Category: Culture

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Keep On Rockin’

 

From the book RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

By William T. Hathaway

RADICAL PEACE presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists who are working to change our warrior culture. An American exchange student in one of my courses here in Germany contributed the following essay about how she became an anarchist for peace.

Jason was my boy-friend for a while in high school. It wasn’t a match made in heaven. Looking back, I think the main thing we had in common was that I wanted a boy-friend and he wanted a girl-friend. Other than that there wasn’t much between us, as we discovered whenever we tried to talk about anything. I broke up with him when he asked me to go rabbit hunting with him. We stayed friends, though, probably because since it was obvious we could never be a real couple, neither of us had hard feelings.

We both left town after graduation; I went to college, Jason went to the marines. Two years later we were both back home; I was on summer vacation, Jason was on medical leave after having half his leg blown off in Iraq. He’d been riding in a truck that hit a mine.

Everybody in town felt terrible about what had happened to him. The American Legion post gave him a parade. The high school marching band played, the vets marched, and Jason walked in front next to the mayor, who was carrying the American flag. Jason could walk pretty well, considering.

They marched into the football stadium, where a couple of hundred people, including me, were sitting in the bleachers. They mayor, the high school principal, and Jason’s minister all gave speeches that praised his heroism and the sacrifice he’d made for our freedom. Jason gave a speech about how much he loved his country and how much he appreciated everyone for their support. He said he had a new dream in life. In high school he’d been on the track team, had run the 220. Now he was going to try out for the Special Olympics, to show the world that people can overcome any handicap.

At this, everyone jumped to their feet and gave him a standing ovation. People were crying while they clapped. Jason started to cry, and the minister led him back to his seat. I left the stadium crying while the band played the “Marine Hymn” and “America, the Beautiful.”

Some of the people in our class were going to give him a party that night, and I’d been planning to go. But now I kept hearing his voice as he was speaking. It sounded like a machine, like he was saying what everybody wanted to hear and what he wanted to hear, what he wanted desperately to believe but couldn’t quite, but if he forced himself to say it and saw everyone else believed it, he might convince himself. Because otherwise it was too terrible, and he couldn’t bear that. To block out his grief, Jason had become a robot of patriotism.

I couldn’t go to the party and hear him talking in that mechanical voice. I didn’t want to hang around home either and hear my parents say how brave Jason was. I poured a little from each of my parents’ liquor bottles — bourbon, scotch, vodka, gin, rum, and Southern Comfort — into a jar, then poured in some Coke. Tasted terrible.

I drove my moped down to the river and sat on the bank as it got dark, drinking and watching the slow brown water and listening to the cicadas and frogs chirping like those speeches. I started out sad and then got mad.

I didn’t think Jason had been defending anybody’s freedom. I drank some more and realized the word “freedom” has become meaningless. It’s just a gesture like waving the flag or playing the national anthem to create a feeling in people.

I threw some rocks into the river. I liked the way they splashed but was afraid I might hit a fish.

I got afraid of being out there alone, so I drove away. The strip mall on the edge of town was closed for the night. I saw the army recruiting office and thought of all the Jasons they’re still convincing to sign up and get their legs blown off. I thought it would be more efficient to put the recruiting office, the hospital, and the funeral home all together, so you could just go from one to the next.

I looked around to see if anybody was there. Nobody. I drove to the edge of the parking lot and picked up a big rock. Drove back and when no cars were going by, I threw the rock through the window.

Crashing glass. Wailing alarm. The cardboard dummies of smiling soldiers in the window display fell over. I felt like David knocking over Goliath. But only for a second. Then I got terrified. The cops would be coming. What if my fingerprints were on the rock? What if somebody saw me? I sped away, taking side streets back into town.

I got home OK. My parents were in bed. I threw up in the toilet and went to bed.

Next morning I woke up hungover and afraid. What should I do if police come to the house? Don’t admit anything. Maybe they can’t prove it.

The newspaper had an article about it and an editorial saying vandalism like this is an insult to Jason and all the other heroes who have sacrificed to defend the free world.

I couldn’t resist returning to the scene of the crime. I left the moped a few blocks away in case anyone recognized it, and I wore a hat and sunglasses. The window was covered with a big sheet of plywood, and people were looking at it and talking. I wondered what they were saying but didn’t want to get that close.

Over the next several days a stream of letters came out in the paper. Some said people who do things like that should be sent to Iraq. But I was surprised by how many said the war is wrong and we shouldn’t be sending our young people over there to fight. It was a real debate that wouldn’t have happened unless I’d thrown the rock.

I thought maybe Jason would write a letter, but he didn’t. I thought about calling him, but I knew I couldn’t say the kind of things that would make him feel better. So I went back to college early.

That town has a recruiting office too, and every time I went by it, I wanted to break the window. But I was too afraid.

