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“Poets are often held in high repute in Russia and often feared by government not because of the power of poetry to move and shape souls, but because, in Russia only great poets dare speak the truth.”
Eric Hoffer

I know that many musicians and other creative spirits feel as if they have little significance or impact in our society. The prevailing metrics of success—money, power, whatever—relegate their work to the fringes and sub-fringes.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, they don’t even get the respect given, in an earlier era, to a counterculture.

In the past, you might not get rich as a member of the counterculture—but at least you had a voice that was heard by the mainstream, and occasionally received some tokens of appreciation. Mainstream elites were not so isolated and antagonistic as today, and felt they needed a reality check from outside—but not anymore.

Conformity is the safest path now. Sometimes it feels like the only path.

Why is this the case?

There are many reasons, but I would focus especially on the technocratic tone in today’s culture in which prominence and relevance is determined by metrics imposed by huge corporations.

Sometimes they won’t even tell you their metrics—who knows how Netflix evaluates its shows? Who knows how things go viral on Instagram?

But when we do learn what moves the wheels of digital media, it’s usually clicks, links, dollars, profits, and other extrinsic hierarchies.

If you look at art that way, you will avoid anything that deviates from mainstream entertainment. Or even just mindless distraction.

That’s why it’s useful to remind ourselves of other times and places when the free creative impulse of artists, even those of genius, genuinely seemed on the verge of eradication.

Yes, there were situations far more dire than our own.

So let me share a story that gives me comfort. It’s almost a parable of the creative life and its hidden power. This particular tale testifies to my belief that artists of vision and courage can even rise above the most brutal dictator.

Alas, this victory of art over tyranny only happens over the long run. But it does happen.

And when it finally occurs, the turnaround takes place so dramatically and resoundingly that we need to reconsider our conventional definitions of power and influence.

I’m referring to the case of Anna Akhmatova.

15-year-old Anna Akhmatova in 1904

Akhmatova, was a promising poet in the days before the Soviet Revolution, but her physical presence was just as compelling as her writing. Modigliani made at least twenty paintings of Akhmatova, and she had an affair with the famous poet Osip Mandelstam. Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak proposed marriage to her on multiple occasions.

Even far away at Oxford, philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin—whom I considered the most brilliant person in the entire University when I was a student there—allegedly pined away with romantic longings based on his brief encounter with Akhmatova 35 years before.

I don’t think it’s going too far to claim that she could have been a movie actress, given her beauty and allure.

Nathan Altman’s Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1915

But Akhmatova was crushed under Soviet rule.

Not only was her poetry sharply criticized and censored, but the secret police bugged her apartment, and kept her under surveillance.

She was silenced so completely, that many people simply assumed she was dead.

One by one, the people closest to her were arrested, prosecuted, and often executed. Her ex-husband Nikolay Gumilev, falsely accused of participating in a monarchist conspiracy, was shot. Her common-law husband Nikolai Punin, an art scholar, got arrested and sent to the Gulag, where he died. (His offense was allegedly mentioning that the proliferation of portraits of Lenin throughout the country was in poor taste.)

But the most painful loss was her son, Lev Gumliev. After the execution of his father, when their child was just nine, Lev got sent to a Soviet labor camps. When he was finally released from captivity, authorities insisted that he fight in the Red Army. Then he was sent off to the prison camps again in 1949.

Akhmatova was desperate to save the life of her son. But what can a poet—even a poet of genius—do in such situations?

“I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad,” she later recalled. She traveled to Kresty Prison every day to hold a futile vigil. She tried constantly to get some word about her son’s status.

Or give him a parcel. Or find someone to beg for his release.

But to no avail.

Here each day she waited with so many other women, often in bitter cold weather—bundled in heavy clothes in front of the closed gates. One day someone in the crowd recognized the poet, who had once been so esteemed and beautiful. She asked Akhmatova whether her poetic gifts were capable of describing this scene of tragedy.

What could be more futile than a poem in the face of Stalinist purges and executions? But Akhmatova told her inquirer: “I can.” And in that horrible and desolate place, “something like a smile” appeared on the other woman’s face.

Akhmatova began working on what would be her greatest work, the long poem called Requiem. But this was a dangerous endeavor.

Publishing a poem of this sort, even overseas, was out of the question. Just putting the words down on paper could lead to her execution—the secret police might search her apartment at any time.

So she burnt the pages she used for rough drafts. The polished version was retained in her memory.

For seventeen months I’ve called you
To come home, I’ve pleaded
—Oh my son, my terror!—groveled
At the hangman’s feet.
So much I can’t say who’s
Man, who’s beast any more, nor even
How long till execution.
(From the translation of Requiem by D.M. Thomas)

This is one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. But the lines that inspire me the most come on the final page, where Anna Akhmatova makes that extraordinary prediction of the destiny for her and this forbidden work.

And if ever in this country they should want
To build me a monument
I consent to that honor,
But only on condition that they
Erect it not on the sea-shore where I was born:
My last links there were broken long ago,
Nor by the stump in the Royal Gardens,
Where an inconsolable young shade is seeking me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours
And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

She is literally taunting Stalin and the Soviet secret police here, but with an authority of her own—one only the creative artist possesses. Yet, in some miracle, she triumphed over the dictatorship.

No, Akhmatova herself didn’t live long enough to see it happen. But she did survive Stalin, and her son was released from incarceration. He eventually witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Akhmatova got shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, and finally—the year before her death in 1966—was allowed to travel to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her global renown as a voice of courage and integrity was so powerful that even the Soviet authorities were now afraid of the consequences of cracking down on her.

So they did nothing when Requiem was finally published in Germany in 1963. And the long poem even got issued in the USSR in 1987, at a time when the regime was now the pathetic vulnerable party.

But the most remarkable moment of vindication came when they erected a statue of Anna Akhmatova in her native land.

It happened on the 40th anniversary of her death in 2006. By then, even the name of the city had changed—it was no longer Leningrad, but St. Petersburg once more. And Akhmatova was now returning to the scene of her greatest suffering and tragedy, but in towering bronze form atop a granite pillar.

Anna Akhmatova, larger than life, stares down Kresty Prison

Meeting her poetic demands, they placed her statue facing Kresty Holding Prison, where she had once waited before the closed gates, day after day.

Her visage is strong and defiant, and the inscription reads:

That’s why I pray not for myself
But for all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

This is more than the triumph of one woman.

Art is more powerful than pundits or politicians, or even the most brutal dictator. It survives the longest. It has an authority that comes from a higher source.

We do well to remember that—especially in times when the creative impulse seems so weak and ineffective.

That weakness is an illusion. Art triumphs in the end. The very hollowness of its opponents ensures that eventual victory. It’s really just a matter of time.

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

February 4, 2025February 3, 2025 | Literature · Society

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 15

Welcome to the last installment of the Convivial Society for 2024. Come January, this iteration of the newsletter will celebrate its fifth year. It’s been a joy to write, and a pleasure to connect with readers over the past five years. Thank you all. In this short installment, I offer you a principle which might guide our thinking about technology in the coming year, along with a couple of year-end traditions tagged on at the end.

Cheers and happy new year,

Michael

A few weeks ago, I posted about how certain lines or quotations can function as verbal amulets that we carry with us to ward off the deleterious spirits of the age. Such words, I suggested, “might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart.”

One such line for me, which I did not include in that earlier post, comes from a rather well-known 1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.”1 Of course, to say it is “well-known” is a relative statement. I mean something like “well-known within that tiny subset of people who are interested in technology and culture and who also happen to care about what older sources might teach us about such matters.” So, you know, not “well-known” in the sense that most people would mean the phrase.

That said, the essay should be more widely read. Sixty years later, Mumford’s counsel and warnings appear all the more urgent. It is in this essay that Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics.”

Here’s how Mumford describes the bargain. Forgive the lengthy quotation, but I think it will be worth your time if you’ve not encountered it before.

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.

There’s a lot to think about in those few lines. For my money, that paragraph, written sixty years ago, tells us more about the current state of affairs than a thousand takes we might stumble across as we browse our timelines today. There is, for instance, just below the surface of Mumford’s analysis, a profound insight into the nature of human desire in late modern societies that is worth teasing out at length, but I’ll pass on that for the time being.2

A little further on, nearing the close of the essay, Mumford tells readers that they should not mistake his meaning. “This is not a prediction of what will happen,” he clarifies, “but a warning against what may happen.” More than half a century later, I’m tempted to say that the warning has come perilously close to reality and the only question now might be what comes next.

But all of this, patient reader, is prelude to sharing the line to which I’ve been alluding.

It is this: “Life cannot be delegated.”

Simply stated. Decisive. Memorable.

Here’s a bit more of the immediate context:

“What I wish to do is to persuade those who are concerned with maintaining democratic institutions to see that their constructive efforts must include technology itself. There, too, we must return to the human center. We must challenge this authoritarian system that has given to an under-dimensioned ideology and technology the authority that belongs to the human personality. I repeat: life cannot be delegated.”

I say it is simply stated, but it also invites clarifying questions. Chief among them might be “What exactly is meant by ‘life’?” Or, “Why exactly can it not be delegated?” And, “What counts as delegation anyway?” So let’s start there.

Whatever we take life to mean, we should immediately recognize that we are speaking qualitatively. Mumford is telling us something about an ideal form of life, not mere existence.3 Earlier, for example, he had spoken about life in its “fullness and wholeness.”

Mumford’s claim is a provocation for us to consider what might be essential to a life that is full and whole, one in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because by its very nature it requires our whole-person involvement. And by delegation, I take Mumford to mean the outsourcing of such involvement to a technological device or system, or, alternatively, the embrace of technologically mediated distraction and escapism in the place of such involvement.

I also tend to read Mumford’s claim through Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds. Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or institution counterproductive. This means that rather than declare a technology or institution either good or bad by its nature, we recognize instead the possibility that a technology or institution might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become, first, counterproductive and then eventually destructive.

So, with regard to the principle that life cannot be delegated, we might helpfully ask, “What are the thresholds of delegation beyond which what we are left with is no longer life in its fullness and wholeness?”

This seems to be an especially relevant question as we navigate the ever-widening field of technologies which invite us to delegate an increasing range of tasks, activities, roles, and responsibilities. We are told, for instance, that we are entering an age of LLM-based AI agents, which will be able to streamline our work and simplify our lives across a wide array of domains.

Perhaps. My point is not to rule out any such possibility.4 Rather, I am inviting us to critically consider at the outset where the thresholds of delegation might be for each of us. And these will, in fact, vary person to person, which is why I tend to traffic in questions rather than prescriptions. I am convinced that these are matters of practical wisdom. No one can set out a list of precise and universal rules applicable to every person under all circumstances. Indeed, the temptation to wish for such is likely a symptom of the general malaise. We must all think for ourselves, and in conversation with each other, so that we can arrive at sound judgments under our particular circumstances and given our particular aims.

The principle “Life cannot be delegated” is simply a guidepost.5 It keeps before us the possibility that we might, if we are not careful, delegate away a form of life that is full and whole, rewarding and meaningful. We ought to be especially careful in the cases where what we delegate to a device, app, agent, or system is an aspect of how we express care, cultivate skill, relate to one another, make moral judgments, or assume responsibility for our actions in the world—the very things, in other words, that make life meaningful.

Perhaps we are tempted to think that care, skill, judgment, and responsibility are only of consequence when the circumstances are grave, momentous, or otherwise obviously consequential, which means that we might miss how, in fact, even our mundane everyday work might be exactly how we care, develop skill, exercise judgment, and embrace responsibility. (It occurs to me just now, that the etymology of mundane, usually given a pejorative sense in English, suggests something that is “of this world.” It is the stuff our world is made of, to take flight from the mundane is to take flight from the world.)

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know this is something I’ve sought to articulate at various points in the last few years (for example). So I’m always glad to encounter someone else trying to say the same thing and saying it well. Recently, I stumbled across this bit of wisdom from Gary Snyder6:

“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality. Reality-insight says … master the twenty-four hours. Do it well, without self-pity. It is as hard to get the children herded into the car pool and down the road to the bus as it is to chant sutras in the Buddha-hall on a cold morning. One move is not better than another, each can be quite boring, and they both have the virtuous quality of repetition. Repetition and ritual and their good results come in many forms. Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick—don't let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits. Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our ‘practice’ which will put us on a ‘path’—it is our path.”

I’ll conclude by offering you a complementary principle to Mumford’s: To live is to be implicated.

I take the language of implication, with its rich connotations, from Steven Garber, who writes about work and vocation from a religious perspective. Drawing on Wendell Berry and Václav Havel, Garber argues that we should seek to live in a manner that implicates us, for love’s sake, in the way the world is and ought to be. In my view, Garber’s exhortation echoes Mumford’s warning but in another key. To say that life cannot be delegated is to say that life, lived consciously and well, will necessarily implicate us in the world. May we have the courage to be so implicated.

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Year’s End

It is customary for me to share Richard Wilbur’s poem “Year’s End” in the last installment of the year. Enjoy.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

“The Hunters in the Snow,” Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565)

1
For a more extensive consideration of this essay, see this excellent discussion by Zachary Loeb: “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, revisited.”

2
Here’s another paragraph that remains timely: “The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.”

3
Although I am immediately tempted to add that there is no such thing as mere existence. Existence itself is a miracle, and the recognition of this fact the beginning of wonder and thus thought.

4
Although I commend to you Rob Horning’s analysis: “Generative AI, [Ben] Recht argues, ‘always seems to provide the minimal effort path to a passing but shitty solution,’ which actually seems like a fairly charitable assessment. But it is obviously something that worker-users would employ when they don’t care about what they are asking for or how it is presented, for optimized producers who see research as an obstacle to understanding rather than the essence of it, for people conditioned to be absent at any presumed moment of communion. Generative AI is the quintessence of incuriosity, perfect for those who hate the idea of having to be interested in anything.”

5
I’m tentatively planning on following up with two additional posts on related principles: Life cannot be simulated, and life cannot be accelerated. We’ll see!

6 In the original post, I wrote “the late Gary Snyder,” which, as more than one attentive reader pointed out, was a grave mistake. Snyder is still with us, and I’m not sure how I got it in my head that he had passed. Snyder was the subject of a recent episode of the wonderful

The Lost Prophets Podcast

. Also, I think the most recent episode with

Dougald Hine

is quite pertinent to the content of this post, and well worth your time.

In ancient times, people would spend their summer vacations reading books. It is a little quaint nowadays, but you can still do that. Above, you can see two novels I have been reading recently: “War and Peace” (1868) by Lev Tolstoy, and “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” by Serena Bedini (2016). Strangely, these two widely different entities have something in common beyond being both definable with the same term, “novels.” Sometimes, differences are the key to understanding what some things have in common with each other. In this case, common element is evil. More exactly, love.

A few months ago, I found a copy of “War and Peace” on my shelves, realizing that I had never read it from start to finish. So, I set myself to engage in the task. My gosh, that was a task.

This novel is more than 1300 pages in its English translation. It starts by doing all those things that manuals about novel writing tell you a writer should never do. It is a slap in the face to the basic suggestion “don’t tell, show.” Tolstoy tells all the time and rarely shows. He tells in the “omniscient” viewpoint that has the writer playing God and telling readers about the details of how characters feel and think. And it starts by throwing in a true crowd of characters. Evidently, when the novel was written more than one and a half centuries ago, people were able to manage such a feat of reading it and enjoying it. At the time, it was what we would call today a “bestseller.”

For a modern reader, it is a feat comparable to climbing Mount Everest wearing tennis shoes — we are just not equipped for that kind of task. Anyway, I managed to do that, but I frequently lost track of what was going on. There are no less than five separate plots ongoing, and I often had to backtrack to understand who was doing exactly what and why. Let me tell you, some books on quantum mechanics I read in the past were easier. But I can tell you it was worth doing — oh, yes. Worth a lot.

It is a story that, if Tolstoy were alive today, could be lifted almost intact from its settings in the early 19th century to our times. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, with all its ramifications in European politics, looks so much like what is happening today that it is both bewildering and mesmerizing to read how Tolstoy chronicles the story. Tolstoy is considered to be a genius as a novelist. He was a genius, full stop.

Before I tell you more about “War and Peace,” let me tell you something about another book I have been reading these days. It is “La Filosofia della Torta di Mele” (The Philosophy of the Apple Pie), a 2016 novel by the Italian writer Serena Bedini. In literar terms, it is the complete opposite to Tolstoy’s war and peace. It is light, like a pâte feuilletée, written from the personal viewpoint of a character whose main problem is a persistent cough. She engages in a search for a special recipe for an apple pie in the Tuscan countryside; not the same kind of drama you find when Napoleon’s armies invade Russia. An easy novel for the blasé 21st-century reader that you can complete in one hour or even less. It leaves you with the sensation of a session of wine tasting that didn’t make you drunk, just relaxed and happy.

Comparing the “philosophy of the apple pie” to “war and peace” looks like comparing a bicycle to a space shuttle. Yet, the universe is fractal, and the two novels do have one fundamental thing in common (besides the fact of being, well, “novels”). Before I tell you what is this thing in common, allow me to digress a little.

You know that one of the masterpieces of Jorge Luis Borges is “Historia del Guerrero y de la Cautiva” (history of the warrior and the prisoner). It is above and beyond the “masterpiece” term — it is on another celestial plane. And what makes it such a master-masterpiece is the audacity of the author, who puts together two stories so different that the very idea of trying makes your head buzz: what does a Germanic Warrior of the early Middle Ages have in common with an English woman captured by an Argentinean Indio tribe and wed to their chieftain? There is something, yes, a very fundamental thing: the acceptance of the “other”, that some of us call “love” which, if you think about that, means exactly “accepting the other even though different.” It is too easy to love something that’s exactly like you; that’s called “narcissism.”

Only a master-master writer such as Borges could take up the challenge of writing such a story. Picking up enormous challenges and meeting them in full is the hallmark of true genius. Now, of course, I don’t dare compare myself to Borges. I just like to point out how the two stories have exactly one point in common: they are acts of love. Read “War and Peace” from start to finish, and you’ll note something that you might have missed at first, but then it appears to you like a flash of light from heaven.

There is no evil in the whole novel.

There is drama, there are emotions, bewilderment, rage, folly, madness, the whole spectrum of human emotions is there in “War and Peace” — but you won’t find in it a character hating another character. Not that it is a light novel about apple pies and curing one’s cough. Tolstoy is a master writer who masters every facet of the events he describes. Even when he tells us of characters that he finds unpleasant, such as Napoleon himself, he describes them as bumbling idiots, which probably they were, but still human beings with all their feelings, their emotions, their desires. In the novel, French and Russian soldiers fight each other, but do not hate each other. When the French or the Russians take prisoners, they treat them as humanely as it is reasonably possible given the circumstances. Nowhere is there talk of exterminating inferior races nor of herrenvolk who should rule them. There is only one event in the novel that you could be said to be evil. It is a real historical event: the lynching of a Russian student named Vereshchagin guilty (perhaps) of having diffused pro-French pamphlets. But even Count Rostopchin, the person who acts in cold blood to direct a crowd to attack Vereshchagin, is described as having human feelings and conscious of his mistake.

You see the same in “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” where, of course, you won’t find battles or lynchings, but that has a light touch that makes everything glow with a certain inner light. A firefly in a hot summer night.

Now, think for a moment about the sad spectacle of our times, where hate for everything different has become the exchange coin of all discourse on the media or anywhere else. How is it that nothing can be done anymore without hating someone or something? What madness is overtaking us? We drink evil, eat evil, breathe evil, continuously see evil, think evil, speak evil.

Tolstoy, philosopher, and historian, couldn’t explain what madness had taken millions of Christians in 1812 to march on to massacre and slaughter other Christians without any conceivable reasons for doing that. He would be even more baffled by our age when millions of human beings can be so easily convinced to hate other human beings without any conceivable reason — they are not required to massacre them with their own hands but, at least, to acquiesce to their slaughter by hunger, artillery, and drones.

We know that love is mostly in the foolish things of the world that God chose to shame the wise and the weak things of the world that God chose to shame the strong. Maybe an apple pie is one of these foolish and weak things that are nevertheless God’s choice to send us a message.

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  [@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: [https://www.rulit.me/](https://www.rulit.me/books/vstrechi-s-tovarishchem-stalinym-read-60539-2.html)

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses. 

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded,  he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for  construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving  across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya  district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft.  To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No  punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil —  as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off.  The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion.  Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image,  to reorder it so that you inhabit  the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes  and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers  and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously  – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors  in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on [November 3, 1931](https://johnhelmer.net/russian-gardens-and-the-war-against-the-anglo-american-grass-sward/), to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.  The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).  

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha  to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money  to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries.  “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey,  Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master.  Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden  columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: [https://johnhelmer.net/](https://johnhelmer.net/cabbages-and-rothschilds-%e2%80%93-the-special-horticulture-of-spreading-manure-grafting-and-forcing-for-the-enrichment-of-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-almost-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-somebody-with-ta/)

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.  

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge  is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity  to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted  and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home  is reciprocal: that one doesn’t  just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging  the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.   

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024

During the period of the Wagner Group insurrection in the spring of 2023, the biography of the mercenary group’s founder and principal owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was spread far and wide. The fact that he had once served meals to Vladimir Putin prompted sniggering among our mainstream commentators. Just imagine that such a person could rise to the power, influence and wealth of Prigozhin! This was proof positive of the endemic corruption and distorted values of the ‘Putin regime,’ they opined.

