, no one is quite sure. War, once declared, is like an oath to the man who declares it. There is absolutely nothing that such a man will not do to fulfil the demands of such an oath. It is now the defining aspect of his being for the simply reason that his whole life is now framed in that lens. Victory is his only purpose and goal. The means and the strategy and the tactics and the specific targets are just the mind-games of that absolute necessity, victory.

Anyone who torques the facts on the ground, in this case that Ukraine is a danger to Russia, as a way of contorting his own mind, and then commands his underlings to follow orders based on such torquing, is no longer in control of the balance and the cognition and the emotions of his person.  He has succumbed to the most effective and lethal seduction of all, self-seduction.

In Paradise Lost, John Milton writes these memorable words:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

The mind’s capacity to distort to such an extreme degree, is, of course, a human capacity. And for many of us, it is the moment when we come to the conclusion that ‘how’ we see things now as unlikely to change, if those conditions are unacceptable to us, that we make what we call life-decisions. Many of those decisions are based on somewhat extravagant hopes and visions of happiness and warmth; others are made on the basis of avoiding, withdrawing from situations in which we find the dynamics to be dysfunctional and not open to change.

While there is some superficial legitimacy to the argument that NATO has indeed expanded closer to the Russian border, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, two things militate against that fact as helping to neutralize its threat to Russia and to Putin. First, NATO is avowedly a defensive organization, determined to protect its members. And, whether or not one believes that argument, is an open question. All steps to develop military weapons, strategy and tactics, war games, are allegedly conducted and created as “defensive” measures, certainly not to be used in an offensive manner. So, inherent in the whole military establishment is the notion that ‘defense’ is a somewhat flimsy justification, given the archives of history are replete with stories of war.

Second, however, to the defensive argument defining NATO, is the more significant argument that undermines the motives and the urgency of the Putin war: that human beings are and will continue to be much more attracted to, motivated by and loyal to a system of governance that respects the individual, that respects the collective will of the people and that works openly and authentically to serve This other way of organizing a country and  the people within the nation is far more abstract, somewhat ethereal, somewhat ambiguous than tyranny. It is also certainly an argument and a way of life that is subject to many interpretations that demand vigorous debate, the even more assiduous gathering and curating of information, and the need for a fourth estate that serves as a bridge between the people in power and their decisions and the people in the streets and their attitudes.

The notion, however, that democracy will never be imposed at the end of a missile or a knife, remains one of the more elusive and yet cogent and compelling features of its inherent value. Persuasion, support, understanding and both empathy and compassion are just some of the instruments of political dialogue that are obviously considered unneeded and unwarranted by Putin and his ilk. And it is their total and abject rejection of those ‘soft-power’ instruments, and their clinging to hard power, including their absolute authority and control of everything within their grasp that paradoxically and tragically impales them on their own character. That observation may not be rocket-science; it is however, worthy of being tapped into the keypad on this blizzardy Friday morning at the end of February 2022.

 

There is something inherently despicable, abhorrent, and heinous about arresting protesters in the streets of some 50 different Russian cities yesterday, just as there is something unconscionable about firing missiles and rockets into Chernobyl’s nuclear site, including its waste storage facilities, that, if not protected, could and would spray radioactive dust far and wide these many years after the original melt-down. There is also something so tragically abhorrent about a threat to use nuclear weapons, should any western power threaten to, or actually impede the determined goals of this new Russian czar. None of these actions is tolerable to a human community of nations, nor are they commensurate with a decent, mutually collaborative world culture, in which pandemics, rising temperatures, and glaring abuse of both wealth and political power by narcissistic tyrants is a growing trendline that threatens to individually as well as taken as a gestalt the very existence of humanity itself.

Call that hyperbolic and apocalyptic if you like. It is long past time that the language of moderation, mediation, tip-toeing through the minefields of polite diplomacy, when the terrain and the political culture requires a more muscular and confident language and tone.

Exposing the oligarchs including Putin himself, by naming them and by seizing their assets and their access to their assets, as Hillary Clinton advocated publicly this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, may well be a preferred starting point. And while it may begin to take the head of the ‘snake’ off its body, such an approach will not neutralize a transactional, commercialized and greed-based-and-fed conventional modus operandi of so many in all countries where money and its pursuit and acquisition carry with it the power and influence of men and women who otherwise would converse modestly, fitting into their neighbourhoods and their office and factory associates with both ease and finesse.

Lies, the incubation of more lies, and the dissemination of those lies is literally a new industry. It is born in the hearts and minds of men and women who refuse to acknowledge their own shame, and their responsibility for generating and for spreading those lies. No politically correct, or euphemistic camouflage can or will remove this cancer from the body politic. No laws will neutralize their lethal toxicity. No law enforcement will even begin to ensnare either the lies themselves or their perpetrators in either confessions or even acknowledgements of their prevarication.