Now I’m doing my junior year abroad in Germany. When I read about how the people here who resisted fascism when it was taking over are now honored but back then were despised and persecuted, it made me glad for what I’d done and convinced me I should keep doing it, be careful but take that chance of getting caught. I don’t have a police record, so if I did get arrested I probably wouldn’t go to prison. It’s just breaking a window. Throwing that rock lets people know we can fight back against this, we aren’t helpless. Each boarded recruiting window makes people wonder if this war is right, especially if they’re thinking of going inside and signing up. And the money it costs the government to fix it can’t be used to kill people.

Actually, now that I think about it, it’s more than just breaking a window. It’s also smashing the glass walls that surround us. This prison we all live in is invisible, but it holds us down. Its walls say: “This is how things have to be, and you have to obey.” “These are your only choices.” “This is freedom.”

The easier a person has it in this society, the harder it is to see it’s really a prison for all of us. Even the people at the top have had to sacrifice their humanity to get there and stay there.

Breaking windows doesn’t demolish the prison, but it does let in a breath of fresh air, and that makes us yearn for more. It’s air conditioning for the brain. Breaking glass is making music. It’s DIY redecoration of our neighborhood. It opens our eyes and lets us see. Breaking glass should be a new Olympic sport … especially for the Special Olympics.

*

RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War is published by Trineday, https://www.trineday.com/products/radical-peace-refusing-war?_pos=1&_sid=6fd196daf&_ss=r

William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran, an emeritus Fulbright professor of American studies in Germany, and the author of Lila, the Revolutionary, a fable for adults about an eight-year-old girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice.

 

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High Summer

‘Now, there are only two teams: human beings and globalist kleptocrats.’ —Jeff Childers

The Past

‘The genius of a meta-fraud is that it is essentially above the law and beyond reproach in ordinary discourse. The wrongfulness becomes normalised, and given the passage of decades, centuries, and even millennia assumes an aura of being beyond question. It is an attack on culture and the fabric of society that establishes privileged classes of rentiers and perpetual beneficiaries. The victims are often recruited to police their own abuse, and rat out anyone who might seek to prevent it.’ —Martin Geddes, Decline and Fall of the Meta-Fraud

I remember the time when there was no news. It was high summer. Not as hot as the summer of ’98. Not as wet and cold as the June-uary of 2022. I remember the wide pebbled beach, the track of the sun on an unbroken sky. No blizzard of ’66, no foreign wars. No great flood, drought, crime of the century, tropical storm.

The people talked among themselves. We walked in the forests and fields, carrying tools, songs and stories, alongside babies.

We sat to wait for the boats to come home, with fish. We carved insignia in wood, rock, our own flesh. For the heck of it. We knew how things worked in the world. We had a story for everything. To share our interest, while waiting.

Once the catch came in… then feasting. Salting some away, and treating elders first. Savoring, knowing how.

‘“We funded the disease, lied about it, funded the cure, and got a mountain of unreported royalties for doing so” is not a good look for NIH and their closing of ranks and collusion in discrediting any idea of lab leak despite it being the obvious, leading thesis.’ —el gato malo, stunning interview with michael yeadon

Clan divisions, territory, that had to be worked out. Part of the deal, living here: shared rental.

‘American politics have coalesced into two new parties: the freedom party and the authoritarian party.’ —Jeff Childers

The Present

‘We have reached the absurd place where people who choose to rely on their own body’s proven self-protection are vilified for declining dangerous genetic therapies from known criminals.’ —Martin Geddes, Decline and Fall of the Meta-Fraud

In high summer, leave all that, waves come in.

Air stirs with all that is—sound, motion, life breathing.

The birds line up on the bay, a way station, relaxed formation.

High above, illuminating trees, sun keeps sentinel, reminding all and sundry where allegiance lies.

Insignia of life is written everywhere.

Dying, Living, there is no boundary; call it all Life, call it all One.

Is this beauty made for us, to feed us by its wonder?

The flowers speak of creativity, lend us sparks of love.

The Future

High summer will be no place to hide. All lit up with stage lights from above, the great unveiling. In the blink of an eye, a lens washed clear, a change of heart… multiplied to a seismic tremor. A crack in the wall of time, that has kept us away from the land of freedom. We have been locked in the past, chained to stories of our doomed destiny, our insignificance beside the Great Powers.

‘Systems of silent enslavement work better than those which require obvious fences and clanking chains. Meta-fraud is the mechanism by which these are established and scaled. Meta-frauds are successful because they are by construction hard to perceive, large, and longstanding: each one is a “new normal” that excludes the idea of any rival system that has legitimacy. By their nature they lead to totalitarian societies — be they communist, fascist, or transhumanist in nature.