However, my point in writing today’s installment is to demonstrate that upward mobility of those with great talent and imagination has long been and remains a competitive advantage of Russia. That was so under Peter the Great in the first quarter of the 18th century, it was certainly true in much of the Soviet period until the 1980s. And it revived very nicely in the ‘Roaring 90s’ when the hero of this piece, Sergei Gutzeit, restaurateur, vineyard owner, restorer of landmark buildings at his own expense, founder and chief benefactor of a lyҫėe for aspiring talents from the lower classes began his steep rise up the success ladder in the circle of another rising star, Vladimir Putin.

All of these issues came to mind this afternoon when my wife and I took lunch in Gutzeit’s first and still best earning restaurant Podvorye located in the Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk where he has kept his primary residence and focus of his charitable works for decades.

Pavlovsk is named for the Emperor Pavel (Paul I), son of Catherine the Great and father of Emperor Alexander I, best known as the conqueror of Napoleon. Paul’s elegant and modestly sized palace is a ‘must see’ tourist destination for both foreign and domestic visitors to Northwest Russia, alongside the much larger and more demanding Summer Palace of Catherine in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 5 km away.

However, the success of Gutzeit’s restaurant opposite the palace park had little to do with location, location, location. Gutzeit opened the Podvorye in 1994 on an unpromising plot of land that the grudging city authorities offered him. It is wedged between the train tracks on one side and a busy local highway on the other. It was his unique architectural solution and his talents in hospitality services that won him a loyal clientele from among the top business and political circles of Petersburg after a very few years.

As for architecture, the Podvorye restaurant and the ensemble of outbuildings adjacent to it are made from immense stripped logs in a style that resembles the stage settings for 17th century or still earlier Russia as shown in Rimsky Korsakov operas in the Mariinsky Theater. The basic menu was built entirely around traditional hearty Russian cuisine that is very well turned out, in copious portions and priced very fairly. And on weekends it was the rule to regale diners with rounds of Russian folk songs by musicians who invited the children especially to join in.

Gutzeit’s fortune was assured in October 2000 when Vladimir Putin decided to celebrate his first birthday as president in…the Podvorye. The specially prepared meal for the presidential party remains on page one of the printed menu and is currently priced at 55 euros in ruble equivalency. In typical Russian fashion, the meal opens with a shock and awe array of eight different meat, fish, salted vegetable, marinated forest mushroom and other appetizers which invite rounds of vodka shot glasses, then moves on to a fish or meat soup followed by the mains of fried fish or meat. Fasting for a day ahead of such a meal is a good idea.

On the other hand, for normal dining, the out of pocket cost is much lower. By way of example, I mention that our favorite dish is half a roast duck served with stewed cabbage and a baked pear with lingonberry filling. One portion is more than sufficient to serve two and today costs the equivalent of 12 euros. Back in the 1990s, when Russian farming was reeling from the shock therapy administered at the advice of Western advisers, Gutzeit had to import his ducks frozen from France to be satisfied with quality and uniform portions. Then when relations with France soured, he shifted to frozen ducks from Hungary. Now chef assures me that they arrive fresh from farms in Rostov (Russia) and I assure you that the quality is superb.

But, to resume my story of Gutzeit’s rise: once word of the President’s visit got around, the Podvorye was filled daily to capacity. Back in the 1990s and early in the new century, the diners were predominantly foreigners whose reservations were made for them by the premiere hotels in St Petersburg where they were lodged. I recall how in about 2004 my wife and I spotted former British prime minister John Major at another table.

Those were the glory days when Gutzeit made a fortune that he immediately invested in other commercial ventures and also in charitable works, the first of which, was a free of charge soup kitchen for the poor run daily from a large, specially built canteen adjacent to the restaurant.

Nowadays the clientele is almost exclusively middle class Russians from near and far. They arrive as couples, as families with kids, and as groups of friends.

Aside from opening other restaurants in the region, Gutzeit created the ‘Russian Village’ in Upper Mandrogi, a Russian equivalent to America’s Williamsburg on a riverbank site jointly agreed with tour operators of cruises in the rivers and canals running north from Lake Ladoga that are very popular in the summer season. This venture provided work opportunities to artisans in traditional decorative handicrafts.

With the proceeds of his businesses, with his own money Gutzeit undertook the restoration of dilapidated buildings from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries in the Pavlovsk area. In one of these complexes he opened what I would call his most ambitious and far-sighted project which was inspired by the lyҫėe within the Catherine Palace which Alexander I created initially with a view to educate his younger brothers together with a small group of talented students from outside the royal entourage. Today it is best known as the school where the young Pushkin studied. Gutzeit’s vision was to help create a new patriotic but broadly educated and widely traveled elite to help guide the country’s future.

The school was named for Russia’s revered Foreign Minister in the second half of the 19th century, A.M. Gorchakov. Gutzeit directly oversaw the selection of the 18 candidates for the first class and following classes from among children of low income intelligentsia families. He oversaw the program of travel abroad in the West and domestically around Russia that the students were given gratis. The school is still going strong and I expect to hear more about its graduates when I meet with Gutzeit at the start of next week.

In reviving the tradition of what was called in Pushkin’s time the Tsarskoye Selo lyҫėe, Gutzeit was a good 20 years ahead of the Putin government. It is only now that a project to revive that school in the original Catherine Palace complex is being realized.

Meanwhile, Gutzeit never abandoned the love for fresh produce that directed him to cooking and restaurant ownership. Originally born and educated in Odessa (Ukraine), Gutzeit got his start in business in the food markets of the north where he traded in vegetables. The latter partly explains his decision early in the new millennium to buy a farming estate in the Crimea. His main crop there is grapes for wine, and he began well before it became popular for Russian arbiters of taste like Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all Russian state television news, to become a vineyard owner in Crimea. Gutzeit indulges in his gentleman farmer avocation in the south from late spring to autumn.

His most recent acquisition, agricultural land near the regional center Gatchina, brings together various interests. The location has its own logic: Paul 1 had his earliest palace in precisely Gatchina. On this farm, Gutzeit is now growing most of the fresh vegetables, herbs, fowl and dairy products that will be featured in Podvorye. With this latest accent on cooking mainly what you get from your surroundings and can personally control, Gutzeit’s restaurant is sure to vie for a star in the Michelin guide if and when sanctions are lifted.

That, in a nutshell, is my Exhibit Number 1 of a successful and wealthy benefactor of his society with outstanding vision who began, like Prigozhin, as ‘a waiter to Putin.’ When you care to scratch the surface, this country has a great many surprises that help you to better understand why it is now the fourth biggest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Equivalency and likely has the number one army in the world.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

I’ve been writing about our world’s upheavals for more than three years now. Over that time one of the most personally significant conclusions I’ve come to is that no clean separation can be made between the “big” issues of our era – the ideological revolutions, the political turmoil, even shifting geopolitics – and the “little” struggles facing the individual human soul.

Cultural narcissism and societal atomization, gender divides and demographic malaise, political nihilism and violence… the many civilizational problems we see manifesting today increasingly seem to me to only reflect something gone tragically wrong at a much deeper level. Our societies feel more and more broken and mad because we are broken and mad, and we no longer seem able to keep a collective lid on it. The political is personal. So although I won’t be going full Faulkner and concluding that “the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself,” I do often find myself hungry for those discussions that manage to go beyond surface-level commentary of culture and politics to explore more lasting human truths beneath.

Which is why I’m particularly pleased to publish this extensive dialogue with
Freya India.

Freya is in my estimation one of the very best young authors writing today. Her talent is to combine a fearless personal honesty with a genuinely penetrating examination of the human heart—with all its anxieties, hopes, and sufferings—and then to trace seamless connections between our common struggles and the realities of our broader cultural and technological landscape. Most importantly, she does this with—as I think you will see here—a startling amount of what used to be described as wisdom. Exactly how such an old soul became trapped in a Gen Z girl, no one seems to know… It’s actually a little bit creepy to be honest.

Freya India

Freya writes with a focus on issues facing young women at her Substack GIRLS, which feels a bit like reading a Tolstoy or Jane Austen disguised in the aesthetics of a teenage glam magazine. Do subscribe.

GIRLS
Girlhood in the Modern World
By Freya India

We both wanted to try something a bit new and different here and allow back-and-forth written dialogue to flow naturally and delve into some important issues in a unique way. So what follows is not a typical interview, but something more like a podcast—except in print and not three hours of shallow banter. And I do think we succeeded in producing something somewhat special, because the dialogue manages to tease out some really fascinating connections. For which I largely credit Freya’s open and refreshingly un-ironic style.

Below, we dive into everything from why therapy culture and the cult of the self has been a disaster for the mental health of young women, and why the male quest for self-optimization can undermine human connection, to how moral judgements are needed to accurately perceiving reality and why the deconstruction of authority has disordered and demoralized society.

And in the best half, after the paywall: why our culture feels so utterly unsexy now, and why we all need to learn to be playful again; what men and women really want, and why we’re so divided; the nature of true love, and why love can rescue us from selfishness; why virtue is the only sure path to sanity; why we’ve both found ourselves drawn inexorably down a road to religious faith, and how we each try to grapple with that in our writing.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and that you’ll check out some of Freya’s other fantastic work.

(Notes: This post will be too long for Gmail, so click on the title to open online or in the Substack app. Freya’s quaint British misspellings have been left intact for affect, do not be alarmed.)

N.S. Lyons: You’ve written extensively on how social media appears to be contributing to skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other mental health problems in our society, especially among girls and young women. The link seems well established, and the stats you’ve cited evidencing this are pretty crazy, such as the suicide rate for girls aged 10-14 increasing 138% between 2012 and 2019, after social media and smart phones became a thing. I encourage everyone to go read your work on this, on your own Substack and with Jonathan Haidt on After Babel. But I want to focus here on teasing out what I find to be a really intriguing thread running through your more recent writing, which hints that your thinking on these problems and their causes has evolved in some pretty important and interesting ways.

As I see it, this begins with your critique of “therapy culture,” which “pathologises normal distress, and presents therapy as the solution to all problems.” This is clearly completely endemic today. As you’ve pointed out, just about everything now—especially online, and perhaps especially among women—seems to be viewed through, talked about in, and marketed using the language of the therapeutic. Spontaneous romantic chemistry might actually be a red flag for past “trauma.” Relationship difficulties are probably down to “anxious attachment.” Constantly “opening up” online about your issues and medications is celebrated; an SSRI prescription is a form of “empowerment.” Getting a Brazilian Butt Lift is now sold as a “life-changing and empowering experience” of “resculpting your confidence” and becoming “your authentic self,” and so on… 

And yet individuals—especially women—and society generally only continue to become more depressed, anxious, and risk-averse. All the therapy and empowerment doesn’t seem to be working. If anything it seems to be having the opposite effect, serving to make people less confident, more fragile, and more emotionally immature. What do you think is going on here? What’s driving this turn to the therapeutic, and what is it doing to us?

Freya India: Well, firstly I think all the therapy and empowerment isn’t working because much of it is just a marketing strategy. Take the obsession with fighting the stigma around mental health. We are relentlessly reminded that mental health problems are stigmatised, that we need to tackle the stigma around medication, that we aren’t opening up enough, that we aren’t aware enough. This is just accepted as fact. Meanwhile the number of young people taking mental health medication is unbelievable. In the UK, antidepressant prescriptions for children aged five to 12 increased by more than 40% between 2015 and 2021. Five! We have girls self-diagnosing with anxiety disorders and OCD and Tourette’s. Young women putting their mental health diagnoses in their Twitter bios and Tinder profiles. There was even a study recently revealing that 32% of all adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the US received prescription medication, treatment, and/or counselling for their mental health in 2023. And it doesn’t seem to make any difference. At this point, I think it’s an insult to tell young people that stigma is our most pressing problem.   

It’s easy to forget that mental health has become an industry. And like any industry, it has profit incentives. It has to drive demand. It needs to expand its customer base. And “mental health awareness” has become a very useful marketing campaign for therapy and medication companies. I think two things can be true: girls are genuinely suffering in the modern world, but also, a major part of it is the marketisation and medicalisation of their normal distress. Their despair and disempowerment is making billions.

In terms of what it’s doing to us, I think, ironically, it’s making us mentally ill. People say therapy culture is stereotypically feminine and it harms men by expecting them to behave more like women, which I agree with—but I actually think it’s worse for women. Girls ruminate more than boys. Women are more anxious, on average. We tend to be more neurotic. And so it gets to me when I see girls being told to focus on their feelings, to take their thoughts so seriously, to search their lives for symptoms. That’s the worst advice we could give. It’s heartbreaking to see how many young women are so miserably stuck in their own heads now, and encouraged to go further and further inwards to find relief. Do the work! Go to therapy! Unpack your trauma! Reflect, analyse, ruminate! Their heads are spinning. Maybe I’m anxious all the time because I have ADHD? Maybe my ADHD is a trauma response? Wait—is it PTSD or a personality disorder?

I also think we get it backwards sometimes. People assume that Gen Z feel too much, that we’re all too emotional, but I’m starting to think the opposite is true. We don’t let ourselves feel anything. We immediately categorise and diagnose and try to control every emotion. I don’t even think we know how to open up properly. We’re all so lonely. Young people hang out with each other far less than previous generations did at the same age. Friendships are much more shallow and superficial. I don’t get the sense that young people are honestly opening up to each other. We talk to therapists. We join online forums. We open up on TikTok, or chat with mental health chatbots. When we do talk about our problems, we disguise it in DSM diagnoses and obscure therapy-speak.

And so the worst part is, therapy culture deprives young people of the language to talk about what’s actually happening in their lives. They can talk about their ADHD symptoms and anxiety disorders, but find it hard to get at anything deeper. Instead of saying oh, maybe I feel insecure because I’m in a situationship where there’s no commitment or expectations or even basic respect, we have all these young women worrying that they are anxiously attached, or have an anxiety disorder, or _relationship OCD—_and even getting medication for it.

I’m not convinced, then, that therapy culture even helps us open up; I think it shuts down our ability to talk about our problems. Maybe you’re not anxiously attached, maybe you want to be loved deeply! Maybe you don’t have social anxiety disorder, maybe you grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history! Modern culture asks young people to accept and excuse more and more behaviour, to adjust to more and more change, and then diagnoses them when they can’t cope. So lately in my writing I’ve been trying to emphasise that it’s okay to be emotional. It’s understandable to feel anxious and insecure right now. That doesn’t make you mentally ill. We’re so determined to de-stigmatise mental health issues we’ve started to stigmatise being human. Having human reactions to things. 

Because yes, humans have emotions. Women are emotional! That seems almost offensive to say now, but I don’t see why. I actually think not properly expressing our emotions is what makes us neurotic. The way I see it, girls are getting two contradictory messages: open up, talk about your problems, but also, being emotional is bad. If someone calls you emotional it’s an insult. Strong independent women aren’t bothered, don’t care. If women do get upset or emotional they must have anxiety, or trauma, or some mental illness. That’s a cruel and confusing message for girls. And an absolute joke to call it empowering.

For most young people, I don’t think they have a disorder. I think they’re experiencing normal distress, and they do need to open up to each other. Girls shouldn’t hide when they’re really not alright. But they should be opening up face-to-face, honestly and vulnerably, in real communities, in meaningful friendships, in stable families—not on TikTok or Reddit forums or to some sketchy BetterHelp counsellor. And they need to use real words, not always couching everything in medical labels and therapy-speak. That’s what we should be encouraging.

Maybe it’s just me, but today there definitely does seem to be a deeply creepy top-down push to sever us from human connection, or even the human in general, and replace it with the digital and the unhuman. It’s as if there’s a growing suspicion of human interaction as something inherently messy and dangerous, while the virtual world is seen as cleaner and safer. We can envision this will, if taken to its maximum extent, deposit us in a “no contact society” like that which, for some reason, has been planned as a future for South Korea (with predictable results so far). Is it possible for us to disentangle the growing role of therapy culture from that of the internet and social media, or do you think these two forces have become inextricably linked in some way?

Of course the foundations for this therapeutic view of the self were laid a long time ago. Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and many others were writing about this in the ‘60s and ‘70s;

Frank Furedi

covered it excellently in the early 2000s.

But I think social media took things to a whole new level. Therapy culture mixed with social media is, in my opinion, a very damaging combination. Therapy culture encourages girls and young women to focus on themselves and their feelings; social media then not only spreads these messages but constantly reminds us that we are each a self. That we are the main character. That our selves are something to be endlessly managed and obsessed over.

Neither encourages actual self-improvement. Social media platforms reduce us to our identity labels or consumer preferences. Therapy culture distills us down into a diagnosis or collection of symptoms. Both fit us into neat categories. What actually matters—our character, our virtue, how we treat other people—is not something easily displayed online. Sure, people try—they tweet their political slogans and post about their activism, but that’s got nothing to do with their character. Says nothing about their private code of conduct. That, I think, is the most important thing about who we are, the most important thing for young people to work on and improve, but we can’t display it. So it holds very little value these days.

All this makes me think about how, from the outside, it looks as if young people are inundated with mental health advice. We have so much guidance! But the truth is, our culture has very little to say to anxious young people. So little to offer. We are too afraid to give actual guidance. There are no clear milestones or markers to follow to adulthood anymore. We stopped appealing to moral character. We got rid of anything more substantial—that was judgemental!—or anything to assure young people that they belong to something bigger—that was superstitious! All that’s left are endless empty platitudes. We tell young people whatever you want to do, do it! As long as it makes you happy! And if they say they feel crippling anxiety or insecurity, we don’t wonder if it’s this morally ambiguous world, the collapse of any real community, this feeling that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves. We don’t investigate further. We diagnose them and are done with it. We call this a culture of compassion, but I’d say that’s far from the truth.

While I’m saying all this, I can’t help but wonder whether young men and women even inhabit the same world now. From what I can see, young women are going further and further down the therapeutic rabbit hole—ruminating over “red flags”, obsessing over “trauma”, increasingly seeing the world and themselves through these psychological labels and terms. Do you see any of that happening with young men? Does therapy culture affect them?

Therapy culture definitely affects men, though I think in different ways. There are of course some men who adopt the feminine model of the therapeutic, becoming the soyboys of internet infamy. But increasingly the equivalent “rabbit hole” for men seems to be one of what we could call “self-optimization.” Instead of obsessing over trauma, we have young men obsessing over whether they’re doing enough. Whether they're waking up early enough to get in their daily stoic journaling practice, internet-sourced ideal workout routine, ice bath, macro-calculated meal prep, and nootropic supplement regimen—all before heading out to grind their underpaid day job while listening to Andrew Huberman podcasts and thinking about how they need to side-hustle more on their passive income scheme. Others obsess over trying to discover and capitalize on whatever laws of science apply to relationships and the female mind, so that they can potentially find a leg up in a ruthless dating market.

Frankly this is all probably still healthier than women’s tendency toward internal rumination and self-diagnosis, since it at least emphasizes personal agency and encourages taking action in the world (and so is also a healthier choice than that of the large subset of men who check out entirely and retire to a quiet life of video games and depression). But the self-optimizers’ is still an anxious response to exactly the same societal situation, in which as you say there’s been a “collapse of any real community” and the dominant feeling is “that they can’t rely on anyone but themselves.” It’s the frenzied behavior of atomized individuals adrift in a world without anything solid, reliable, or permanent to support them, in which they can’t be sure of anything except relentless competition with each other.

I also see the predicament facing both men and women as in large part rooted in our modern crisis of authority. By authority I mean that power which can tell you what to do and you will accept this decision as legitimate and trustworthy. Our egalitarian culture is basically allergic to the idea of legitimate authority, or at least moral authority and all its traditional sources. Today it tends to be associated with authoritarianism and oppression of the individual.

Without getting into a whole other rabbit hole, it’s worth noting that this negative view was imposed deliberately by the therapeutic state. After WWII, intellectual pioneers of the therapeutic worldview like Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno fingered the “authoritarian personality”—and especially the patriarchal authority of the strong father figure—as the psychological root of fascism. As Philip Rieff summarized it, their conclusion was that the “revolution must sweep out the family and its ruler, the father, no less cleanly than the old [authoritarian] political gangs and their leaders.” So they set out, with the backing of the U.S. government, to destroy that authority figure and replace it with emotional management via professional therapists and educational bureaucracies. It seems obvious that they succeeded pretty wildly in this pathologization of the authoritative father figure. How many young men and women feel they must turn first to the internet for advice and direction, even if they are lucky enough to have a father present in their lives? The result is a kind of widespread infantilization that many people fail to ever grow out of.

Lecture of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the 33rd Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp

• 27/07/2024
• Source: Cabinet Office Of The Prime Minister

Good morning Summer Camp and other Guests.

The first piece of good news is that my visit this year was not accompanied by the same kind of brouhaha as last year’s: this year we have not received – I have not received – a diplomatic démarche from Bucharest; what I received was an invitation to a meeting with the Prime Minister, which took place yesterday. Last year, when I had the opportunity to meet the Prime Minister of Romania, I said after the meeting that it was “the beginning of a beautiful friendship”; at the end of the meeting this year, I was able to say “We’re making progress”. If we look at the figures, we are setting new records in economic and trade relations between our two countries. Romania is now Hungary’s third most important economic partner. We also discussed with the Prime Minister a high-speed train – a “TGV” – linking Budapest to Bucharest, as well as Romania’s membership of Schengen. I have undertaken to put this issue on the agenda for the October Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting – and, if necessary, for the December Council meeting – and to take it forward if possible.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

We have not received a démarche from Bucharest, but – to prevent us getting bored – we have received one from Brussels: they have condemned the Hungarian peace mission efforts. I have tried – without success – to explain that there is such a thing as Christian duty. This means that if you see something bad in the world – especially something very bad – and you receive some instrument for its correction, then it is a Christian duty to take action, without undue contemplation or reflection. The Hungarian peace mission is about this duty. I would like to remind all of us that the EU has a founding treaty, which contains these exact words: “The Union’s aim is peace”. Brussels is also offended at our describing what they are doing as a pro-war policy. They say that they are supporting the war in the interest of peace. Central Europeans like us are immediately reminded of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who taught that with the advent of communism the state will die, but that the state will die while first constantly strengthening. Brussels is also creating peace by constantly supporting war. Just as we did not understand Lenin’s thesis in our university lectures on the history of the labour movement, I do not understand the Brusseleers in European Council meetings. Perhaps Orwell was right after all when he wrote that in “Newspeak” peace is war and war is peace. Despite all the criticism, let us remind ourselves that since the beginning of our peace mission the US and Russian war ministers have spoken to each other, the Swiss and Russian foreign ministers have held talks, President Zelenskyy has finally called President Trump, and the Ukrainian foreign minister has been to Beijing. So fermentation has begun, and we are slowly but surely moving from a pro-war European policy to a pro-peace policy. This is inevitable, because time is on the side of peace policy. Reality has dawned on the Ukrainians, and now it is up to the Europeans to come to their senses, before it is too late: “Trump ante portas”. If by then Europe does not switch to a policy of peace, then after Trump’s victory it will have to do so while admitting defeat, covered in shame, and admitting sole responsibility for its policy.