And, as the recently deceased Canadian comedian, Norm Crosby, put it in one of his gigs about Bill Cosby, “I keep hearing that Cosby’s greatest failing is his hypocrisy. But, I have to think that rape and drugging the person to be raped rank higher on the totem pole of failures…don’t they?” Diplomatic language that swims in metaphors of world order, and ideologies, and size of state economies, and numbers of incarcerations for political protest, and even numbers of COVID cases, deaths and hospitalizations, while useful for those who study such matters does not get to the point of the criminality of so much of recent political actions, attitudes, utterances and human impacts.

We have witnessed, appallingly, and disheartedly, four-plus years of criminal chicanery from the former U.S. president, from the human rights abuses in China, from the burning of the Amazon forest for private developers, from the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, and from the intransigence of rich political bag-men like the Koch’s in America who pour truck-loads of cash into the coffers of coal companies, and political candidates who will dance to the strings of their puppeteer.

And there have also been nearly one million deaths from COVID in the United States, many of those deaths preventable, had there been a competent, ethical, and legitimate occupant of the Oval Office in charge, instead of a saloon huckster who cares more for his own skin and reputation and self-aggrandizement than for the lives of ordinary mortals. And yet, just as in the two impeachment trials, this man was not convicted. And the drum-beat of lies, fed by greed and hyperbolic personal insecurity, nationalistic hubris, and an exaggeration even of the Gatsby’s hollow attempt to purchase history with ill-gotten riches, marches through Kyiv and who knows where else?

One has to wonder when the penny will drop, everywhere, that rings a note that removes all doubt that we are ALL literally, metaphorically, medically, politically and militarily, environmentally IN THIS TOGETHER?

Today we woke to a very different world from the one we left last night

 I never thought I would be watching and listening to the words from former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, this morning, saying that today is reminiscent of September 1939. Those of us born in the middle of World War II, were raised in a post-war world of relative peace, relative economic stability and growth, near-full employment, and the shuttering of the munitions factory DIL just north of our home town.

Fathers of classmates had served in the Great War that ended in 1918, and other fathers had served in WWII; some of us were spared the spectre of having a parent or grandparent serving the allied forces in both European wars. Very few conversations were heard in recollection of what those wars were like for servicemen and women. November 11, Remembrance Day, was celebrated with ceremonies at cenotaphs, the sale and wearing of the Legion poppies, and people pausing to reflect on the trauma that had plagued the world.

War, even on the Korean peninsula, was still a kind of event characterized by many in Canada as “over there” somewhere on the other side of the world. The Cuban missile crisis came, scared everyone, saw the construction of bomb shelters, and fortunately passed from the front pages, and into the history books and the doctoral theses. Later, in Viet Nam, mostly the Americans were engaged in another war on the other side of the world.

We are a generation schooled on peace treaties, memorials and history books, on the ravages of military conflict. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6, 1945, while ending WWII, nevertheless, changed the basic security of every human being on the planet. The nuclear war spectre, monitored on the nuclear clock, hovered near mid-night through the decades of our lives. Treaties have come and gone on the numbers and the relative safety and security of nuclear weapons, their storage and the competing ambitions of non-nuclear states to acquire them (think Iran, North Korea). Nations like Ukraine, formerly nuclear powers, we thought and believed, fortunately surrendered their nuclear weapons.

Today, ironically, falsely, and in an unprovoked way, Putin sent military forces, aircraft, missiles into Ukraine, on the pretext that Russia was in danger of attack by the Ukrainian military. Nothing could or would be considered even feasible, let alone even considered by the Ukrainian government. Ukrainian military capacity, economic stability and political stability is dramatically inferior especially militarily to Russia’s. It would not nothing short of foolhardy for Ukrainians to attack Russia.

In the Donbas and Luhansk, on the eastern border of Ukraine with Russia, where Russian-natives live, and where Russian is spoken on the street, there have been tensions between Russian-inspired separatists seeking unity with Russia and the Ukrainian military. No doubt these tensions were continually fostered and nurtured by the Kremlin since 2014, since Russia took over Crimea also in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine has written into its constitution a determination to join NATO, at some time in the future. Thus far, she had not fulfilled the expectations of NATO membership, although Putin claims Russia is ‘threatened’ by the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. In the last two or three decades, NATO has indeed fostered and acquired new members in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are also relatively recent NATO members.

So much has changed not only from 2014 until today, but especially, since 1989-90 and the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s governance has been taken over by Putin’s oligarchic cleptocracy; social media as flushed disinformation into the public dialogue and thereby enabled propaganda machines in all countries. The rising consciousness of both a global pandemic and the spectre of rising global temperatures from the continual toxic emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, and a political information war funded by corporate interests embedded in the fossil fuel sector.

