“It is forbidden to kill, therefore all murderers are punished, unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets”, Voltaire.
So another year rolls by and still we’re none the wiser as to what the world is all about. As we play our ritual roles in the season of “peace and goodwill”, measured more by the ringing of tills than church bells and more by the smell of cordite than cordiality, who can honestly say that this is as it should be?
With destitution, destruction and division soaring, and the doomsday clock just seconds from midnight, is this really the best we can do as a society? – Really?
How can we allow the world and our society’s place in it to be so managed that, under the guise of serving our best interests, our system of government is structured to first defend the interests of power, privilege and profit before that of people, so bringing us to this time of unprecedented tragedy and imminent catastrophe?
How can we be so ignorant of the game we are pawns in, one in which the system, feigning the role of vaccine to a virus, keeps us in comatose-compliance lest we conclude it’s “the game” that’s the virus and real democratic democracy that’s the vaccine.
With Press, politicians, priests and police, the four horsemen of our apocalypse, posing as protectors of our collective interests, while primarily concerned with protecting the interest of the mighty, why can’t we see it?
Or don’t we want to see it?
How, at this time of year, of all times, do we allow our politicians, in the interests of political pragmatism and collective responsibility, to deny genocide is taking place in the land of Christ, the prince of peace, whose birth we are supposed to be celebrating?
Surely politicians and their parties first duty of collective responsibility is to us – the people who elected them!
There might have been a time when the real spirit of Christmas prevailed just as there might have been a time when, with other “like-minded nations”, we were part of a world peace initiative. But who can honestly say that that has been the case, at least since the end of the second world war? Where are the interests of world peace served by all the death and destruction we’ve been so long bullied into being a part of?
If we were shocked and horrified by the tragedy of the Holocaust, in which millions were cruelly dispossessed and systematically murdered and so, to preclude it ever being repeated we were sympathetic to them having a place to call their own, how can we not be at least equally shocked and horrified when, to provide that place, our system tells us we must sanction the dispossession and slaughter of those already living in that land?
How can that be? – I mean, how can that possibly be?
Other than us having been seduced by our “system” to believe, as Voltaire said; “It is forbidden to kill, therefore all murderers are punished …. unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets”, how can that possibly be?
Where is our morality? Where are our elected leaders? Where are our clergy? Some might say “where is our Christianity”, both Catholic and Protestant, but that last just quietly since it’s at the root of European anti-Semitism, therefore, of Zionism, Israel’s apartheid system.
And so too our understanding of the situation in Ukraine is managed to have us believe that Russia is responsible for the aggression and so should be pilloried for it. And we can’t be allowed to know anything of the duplicitous geopolitical chicanery and wanton killing of Russian-speaking Ukrainians that took place in the years leading up to Russia crossing the border in February 2022
And so too again, domestically, we are taught that the root causes of poverty and crime are inherent deficiencies in the genes of certain people, rather than the requirements of Capitalism’s economic structure which can’t function without a pool of cheap labour.
So it is that our understanding of our own history, a carbon copy of Israel’s brutal colonisation of Palestine, has been managed so as to down-play the injustices which underpin our society and which, were the truth to be known, might imperil the progress of “Corporate New Zealand”.
So it is that we have been convinced that education, the very thing which might drag us out of the mire, must be made so expensive that only the wealthy can afford it. And we must never be allowed to consider that education, let alone housing, health and heating are social goods that governments are elected to guarantee.
And we can’t know that a lowering of education standards is part of the arsenal of control – dumb people don’t know what they’re being deprived of, but they can be easily set to blame one another for any deficiencies that become apparent.
In a 24/7 deregulated economy New Zealanders have never been required to “work harder” than we are working now, yet still we struggle. How could it be otherwise when we see how older and older people now staffing the aisles in places like Bunnings and Mitre 10 these days?
These are instances of the dogma that defines our society’s structure, which by any objective measure are unconscionable but which, like the terrible, grotesque lie, “Work will make you free” that straddled the gates of Nazi concentration camps, so we have been schooled to blindly toil till, like the poor souls in those camps, we too are expended with.
Tutti salute Antonio Gramsci.
READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE
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