But, Ladies and Gentlemen, The subject of today’s presentation is not peace. Please regard what I have said so far as a digression. In fact, for those who are thinking about the future of the world, and of Hungarians within it, there are three big issues on the table today. The first is the war – or more precisely, an unexpected side-effect of the war. This is the fact that the war reveals the reality in which we live. This reality was not visible and could not be described earlier, but it has been illuminated by the blazing light of missiles fired in the war. The second big issue on the table is what will happen after the war. Will a new world come into being, or will the old one continue? And if a new world is coming – and this is our third big issue – how should Hungary prepare for this new world? The fact is that I need to talk about all three, and I need to talk about them here – first of all because these are the big issues that are best discussed in this “free university” format. From another point of view, we need a pan-Hungarian approach, as looking at these issues only from the point of view of a “Little Hungary” would be too constricting; it is therefore justified to talk about these issues in front of Hungarians outside our borders.

Dear Summer Camp,

These are big issues with manifold interrelations, and obviously even the esteemed audience cannot be expected to know all the important basic information, so from time to time I will need to digress. This is a tough task: we have three topics, one morning, and a ruthless moderator. I have chosen the following approach: to speak at length about the real situation of power in Europe as revealed by the war; then to give some glimpses of the new world that is in the making; and finally to refer – rather in the manner of a list, without explanation or argumentation – to the Hungarian plans related to this. This method has the advantage of also setting the theme for next year’s presentation.

The undertaking is ambitious, and even courageous: we must ask ourselves whether we can undertake it at all, and whether it might be beyond our ability. I think it is a realistic endeavour, because over the past year – or two or three years – some superb studies and books have been published in Hungary and abroad, and translators have also made these available to the Hungarian public. On the other hand, with all due modesty we must remind ourselves that we are the longest-serving government in Europe. I myself am the longest-serving European leader – and I should quietly point out that I am also the leader who has spent the longest time in opposition. So I have seen everything that I will talk about now. I am talking about something that I have lived through and continue to live through. Whether I have understood it is another question; that is something we will find out at the end of this presentation.

So, about the reality revealed by the war. Dear Friends, the war is our red pill. Think of the “Matrix” films. The hero is faced with a choice. He has two pills to choose from: if he swallows the blue pill, he can stay in the world of surface appearances; if he swallows the red pill, he can look into and descend into reality. The war is our red pill: it is what we have been given, it is what we must swallow. And now, armed with new experiences, we must talk about reality. It is a cliché that war is the continuation of policy with other means. It is important to add that war is the continuation of policy from a different perspective. So war, in its relentlessness, takes us to a new position from which to see things, to a high vantage point. And from there it gives us a completely different – hitherto unknown – perspective. We find ourselves in new surroundings and in a new, rarefied force field. In this pure reality, ideologies lose their power; statistical sleights of hand lose their power; media distortions and politicians’ tactical dissimulation loses its power. There is no longer any relevance to widespread delusions – or even to conspiracy theories. What remains is the stark, brutal reality. It’s a pity our friend Gyula Tellér is no longer with us, because now we would be able to hear some surprising things from him. Since he is no longer with us, however, you will have to make do with me. But I think there will be no shortage of shocks. For the sake of clarity, I have made bullet points of everything we have seen since we swallowed the red pill: since the outbreak of the war in February 2022.

Firstly, the war has seen brutal losses – numbering in the hundreds of thousands – suffered by both sides. I have recently met them, and I can say with certainty that they do not want to come to terms. Why is this? There are two reasons. The first is that each of them thinks that they can win, and wants to fight until victory. The second is that both are fuelled by their own real or perceived truth. The Ukrainians think that this is a Russian invasion, a violation of international law and territorial sovereignty, and they are in fact fighting a war of self-defence for their independence. The Russians think that there have been serious NATO military developments in Ukraine, Ukraine has been promised NATO membership, and they do not want to see NATO troops or NATO weapons on the Russian–Ukrainian border. So they say that Russia has the right to self-defence, and that in fact this war has been provoked. So everyone has some kind of truth, perceived or real, and will not give up fighting the war. This is a road leading directly to escalation; if it depends on these two sides, there will be no peace. Peace can only be brought in from outside.

Secondly: in years gone by we had got used to the United States declaring its main challenger or opponent to be China; yet now we see it waging a proxy war against Russia. And China is constantly accused of covertly supporting Russia. If this is the case, then we need to answer the question of why it is sensible to corral two such large countries together into a hostile camp. This question has yet to be answered in any meaningful way.

Thirdly: Ukraine’s strength, its resilience, has exceeded all expectations. After all, since 1991 eleven million people have left the country, it has been ruled by oligarchs, corruption sky-high, and the state had essentially ceased functioning. And yet now we are seeing unprecedentedly successful resistance from it. Despite the conditions described here, Ukraine is in fact a strong country. The question is what the source of this strength is. Apart from its military past and individuals’ personal heroism, there is something worth understanding here: Ukraine has found a higher purpose, it has discovered a new meaning to its existence. Because up until now, Ukraine saw itself as a buffer zone. To be a buffer zone is psychologically debilitating: there is a sense of helplessness, a feeling that one’s fate is not in one’s own hands. This is a consequence of such a doubly exposed position. Now, however, there is the dawning prospect of belonging to the West. Ukraine’s new self-authored mission is to be the West’s eastern military frontier region. The meaning and importance of its existence has increased in its own eyes and in the eyes of the whole world. This has brought it into a state of activity and action, which we non-Ukrainians see as aggressive insistence – and there’s no denying that it is quite aggressive and insistent. It is in fact the Ukrainians’ demand for their higher purpose to be officially recognised internationally. This is what gives them the strength that makes them capable of unprecedented resistance.

Fourthly: Russia is not what we have so far seen it to be, and Russia is not what we have so far been led to see it as. The country’s economic viability is outstanding. I remember being at European Council meetings – the prime ministers’ summits – when, with all sorts of gestures, Europe’s great leaders rather hubristically claimed that the sanctions against Russia and the exclusion of Russia from the so-called SWIFT system, the international financial clearing system, would bring Russia to its knees. They would bring the Russian economy to its knees, and through that the Russian political elite. As I watch events unfold, I am reminded of the wisdom of Mike Tyson, who once said that “Everyone has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.” Because the reality is that the Russians have learned lessons from the sanctions imposed after the 2014 invasion of Crimea – and not only have they learned those lessons, but they have translated those lessons into action. They implemented the necessary IT and banking improvements. So the Russian financial system is not collapsing. They have developed the ability to adapt, and after 2014 we fell victim to this, because we used to export a significant proportion of Hungarian food produce to Russia. We could not continue to do so because of the sanctions, the Russians modernised their agriculture, and today we are talking about one of the world’s largest food export markets; this is a country that used to have to rely on imports. So the way that Russia is described to us – as a rigid neo-Stalinist autocracy – is false. In fact we are talking about a country that displays technical and economic resilience – and perhaps also societal resilience, but we’ll see.

The fifth important new lesson from reality: European policy-making has collapsed. Europe has given up defending its own interests: all that Europe is doing today is unconditionally following the foreign policy line of the US Democrats – even at the cost of its own self-destruction. The sanctions we have imposed are damaging fundamental European interests: they are driving up energy prices and making the European economy uncompetitive. We let the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline go unchallenged; Germany itself let an act of terrorism against its own property – which was obviously carried out under US direction – go unchallenged, and we are not saying a word about it, we are not investigating it, we do not want to clarify it, we do not want to raise it in a legal context. In the same way, we failed to do the right thing in the case of the phone tapping of Angela Merkel, which was carried out with the assistance of Denmark. So this is nothing but an act of submission. There is a context here which is complicated, but I will try to give you a necessarily simplified but comprehensive account of it. European policy-making has also collapsed since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war because the core of the European power system was the Paris–Berlin axis, which used to be inescapable: it was the core and it was the axis. Since the war broke out, a different centre and a different axis of power has been established. The Berlin–Paris axis no longer exists – or if it does, it has become irrelevant and liable to be bypassed. The new power centre and axis comprises London, Warsaw, Kiev/Kyiv, the Baltics and the Scandinavians. When, to the astonishment of Hungarians, one sees the German chancellor announcing that he is only sending helmets to the war, and then a week later he announces that he is in fact sending weapons, do not think that the man has lost his mind. Then when the same German chancellor announces that there may be sanctions, but that they must not cover energy, and then two weeks later he himself is at the head of the sanctions policy, do not think that the man has lost his mind. On the contrary, he is very much in his right mind. He is well aware that the Americans and the liberal opinion-forming vehicles they influence – universities, think tanks, research institutes, the media – are using public opinion to punish Franco–German policy that is not in line with American interests. This is why we have the phenomenon that I have been talking about, and this is why we have the German chancellor’s idiosyncratic blunders. Changing the centre of power in Europe and bypassing the Franco–German axis is not a new idea – it has simply been made possible by the war. The idea existed before, in fact being an old Polish plan to solve the problem of Poland being squeezed between a huge German state and a huge Russian state, by making Poland the number one American base in Europe. I could describe it as inviting the Americans there, between the Germans and the Russians. Five per cent of Poland’s GDP is now devoted to military expenditure, and the Polish army is the second largest in Europe after the French – we are talking about hundreds of thousands of troops. This is an old plan, to weaken Russia and outpace Germany. At first sight, outpacing the Germans seems to be a fantasy idea. But if you look at the dynamics of the development of Germany and Central Europe, of Poland, it does not seem so impossible – especially if in the meantime Germany is dismantling its own world-class industry. This strategy caused Poland to give up cooperation with the V4. The V4 meant something different: the V4 means that we recognise that there is a strong Germany and there is a strong Russia, and – working with the Central European states – we create a third entity between the two. The Poles have backed out of this and, instead of the V4 strategy of accepting the Franco–German axis, they have embarked on the alternative strategy of eliminating the Franco–German axis. Talking of our Polish brothers and sisters, let us mention them here in passing. Since they have now kicked our backsides black and blue, perhaps we can allow ourselves to say a few sincere, fraternal home truths about them. Well, the Poles are pursuing the most sanctimonious and hypocritical policy in the whole of Europe. They lecture us on moral grounds, they criticise us for our economic relations with Russia, and at the same time they are blithely doing business with the Russians, buying their oil – albeit via indirect routes – and running the Polish economy with it. The French are better than that: last month, incidentally, they overtook us in gas purchases from Russia – but at least they do not lecture us on moral grounds. The Poles are both doing business and lecturing us. I have not seen a policy of such rank hypocrisy in Europe in the last ten years. The scale of this change – of bypassing the German–French axis – can truly be grasped by older people if they perhaps think back twenty years, when the Americans attacked Iraq and called on the European countries to join in. We, for example, joined in as a member of NATO. At the time Schröder, the then German chancellor, and Chirac, the then French president, were joined by President Putin of Russia at a joint press conference called in opposition to the Iraq war. At that time there was still an independent Franco–German logic when approaching European interests.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The peace mission is not just about seeking peace, but is also about urging Europe to finally pursue an independent policy. Red pill number six: the spiritual solitude of the West. Up until now the West has thought and behaved as if it sees itself as a reference point, a kind of benchmark for the world. It has provided the values that the world has had to accept – for example, liberal democracy or the green transition. But most of the world has noticed this, and in the last two years there has been a 180-degree turn. Once again the West has declared its expectation, its instruction, for the world to take a moral stand against Russia and for the West. In contrast, the reality has become that, step-by-step, everyone is siding with Russia. That China and North Korea are doing so is perhaps no surprise. That Iran is doing the same – given Iran’s history and its relationship with Russia – is somewhat surprising. But the fact that India, which the Western world calls the most populous democracy, is also on the side of the Russians is astonishing. That Turkey refuses to accept the West’s morally based demands, even though it is a NATO member, is truly surprising. And the fact that the Muslim world sees Russia not as an enemy but as a partner is completely unexpected.

Seventhly: the war has exposed the fact that the biggest problem the world faces today is the weakness and disintegration of the West. Of course, this is not what the Western media says: in the West they claim that the world’s greatest danger and problem is Russia and the threat it represents. This is wrong! Russia is too large for its population, and it is also under hyper-rational leadership – indeed it is a country that has leadership. There is nothing mysterious about what it does: its actions follow logically from its interests, and are therefore understandable and predictable. On the other hand, the behaviour of the West – as may be clear from what I have said so far – is not understandable and not predictable. The West is not led, its behaviour is not rational, and it cannot deal with the situation that I described in my presentation here last year: the fact that two suns have appeared in the sky. This is the challenge to the West in the form of the rise of China and Asia. We should be able to deal with this, but we are not able to.

Point eight. Arising from this, for us the real challenge is to once again try to understand the West in the light of the war. Because we Central Europeans see the West as irrational. But, Dear Friends, what if it is behaving logically, but we do not understand its logic? If it is logical in the way it thinks and acts, then we must ask why we do not understand it. And if we could find the answer to this question, we would also understand why Hungary regularly clashes with the Western countries of the European Union on geopolitical and foreign policy issues. My answer is the following. Let us imagine that the worldview of us Central Europeans is based on nation states. Meanwhile the West thinks that nation states no longer exist; this is unimaginable to us, but all the same this is what it thinks. The coordinate system within which we Central Europeans think is therefore completely irrelevant. In our conception, the world is made up of nation states which exercise a domestic monopoly on the use of force, thereby creating a condition of general peace. In its relations with other states the nation state is sovereign – in other words, it has the capacity to independently determine its foreign and domestic policy. In our conception, the nation state is not a legal abstraction, not a legal construct: the nation state is rooted in a particular culture. It has a shared set of values, it has anthropological and historical depth. And from this emerge shared moral imperatives based on a joint consensus. This is what we think of as the nation state. What is more, we do not see it as a phenomenon that developed in the 19th century: we believe that nation states have a biblical basis, since they belong to the order of creation. For in Scripture we read that at the end of time there will be judgement not only of individuals but also of nations. Consequently, in our conception nations are not provisional formations. But in complete contrast Westerners believe that nation states no longer exist. They therefore deny the existence of a shared culture and a shared morality based on it. They have no shared morality; if you watched the Olympic opening ceremony yesterday, that is what you saw. This is why they think differently about migration. They think that migration is not a threat or a problem, but in fact a way of escaping from the ethnic homogeneity that is the basis of a nation. This is the essence of the progressive liberal internationalist conception of space. This is why they are oblivious to the absurdity – or they do not see it as absurd – that while in the eastern half of Europe hundreds of thousands of Christians are killing one another, in the west of Europe we are letting in hundreds of thousands of people from foreign civilisations. From our Central European point of view this is the definition of absurdity. This idea is not even conceived of in the West. In parenthesis I note that the European states lost a total of some fifty-seven million indigenous Europeans in the First and Second World Wars. If they, their children and their grandchildren had lived, today Europe would not have any demographic problems. The European Union does not simply think in the way I am describing, but it declares it. If we read the European documents carefully, it is clear that the aim is to supersede the nation. It is true that they have a strange way of writing and saying this, stating that nation states must be superseded, while some small trace of them remains. But the point is that, after all, powers and sovereignty should be transferred from the nation states to Brussels. This is the logic behind every major measure. In their minds, the nation is a historical or transitional creation, born of the 18th and 19th centuries – and as it arrived, so may it depart. For them, the western half of Europe is already post-national. This is not only a politically different situation, but what I am trying to talk about here is that this is a new mental space. If you do not look at the world from the point of view of nation states, a completely different reality opens up before you. Herein lies the problem, the reason that the countries in the western eastern halves of Europe do not understand one another, the reason we cannot pull together.

If we project all of this onto the United States, this is the real battle that is going on over there. What should the United States be? Should it become a nation state again, or should it continue its march towards a post-national state? President Donald Trump’s precise goal is to bring the American people back from the post-national liberal state, to drag them back, to force them back, to raise them back to the nation state. This is why the stakes in the US election are so enormous. This is why we are seeing things that we have never seen before. This is why they want to prevent Donald Trump from running in the election. This is why they want to put him in jail. This is why they want to take away his assets. And if that does not work, this is why they want to kill him. And let there be no doubt that what happened may not be the last attempt in this campaign.

In parenthesis, I spoke to the President yesterday and he asked me how I was doing. I said that I was great, because I am here in a geographical entity called Transylvania. Explaining this is not so easy, especially in English, and especially to President Trump. But I said that I was here in Transylvania at a free university where I was going to give a presentation on the state of the world. And he said that I must pass on his personal heartfelt greetings to the attendees at the camp and those at the free university.

Now, if we try to understand how this Western thinking – which for the sake of simplicity we should call “post-national” thinking and condition – came about, then we have to go back to the grand illusion of the 1960s. The grand illusion of the 1960s took two forms: the first was the sexual revolution, and the second was student rebellion. In fact, it was an expression of the belief that the individual would be freer and greater if he or she were freed from any kind of collective. More than sixty years later it has since become clear that, on the contrary, the individual can only become great through and in a community, that when alone he or she can never be free, but always lonely and doomed to be shrunken. In the West bonds have been successively discarded: the metaphysical bonds that are God; the national bonds that are the homeland; and family bonds – discarding the family. I am referring again to the opening of the Paris Olympics. Now that they have managed to get rid of all that, expecting the individual to become greater, they find that they feel a sense of emptiness. They have not become great, but have become small. For in the West they no longer desire either great ideals or great, inspiring shared goals.

Here we must talk about the secret of greatness. What is the secret of greatness? The secret of greatness is to be able to serve something greater than yourself. To do this, you first have to acknowledge that in the world there is something or some things that are greater than you, and then you must dedicate yourself to serving those greater things. There are not many of these. You have your God, your country and your family. But if you do not do that, but instead you focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on that, on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity. And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluity that goes with it gives rise to aggression. Hence the emergence of the “aggressive dwarf” as a new type of person.

To sum up, what I want to say to you is that when we talk about Central Europe and Western Europe, we are not talking about differences of opinion, but about two different worldviews, two mentalities, two instincts, and hence two different arguments. We have a nation state, which forces us towards strategic realism. They have post-nationalist dreams that are inert to national sovereignty, do not recognise national greatness, and have no shared national goals. This is the reality we have to face.

And finally, the last element of reality is that this post-national condition that we see in the West has a serious – and I would say dramatic – political consequence that is convulsing democracy. Because within societies there is growing resistance to migration, to gender, to war and to globalism. And this creates the political problem of the elite and the people – of elitism and populism. This is the defining phenomenon of Western politics today. If you read the texts, you do not need to understand them, and they do not always make sense anyway; but if you read the words, the following are the expressions you will find most often. They indicate that the elites are condemning the people for drifting towards the Right. The feelings and ideas of the people are labelled as xenophobia, homophobia and nationalism. In response, the people accuse the elite of not caring about what is important to them, but of sinking into some kind of deranged globalism. Consequently the elites and the people cannot agree with each other on the question of cooperation. I could mention many countries. But if the people and the elites cannot agree on cooperation, how can this produce representative democracy? Because we have an elite that does not want to represent the people, and is proud of not wanting to represent them; and we have the people, who are not represented. In fact in the Western world we are faced with a situation in which the masses of people appearing with college degrees no longer form less than 10 per cent of the population, but 30 to 40 per cent. And because of their views these people do not respect those who are less educated – who are typically working people, people who live from their labour. For the elites, only the values of graduates are acceptable, only they are legitimate. This is the viewpoint from which the results of the European Parliament elections can be understood. The European People’s Party garnered the votes of “plebeians” on the Right who wanted change, then took those votes to the Left and made a deal with the left-wing elites who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. This has consequences for the European Union. The consequence is that Brussels remains under the occupation of a liberal oligarchy. This oligarchy has it in its grip. This left-liberal elite is in fact organising a transatlantic elite: not European, but global; not based on the nation state, but federal; and not democratic, but oligarchic. This also has consequences for us, because in Brussels the “3 Ps” are back: “prohibited, permitted and promoted”. We belong to the prohibited category. The Patriots for Europe have therefore been prohibited from receiving any positions. We live in the world of the permitted political community. Meanwhile our domestic opponents – especially the newcomers to the European People’s Party – are in the strongly promoted category.