Russia, itself, relies on the production of fossil fuels, as its primary source of revenue. And, as part of its initiative to neutralize Germany and other European nations in the event of initiating a military move, Russia has begun to construct Nord Stream 2, a pipeline under the Baltic Sea, to convey oil and gas from Russia to Germany and other European states. So, disinformation through cybercrime and dependence on fossil fuel are two of the non-missile or bomb-like weapons that Russia has developed. Putin is also thumping his national chest about new weapon development the likes of which the west has not witnesses.

NATO members, as well as non-NATO nations like Great Britain, Sweden, Finland, have tried to pull together in a common, committed and concerted agency opposed to the territorial expansion of Russia, a ‘united front’ of commitment to extreme sanctions on banks and oligarchs, as a way to deter Putin from his obsessive purpose.

Whether or not that purpose includes the full take-over of Ukraine, by Putin, is becoming less and less in doubt hour by hour. A hollowed-out Ukraine, one of the highly probably outcomes of this latest tragic attack. Millions are already in their vehicles attempting to escape to Poland from Ukrainian cities. In Moscow, with 3 million Ukrainians living in Russia, there are no more ‘dollars’ as there has been a ‘run’ at the banks with people attempting to dump rubles in favour of dollars.

Reports of Russian forces attacking nuclear waste storage sheds in Chernobyl demonstrate a complete disregard for human life, given that if successful, nuclear dust will spread near and far in that area immediately north of Ukraine in Belarus. However, a Russian puppet, Lukashenka, holds power propped up by Putin, in spite of the rebellion in the streets of Minsk last summer, demanding his overthrow, a new election and a new democratically-elected government. Leader of the opposition in Belarus left her homeland fearing for her life, at the hands of the Belarus dictator.

It is almost impossible to keep up the reports of military conflict, announcements of sanctions, curtailment of Russian banking options, and more threats from the Kremlin depicting both danger for more countries than Ukraine, and also proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, the mental, emotional and even political melt-down of the Russian tyhrant.

The deplorable fact that trump and his acolytes, in both the Republican party and on Fox, echo support for Putin is another of the seismic shifts in the health of the body politic of the United States of America. Naturally, given the penetrating intelligence of the Russian oligarch, Putin is intimately acquainted with American chaos, disunity, racial animus and economic insecurity, especially in the middle of a pandemic. He is also intimately aware that his own standing in Russia itself is  under a considerable cloud of public distrust. Alexi Navalny lies in serious ill health, in a Russian prison. Poisonings of Russian emigres in Great Britain have resulted in both death (assassination) as well as perpetual sickness. Journalists, under Putin, have the respect one might afford a python in the kitchen, such is the fear and the unmitigated contempt for truth, transparency, accountability, and the names and faces of those everywhere who stand for such values, and who fight to sustain those values.

This conflict is not, and never will be, contained within the borders of Ukraine, not even within the confines of Europe itself. The whole world is facing the spectre of a conflict with weapons never before deployed, under technologies never before imagined, and certainly not reined in by law and or self-regulation. Hackers acting on behalf of Putin and the Russian government, are among the most loyal of Putin’s forces, and their stealth and infiltration into all cyber systems threaten all systems of energy production and distribution everywhere, in Europe and North America.

The position of all countries in the world on this invasion of Ukraine by Russia remains significant, and none more than whether or not China utters words of support, condemnation or neutrality in the light of developments.

The markets, of course, are dropping in both performance and in confidence in the near future, given their heralded disdain for uncertainty. Prices of all commodities, including gas, oil, food, and necessary supplies are already rising, and will spike even further as a consequence of this unprovoked military aggression.

We are and will continue to experience not only those rising prices of commodities we all need; we are and will continue to experience increased anxiety, tension, apprehension and scepticism not only about the full impact of these events but also of the vibrations and imitations and echoes that will continue to redound around the planet.

Dictators everywhere will be emboldened by Putin’s intemperate, unconscionable  unjustified, senseless, illegal war. Even many Russians themselves, are angry by these actions of their leader. Whether the  “squeeze” that the west exerts on oligarchs and cleptocrats in Russia, on their stashed cash in foreign bank accounts, is enough of a tourniquet to stop  the blood and the pulse of the Russian bear, and bring him/it to its knees, is an open question.

Many of us who are watching are filled with scepticism that the west, especially those barons enmeshed in the financial networks inhabited by Russian oligarchs, and their politicians, have the guts, the commitment and the foresight to recognize that stashed cash, in the cause of sinister, inhuman and inhumane power brokers, could prove to be an existential threat to what we have considered “world order” for more than half a century.

Restraining a madman from pulling the trigger on nuclear weapons, too, is an obvious risk that every single person has to bear in mind, including those leaders western capitals, in the UN, in NATO and around the world.

Today we all woke up to a very different, far less safe and secure world than the world we lived in when we went to bed last night. Putin and his means and methods, exclusively and intemperately and unconscionably thrown around with impunity seem, at this moment, more than  the west can wrestle to the ground. Can he commit self-sabotage and bring himself the oblivion he so richly deserves?

We can only hope and pray.