And perhaps one last, tenth point, is about how Western values – which were the essence of so-called “soft power” – have become a boomerang. It has turned out that these Western values, which were thought to be universal, are demonstratively unacceptable and rejected in ever more countries around the world. It has turned out that modernity, modern development, is not Western, or at least not exclusively Western – because China is modern, India is becoming increasingly modern, and the Arabs and Turks are modernising; and they are not becoming a modern world on the basis of Western values at all. And in the meantime Western soft power has been replaced by Russian soft power, because now the key to the propagation of Western values is LGBTQ. Anyone who does not accept this is now in the “backward” category as far as the Western world is concerned. I do not know if you have been watching, but I think it is remarkable that in the last six months pro-LGBTQ laws have been passed by countries such as Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan. But the world does not agree. Consequently, today Putin’s strongest tactical weapon is the Western imposition of LGBTQ and resistance to it, opposition to it. This has become Russia’s strongest international attraction; thus what used to be Western soft power has now been transformed into Russian soft power – like a boomerang.

All in all, Ladies and Gentlemen, I can say that the war has helped us to understand the real state of power in the world. It is a sign that in its mission the West has shot itself in the foot, and is therefore accelerating the changes that are transforming the world. My first presentation is over. Now comes the second.

What comes next? It needs to be shorter, Zsolt Németh says. So the second presentation is about what follows from this. First, intellectual courage is needed here. So you have to work with broad brushstrokes, because I am convinced that the fate of the Hungarians depends on whether they understand what is happening in the world, and whether we Hungarians understand what the world will be like after the war. In my opinion a new world is coming. We cannot be accused of having a narrow imagination or of intellectual inertia, but even we – and I personally, when I have spoken here in recent years – have underestimated the scale of the change that is happening and that we are living through.

Dear Friends, Dear Summer Camp,

We are in a change, a change is coming, that has not been seen for five hundred years. This has not been apparent to us because in the last 150 years there have been great changes in and around us, but in these changes the dominant world power has always been in the West. And our starting point is that the changes we are seeing now are likely to follow this Western logic. By contrast, this is a new situation. In the past, change was Western: the Habsburgs rose and then fell; Spain was up, and it became the centre of power; it fell, and the English rose; the First World War finished off the monarchies; The British were replaced by the Americans as world leaders; then the Russo–American Cold War was won by the Americans. But all these developments remained within our Western logic. This is not the case now, however, and this is what we must face up to; because the Western world is not challenged from within the Western world, and so the logic of change has been disrupted. What I am talking about, and what we are facing, is actually a global system change. And this is a process that is coming from Asia. To put it succinctly and primitively, for the next many decades – or perhaps centuries, because the previous world system was in place for five hundred years – the dominant centre of the world will be in Asia: China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and I could go on. They have already created their forms, their platforms, there is this BRICS formation in which they are already present. And there is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which these countries are building the new world economy. I think that this is an inevitable process, because Asia has the demographic advantage, it has the technological advantage in ever more areas, it has the capital advantage, and it is bringing its military power up to equilibrium with that of the West. Asia will have – or perhaps already has – the most money, the largest financial funds, the largest companies in the world, the best universities, the best research institutes, and the largest stock exchanges. It will have – or already has – the most advanced space research and the most advanced medical science. In addition, we in the West – even the Russians – have been well shepherded into this new entity that is taking shape. The question is whether or not the process is reversible – and if not, when it became irreversible. I think it happened in 2001, when we in the West decided to invite China to join the World Trade Organisation – better known as the WTO. Since then this process has been almost unstoppable and irreversible.

President Trump is working on finding the American response to this situation. In fact, Donald Trump’s attempt is probably the last chance for the US to retain its world supremacy. We could say that four years is not enough, but if you look at who he has chosen as Vice President, a young and very strong man, if Donald Trump wins now, in four years his Vice President will run. He can serve two terms, and that will total twelve years. And in twelve years a national strategy can be implemented. I am convinced that many people think that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the Americans will want to retain their world supremacy by maintaining their position in the world. I think that this is wrong. Of course, no one gives up positions of their own accord, but that will not be the most important goal. On the contrary, the priority will be to rebuild and strengthen North America. This means not only the US, but also Canada and Mexico, because together they form an economic area. And America’s place in the world will be less important. You have to take what the President says seriously: “America First, everything here, everything will come home!” This is why the capacity to raise capital from everywhere is being developed. We are already suffering as a result: the big European companies are not investing in Europe, but are investing in America, because the ability to attract capital seems to be on the horizon. They are going to squeeze the price of everything out of everyone. I do not know whether you have read what the President said. For example, they are not an insurance company, and if Taiwan wants security, it should pay. They will make us Europeans, NATO and China pay the price of security; and they will also achieve a trade balance with China through negotiations, and change it in favour of the US. They will trigger massive US infrastructure development, military research, and innovation. They will achieve – or perhaps have already achieved – energy self-sufficiency and raw material self-sufficiency; and finally they will improve ideologically, giving up on the export of democracy. America First. The export of democracy is at an end. This is the essence of the experiment America is conducting in response to the situation described here.

What is the European response to global system change? We have two options. The first is what we call “the open-air museum”. This is what we have now. We are moving towards it. Europe, absorbed by the US, will be left in an underdeveloped role. It will be a continent that the world marvels at, but one which no longer has within it the dynamic for development. The second option, announced by President Macron, is strategic autonomy. In other words, we must enter the competition of global system change. After all, this is what the USA does, according to its own logic. And we are indeed talking about 400 million people. It is possible to recreate Europe’s capacity to attract capital, and it is possible to bring capital back from America. It is possible to make major infrastructure developments, especially in Central Europe – the Budapest–Bucharest TGV and the Warsaw–Budapest TGV, to mention what we are involved in. We need a European military alliance with a strong European defence industry, research and innovation. We need European energy self-sufficiency, which will not be possible without nuclear energy. And after the war we need a new reconciliation with Russia. This means that the European Union must surrender its ambitions as a political project, the Union must strengthen itself as an economic project, and the Union must create itself as a defence project. In both cases – the open-air museum or if we join the competition – what will happen is that we must be prepared for the fact that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO or the European Union, because we Europeans do not have enough money for that. Ukraine will return to the position of a buffer state. If it is lucky, this will come with international security guarantees, which will be enshrined in a US–Russia agreement, in which we Europeans may be able to participate. The Polish experiment will fail, because they do not have the resources: they will have to return to Central Europe and the V4. So let us wait for the Polish brothers and sisters to return. The second presentation is over. There is only one left. This is about Hungary.

What should Hungary do in this situation? First of all, let us record the sad fact that five hundred years ago, at the time of the last global system change, Europe was the winner and Hungary the loser. It was a time when, thanks to geographical discoveries, a new economic space opened up in the western half of Europe – one in which we were completely unable to participate. Unfortunately for us, at the same time a civilisational conflict also kicked down our door, with Islamic conquest arriving in Hungary, making us a war zone for many years. This resulted in a huge loss of population, leading to resettlement – the consequences of which we can see today. And unfortunately we did not have the capacity to break out of this situation on our own. We could not liberate ourselves by our own efforts, and so for several centuries we had to be annexed to a Germanic Habsburg world.

Let us also remind ourselves that five hundred years ago the Hungarian elite fully understood what was happening. They understood the nature of the change, but they did not have the means that would have enabled them to prepare the country for that change. This was the reason for the failure of the attempts to expand the space – the political, economic and military space – and to avoid trouble: the attempts to cut our way out of the situation. Such an attempt was made by King Matthias, who – following Sigismund’s example – sought to become Holy Roman Emperor, and thus involve Hungary in the global system change. This failed. But I would also include here the attempt to have Tamás Bakócz appointed as Pope, which would have given us another opportunity to become a winner in this global system change. But these attempts did not succeed. Therefore the Hungarian symbol of this era, the symbol of Hungarian failure, is [military defeat at] Mohács. In other words, the beginning of the West’s world power dominance coincided with the decline of Hungary.

This is important, because now we must clarify our relationship to the new global system change. We have two possibilities: Is this now a threat for Hungary, or an opportunity for Hungary? If it is a threat, then we must pursue a policy of protecting the status quo: we must swim along with the United States and the European Union, and we must identify our national interests with one or both branches of the West. If we see this not as a threat but as an opportunity, we need to chart our own development path, make changes and take the initiative. In other words, it will be worth pursuing a nationally-oriented policy. I believe in the latter, I belong to the latter school: the current global system change is not a threat, not primarily a threat, but rather an opportunity.

If, however, we want to pursue our independent national policy, the question is whether we have the necessary boundary conditions. In other words, would we be in danger of being trodden on – or, rather, being trampled on. So the question is whether or not we have the boundary conditions for our own path in our relations with the USA, the European Union and Asia.

In short, I can only say that developments in the US are moving in our favour. I do not believe that we will get an economic and political offer from the United States that will create a better opportunity for us than membership of the European Union. If we do get one, we should consider it. Of course the Polish trap is to be avoided: they have bet a lot on one card, but there was a Democratic government in America; they have been helped in their strategic Polish national goals, but the Poles are subject to the imposition of a policy of democracy export, LGBTQ, migration and internal social transformation which actually risks the loss of their national identity. So if there is an offer from America, we need to consider it carefully.

If we look at Asia and China, we have to say that there the boundary conditions exist – because we have received an offer from China. We have received the maximum offer possible, and we will not get a better one. This can be summarised as follows: China is very far away, and for them Hungary’s membership of the European Union is an asset. This is unlike the Americans, who are always telling us that perhaps we should get out. The Chinese think that we are in a good place here – even though EU membership is a constraint, because we cannot pursue an independent trade policy, as EU membership comes with a common trade policy. To this the Chinese say that this being the case, we should participate in each other’s modernisation. Of course, when lions offer an invitation to a mouse, one must always be alert, because after all reality and relative sizes do matter. But this Chinese offer to participate in each other’s modernisation – announced during the Chinese president’s visit in May – means that they are willing to invest a large proportion of their resources and development funds in Hungary, and that they are willing to offer us opportunities to participate in the Chinese market.

What is the consequence for EU–Hungary relations if we consider our membership of the EU as a boundary condition? As I see it, the western part of the European Union is no longer on course to return to the nation state model. Therefore they will continue to navigate in what to us are unfamiliar waters. The eastern part of the Union – in other words us – can defend our condition as nation states. That is something we are capable of. The Union has lost the current war. The US will abandon it. Europe cannot finance the war, it cannot finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, and it cannot finance the running of Ukraine.

In parenthesis, while Ukraine is asking us for more loans, negotiations are underway to write off the loans it has previously taken out. Today the creditors and Ukraine are arguing over whether it should repay 20 per cent or 60 per cent of the debt it has taken on. This is the reality of the situation. In other words, the European Union has to pay the price of this military adventure. This price will be high, and it will affect us adversely. As a boundary condition, the consequence for us – for Europe – is that the European Union will acknowledge that the Central European countries will remain in the European Union, while remaining on nation-state foundations and pursuing their own foreign policy objectives. They may not like it, but they will have to put up with it – especially as the number of such countries will increase.

All in all, therefore, I can say that the boundary conditions exist for independent nationally-oriented policy towards America, Asia and Europe. These will define the limits of our room for manoeuvre. This space is wide – wider than it has been at any time in the last five hundred years. The next question is what we need to do to use this space to our advantage. If there is a global system change, then we need a strategy that is worthy of it.

If there is a global system change, then we need a grand strategy for Hungary. Here the order of words is important: we do not need a strategy for a grand Hungary, but a grand strategy for Hungary. This means that up to now we have had small strategies, usually with a 2030 time horizon. These are action plans, they are policy programmes, and they have been intended to take what we started in 2010 – what we call national course building – and simply finish it. They have to be followed through. But in a time of global system change this is not enough. For that we need a grand strategy, a longer timeframe – especially if we assume that this global system change will lead to a stable long-term state of affairs that will last for centuries. Whether this will be the case will, of course, be for our grandchildren to say at Tusnád/Tușnad in 2050.

How do we stand with Hungary’s grand strategy? Is there a grand strategy for Hungary in our drawer? There would be, and in fact there is. This is the answer. Because over the past two years the war has spurred us on. Here some things have happened that we have decided to do in order to create a grand strategy – even if we have not talked about them in this context. We immediately started working on such a grand strategy after the 2022 election. Unusually, the Hungarian government has a political director whose job is actually to put together this grand strategy. We have entered the programme-writing system of President Donald Trump’s team, and we have deep involvement there. For some time researchers at the Magyar Nemzeti Bank [Hungarian National Bank] have been taking part in strategy workshops in Asia – particularly in China. And to turn our disadvantage into an advantage, after we were forced into a ministerial change, we brought into the Government not a technocrat but a strategic thinker, and we created a separate European Union ministry with János Bóka. And so in Brussels we are not passive, but we have set up shop there: we are not moving out, but moving in. And there are a number of such soft power institutions associated with the Hungarian government – think tanks, research institutes, universities – which have been operating at full throttle over the past two years.

So there is a grand strategy for Hungary. What condition is it in? I can say that it is not yet in a good condition. It is not in a good condition because the language being used is too intellectual. And our political and competitive advantage comes precisely from the fact that we are able to create a unity with the people in which everyone can understand exactly what we are doing and why. This is the foundation for our ability to act together. Because people will only defend a plan if they understand it and see that it is good for them. Otherwise, if founded on Brusselian blah-blah, it will not work. Unfortunately, what we have now – the grand strategy for Hungary – is not yet digestible and widely comprehensible. It will take a good six months to get to that stage. Currently it is raw and coarse – I could even say that it was not written with a fountain pen, but with a chisel, and that we need to get through a lot more sandpaper to make it comprehensible. But for now, I will briefly present what there is.

So the essence of the grand strategy for Hungary – and now I will use intellectual language – is connectivity. This means that we will not allow ourselves to be locked into only one of either of the two emerging hemispheres in the world economy. The world economy will not be exclusively Western or Eastern. We have to be in both, in the Western and in the Eastern. This will come with consequences. The first. We will not get involved in the war against the East. We will not join in the formation of a technological bloc opposing the East, and we will not join in the formation of a trade bloc opposing the East. We are gathering friends and partners, not economic or ideological enemies. We are not taking the intellectually much easier path of latching on to someone, but we are going our own way. This is difficult – but then there is a reason that politics is described as an art.

The second chapter in the grand strategy is about spiritual foundations. At the core of this is the defence of sovereignty. I have already said enough about foreign policy, but this strategy also describes the economic basis of national sovereignty. In recent years we have been building a pyramid. At the top of it are the “national champions”. Below them are the internationally competitive medium-sized companies, below which are companies producing for the domestic market. At the bottom are small companies and sole traders. This is the Hungarian economy that can provide the basis for sovereignty. We have national champions in banking, energy, food, the production of basic agricultural goods, IT, telecommunications, media, civil engineering, building construction, real estate development, pharmaceuticals, defence, logistics, and – to some extent, through the universities – knowledge industries. And these are our national champions. They are not just champions at home, but they are all out there in the international arena and they have proven themselves competitive. Below these come our medium-sized companies. I would like to inform you that today Hungary has fifteen thousand medium-sized companies that are internationally active and competitive. When we came to power in 2010, the number was three thousand. Today we have fifteen thousand. And of course we need to broaden the base of small enterprises and sole traders. If by 2025 we can draw up a peace budget and not a war budget, we will launch an extensive programme for small and medium-sized enterprises. The economic basis for sovereignty also means that we must strengthen our financial independence. We need to bring our debt down not to 50 or 60 per cent, but close to 30 per cent; and we need to emerge as a regional creditor. Today we are already making attempts to do this, and Hungary is providing state loans to friendly countries in our region that are in some way important to Hungary. It is important that, according to the strategy, we must remain a production hub: we must not switch to a service-oriented economy. The service sector is important, but we must retain the character of Hungary as a production hub, because only in this way can there be full employment in the domestic labour market. We must not repeat the West’s mistake of using guest workers to do certain production work, because over there members of host populations already consider certain types of work to be beneath them. If this were to happen in Hungary, it would induce a process of social dissolution that would be difficult to halt. And, for the defence of sovereignty, this chapter also includes the building of university and innovation centres.

The third chapter identifies the body of the grand strategy: the Hungarian society that we are talking about. If we are to be winners, this Hungarian society must be solid and resilient. It must have a solid and resilient social structure. The first prerequisite for this is halting demographic decline. We started well, but now we have stalled. A new impetus is needed. By 2035 Hungary must be demographically self-sustaining. There can be no question of population decline being compensated for by migration. The Western experience is that if there are more guests than hosts, then home is no longer home. This is a risk that must not be taken. Therefore, if after the end of the war we can draw up a peace budget, then to regain the momentum of demographic improvement the tax credit for families with children will probably need to be doubled in 2025 – in two steps not one, but within one year. “Sluice gates” must control the inflow from Western Europe of those who want to live in a Christian national country. The number of such people will continue to grow. Nothing will be automatic, and we will be selective. Up until now they have been selective, but now we are the ones who will be selective. For society to be stable and resilient it must be based on a middle-class: families must have their own wealth and financial independence. Full employment must be preserved, and the key to this will be to maintain the current relationship between work and the Roma population. There will be work, and you cannot live without work. This is the deal and this is the essence of what is on offer. Also linked to this is the system of Hungarian villages, which is a special asset in Hungarian history, and not a symbol of backwardness. The Hungarian village system must be preserved. An urban level of services also needs to be provided by us in villages. The financial burden of this must be borne by towns and cities. We will not create megacities, we will not create big cities, but we want to create towns and rural areas around towns, while preserving the historical heritage of the Hungarian village.

And finally there is the crucial element of sovereignty, with which we have arrived here on the banks of the River Olt. We have reduced this to a minimum, fearing that otherwise Zsolt might take the microphone from us. This is the essence of the protection of sovereignty, which is the protection of national distinctiveness. This is not assimilation, not integration, not blending in, but the maintenance of our own particular national character. This is the cultural basis of the defence of sovereignty: language preservation, and avoiding a state of “zero religion”. Zero religion is a state in which faith has long disappeared, but there has also been the loss of the capacity for Christian tradition to provide us with cultural and moral rules of behaviour that govern our relationship to work, money, family, sexual relations, and the order of priorities in how we relate to one another. This is what Westerners have lost. I think that this state of zero religion comes about when same-sex marriage is recognised as an institution with a status equal to that of marriage between men and women. That is a state of zero religion, in which Christianity no longer provides a moral compass and guidance. This must be avoided at all costs. And so when we fight for the family, we are not just fighting for the honour of the family, but for the maintenance of a state in which Christianity at least still provides moral guidance for our community.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

And finally, this Hungarian grand strategy must not start from “Little Hungary”. This grand strategy for Hungary must be based on national foundations, it must include all areas inhabited by Hungarians, and it must embrace all Hungarians living anywhere in the world. Little Hungary alone – Little Hungary as the sole framework – will be insufficient. For this reason I dare not give a date, because we would have to stick to it. But within the foreseeable future all the support that serves the stability and resilience of Hungarian society – such as the family support system – must be extended in its entirety to areas inhabited by Hungarians outside the country’s borders. This is not going in a bad direction, because if I look back at the amounts spent on these areas by the Hungarian state since 2010, I can say that we have spent an average of 100 billion forints a year. By way of comparison, I can say that during the [Socialist] government of Ferenc Gyurcsány, the annual expenditure on this was 9 billion forints. Now we are spending 100 billion a year. So that’s a more than tenfold increase.

And then the only question is this: When the grand strategy for Hungary is in place, what kind of policy can be used to make it a success? First of all, for a grand strategy to succeed, we need to know ourselves very well. Because the policy we want to use to make a strategy a success must be suited to our national character. To this, of course, we can say that we are diverse. This is particularly true for Hungarians. But there are nevertheless shared essential features, and this is what the strategy must target and fix on. And if we understand this, then we do not need compromises or consolidation, but we need to take a firm stand. I believe that, in addition to diversity, the essence – the shared essence that we must grasp and on which we must build the Hungarian grand strategy – is the freedom which must also be built inwards: we must not only build the freedom of the nation, but we must also aim for the personal freedom of Hungarians. Because we are not a militarised country like the Russians or the Ukrainians. Nor are we hyper-disciplined like the Chinese. Unlike the Germans, we do not enjoy hierarchy. We do not enjoy upheaval, revolution and blasphemy like the French. Nor do we believe that we can survive without our state, our own state, as the Italians tend to think. For Hungarians order is not a value in itself, but a condition necessary for freedom, in which we can live undisturbed lives. The closest thing to the Hungarian sense and meaning of freedom is the expression summing up an undisturbed life: “My house, my home, my castle, my life, and I will decide what makes me feel comfortable in my own skin.” This is an anthropological, genetic and cultural characteristic of Hungarians, and the strategy must adapt to it. In other words, it must also be the starting point for politicians who want to carry the grand strategy to victory.

This process we are talking about – this global system change – will not take place in a year or two, but has already begun and will take another twenty to twenty-five years, and therefore during these twenty to twenty-five years it will be the subject of constant debate. Our opponents will constantly attack it. They will say that the process is reversible. They will say that we need integration instead of a separate national grand strategy. So they will constantly attack it and work on diverting it. They will constantly question not only the content of the grand strategy, but also the need for it. This is a fight that must now be committed to, but here one problem is the timeframe. Because if this is a process spanning twenty to twenty-five years, we have to admit that as we are not getting any younger, we will not be among those who finish it. The implementation of this grand strategy – especially the final phase – will certainly not be done by us, but mostly by young people who are now in their twenties and thirties. And when we think about politics, about how to implement such a strategy in political terms, we have to realise that in future generations there will essentially be only two positions – just as there are in our generation: there will be liberals and there will be nationalists. And I have to say that there will be liberal, slim-fit, avocado-latte, allergen-free, self-satisfied politicians on one side, and on the other side there will be streetwise young people of nationalist sympathies, with both feet firmly on the ground. Therefore we need to start recruiting young people – now, and for us. The opposition is constantly being organised and deployed to the battlefield by the liberal Zeitgeist. They have no need for recruitment efforts, because recruitment happens automatically. But our camp is different: the national camp will only come out at the sound of a trumpet, and can only rally under a flag that has been raised high. This is also true of young people. Therefore we need to find courageous young fighters with nationalist sentiments. We are looking for courageous young fighters with a national spirit.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen.

The transition from years of confinement in a maximum-security prison to standing here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and surreal shift.

The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence.

I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured – the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can i speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.

I apologise in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect in such a distinguished forum.

Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.

However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly. I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today.

Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank PACE for its 2020 resolution (2317), which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noted that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture called for my release.

I’m also grateful for PACE’s 2021 statement expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release.

And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights.

However, like so many of the efforts made in my case – whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens – none of them should have been necessary.

None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day.

This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.

I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism – to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now.

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better.

Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.

Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none.

We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance.

We revealed not just when and where these things happened but frequently the policies, the agreements, and structures behind them.

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world.

But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval.

In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing these policies.

The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations is simple: Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest.

WikiLeaks’ work was deeply rooted in the principles that this Assembly stands for.

Journalism that elevated freedom of information and the public’s right to know found its natural operational home in Europe.

I lived in Paris and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers in based in France, Germany, and Norway.

But 14 years ago the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, PFC Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq.

The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues.

The US government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and freeze our accounts.

The UK government took part in some of this retribution. It admitted at the European Court of Human Rights that it had unlawfully spied on my UK lawyers during this time.

Ultimately this harassment was legally groundless. President Obama’s Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed.

The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution.

In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA Director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of French political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.

We revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.

It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.

My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy.

This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.

The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain.

This Assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA.

PACE’s groundbreaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centres and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law.

In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to forty years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation.

His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it.

These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.

Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes.

The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and extradition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe.

In Mike Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA Director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA.

Indeed, acceding to Pompeo’s efforts, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness.

Manning was held in prison for over a year and fined a thousand dollars a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me.

She ended up attempting to take her own life.

We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources. But Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist.

By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way, and the US government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition.

The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years, while it, the US government, and the new president of Ecuador moved to shape the political, legal, and diplomatic grounds for my arrest.

When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without them no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy.

If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to – perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he may be extradited just like me.

Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit.

The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalisation of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my extradition, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users, by claiming that their secrecy laws have been violated.

The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here.

As one of the world’s two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere.

I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.

Journalism is not a crime; it is a pillar of a free and informed society.

Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone else.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this assembly, to the conservatives, social democrats, liberals, leftists, greens, and independents – who have supported me throughout this ordeal and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release.

It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties.

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads. I fear that unless norm setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late.

Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

Probably the most famous actor and theater man in Germany, Dieter #Hallervorden, has unexpectedly clearly, albeit in subtle lyrics, sided with the people bombed in the #Gaza Strip. The video shows harsh images with a sensitive song, not only for the Palestinian people, but also for a peaceful future for Israel.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States. Soul became the chic word. It popped up everywhere. Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc. Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.

The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized. While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume. It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior. It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void. At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best. Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.

The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.) His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception. “You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality and independence as I do.” Ah, soul!

Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.

Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.

Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”

Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an individual life.”

Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away. I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK, Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.” I didn’t know this. I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information). I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. He writes:

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.

Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become. “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in gratitude.

For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”

The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes: “What are we going to do about the CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA. Kennedy, Jr. writes:

Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless interventions.

Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency. She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians. Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?

Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent. They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe. Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.

And here we are in another presidential election year. When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh. I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time. It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny. It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes. Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history. They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands. They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector. But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will. The military needs good people. To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It’s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win. Ha! Ha! Never reject the system is always the message.

Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world. But we can pretend otherwise. For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. – all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.

That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.

What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can’t buy you money? Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government. For the truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.

Scotte Ritter has recently written the following about the CIA and its spearheading of the U.S. war against Russia through Ukraine:

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.

If this is soulful work, God help us.

Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.

“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.”

And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality. Eugene O’Neill could be humorous also. He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.

There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?” “No,” she replied, “but he’s breathing hard.”

Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc. Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Living in a technological world of the internet divorces us from real life as it passes into inert, abstract, and dead screen existence. It should not be surprising that people grow sick and tired of the steady streams of “news” that fills their days and nights. So much of the news is grotesque; propaganda abounds. Stories twisted right and left to tie minds into knots. After a while, as Macbeth tells us, life seems like “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world. This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda. A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely. Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness. Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.

Jonathan Crary, in a scathing critique of the digital world in Scorched Earth, puts it thus:

For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.

I agree with Crary. During my sickness, I did manage to read a few brief pieces, an essay, a short story, and a poem. Serendipitously, each confirmed the trend of my thinking over recent years as well as what my bodily discomfit was teaching me.

The first was an essay by the art critic John Berger about the abstract expressionist, avant-garde painter Jackson Pollock, titled “A Kind of Sharing.” It struck me as very true. Pollock came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was described as an “action” painter who poured paint on large canvases to create abstract designs that were lauded by the New York art world. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The description of Pollock as an untalented pourer, Berger says, is false, for Pollock was a very precise master of his art who was aware of how he was putting paint to canvas and of the effects of his abstractions. His work made no references to the outside world since such painting at that time was considered illustrative. Berger says that Pollock’s paintings were violent in that “The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection.” He argues that Pollock, who died in a drunken car crash in Easthampton, Long Island on August 11, 1956, was committing art suicide with his abstract paintings because he had rejected the ancient assumption of painting that the visible contained hidden secrets, that behind appearances there were presences. For Pollock, there was nothing beyond the surfaces of his canvases. This was because he was painting the nothingness he felt and wished to convey. A nihilism that was both personal and abroad in the society.

Pollock’s story is a sad one, for he was praised and used by forces far more powerful than he. Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that his mother had cofounded, called Pollock’s work “free enterprise paintings,” and the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly promoted it as a Cold War weapon against the Soviet Union’s socialist realism art, even as right-wing congressmen ripped Pollock as a perverse artist. So in the name of openness, the CIA secretly promoted Pollock’s avant-gardism as real America art in a campaign of propaganda, while the right-wing bashed him as a perverted leftist. This sick double game became a template for future mind-control operations that are widespread today.

As was his habit, Berger brilliantly places Pollock’s work within social and political history, a description of a time very similar to today when the word “freedom” was bandied about. Then it was the freedom of the Voice of America extolling the Cold War tale of freedom of the “Free World”; freedom for artists to be free of rhetoric, history, the past, and to jettison the tyranny of the object; freedom of the market amidst a strident yet incoherent sense of loss. He writes:

At this moment, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his traitors. The mood in the country that had suffered least from the war was defiant, violent, haunted. The play most apt to the period would have been Macbeth, and the ghosts were from Hiroshima.

Today’s ghosts are still from Hiroshima and Macbeth is still apposite, and the ghosts of all the many millions killed since then haunt us now if we can see them. Although their bodies have disappeared out the back door of the years – and continue to do so daily – true art is to realize their presence, to hear their cries and conjure up their images. While the word freedom is still bandied about in this new Cold War era where the sense of social lostness is even more intense than in Pollock’s time, it often comes from a nihilistic despondency similar to Pollock’s and those who used atomic weapons, a belief that appearances and surfaces are all and behind them there is nothing. Nada, nada, nada. A society that Roberto Calasso calls “an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” Berger concludes:

Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times that nourished him, to refuse this act of faith [that painting reveals a presence behind an appearance]: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism that was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

This short essay by Berger about Pollock’s denial of the human body struck me as my own body was temporarily failing me. It seemed to contain lessons for the augmented realities of the internet and the new Cold War being waged for the control of our minds and hearts today. Inducements to get lost in abstractions.

Then one day I picked up another book from the shelf to try to distract myself from my physical misery. It was a collection of stories by John Fowles. I read the opening novella – “The Ebony Tower” – haltingly over days. It was brilliant and eerily led me to a place similar to that of Berger’s thoughts about Pollock. Fowles explores art and the body against a dreamy background of a manor house in the French countryside. As I read it lying on a couch, I fell in and out of oneiric reveries and sleep, induced by my body’s revolt against my mind. Trying to distract myself from my aches and pains, I again found myself ambushed by writing about corporality. Both Berger and Fowles sensed the same thing: that modernity was conspiring to deny the body’s reality in favor of visual abstractions. That in doing so our essential humanity was being lost and the slaughters of innocent people were becoming abstractions. Then the Internet came along to at first offer hope only to become an illusion of freedom increasingly controlled by media in the service of deep-state forces. Soon the only way to write and distribute the truth will be retro – on paper and exchanged hand to hand. This no doubt sounds outlandish to those who have swallowed the digital mind games, but they will be surprised once they fully wake up.

Fowles’s story is about David, an art historian who goes to visit a famous, cranky old painter named Henry Breasely. The younger man is writing about the older and thinks it would be interesting to meet him, even though he thinks it isn’t necessary to write the article he has already composed in his mind. The art historian, like many of his ilk, lives in his mind, in academic abstractions. He is in a sense “pure mind,” in many ways a replica of T.S. Eliot’s neurotic J. Alfred Prufrock. The old painter lives in the physical world, where sex and the body and nature enclose his world, where paint is used to illuminate the physical reality of life, its sensuousness, not abstractions, where physical life and death infuse his work, including political realities. Obviously not new to William Butler Yeats’ discovery as expressed in the conclusion to his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The old man fiercely defends the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” against all abstractions and academic bullshit, which are the young man’s métier. He accuses the young critic of being afraid of the human body. When the critic responds, “Perhaps more interested in the mind than the genitals,” the caustic and funny painter says, “God help your bloody wife then.” He accuses the younger man of being in the game of destruction and castration, of supporting abstractions at the expense of flesh and blood life. “There are worse destroyers around than nonrepresentational art,” the critic says in his defense. To which the painter roars, “You’d better tell that to Hiroshima. Or to someone who’s been napalmed.”

Back and forth they go, as a nubile art student, who is there to help the elderly artist, acts as a sort of interlocutor. Her presence adds a sexual frisson throughout the story, a temptation to the milk-toast critic’s life of sad complacency. The wild old man’s rants – he calls Jackson Pollock Jackson Bollock – are continually paraphrased by the girl. She says, “Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. . . . Ideas are inherently dangerous because they deny human facts. The only answer to fascism is the human fact.”

The old painter’s uncensored tongue brought tears of laughter to my eyes and a bit of relief to my aches and pains. I was primarily taken aback by the weirdness of haphazardly reading a second piece that coincided with my deepest thoughts that had been intensified by my body’s revolt. The narrator’s words struck me as especially true to our current situation:

What the old man still had was an umbilical chord to the past; a step back, he stood by Pisanello’s side. In spirit, anyway. While David was encapsulated in book knowledge, art as social institution, science, subject, matter for grants and committee discussion. That was the real kernel of his wildness. David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self.

The Internet life has made caged monkeys of us all. We seem to think we are seeing the real world through its connectivity bars, but these cells that enclose us are controlled by our zoo keepers and they are not our friends. Their control of our cages keeps increasing; we just fail to see the multiplying bars. They have created a world of illusions and abstractions serving the interests of global capitalism. Insurgent voices still come through, but less and less as the elites expand their control. As internet access has expanded, the world’s suffering has increased and economic inequality heightened. That is an unacknowledged fact, and facts count.

Toward the end of my two-week stay in the land of sickness, I read this poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. My sickness turned to rage.

“I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do,” Refaat Alareer vowed in one of his final interviews.

My friend Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israeli invaders in Shujaiya, east of Gaza City, on December 6. He is now among the more than 16,000 civilians killed by Israel in the besieged enclave since October 7.

Our correspondence continued off-and-on for the past nine years. In our final exchange, on November 27, as the bombing grew closer to his home, he told me, “Everything is running out. Food. Water. Cooking gas. Israel is bombing all sources of life. Solar panels, water tanks and pipes. Not one bakery is functioning.” 

Refaat was an author and educator who taught English literature at Gaza’s Islamic University, which has been completely destroyed. “Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” he explained to me. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

In one of his last public interviews, with Electronic Intifada, Refaat vowed that, if necessary, he would die by the same pen by which he lived: “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.”

Refaat was a model of the resistance which Israel and its patrons aim to destroy. I tell his story in the passages below, which are excerpted from my 2015 book, The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

The Teacher

Just a few months before I traveled to Gaza to cover the 51 Day War, I was dining with the literature professor Refaat Alareer, who usually lives in Gaza City, at an upscale Italian restaurant in Berkeley, California. We had been invited there by the Lannan Foundation, a Santa Fe, New Mexico–based foundation that supports a mix of artistic endeavors and progressive political causes. I had just delivered a talk on my book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, in San Francisco, beside the Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah. For his part, Refaat had been touring the US with a group of Palestinian authors from Gaza to promote the compilation of essays he had edited, Gaza Writes Back.

We had followed closely on each other’s heels throughout our book tours that spring. When I spoke at Western Washington University, a picturesque campus on the US border with Canada, I was peppered with questions by a Jewish-American undergrad who seemed to have never encountered a critical analysis of Israel and Zionism. A week later, I learned from Refaat that the student had cried openly as he and two other young writers from Gaza, Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, described growing up under siege to the campus audience.

By the time we gathered at the long dining table in downtown Berkeley, everyone seemed to be struggling with varying levels exhaustion and bewilderment from our long cross-country tours. I felt slightly uncomfortable seated beside three young people on a brief furlough from the Gaza ghetto before white tablecloths spread with crystal goblets of Merlot and smooth wooden boards of artisanal cheeses. But I quickly forgot my discomfort as I fell into conversation with Refaat.

We spent the next hour chatting about his impressions of the vast and blindingly colorful country he had just barnstormed across. The American landscape had offered Refaat the chance to meet Jews who did not greet him from behind the barrel of an M-16, from inside the cockpit of an F-16, from the turret of a Merkava tank, or behind an occupation administrator’s desk. Refaat described it as his “Malcolm X moment.”

“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, ‘Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of black people and the white man is the Devil.’ He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them,” Refaat explained. “This is what’s happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who’s not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”

It was not until Refaat visited the United States that he came face-to-face with a Jew who sympathized with his plight as a Palestinian. “When you talk to Jewish people about their lives, they host you in their homes, you spend time with their families, they can educate you in ways beyond imagination because they know about Israel, about Jewish life, about Zionism,” he marveled. “You learn so much because they are insiders. It was the tour to America that changed me in so many ways.”

Even as it stimulated his imagination and broadened his perspective, Refaat’s trip to the US summoned pangs of regret. Like any other Palestinian academic, the occupation had cost him countless opportunities to study abroad and form relationships with his intellectual counterparts. In 2005, Israeli authorities refused to allow him to complete his master’s degree in the UK. He lost an entire year of his studies along with his scholarship. Over the following two years, the Israelis refused to allow him to leave Gaza on ten separate occasions. He remembered telling them, “If you have something against me, just put me in prison!”

When Refaat finally managed to secure permission to travel to the US in 2014, Sarah Ali, a twenty-two-year-old English literature student and teaching assistant at Islamic University who had contributed to Gaza Writes Back, was refused a permit to join him on the book tour. Thus, at events around the country, Refaat and his fellow Gaza writers, Yousef and Rawan, delivered lectures next to a chair with a cardboard cutout that read: “Sarah Ali Should Be Here.”

“Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” Refaat reflected. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

When Refaat returned to Gaza from the US, he redoubled his efforts to educate Gaza youth out of the narrow prejudices spawned in the seedbed of siege and occupation. At Islamic University, the conservative higher education institution co-founded by the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1978, Refaat introduced his students to Hebrew literature. Among the Jewish Israeli writers he assigned them was Yehuda Amichai, the legendary poet whose famed work, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,” tells of short lives consumed in war and punctuated by intimate encounters with violence. The poem’s opening stanzas resonated easily with Refaat’s students:

God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children — less.
But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.

Refaat also assigned his students The Merchant of Venice. He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.

When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.

In her final paper, one of the Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:

Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Refaat stored his students’ papers in his desk at Islamic University’s English Department like small treasures. Then, on August 2, the Israeli military bombed his department along with the university’s administrative offices, sending those papers up in flames. The office where students met him during office hours was pulverized and the student library next door was decimated. When Israeli army spokesman Peter Lerner claimed that the air force had targeted a “weapons development center” in the school, Refaat’s students responded with a wave of jokes about PMDs, or Poems of Mass Destruction. “Open minded Palestinians are more dangerous,” Refaat said. “That’s why [Israel] attacks the Islamic University. That’s why it attacks other colleges. Of course, they lied when they attacked it.”

  Refaat had seen his school attacked by Israeli forces before, and he watched it be rebuilt. But there was little that could console him over the violence that sheared branch after branch from his family tree. During the war, he lost his brother-in-law, who also happened to be his best friend. He learned that his cousins were massacred in Shujaiya — Fathi al-Areer was among the survivors of Refaat’s extended family whom I interviewed in the rubble on August 14. Next, he received news that his brother was killed.

In the months after the war, his brother’s young son, Ranim, slipped into desolation. “I hate Dad,” Ranim muttered on a routine basis. “He won’t come back.”

Holy work

In early 2015, as electricity shortages plagued Gaza, I struggled to stay in touch with Refaat. His electricity came on for less than six hours at varying times depending on which day it was, leaving us with only a brief window of time to connect on Skype. When I finally reached him in late January, I found him coping with the malaise spreading through Gaza after the war. His house and his neighbor’s house had been bombed, forcing him to spend days at UNRWA offices attempting to negotiate the reconstruction process. It had taken three months to demolish a section of his family’s home that threatened to collapse atop passersby. “If it took that long, imagine how long the bureaucracy of getting it built again will take,” Reefat sighed.

One of Refaat’s brothers lost his job when the ice cream factory he worked in was bombed by Israel. He was left to scramble to collect enough money just to pay his monthly rent. His father, who had not been able to find work in twenty years, depended on help from his unmarried sons. But they considered themselves lucky compared to the thousands of government employees who had not worked in months and had no family assistance. “We always ask ourselves how they survive,” Refaat said of the unpaid workers. “You get to the point that you will do anything for a buck. It’s no surprise that crime is up, that domestic violence is up, that divorce is skyrocketing. Does the PA or Israel understand that sooner or later this will lead to an explosion?”

With the Rafah border crossing almost hermetically sealed by the Egyptian junta, Refaat had little chance of escaping Gaza to complete his PhD. His only release from frustration was in the classroom. As the siege tightened in the immediate aftermath of the war, he returned to Islamic University and redoubled his efforts to expand his students’ intellectual horizons. “I find myself releasing most of my anger at the situation by teaching young people about the struggle and about being creative in the way we fight for our rights and freedom,” Reefat said. “It’s very rewarding.”

In December 2014, Refaat’s class played host to my colleague Dan Cohen. Dan observed as Refaat presented his class with a story by one of his students, Noor Elborno, written from the perspective of an Israeli veteran of an assault on the Gaza Strip. The soldier had returned to his family in Israel plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder and consumed with nightmares about the children he had killed back in Gaza. As the Palestinian children in his nightmares turned to his own, the soldier descended into madness. If the story had been written by an Israeli, it would have fit neatly into the country’s hackneyed shooting-and-crying literary sub-genre, the most notable example being Waltz With Bashir, in which soldiers sought personal absolution through anguished confessions of crimes they committed against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Authored by a young Palestinian in Gaza taking on the perspective of an Israeli directly engaged in violence against her society, however, it reflected an unusual yearning to understand the psyche of the occupier.

Refaat turned to his class and asked them if they could sympathize with the soldier in the story. Some among the class said they might be able to, but only on the condition that they were released from the bonds of occupation. Others protested that the soldier was complicit in their oppression, and that he was a baby killer who deserved to suffer for his crimes. The angry voice of a young woman suddenly rose above those of her classmates. “I hate them all!” she exclaimed. She emphasized that she was referring to all Jews.

Refaat emphasized to the class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name. “I told my students about my time in the US staying with Jewish friends, being with their families, about seeing them defend Palestinians,” he recalled. “It’s abstract to them because Israel won’t even let my students travel to meet other people. Actually, three of my students have been prevented from leaving recently. But if these kinds of discussions help ten percent that’s wonderful, because later on, when they get to break the walls of isolation the occupation and Egypt are creating, when they meet Jewish people who are working for our cause, it’s going to make all the difference.”

Towards the end of the class, Refaat asked his students to raise their hands if they had lost their home or friends and family during the war. Most in the room threw a hand in the air. The young woman who declared her hatred for Jews had, in fact, lost her home in Shujaiya and witnessed the death of family members and neighbors. “It clearly showed how Israeli violence is pushing everyone to the extreme,” Refaat remarked. “This war was so horrible, it really touched everyone.”

When class was over, fifteen young women in colorful headscarves and long dresses approached Dan all at once, peppering him with questions. “The class had apparently known that I was a Jew,” Dan told me, “and they wanted to know what I thought about them, about Gaza, about my life in the US. They had never met a Jew before and they really showed me a lot of respect.”

The following day, the young woman who declared her hatred for Jews approached Refaat to express regret. Hearing herself verbalize her resentment left her feeling ashamed, she told him. And the meeting with Dan after class had provoked her to consider redirecting the anger that had gripped her after the war.

“Gaza is the most maligned place in the world, and if we were to believe what we’re told by established Jewish groups in the US and mainstream media, we would think that a Jew in Gaza would be ripped apart, that Gazans are running around looking for a Jew to kill,” Dan reflected later. “In this supposed hotbed of anti-Semitism, everything was completely the opposite of the way I was told it was going to be. What I found were people like Refaat fighting to keep the violence that had consumed the physical lives of his students from consuming them internally. What he’s doing is holy work.”

Days before his death, Refaat pinned the following poem he wrote to the top of his Twitter/X timeline:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

RIP Refaat in Gaza

Sad news:

Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 - 19:52 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

Israel killed Prof. Refaat al-Areer, one of Gaza's most prominent writers, poets & activists who spent his life trying to get Gaza's voice to the outside world.

He was killed in a targeted airstrike on his sister's home that also killed his brother, sister & her 4 kids...

Refaat's pinned tweet:

Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 13:01 UTC · Nov 1, 2023

If I must die, let it be a tale.

#FreePalestine
#Gaza

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Refaat's last tweet:

Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 5:00 UTC · Dec 4, 2023

The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.

Quote
Vice President Kamala Harris ...
Embedded video

His writing:

My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’ - NY Times - May 13, 2021

By Refaat Alareer
Mr. Alareer lives in Gaza and is the editor of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories.
...
On Tuesday, Linah asked her question again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is nothing left.”

But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I lie: “No, sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”

Lectures:

English Poetry Lecture 1/28: An Introduction to Poetry (video) - Refaat Alareer / eLearning Centre - IUG

On air:

_Palestine voices on Israel's war against Gaza - Usefull Idiots - Oct 13, 2023
This week’s interview with Refaat Alareer, Yumna Patel, and Muhammad Shehada
video_

How Refaat was murdered:

شهداء غزّة Gaza martyrs @Gaza_Shaheed - 12:54 UTC · Dec 8, 2023

Important information on Refaat’s assassination:
The day before yesterday, Refaat received a phone call from the Israeli intelligence about locating him in the school where he took refuge. They informed him that they were going to kill him. He left the school not wanting to endanger the others, and at 6 p.m. his sister's apartment was bombed, where he was killed, his sister and her four children

Obits:

In memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer - The Electronic Intifada - 7 December 2023

‘If I must die, let it be a tale’: a tribute to Refaat Alareer - Max Blumenthal - December 7, 2023

Related:

The “Hunt for Hamas” Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza - Adam Johnson / The Nation - Dec 7 2023
The US press and politicians are trying to fit the attacks on Gaza into a Zero Dark Thirty mold, but it’s something much simpler—and sinister.

> America’s media and political class is analyzing, debating, and shaping a narrative in Gaza that’s entirely different from the one being discussed in Israeli media and among Israeli political leaders. This gap, born from casual racism, deliberate credulity, and reflexive alignment with the US government’s party line, is creating a media failure the likes of which we haven’t seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. ... <

A dear friend of Moon of Alabama tweets:

annie fofani🇵🇸 @anniefofani - 22:08 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

I miss you so much Refaat. i assume you sent me this so i could pass it on after your death. so, here it for the world. click, the date is at the base.

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Rest in peace.

Posted by b on December 8, 2023 at 10:44 UTC | Permalink

This is the transcript of our film “Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition“.

Written, narrated and audio editing by Bernhard Guenther.
Visuals and video editing by Humberto Braga.

Youtube Link

“Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition” has been selected as the #1 film 2011-2012 of the “Top 100 Global Development Movies”.”The best positive, inspirational, thought-provoking movie of our times.”

– RYB TV

Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition – Transcript

By Bernhard Guenther, October 2011

It is true, all we need is love. But do we really know what love is? Love is a word that is sung about in songs, written in poems, talked about a lot and it is something many people long for one way or the other, mostly in the form of a partner. We hear it a lot these days: “Be heart-centered” and “Be love”, “Love is the answer, because love always wins!”, “Send Love and Light!” and so on. People use it casually in conversations in their every day lives. It is seen as the solution to all the world problems. All you need is Love!

If that’s so easy, how come nothing has changed fundamentally on planet earth despite the obvious technological progress? ?We still see genocide, oppression and wars happening. Hundreds of thousands of children and civilians have died in the Middle East and around the world because of the war machine under the control of psychopathic leaders who couldn’t care less about anyone who holds up a peace sign with a proclamation of love as the force for change. ?Looking at it more closely we can see that “Love” is one of the most abused and misunderstood words.

We mistake things like gratification, sentimentality, obligation, duty, passion, desire, and other superficial emotions, ideas and conditioned concepts as “Love” in order fill something that is ultimately lacking within us. These distortions are also used mostly unconsciously as buffers to avoid facing reality as it is by looking at the world with rose-colored glasses on, instead of seeing oneself and the world more objectively beyond appearances.

“For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli

There is personal love between humans, motherly love, love of family and community, love for oneself, love for something greater than the self, love for god and even love for man-made ideologies and concepts such as for a nation and country.? So what is love? How can we describe or define such a powerful force? Words are very limiting and can only point to it, but are not it. Maybe we can start by examining what love is not.

When it comes to interpersonal relationships we often see control games, jealousy, and envy which is obviously not love, but expressions and behaviors based on fear and need. ??Love is related to emotions and feelings, but they can be merely based on chemical reactions in the brain that result in a “high”, where people feed off each other which is also be the basis for psychic vampirism. Many relationships are based on this feeding mechanism, which has nothing to do with love, but is a parasitic need resulting in co-dependance. Sexual attraction is also mistaken for love at times. Many people get into relationships for the wrong reasons, be it to escape their loneliness, to fill a hole in their lives or feed off another person. For the most part this happens unconsciously and so people tend to lie to themselves about love and their relationships in many ways, not seeing the other person as he/she is and not even seeing themselves clearly as they are.

“People convince themselves of their own lies, becoming victims of their own inventions as they begin to direct their lives by standards of behavior, ideas, feelings, or instincts which do not correspond to their inner reality. What is truly serious in this matter is that the individual loses all points of reference regarding what comprises truth, and what comprises lies. He becomes used to considering as true only that which is convenient for his personal interests; everything that is in opposition to his self-esteem or in conflict with already established prejudices, he considers false.”

– John Baines

To truly love another person we need to see the other as he/she is without trying to change that person. That is the basis for unconditional love, but for that to happen we also need to know ourselves and see us as we truly are , so we don’t fall into the trap of illusory projections which only result in disappointment and hurt once the romantic phase is over. It’s about acceptance and consideration, being able to give and receive, to be externally considerate and not expect anything.?? But beyond personal relationships, the idea of love has also been distorted and used superficially as slogans. It is equated with being positive, open, friendly, not saying or focusing on anything “bad” or “negative”, to be always cheerful and have a smile on ones face. Of course there is nothing wrong with kindness and friendliness as well as positivity, but it must be based on truth and reality, not lies, self-calming rationalizations or avoidance, including political correctness which only leads to complacency and ignorance.

Some people say we need to be more heart-centered, loving and compassionate. Yes, obviously we all need to connect more to our heart, show empathy and compassion, especially extending it the whole world, beyond our close friends and family. ??But what does that really mean? Many people seem to associate love with emotions and feelings or niceness, but is it not more than that, like a higher state of consciousness and being??? We seem to mistake many things for “love” and even judge the intellect as “bad”, mistaking it for the monkey/predator mind, hence many suggest that we should “think” with our heart and do what we “feel” like doing, which mostly results in mere self-deception and lack of critical thinking. It’s about aligning the heart with the intellect, intuition with logic, mysticism with science.

Many people seem to force themselves into this artificial and superficial state of love through contrived affirmations and “feel good” spirituality, ignoring anything that may be a threat to their “positive” life view. ??Ultimately this results in suppression and armor that is manifested by denying the shadow part of themselves and the world as they ignore objective reality. On the surface they don’t even think that anything is “wrong” with them. It’s very much a blissful ignorant state, trying to stay high on artificial emotional projections, avoiding anything that may give them a downer and living in a subjective tunnel vision with blinders on.

One can see this kind of attitude in many self-proclaimed “aware” and “conscious” people who follow shallow New Age teachings and pop psychology resulting in self-calming but lacking deeper healing, growth and essentially real love.

“We’ve all met people who seem too sticky and gooey. They are “too nice” and sickeningly sweet. We sense that they are somehow being fake when we are around them and we feel we never really know them. They are, as the saying goes, “too good to be true.” These people are barricaded behind their mask or persona. They will deliberately avoid any kind of negative reaction or emotion. They refuse to be real and suffer the acceptance of their own dark side and this can be a dangerous thing.”

– Rebeca Eigen

“The Shadow describes the part of the psyche that an individual would rather not acknowledge. It contains the denied parts of the self. Since the self contains these aspects, they surface in one way or another. Bringing Shadow material into consciousness drains its dark power, and can even recover valuable resources from it. The greatest power, however, comes from having accepted your shadow parts and integrated them as components of your Self. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

– Carl G. Jung

Love is not merely an emotional state, but a state of consciousness. Just like there are different levels of consciousness, there are also different levels of love one can access on the spectrum of consciousness based on ones level of being and awareness. ?There is carnal love based on the sexual center and animal part in man which is the biological drive to procreate, ensuring that organic life on earth continues. This drive is mechanical tied to the esoteric meaning of the General Law and waking sleep state homo sapiens is under.

“As a cell of humanity, man forms part of organic life on Earth. This life in its ensemble represents a very sensitive organ of our planet, playing an important role in the economy of the solar system. As a cell of this organ, man finds himself under the influence of the General Law, which keeps him in his place. In fact, this law leaves him a certain margin or tolerance. It allows him some free movement within the limits it sets. Within these boundaries, which are very limited objectively although subjectively they appear vast, man can give free rein to his fantasies and his ambitions.

Without going too far into the definition of these limits and detailed description of the components of this General Law, we can say as an example that one of those factors is hunger: the servitude of working to assure our subsistence. The chain: sexual instinct; procreation; and the care of parents for their children, is another factor. The esoteric maxim that applies to this aspect of life is conceived thus: carnal love is necessary for the general good.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis

Then there is courtly love based on the higher centers, which is a higher state of being that can only be accessed through sincere self-work, not giving in to mechanical driven behaviors and choices. Essentially for true love between two people to manifest there needs to be a connection and matching on all centers: physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.

We need to continually work on ourselves to bring the centers into balance, so no one feeds of the other, but both compliment each other. Love, in its truest sense means to see the world, oneself, and others more objectively. From an esoteric perspective it’s about evolving towards this objective love. In other words, the more we are objective with ourselves and the world, raising awareness and see things as they are, the higher the degree of love we can access. It is based on knowledge, being and understanding, not merely emotional states and “happy thoughts”.

Subjective love is attached to one’s own idea of the other or to what can be gained or obtained from the other. People call the most various desires love. These can have to do with social status, addiction to power over or domination of another, sexual interest and so forth. The emotion fluctuates between satisfaction of getting and fear of losing and is generally centered on the self. Subjective love seeks to somehow forcibly appropriate another into one’s extended self. One example of this is showing off what a clever or good-looking partner or child one has in order to somehow increase oneself. Any games of domination or co-dependence which often involve the term love fall in this category.

However, by doing the work towards objective love one shouldn’t ignore or suppress anything that doesn’t live up to the ideal of higher love beyond the self. Everyone is on a different level of being with different lessons to learn and integrate. ?It seems to happen very often in spiritual and esoteric circles that people claim attributes to themselves and inflate their being above the actual state of where they are and what they need to learn and confront in order to grow and evolve. ??Objective love is not a detached unemotional state of existence. It simply means to act from one’s true self beyond conditioning, programming and projections, but with a “clean” emotional center, not one that is shut down.

Our emotions are the gateway to love, but they are not love. It’s about opening up to vulnerability and not suppressing negative emotions such as anger, sadness, jealousy, grief, but work through them which leads to compassion and empathy, not only for oneself or close friends and family but for the world and humanity at large. ??This also means to experience and feel emotions so we can let them go without suppressing them or projecting them on someone else. There are many ways to do this. Art, music, journaling as well as breathwork, bodywork and other healing modalities can help in the process of transmuting the shadow into light through emotional cleansing. It’s a delicate and deep process that doesn’t happen over night.

In that sense relationships are also lessons in love and not an end in itself, but can help us to learn more about ourselves. People and friends who are also engaged in sincere self-work can show us valuable lessons as they serve as mirrors and can help to expose parts of ourselves we wouldn’t be able to see since we all have subjective blind spots. A mirror generally is perceived as shocking or socially disagreeable. This comes from the fact that if the mirror is any good, it will conflict with the subjective filters of perception most people maintain concerning themselves. In other words, people’s self image is more or less based on lies to self and in the degree the mirror reaches its intended truthfulness, it will challenge these lies.

“According to the Great Work, a friend is one in which you support and encourage the others expansion in either the mind or the spirit.Otherwise they are people you are sentimentally attached to it because they would eat cinnamon bun with you. And they will say ‘hee, hee, hee’ aren’t we having fun”. Drug addicts do the same thing. Drug addicts want to be around people who will support them and be away from real friends. Do you know why? Because it feels good. To be a member of a mystery school can be catastrophic to the ego and to the ego’s habits and to the propensity for mediocrity. No one ever cried striving for excellence. They only cried when their mediocrity was taken away from them and pointed out to them.”

– Jerhoam

The more lessons are learned, the more knowledge gained, understood and applied, the more we purify our emotions, the more one’s being and awareness raises as the higher centers are activated and the more we can “see the unseen”. However, this is a process that is different for each depending on many factors.

Psychopaths on the other hand (about 6% of humanity) have no capability to experience anything close to love, compassion and empathy by birth. It’s not a psychological disposition but a genetic one. That is another topic which is very misunderstood and ignored, especially since most psychopaths can appear as “normal” through their “mask of sanity“. They are not necessarily criminals in prisons, but can be CEO’s, politicians, spiritual leaders, a husband, wife, child or the neighbor next door. They can tell you exactly what you want to hear, appear compassionate, empathetic and understanding without meaning or feeling it one bit.

To assume that we are all the same and that everyone has access to this higher love (or any form of love) is self-deceiving at best and we can see those kind of assumptions in the oversimplified idea of “we are all one!”. You cannot BE what you’re not, nor can you give what you don’t have.

We are all one, but we are not all the same. There seems to be some major blind spot and oversimplification about the idea of “we”. This has nothing to do about “us vs. them”, but understanding how complex humanity actually is, what we choose to believe and wish for and what we avoid to look at and confront, within and without.

“Too many people hold the idea that psychopaths are essentially killers or convicts. The general public hasn’t been educated to see beyond the social stereotypes to understand that psychopaths can be entrepreneurs, politicians, CEOs and other successful individuals who may never see the inside of a prison.”

– Dr. Robert Hare

“It feels more democratic and less condemnatory (and somehow less alarming) to believe that everyone is a little shady than to accept a few human beings live in a permanent nighttime. To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.”

– Dr. Martha Stout

If one looks into the accounts of Near-Death experiences (NDE) and what some people have seen or realized, there is a common theme:? This profound experience of objective Love, which is not related to the Love as the human personality experiences it. It is for example, as one person who had a NDE said, not a sentimental, get a tear, ‘feel someone’s pain’ feeling, not an emotion. It is beyond sentiment or feeling someone else in this form, but relates more to an all expansive, knowing and understanding.

“The problem is not the term “love”, the problem is the interpretation of the term. Those on third density have a tendency to confuse the issue horribly. After all, they confuse many things as love. When the actual definition of love as you know it is not correct either. It is not necessarily a feeling that one has that can also be interpreted as an emotion, but rather, as we have told you before, the essence of light which is knowledge is love, and this has been corrupted when it is said that love leads to illumination. Love is Light is Knowledge. Love makes no sense when common definitions are used as they are in your environment.? To love you must know.? And to know is to have light.? And to have light is to love. ?And to have knowledge is to love.”

– from the Cassiopaean sessions??

Ultimately there is no love where there is no truth and knowledge. Love entails seeing the world as it is- not as we like, want it or assume it to be. Hence, true love is essentially linked to how much one can access objective reality.

“You know the consciousness movement has let us in to create a kind of a hybrid spirituality that is mixed with a very toxic degree of narcissism and we need to look at that . It has made us very hyper sensitive and not very strong. I would say to you what has it made us conscious of because if it made us that conscious of the world we wouldn’t be in this state we’re in. If it made us that conscious of the world, we wouldn’t have dropped the ball on the management of freedom and the bill of rights, but we did. We’ve lost our civil rights. We dropped the ball. We dropped the ball on the management of the earth’s creatures and we got a hundred and fifty chimps left.

What have we become conscious of these last fifty years? Where have we been? We’ve been processing wounds. I know people who say I’m working to become conscious but I won’t look at the TV and I won’t read the news. Then what are you becoming conscious of? Myself. Now I have to tell you something, that’s exactly the formula through which you cannot heal. You cannot heal. Do you… Can you understand that? That kind of narcissism is the classic formula for fueling your own rage. Your own rage. Narcissism and it’s about me, it’s about me, it’s about my time, my space, my needs, my this, my wounds, my this. I have to tell you, that the ungenerous heart and the narcissist go to the hospital and get your meds, because you cannot, it is not possible to find yourself healing from the serious disorders that require an emergence into a cosmic level of consciousness.”

– Caroline Myss

In order for love to be the agent of change towards a better world and to bring about positive change we also need to acknowledge the darker side of life and the world we live in, the things and issues many people look away from, believing that by simply focusing on the “good” and “positive” there will be a shift in consciousness. This kind of thinking is the blind spot in many New Age teachings these days, which actually results in the opposite of what is intended for the unacknowledged shadow grows bigger and stronger, manifesting itself unconsciously through our collective. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

“An Ideal is merely an escape, an avoidance of what is, a contradiction of what is. An ideal prevents direct action upon what is. To have peace, we will have to love, we will have to begin not to live an ideal life but to see things as they are and act upon them, transform them.”

– J. Krishnamurti

The many ideas of just focusing on love and how people interpret that, or sending love to the world leaders and humanity or even to the planet are not acts of real love, but merely emotional projections which are self-deceiving and put man more into sleep, believing he’s actually doing something and bringing about positive change. True love respects free will and one cannot give or send love to someone who didn’t ask for it.

One has to wonder when people talk about world peace and love, but still vote for Obama and believe the lies we’re being told by our governments, be it about 9/11, the war on terror or anything else that has been clearly used for social control. One can have as many positive/loving/nice thoughts and emotional highs as one like, but if one still believes in lies, follows teachings based on lies, there will be no raise in consciousness nor access to a higher love that can actually be a true agent of healing and awareness. On the contrary, believing in lies feeds entropy, no matter how well-meaning the intent.

Love is beyond words and no change is going to happen if people simply repeat that “love is the answer” or “all you need is love” while still clinging to illusions and not engaging in sincere self-work. Without a deep understanding and knowledge of what love truly is and entails, we just keep going in circles as history is repeating itself. If we really want a shift in consciousness then we need to take a look into the mirror and also do the work to see the world as it is without ignoring things that may not look that “pretty”. There is still much we have to confront before we can enter a new world based on love, peace and truth.

“Love is not a behavior, an attitude, a mannerism. It is not etiquette. It is not convention. Love may express itself in many different ways—softly or forcibly. Love can appear meek. Love can appear strong. Love can challenge you. Love can criticize you. Love can expose your illusions, your fantasies and your self-deception. Love is not what people really mean when they talk about love, in nearly all circumstances. Real love emanates from Knowledge. It, in essence, is the expression of Knowledge. Only Knowledge can take you there. Knowledge can bring two people from opposite ends of the world together for a greater purpose. That is the power of the Great Love. And the Great Love is what the world needs now.”

– Marshall Vian Summers

There also seems much confusion about what is supposedly positive or negative, subjective or objective. Some people claim that there is nothing like objectivity and all is subjective. Everything depends on how we look at things and quantum mechanics, so they say, shows us that there is no objective reality or truth, but there is only “my” or “your” truth and we create our own reality by the thoughts we have, what we like to see and what we focus on. But is that really so?

It seems that the science of quantum mechanics has been oversimplified into sales-bits in the new age arena and movies like The Secret. This doesn’t mean throwing out the baby with the bath water, as our perception does seem to have an influence on reality, but maybe it’s not as simple as we have been made to believe by many bestselling “self-help” gurus these days.

“For the record: Quantum mechanics does not deny the existence of objective reality. Nor does it imply that mere thoughts can change external events. Effects still require causes, so if you want to change the universe, you need to act on it.”

– Lawrence M. Krauss, professor of physics

The question about the existence of an objective truth is a tricky one to answer. Philosophical views on truth and criteria for knowing it vary with the old dispute between rationalism and empiricism.

However, beyond philosophical or scientific discussion, there usually seems to be one element that is barely questioned in more depth: the state of being/awareness of a person which relates to how much objective reality he/she can actually access. In our current state of being and existence we cannot perceive objective reality fully, however we can work towards objectivity and expand our understanding of reality and ourselves accordingly. A “shift in consciousness” and “awakening” implies a higher state of awareness, which means to become more aware or it all, which implies again to see the world and oneself more objectively, without blinders on. This doesn’t happen by itself, but requires sincere effort and work to separate truth from lies, within and without. That is the basis of esoteric work which relates to gaining self-knowledge in order to raise awareness and consciousness to a higher level of Being.

“To search means, first, I need Being, Truth; second, I do not know where to find it; and third, an action takes place that is not based on fantasies of certainty— while at the same time a waiting takes place that is rooted not in wishful thinking but in a deep sense of urgency.”

– Jacob Needleman

Subjectivity is the preference to rather consider one’s favorite beliefs than the external world. Such a tendency is generally backed by a strong emotional attachment to these beliefs. Wishful thinking, assumptions and opinions based on reactive behavior directly relate to it. Objectivity is the ability to see things as they are, not as we envision them to be, like them or want them to be. The ability to perceive objective reality depends upon one’s ability to clearly receive . To reach a higher state of objective awareness, one must first see themselves clearly and that entails to work through one’s lies, illusions, buffers and self-deceptions.

“The survival of the ego is established pretty early in life by our parental and societal programming as to what IS or is NOT possible; what we are “allowed” to believe in order to be accepted. We learn this first by learning what pleases our parents and then later we modify our belief based on what pleases our society – our peers – to believe.?[…]?One of the first things we might observe is that everyone has a different set of beliefs based upon their social and familial conditioning, and that these beliefs determine how much of the OBJECTIVE reality anyone is able to access.

Suffice it to say that, under ordinary conditions of reality, we almost never perceive reality as it truly IS. There are thousands of different little “hypnotic suggestions” that have taken hold of us from infancy on, that determine, in any given moment, what we believe or think or think we believe or believe we think.”

– Laura Knight-Jadczyk

It’s easy to over-philosophize the idea of objectivity vs. subjectivity without considering some very practical applications. For example, regardless of what one believes to be “one’s truth” or what one is thinking about and visualizing, if you walk off a cliff, won’t gravity pull you down? Isn’t one plus one two, and not three? Is the world round or flat?

And in regards to global issues: Is the official 9/11 story true or have we been lied to? Was it a false flag attack? Are we losing our basic rights for our protection from the so-called “terrorists” or is there a different reason? Is Obama telling the truth or is he lying? These question can be answered objectively if proper research is done.

However, the truth may not necessarily agree with one’s preferred beliefs, opinions or assumptions. So it is important not to fall into denial or avoidance when some of our core beliefs are being challenged, especially if one is emotionally attached to them and the ego tries to (unconsciously) defend the lies in order to be “right” as the truth may open up a can of worms one is not ready to handle.

Moreover, no matter how much one tries to close oneself off from the “outside world”, believing that nothing will affect them as long as one focuses on “positive” thoughts and what one “likes” to experience, the bigger issues of the world still have an effect on us all, precisely because we are all one and everything is connected. No man is an island and no one’s reality is isolated from the Whole.

A fatuous paradigm that is currently running amok though the New Age community for quite a while is better known as You Create Your Own Reality (YCYOR) and is deliberately creating a lot of confusion. YCYOR is a very misleading and tentative paradigm with a certain half-truth in it, that is never expressed in this way in the Esoteric Traditions. Michael Topper brings some common sense to this issue:

“What makes the YCYOR (You Create Your Own Reality) evangelist fatuous is precisely the fact that all such personal decreeing, positive thinking and confident imagining takes place in an inevitable context. There are implications! There are repercussions! No one decrees in a personal or private, solipsistic vacuum. There is a variegated World of myriad “pulls” and “claims” coexisting along with the private desires and designs of the given ego-subject.

But “so what?” we hear the die-hard “reality-creator” claim “don’t we remain untouched by those ‘co-existents’ as long as we keep secure in the confidence of our own private deservedness, our own authoritative affirmations and specific commissions of positive thought-re-inforcement?”

No. Man does not live by “commission” alone. This is why you do not create your own reality, but merely generate reality-hypotheses or scenarios which are continuously reflected and tested against the Whole; and the Whole, being inseparable from the Potential of your own innate-global Being, is constituted by the explicit and implicit alike, by that which is produced through active or positive commission and that which results from the gaps, blind-spots and vacuums of interpretive omission. All the lines, potential and actual, exist within one’s being and are inevitably calculated into the total account! This is what it means when we say there’s a context in which all our desire-formulation and “decreeing” takes place.

This is a Deity-centered reality, not an ego-centered reality. Only the totality of the soul-nature is in touch with the Totality of Spirit-being. Anything else necessarily involves a partial perspective, a conceptual self-estimation producing inevitable blindspots.

What you have selectively omitted from “your reality”, is manifested as well! We can of course say the “victim” still deserves his fate or has drawn his fate to himself by a quality of callousness embedded in his characteristic thought-formulae; and occasionally this interpretation may touch on some real factor involved in the negative effect. But neither the simple presence of some attitude toward elements of the ultimate negative resultant, nor explanations of residual “karma” (or anything of the kind) may adequately account for all cases in the same category.

It is just simply not true that every rape victim somehow “invited” the experience as a personal form of “commission”.

The converse implication of this, of course, is that only in alignment and integral consonance with the Whole-value of Being may Reality be accurately manifested through the medium of “personal expression” for then there is no discrepancy between “personal” and Universal, the perspectival “part” and the indeterminate Whole. It is under this condition that the “impossible” can be manifested (i.e. that which is self-evidently beyond the power of anyone to “personally” manipulate or control).

For, understood in this way (and only in this way) it may be seen that unimaginable effectiveness results when the expression of one’s “personal” will is not different than or removed from the Spirit of Divine Will, i.e. the Will to reveal Spirit as the Truth and authentic character of everyone’s illimitable Being. This means that, in terms of “personal will”, only the Spirit of the Teaching Function remains. There is no will remaining in the repertoire of “personal will” except that which expresses perfect alignment, integration and identity with Divine Will.

Contrary to unwarranted popular opinion, such initiated alignment with the Will of Absolute Spirit-being does not result in “working one’s will unopposed”. On the contrary, the very presence of the Awakened Truth in the form of the Spiritual adept has always generated immediate opposition; it has always “awakened” a corresponding reaction from the collective ego’s self-protective slumber.

Initiated alignment of will with the creative Whole doesn’t guarantee “smooth personal circumstances”; on the contrary, look at the story of every adept, examine the events surrounding the Masters known to history. Rather it ensures that such events will possess the character of an authentic teaching-demonstration, to all who have the Soul to see. It ensures the Will of the Whole is always done, regardless the partiality and prejudice by which that Whole may be perceived in any given case.”

– Michael Topper

There is an objective truth outside the context of what our little “I” perceives. It seems a tendency in certain Conscious Movements to overgeneralize and distort spiritual “higher” truths and quantum physics with an oversimplification of: All Truth is relative! ?Hence some people unconsciously (or consciously) use this explanation as an excuse and justification for the atrocities in the world or for whatever one may want to believe in one’s own little subjective world, no matter how illusory, false and based on pure wishful thinking or emotional projections it may be; even to the point of declaring that it is all just about “my” or “your” truth and there is no objective truth.

Obviously we all have our own personal lessons to learn and talents to develop, which could be interpreted as one’s “personal truth”, however that doesn’t exclude oneself from the collective lessons we all “need” to look at if we want to evolve consciously as ONE.?? Simply acknowledging that we are all one, separation is illusion and seeing everything as “Light” while focusing on what one believes to be “positive” and ignoring what one perceives as “negative” does not result in change for the better.?? Conversely, by insisting on what one would like to see, as opposed to seeing the world as it is, is coming into conflict with creation, which then results in entropy and MORE suffering on a global scale, not less.

A deeper insight into this gives the Event Enhanced Quantum Theory developed by physicists Ark Jadczyk and Philip Blanchard. Its conclusion in a nutshell:

“Everyone who “believes” in an attempt to “create reality” that is different from what IS, adds to the increase of chaos and entropy. If your beliefs are orthogonal to the truth, no matter how strongly you believe them, you are essentially coming into conflict with how the Universe views itself and I can assure you, you ain’t gonna win that contest. You are inviting destruction upon yourself and all who engage in this “staring down the universe” exercise with you.

On the other hand, if you are able to view the Universe as it views itself, objectively, without blinking, and with acceptance of the reality and appropriate responses to how things really are, you then become more “aligned” with the Creative energy of the universe and your very consciousness becomes a transducer of order energy, and your actions are consonant with what is. Your energy of observation, given unconditionally, matched by the appropriate actions, can bring order to chaos, can create out of infinite potential.”

– from “The Secret History of the World” by Laura Knight-Jadczyk

Some people seem to mistake objectivity for negativity and wishful thinking for positivity. Most of what people see as negative or positive are their subjective projections and opinions that don’t really reflect the world as it is. Without Truth and Objectivity there won’t be a change for the “better”, nor a raise in consciousness, within and without.

In that sense, many well-meaning and good-hearted folks who want a better world actually do more harm than any good by ignoring and denying aspects of our reality that may not fit into their subjective “positive” world view; instead believing that by shutting the so-called “negative” out and just seeing everything as “One” and “Light”, visualizing, meditating on world peace and projecting “love and light”, it will create peace and harmony. Nothing could be further from the truth and that is actually exactly what certain forces, who do not wish humanity to awaken for their own interests, want us to do and believe. It ties in with how religious and spiritual values have been corrupted.

In other words, the ones exposing the lies and atrocities in the world, the ones looking at the world as it is with all the different “faces of god” including the unpleasant ones which many people perceive as “negative” and hence like to ignore, are actually doing LIGHT WORK in the true meaning of the word: Making the darkness conscious, raising awareness and shining Light into it. Light is information and knowledge, not just making things “light” in the sense of being “nice” or “kind” and “loving” without saying anything “bad” or “heavy”.

“When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up.”

– Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoch

“Real compassion kicks butt and takes names and is not pleasant on certain days. If you are not ready for this FIRE, then find a new-age, sweetness and light, perpetually smiling teacher and learn to relabel your ego with spiritual sounding terms. But, stay away from those who practice REAL COMPASSION, because they will fry your ass, my friend.”

– Ken Wilber

This contrived “niceness” seems also very common in today’s conscious movements, where people don’t want to say anything “negative”, in their subjective understanding of it of course. In general, some folks hide behind a social etiquette and mask without wanting to say anything bad or touching on any taboo subjects. They speak around issues in order to be spiritually or politically correct so as to “not step on anyone’s toes”.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that one should be mean, aggressive and rude or push information on someone who didn’t ask for it. It simply means to be sincere and honest with conscience and awareness. There is a time to speak up and a time to be silent. And sometimes you have to be direct, call a spade a spade and give the lie what it deserves: the truth, regardless of what others may think, even if it doesn’t sound “nice” and it doesn’t conform to what someone “likes” to hear. You can be considerate and still speak the truth, even if others see it as “negative” from their conditioned point of view.

“Cowardice asks the question: “Is it safe”?? Expediency asks the question: “Is it politic”?? Vanity asks the question: “Is it popular?”?But conscience asks the question: “Is it right?”?And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular?but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one what is right.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are many so-called conscious festivals these days with music, art, workshops and lectures. Lots of pretty people in hip clothes, feathers, furry hats and much eye candy, supposedly representing the “counter-culture” of aware people. There is nothing wrong with dressing up, partying and having a good time, however, when looking at the program of talks and workshops of some of these festivals something seems to be missing, mainly the topics we need to become aware of as a species if we want to make the right turn.

At any festival that claims to be “conscious” and “spiritual” and is supposedly the reflection of the “counter-culture”, one must ask why are there no workshops or lectures about the genocide in Palestine, the crimes by the US government aka Military Industrial Complex, the idea that psychopaths without conscience seem to rule our world and institutions, that 9/11 is a lie that has cost oppression and misery all over the world based on a fake war on terror, that Obama is a corporate puppet just as the old “boss”, that UFOs may not be signs of our “space brothers” coming to help us but that we are actually “food” in many ways, or that we are not “one big human family”, but that there may be souled and soulless humans and many other issues? ……all these topics are part of being aware and conscious, are they not?

It seems that conscious festivals like that are becoming more and more a hip thing rather than using it to truly help people become aware of the shadow that needs to be made conscious of and shined light into. It’s not just about doing yoga, eating raw food and knowing permaculture, nor is it simply about being “positive” for the sake of being positive or learning about how to manifest your desired income.

“We’re very much grounded within the counter culture of the 1960s of which this festival is indeed a legacy and an extension historically, and talk to you about some of… I don’t really want to talk to you about the similarities because you know what the similarities are…the similarities are mainly cosmetic.
And there are some other philosophical similarities which I’ll discuss but one of the things that I’d like to talk with you about are some of the differences. In the 1960s, the counter cultural movement had at its core, we have the music yes, we had the drugs which was not in all ways a high side of it.

There was the music, there was a definite sense of counter culture, there was a definite repudiation of certain values which people deemed to be obsolete and unsustainable. But it bears noting that there was also at it’s core the repudiation of a war and ultimately the ending of a war, which means that the counter culture at that time was making a serious stand against something new on the planet; something horrible on the planet called “American military domination of anything it cared to dominate”. And that gave a moral authority to the counter culture of the 1960s, and I would hope that a festival like this does not- in a heart that brings us here, the consciousness that brings us here- I’m reminded of a line in “A Course in Miracles” where it says, “You cannot bring the light to the darkness you must bring the darkness to the light“.

Dream and I were having an interesting conversation… we were talking about this festival and she said people just wanted to be in the light for a few days…But I say to you as your sister, as your spiritual companion, embedded in the principles of “A Course in Miracles” and in my own spiritual search, but I know that there is only one truth spoken in many different ways…There is a difference between transcendence and denial…and if the consciousness that brings you to a festival like this, is one in which we feel- as Americans, as men, as women, as citizens of the planet- that we can be here, that this can be anything with true gravitas or moral authority and we are forgetting the fact that our country has turned into a permanent war machine, then there is something very sad about this festival rather than happy for me.

Now we were talking about, earlier, we were talking about the fact that men in…about the feminine power…and the divine feminine…and it was another I heard someone say that the men here are holding the space for the feminine ,which is very beautiful, it’s a very beautiful thing the, the mix of, you know- obviously there are men and women here, and both for the women who want to hold the space for the divine feminine, and as well for the men who want are holding the space for the divine feminine, thank you so much.

I’d to talk to you for a moment about the divine feminine because the divine feminine has a fierce aspect. The divine feminine is not just dressing up, the divine feminine it’s not just getting pretty in whatever pretty of the day is, whether it’s big boobs or feathers. It’s all just cosmetic… hello… The divine feminine cares about the fact that 17,000 babies die on this planet everyday of hunger. The divine feminine cries, the divine feminine shrieks when she has to. You know if you… there is an interesting anthropological characteristic of every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives; and that is the fierce behavior of the adult female of that species when she senses that there is a threat to her cubs that whether it’s the mama bear or the tiger or a lion. Did you know that even among the hyenas the adult female hyenas encircle their babies, encircle the cubs while they’re feeding and will not let the adult males of that species anywhere near the food until the cubs have been fed.

Surely the women of America could do better than the hyenas. And the fact that collectively, not in terms of our hearts, our hearts are good, and I know that the heart that draws us to a place like this today is good, but we have to ask ourselves at what point, whether you’re in therapy or your at a festival like this, at what point do you stand in that place which is not comfortable, do you stand in that place which is not comfortable and not turn away? Because if a counter cultural movement, such as this at least externally represents here today, is one, I asked earlier, I said “Hmm. Is there anything political going on here today?” and I was told “No, these are just people who are ready to transcend.” And let be very clear once again about that difference between transcendence and denial because if the counter cultural movement in 2011 is one in which it is deemed for whatever reason acceptable to look away from the fact that tremendous amounts of unnecessary human suffering occur on this planet and in this country for no other reason than that so a relatively few people on this planet and in this country can have all the money they want. That is not service, it is NOT counter cultural, it is the the epitome of being co-opted by the very culture that we seek to counter.

Now you might say to me “What do you want us to do?” I don’t know what your supposed to do… None of my business what your supposed to do. But I’m asking you as Jesus said to the disciples the night before the crucification in the garden of Gethsemane, “Please do not go to sleep. Do not go to sleep in the hour of my agony. Remain awake!”… That’s what they do to you. They put you to sleep! The system would love this festival! The system would love this festival because its not saying “Fuck you!” to anybody. And there’s a sense that that is somehow spiritual. There’s a sense that that is somehow spiritual, and I believe deeply that, as “The Course in Miracles” says, “Look at the crucification but do not dwell on it.” I’m not saying let’s dwell on what’s bad, because if you dwell on what’s bad then it’s true, that is you just focus on it and make more of it. But to not look at it at all… to not look at it at all, there’s not the divine feminine about that.

The divine feminine… if there was a starving child here…somebody tell me…if there was a child here or if anyone- god forbid- let’s just talk about our deep humanity… Let’s say right here right now- god forbid- somebody, uh, had a heart attack or something. Well the fact that I’m speaking up here would be irrelevant. Somebody would yell out say, “Is there a doctor here?” We would all get deeply human very quickly wouldn’t we? Are you with me? Now this is an interesting thing about our country, if you look and see, I always say that if I’m if I’m on an airplane somewhere, anywhere in the world… I love to sit next to an American …I… characterologically we’re cool people and we care. We’re not, you know… We’re human beings and there’s a spunkiness and it’s a coolness. But our collective capacity for denial and grandiosity is frightening and perilous….”

– Marianne Williamson

In the end most people are only afraid of the unknown and what they don’t understand. Once we make the effort to deprogram ourselves from our conditioning and gain knowledge and understanding within AND without, shining “LIGHT” into darkness, our awareness/consciousness rises and we start to SEE in alignment with who we truly are, beyond preference, wishful thinking or denial and then can act in alignment with our Higher Self and the Universe.

If we truly love life, the world we live in and want positive change, then this also implies to look at the issues and injustices in the world so many of us like to ignore or deny. This is not being “negative”, but the work to be done during this Time of Transition

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. ”

– Martin Luther King Jr.

Seeking truth and making the darkness conscious needs to happen within AND without, not just one or the other. Activism and spiritual self-work go hand in hand. It’s not separated but interrelated.

The problem that comes with truth seekers and activists who only focus on the outside is that they can easily fall into the trap of disinformation or they resonate with lies because their “Reading Instrument”, the Self, is not “tuned” correctly through sincere self work which would help their critical thinking abilities. It becomes harder to separate truth from lies and one may even spread disinformation unknowingly because one is less likely to see the “unseen” or the “devil in the details” so to speak, resulting in oversimplifications, assumptions, and misconceptions. In other words, I need to understand my “machine”, my habitual way of thinking and how my emotional reactions and attachments can distort things, how I take in information and how my own bias and conditioned beliefs filter information which can result in cognitive dissonance.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.“

– Frantz Fanon

“In order to understand the interrelation of truth and falsehood in life, a man must understand falsehood in himself, the constant incessant lies he tells himself.”

– G.I. Gurdjieff

According to the mystic and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, the human organism is constituted by two fundamental functions: essence and personality. Essence is what we are born with, the raw material of one’s being. It includes the physical body, genetic make-up, energy metabolism, the inborn capacity for emotions and sensations. There are also external influences that affect us, such as planetary vibrations, present in the immediate environment at conception, during the fetal stage, and at birth. An astrological birth chart can give some insight into that.

As we grow, our essence is molded by cultural influences. It can mature along the lines of its inherent nature and potential, or it can become blocked in its maturation and hence form something that works against its inborn potential. Essence would evolve in societies where essential practices and values predominate, such as sincerity, love, truth, compassion, knowledge, and so on. Obviously we live in a world where such values have become distorted and ponerized, meaning that our society at large has taken on pathological values that are seen as normal and people can no longer make the distinction between healthy and pathological thought processes and logic. One is no longer able to draw a line between correct thinking and deviate thinking. The influence of higher density beings and forces may also have an effect on us in that regard as explored in UFOs, Aliens, and The Question of Contact.

Personality is the mask we carry over our essence. The vehicle for essence to work through so to speak. Our personality is conditioned and programmed through upbringing in a society that is built on lies, and the stronger the programming, the harder it is for essence to come through. Hence, de-programming and facing the lies of one’s personality is key so it becomes a direct reflection and expression of essence, which ultimately leads to conscious actions based on one’s inherent potential. In a mature person, essence and personality form one continuous “I”, which is to say that the person is unified.

“People are always infused with all kinds of fantastic ideas about themselves, the world, people, love, idealism, society, etc. Led by his eagerness to evade a disagreeable reality, man gives free rein to his imagination and is inclined to believe the first agreeable lie he encounters along the way. The individual projects his personal illusions onto a cold and immutable reality, and thus deceiving himself, he endeavors to contemplate reality through rose-colored glasses. “Disillusion” is a painful process and can be prolonged, depending on how much time the individual takes to realize he is living artificially and that this condition is a product of his internal dreams. Great courage is required to face reality and to destroy the mirage of a pleasant dream.”

– John Baines

On the other hand, many spiritually inclined people only focus on the self, believing that will change the outside eventually, without making the effort to look at the world more objectively and acting upon it. Gandhi’s call to “be the change you want to see in the world” has also been misunderstood that way. First of all the “kind of change” people want to see is different for each based on one’s subjective understanding of it, which can be very distorted, especially if one is avoiding seeing the world as it is, believing in lies and just projecting one’s desires and hopes that are based on the conditioned personality, resulting in wishful thinking. For example, just being “nice” because I want to see a “nice” world does not automatically make the world so, especially since some humans are “wired” differently.

Another issue is that many people try to explain everything through one system or teaching and do not see its limitations or even distort it to mold it into their belief system. For example, not everything “negative” in the world is a manifestation of our shadow material, nor is everything that happens to us our karma, nor do we attract everything with our thoughts. Sure there is truth to the idea of karma, but using that explanation to justify all the atrocities in the world is short-sighted and misses the point as we still have to act and learn our lessons, not just “turn the other cheek” or stand by and keep silent, saying “oh it’s just your/their/my karma”.

We are not the peak of God’s creation and so special and holy that nothing other than ourselves would harm, control or manipulate us. It’s actually quite arrogant and anthropocentric to think that way. We don’t do everything to ourselves. It’s not about blaming, but getting out of our self-centered view of reality and the universe. There are other forces acting on us, just as we influence, consume and to a certain extent control lower life forms such as plants and animals. As above, so below.

“There are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep. First of all it must be realized that the sleep in which man exists is not normal but hypnotic sleep. Man is hypnotized and this hypnotic state is continually maintained and strengthened in him. One would think that there are forces for whom it is useful and profitable to keep man in a hypnotic state and prevent him from seeing the truth and understanding his position.”

– G. I. Gurdjieff

The learning never stops and humanity still has much to confront and learn about that may require a whole new understanding of reality, just like there are different or expanded views now in science compared to what Einstein and Newton had discovered.

There is always more to learn and find out that requires an adjustment and new understanding, expanding our view and understanding of reality. It is what raising consciousness implies. People who are stuck in one idea or teaching and try to explain everything through it are building their own limited reality box. This also relates to psychology, astrology, philosophy, the healing arts, spiritual practices or any religion (east and west) where many “experts” in any of these systems are looking through one lens (many of them distorted/false to begin with), not realizing that this approach can easily lead to distortion and a tunnel vision. It can also become an egotistical point of pride preventing that person to admit to him/herself that there is maybe more to the story which one hasn’t considered before, especially when they have written books about it, their career depends on it and they have an image to sell/live up to.

One can see these fallacies with many popular spiritual teachers, researchers, visionaries, therapists and self-help gurus, where career and image seem to take precedence over truth and reality. There are many topics that affect us more than many of them are aware of, be it the idea of hyperdimensional manipulation, genetic psychopathy or soulless humans. But instead of being more open to such topics and looking into them sincerely and unbiased, these seemingly intelligent and aware individuals ignore or debunk them right off-hand exposing their own lack of critical thinking.

Awareness and study of the aforementioned topics and also looking into the “taboo” subject of conspiracies would actually help and expand their knowledge and ability to truly help others and society at large.

Many people tend to laugh at the term “conspiracy theories” and even use it with a negative, condescending tone. The social reality that they are taboo solidifies this also deeper into people’s minds, subconsciously. Nobody wants to be called a “conspiracy theorist.” It’s like calling somebody a “wacko” and commonly used as an ad hominem attack that lacks critical thinking. Most people don’t have a true understanding of what the word “conspiracy” actually means. Historian Richard M. Dolan brings some common sense to this issue:

“From a historical point of view, the only reality is that of conspiracy. Secrecy, wealth and independence add up to power. Deception is the key element of warfare, (the tool of the power elites), and when winning is all that matters, the conventional morality held by ordinary people becomes an impediment. Secrecy stems from a pervasive and fundamental element of life in our world, that those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps are necessary to maintain the status quo.?[…]? The very label ‘conspiracy’ serves as an automatic dismissal, as though no one ever acts in secret. Let us bring some perspective and common sense to this issue. The United States comprises large organizations – corporations, bureaucracies, ‘interest groups,’ and the like – which are conspiratorial by nature. That is, they are hierarchical, their important decisions are made in secret by a few key decision-makers, and they are not above lying about their activities. Such is the nature of organizational behavior. ‘Conspiracy’, in this key sense, is a way of life around the globe.“

– Richard Dolan

“Do I believe in conspiracies? Naah! Do I believe that powerful people would get together and plan for certain outcomes? Naah! Do I believe that powerful interests would operate outside the law and maybe even kill people? Naah! Do I believe secret government agencies might feel the need to assassinate a person and cover it up? Naah! I think everything in America is open and clean and above board and powerful people always play by the rules.”

I think the system contracts and expands as it wants to. It accommodates these changes. I think the civil rights movement was an accommodation on the part of those who own the country. I think they see where their self-interest lies. They see a certain amount of freedom seems good, an illusion of liberty. Give these people…give these people a voting day every year so that they’ll have the illusion of meaningless choice… meaningless choice that we go like slaves and say, “Yeah, I voted.”

The limits of debate in this country are established before the debate even begins and everyone else is marginalized and made to seem either to be communists or some sort of disloyal person, a “kook”- there’s a word- and now it’s “conspiracy”, see? They’ve made that something that should not even be entertained for a minute; that powerful people might get together and have a plan. Doesn’t happen, you’re a kook, you’re a conspiracy buff!

– George Carlin

Our views on life and existence, science and religion, spirituality and evolution, consciousness and psychology as well as reality as we know it would take on a whole new understanding when looking deeper into the topics we dismiss so easily simply because we don’t “believe” them to be true. Let’s not forget, not too long ago we believed that the earth is flat.

“Consciousness means, literally, “knowing-together.” A development of consciousness would therefore mean knowing “more together,” and so it would bring about a new relationship to everything previously known. For to know more always means to see things differently.”

– Maurice Nicoll

We’re being lied to in virtually all areas of our lives and our attention is being vectored away from the truth. The corruption of science plays a big part in it as well. As a matter of fact, those who get too close to the truth are often attacked and ridiculed. Truth is no good for business in a ponerized society with psychopaths in power, steering the ship where pathological traits have become the accepted norm in our official culture.

The work to seek truth within and without is not for everyone, nor can everyone engage in it since people are different inside, some lacking the “seed” so to speak. Not everyone is a Warrior (as coined by Carlos Castaneda) and everyone has different lessons to learn and talents to develop with a different “inner wiring”. Nobody is better or worse, it’s just what it is in this evolutionary cycle we’re in. For that reason there also won’t be a collective awakening where everyone is all of a sudden “enlightened” or “aware”. Many folks who are waiting for 2012 for that to happen will be greatly disappointed. Awakening implies evolving consciously. Now is an opportunity (not a guarantee), a “window” to move up a level so to speak, but it doesn’t happen by itself. Conscious effort and work are needed to counter the forces of entropy for there is a way up and down as the Hopi Indians said about this Time of Transition.

“What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.”

– Jeanne De Salzmann

Many are called, few are chosen [or choose to answer the call]. Now is the time for the ones who feel “called” to ask themselves, what am I doing with my life, where is my attention and focus? Am I doing the best I can to help in this time of transition in terms on working on myself and seeking truth? Conscious Reality Creation happens when we are connected with our true self/higher self and we become a vessel for higher energies to work through us which are in alignment with the universe and one’s soul’s purpose, not the desires, wants and needs of the conditioned personality. If our actions and beliefs are in alignment with what IS, we become transducers of energies that not only benefit us individually but the world at large, bringing order out of chaos.

It is important that the ones who are sincerely engaged in seeking truth connect with others who are like-minded, so we become collinear and act as alarm clocks for each other, keeping each other awake and help in the process of separating truth from lies. A nucleus of truly conscious people, acting as conscious transducers of higher energies and seeing the universe as it sees it self, working towards objectivity, can provide the qualitative frequency resonance vibration that will create the template for the new world. The more people do this work consciously the better, but it is about quality over quantity.

There are countless distractions, temptations and deceptions that keep the seeker away from Truth and Awakening in this Matrix Control System with various forces acting on humanity to keep us asleep. It comes down to discernment and without inner work in order to see the unseen we cannot raise our Being to truly BE the change we want to SEE according to our higher nature and not our conditioned personality. At the same time Being the change entails facing reality and see things as they are, not as we hope, wish or want them to be. It’s a holistic approach. Just as we need to cleanse and detoxify our body and give it the proper nutrition, we also need to detoxify the world “out there” by separating truth (nutrition) from lies (toxins).

This has also nothing to do with trying to “save the world”, but simply engaging in the process of conscious evolution, nor is it about “controlling external reality”, but acting in alignment with the universe. And we only become truly aligned if we engage in the work to see the universe as it sees itself. Being entails seeing the world as it IS. That is the path towards healing, wholeness, conscious reality creation and essentially true Love. It’s a process that is different for each as we all have our own lessons to learn, karma to work out and talents to develop in this time of transition.

In that sense everyone also has unique skills which he/she can contribute to the whole, so we can support each other, moving from Service to Self and competition towards Service to Others and sharing. It’s about working together creating synergy, but also respecting each others individuality and process at the same time. What may work for one, may not work for another. But to know this, we need to know our true self and also make the effort to see the world as it is, so our actions have real impact and power beyond self-gratification or senseless rioting.

“Every man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion.
He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over God’s depths into an infinite sea.
This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which a general soul incarnates in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him, and good when it is done, but which no other man can do.
He has no rival.
For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. When he is true and faithful, his ambition is exactly proportional to his powers. By doing his work he makes the need felt which only he can supply.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more we are collinear and SEE the world as it is and act as ONE, the “easier” the transition to a better world for all of us. We do create our reality and our consciousness has an effect on the outside world, but we need to be in alignment with the Universe, otherwise we will increase entropy and chaos, which also manifests in earth and climate changes, as we can see already happening. Increased awareness combined with action based on truth could mitigate any upcoming cataclysms that seem to be right over the horizon. It’s up to each one of us and all of us together.

“With the approach of the era of the Holy Spirit, everything must be gradually brought to the light of day, not only the secrets of the laboratory but the deepest meanings of esotericism. The same must happen with illusions, errors and lies, which must also be revealed so that they can later be rectified.

The world is suffering from a lack of harmony which gets deeper on every plane, and this is a serious danger to the moral and spiritual recovery of humanity. It also involves a serious risk of failure in the last stage of this Time of Transition that we are now entering, If this risk is not overcome, the Deluge of Fire awaits us. We will have to make an immense effort to ward off this fate, and we have very little time in which to do it.

Man has only himself to blame for the greatness of the effort needed: this is a result of his obstinate refusal to heed the warnings that have been addressed to him time and again by the Divine Voice, just as he continues today to blind himself to the fact that the Deluge of Fire is being made ready.”

– Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis II

On January 8, 2023 the US has to release a federal prisoner who is known as one its most notable opponents of treatment of Cuba since its revolution. She is Ana Belén Montes, and she will be freed after over 21 years in a federal military prison.

She was a top official on Latin America in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who, solely out of moral conviction, gave Cuba information on top secret US military plans and operations. Unrepentant in her trial, she defended herself saying, “I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. … I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

Ana Belén is one of the many Americans who have taken a moral stance in opposition to the actions of their government, and who were subsequently hunted as traitors or spies. Edward Snowden was another such figure, having exposed how the National Security Agency’s spying on the US population and leaders of other countries. Rather than spend much of his life in a federal prison, Snowden has opted to live in exile in Russia.

While the US movement in defense of Cuba did not champion the case of Ana Belén as with the very similar situation of the Cuban Five, she is recognized as a hero in Cuba. In 2016, the famed Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez dedicated a song to her, explaining, “The prisoner I mentioned yesterday… is Ana Belén Montes and she was a high official of the US secret services. When she knew that they were going to do something bad to Cuba, she would pass on the information to us. That is why she is serving a sentence of decades…Much evil did not happen to us because of her. Freedom for her.”

Silvio Rodríguez le dedicó esta canción a la presa política del imperialismo Ana Belén Montes, quien saldrá libre este fin de semana después de pasar 20 años de prisión en aislamiento total #FreeAnaBelen #FreeLeonardPeltier #FreeJulianAssange #FreeAlexSaab pic.twitter.com/4OphzkUXVp

— Roi Lopez Rivas (@RoiLopezRivas) January 4, 2023

Ana Belén did not receive any money from Cuba for her 16 years of work. Knowing the dire risks she faced, she acted out of a belief in justice and solidarity with Cuba. For over 60 years, the country has suffered under a US blockade – repeatedly condemned by the United Nations – imposed in retaliation for choosing national sovereignty over continued neocolonial status. US supported terrorism against Cuba has killed 3,478 and caused 2,099 disabling injuries over the years.

One of the charges brought against Ana Belén was having helped assure Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Cuba represented no military threat to the US, and therefore contributed to avoiding another US regime change war that would have meant the death of countless Cubans. She also acknowledged having revealed the identities of four American undercover intelligence officers working in Cuba.

“The Queen of Cuba” hailed from a family of feds

Born in West Germany on February 28, 1957, a Puerto Rican citizen of the United States, and a high official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Belén was convicted as a spy for alerting Cuba to the interventionist plans that were being prepared against the Cuban people.

In 1984 while working as a clerk in the Department of Justice, Ana Belén initiated her relationship with Cuban security. She then applied for a job at the DIA, the agency responsible for foreign military intelligence to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The DIA employed her in 1985 until her arrest at work 16 years later. She became a specialist in Latin American military affairs, was the DIA’s principal analyst on El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later Cuba.

Because of her abilities, Ana Belén became known in US intelligence circles as “the Queen of Cuba”. Her work and contributions were so valued that she earned ten special recognitions, including Certificate of Distinction, the third highest national-level intelligence award. CIA Director George Tenet himself presented it to her in 1997.

“She gained access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents, typically taking lunch at her desk absorbed in quiet memorization of page after page of the latest briefings,” which she would later write down at home and convey to Cuba.

Avoiding capture through discretion, until the intercept came

On February 23, 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Defense asked visiting American Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll to warn off Miami Brothers to the Rescue planes that planned to again fly over Havana. Carroll immediately informed the State Department.

Instead of ending the provocations, the US let the planes fly, and two “Brothers to the Rescue” planes were shot down over Cuba the next day. The US exploited the flare-up to sabotage the growing campaign to moderate the US blockade of the island. The US official who arranged Admiral Carroll’s meeting was Ana Belén. Her explanation that the date was chosen only because it was a free date on the Admiral’s schedule was accepted.

Nevertheless, a DIA colleague reported to a security official that he felt Ana Belén might be under the influence of Cuban intelligence. He interviewed her, but she admitted nothing. She passed a polygraph test.

Ana Belén had access to practically everything the intelligence community collected on Cuba, and helped write final reports. Due to her rank, she was a member of the super-secret “inter-agency working group on Cuba”, which brings together the main analysts of federal agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House itself.

The Washington Post reported, “She was now briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and even the president of Nicaragua about Cuban military capabilities. She helped draft a controversial Pentagon report stating that Cuba had a ‘limited capacity’ to harm the United States and could pose a danger to U.S. citizens only ‘under some circumstances.'”

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a US agent in Cuba’s Ministry of Interior that Cuba had uncovered and imprisoned, was released and traded for three of the Cuban 5 in 2014. He had “provided critical information that led to the arrests of those known as the “Cuban Five;” of former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers; and of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, Ana Belén Montes.”

In 1999 the National Security Agency intercepted a Cuban communication. It revealed a spy high in the hierarchy, who was associated with the DIA’s SAFE computer system. It meant the spy was likely on staff of the DIA. The suspect had also traveled to Guantánamo Bay in July 1996. Coincidentally, Ana Belén worked in the DIA and had traveled to the Bay on DIA business. The spy was using a Toshiba laptop, and it was discovered she had one. A decision was taken to break into her flat and copy the hard drive.

Since the case being put together indicated she was providing information to Cuba, she was arrested by FBI agents on September 21, 2001 while in her DIA office. She was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for Cuba. “She told investigators after her arrest that a week earlier she had learned that she was under surveillance. She could have decided then to flee to Cuba, and probably would have made it there safely.” But her political commitment made her feel “she couldn’t give up on the people (she) was helping.”

Nigerian commentator Owei Lakemfa presented ten reasons he thought Ana Belén Montes avoided detection during her 16 years in the DIA. Among the most important was that she was extremely discreet and kept to herself. She lived alone in a simple apartment north of the US capital, and memorized documents, never taking any home. And she never received unexplainable funds.

Ironically, her brother was an FBI special agent, and her sister an FBI analyst who “played an important role in exposing the so-called Wasp Network of Cuban agents [the Cuban 5 and 7 others] operating in Florida.”

Ana Belén avoided the death penalty for high treason, highly likely in the post September 11 atmosphere, by pleading guilty before the US federal court handling her case. Since she acknowledged her conduct, and told the court how she worked, she was sentenced to “only” twenty-five years. However, she was imprisoned in conditions designed to destroy her, as the case with Julian Assange today. She was sent to special unit of a federal prison for violent offenders with psychiatric problems.

“I obeyed my conscience rather than the law”

In her October 16, 2002 trial statement, she declared that she obeyed her conscience:

“There is an Italian proverb that is perhaps the one that best describes what I believe: The whole world is one country. In that ‘world country’, the principle of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, is an essential guide for harmonious relations between all our ‘nation-neighborhoods’.

This principle implies tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It mandates that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated – with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, unfortunately, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.

Your Honor, I got involved in the activity that has brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. Our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, deeply unfriendly; I feel morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values ​​and our political system on it.

We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders cannot be, and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for more than two centuries?

My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba’s right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice.

My greatest wish would be to see a friendly relationship emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope that my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility toward Cuba and work together with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect and understanding.

Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred – by individuals or governments – only spreads pain and suffering. I hope that the United States develops a policy with Cuba based on love of neighbor, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any other nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt.

Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one ‘world-country,’ in our only world-homeland.”

Brutal prison conditions aimed to destroy Ana Belén

Jürgen Heiser of the German solidarity Netzwerk-Cuba reported that “Ana Belén has been isolated in conditions that the UN and international human rights organizations describe as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ and torture. Her prison conditions were further exacerbated after her trial, when she was placed in the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, outside of Fort Worth, Texas. The FMC is located on a US marine compound and previously served as a military hospital… It includes a high security unit set aside for women of “special management concerns” that can hold up to twenty prisoners. A risk of “violence and/or escape” are specified as grounds for incarceration in the unit. This is where the “spy” Ana Belén is being held in isolation, in a single-person cell.”

Her cell neighbors have included one who strangled a pregnant woman to get her baby, a longtime nurse who killed four patients with massive injections of adrenaline, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson follower who tried to assassinate President Ford.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram has regularly covered the abuses against the women inmates at Fort Carswell Carswell prison, which has also housed two other political prisoners Reality Winner and Aafia Siddiqui. Detainees have suffered gross violations of their human rights, including documented cases of police abuse, suspicious deaths where the investigations into them have been blatantly obstructed, deaths due to the denial of basic medical attention, rape of prisoners by guards, and exposure to toxic substances. In July 2020, 500 of the 1400 prisoners had Covid. The Star Telegram reported “the facility showed a systemic history of covering misconduct up and creating an atmosphere of secrecy and retaliation…”

Ana Belén wrote, “Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in, but some things in life are worth going to prison for, or worth doing and then killing yourself before you have to spend too much time in prison.”

She has been subjected to extreme conditions in that prison, akin to those imposed on Assange. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has reported that:

She can only have contact with her closest relatives, since her conviction is for espionage.

No one can inquire about her health or know why she is in a center for people with mental problems, when she does not suffer from them.

She cannot receive packages. When her defenders sent her a letter, it has been returned by certified mail.

Only people on a list (no more than 20 who have known her before her incarceration and have been approved by the FBI) ​​can correspond, send books, and visit Ana. Few people have visited her besides her brother and niece.

She cannot interact with other detainees in jail, and was always alone in her cell.

She is not allowed to talk on the phone, except to her mother once a week for 15-20 minutes.

She could not receive newspapers, magazines or watch television. After a dozen years in prison, the restrictions were slightly relaxed.

Karen Lee Wald noted in 2012, “If she is taken out of her cell in the isolation unit for any reason, all other prisoners are locked in their cells so they cannot speak to her. Basically, she has been buried alive.”

David Kovics, the renowned leftist songwriter, was moved to pay tribute to her in song. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who was jailed by the US during his fight for Puerto Rican independence, said, “I think that every Puerto Rican who loves justice and freedom should be proud of Ana Belén. What she did was more than heroic. She did what every person who believes in peace, justice and freedom and in the right of every nation to govern itself in the best possible way and without the intervention or threat of anyone, would have done.”

The Monastiraki Kitchen wanted to present the best Christmas dinner ever (until next Christmas) for our clients. The Big Feast. A meal for Kings and Queens. Partly because of our Automatic Earth readers’ donations, I think we got quite a ways there. Even if the dinner happened yesterday, December 31, instead of Christmas.

The Automatic Earth readers were responsible for buying €450 worth of steaks, meaning a good sized steak for 450 people (sometimes we make good deals). And we also bought tons of cookies, and charcoal, etc. Ask Filothei, she knows the details. I decided I’ll let the photos tell the story this time, not me. Here we go:

Apart from the usual food, and this time the steaks, Christmas at Monastiraki is always a time for gift bags. Hundreds of them. They contain lots of sweets, but also soaps, shampoo, warm socks and gloves etc. Very popular. We are so grateful to all those who contribute.

Really, lots of gift bags.

A crazy amount of sweets. Carloads.

And the steaks. Ever tried to prepare 450 of them?

It’s a lot.

Did I mention there were sweets? The bakers who donate these are saints. We are dealing with homeless people, for whom steaks and cakes and good chocolate are dreams. Well, Christmas is the time to make dreams come true.

And all this is dragged to the square by the crew.

Who then do the last preparations.

Yeah, Monastiraki Square is a bit magical at times.

And it’s also busy…

Before the food arrives. Gift bags! We have gift bags!

Yes. Popular.

The girl crew.

Did I mention we have sweets?

Thank you all soo much for making this possible. It counts. It makes a real difference. It’s a community effort. Even if you’re in Tennessee, you are part of that community.

I’ll end with the usual play:

Most of you will know the drill of this by now: any Paypal donations ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go straight to the Monastiraki kitchen, while other donations go to the Automatic Earth -which also badly needs them. (Note: a lot of Automatic Earth donations also end up at the kitchen).

I dislike few things more than asking people for money, even though the Automatic Earth now runs primarily on donations, and there’s some sweet justice in that as well, in depending on people’s appreciation of what we do, instead of ad revenues.

But I cannot do this on my own right now. The Monastiraki kitchen will realistically need about €1,500 per month (not all from my readers). I don’t have that to spare. So I’m calling on you. Unashamedly, because I know there is no reason to be ashamed of the cause.

I love all you people, and I’m sorry I can’t thank you all individually who have supported -and still do- the Monastiraki kitchen and the Automatic Earth all this time, and I ask you to keep on doing just that. The details for donations on Paypal and Patreon, for both causes, are in the top of the two sidebars of this site. Could not be much easier. If you’d rather send a check, go to our Store and Donations page. Bitcoin: 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT.

Love you. Thank you. This kitchen would not exist without you, these people would not get fed.