‘The simultaneous unravelling of all the interconnected meta-frauds is therefore both unthinkable to most people, and the most sizeable change to human society possible, short of relocating to another planet or dimension. The Great Awakening is the transformation of our society so that these frauds are widely perceived, which is an experiential process. We have to endure the exposure and collapse of these meta-fraud systems and institutions, in order to overcome and transcend them.

‘Eliminating meta-fraud is a paradoxical process, in that it involves “boiling the frog too fast”. For instance, the slow rebranding of “red” Marxism as “green” Environmentalism is derailed by suddenly increasing energy prices and creating shortages, which in turn causes people to question the official explanations being offered. The decline and fall of the empire of meta-fraudsters looks like a horrific end of established society, but actually it is only the beginning of genuine civilisation.’

—Martin Geddes, Decline and Fall of the Meta-Fraud

In high summer the mighty are brought low, by sweat and overwhelm, the one Great Power untouchable by their simulations, their suicidal frenzy.

—

Talking Spirit: Essays and Inspirations, by Nowick Gray

Essays spanning three decades—reflective yet contemporary, philosophical and practical—address human nature and environmental ethics; personal and metapolitical intention; radical insight and live freedom in thought, emotion and action.

Order now from Amazon.

Nowick Gray is a regular contributor to The New Agora and also offers perspectives and resources for alternative culture and African drumming. Subscribe to his Substack (New World Dreaming) or visit his  writings website at NowickGray.com.

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image credits:
(feature) beach: NG
news: Stephan Pastis
insignia: NG
birds bay: NG
sun church: NG
WHO: Dr. Pierre Kory
Covid Facts: Dr. Robert Malone
one percent: @ZubyMusic, Twitter

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Divergent

In the 2014 dystopian action film Divergent (PG-13), a postwar future world enforces a division into five factions. Spoiler alert for fans of the Covid Era, the army and police (the Dauntless), are mass injected with a chemical that subjects them to control by the Erudites, vying for a takeover of power. While the ruling faction of the old normal is benevolent in the mold of good old liberal social democracy, circa 2014, the Erudites aim to wipe them out (via the zombified Dauntless troops) and install a technocratic regime. To ensure public peace and safety, these new controllers also feel the need to target and hunt down any challengers of the system, the renegades called Divergents.

Needless to say, at the end the film the outcome shows the stereotypical flight from the city by the two teen heroes (he and she), to the wild and desolate lands beyond the Wall… presumably to join the Resistance—in today’s simulation, the Unjabbed.

Despite the struggle between factions, there is one operating mantra common to all: Faction before blood. So we see families torn by their caste allegiances, and the triumph of social ideology over kinship and friendship. “Human nature is the enemy” according to the Erudites, who by their own nature claim to know what is best for everyone. WEF Fuhrer Klaus Schwab, Israeli egghead Yuval Harari, or transhumanist Ray Kurzweil couldn’t have voiced that confession any more succinctly.

If the Hollywood screenwriters have their say, the social science is settled and the only hope for humans lies in returning to the forest—packing remnants of military hardware, reflective mylar capes to hide from infrared-tracking drones, and some dauntless drive never to give up.

Personally, I don’t think the Avatar-style shootout in the woods is the way to go, even with all of Gaia’s helpers. But with cape and bugout kit handy, there’s no going back to the urban matrix, the collective control grid, with its compliant subjects already denatured of their humanity.

The Silence of the Lambs

No, this is not another film review. But it follows a dystopian script, set in 2022, at an otherwise idyllic Northwest retreat center. Our hero arrives having paid his hefty deposit, with the terms and conditions accepted: for this week of Mindfulness Meditation, masks are “recommended.”

To each his own, thinks the hero: My body, my choice. But when he arrives, the front desk informs him the face rag is mandatory. He takes a deep breath… perhaps his last one unfiltered for the next ten days. Taking notice of the indignation raising his pulse, he finally negotiates a compromise. He will tuck his bandana over his nose when entering or leaving the hall.

During sessions the meditation room will be packed full of fifty masked Covidians—mindful of everything, one presumes, but the impact of the mask on each breath: oxygen deficit, increased viral load, harmful levels of once-demonized CO2. Nowhere in this realm of clear mind is there space for any of the 150 comparative studies and articles on mask ineffectiveness and harms.

For the first three days, our hero’s monkey mind revolves around the issues at stake with this muffled breathing, in, out. Safety versus freedom, truth versus politics, the individual versus the herd. There are no gurus in this spiritual practice, handing out dictates from on high. It’s just the leaders of the retreat, and the retreat center itself, following new normal mask policy, acting out of “an abundance of caution”—in compassionate consideration of the traumatized mindset of the paying clientele. Finally the resisting mind comes to relax, exhausted by its own struggle against What Is.

Perfection is within our grasp, if we only pause in the stillness, and accept our condition, witnessing the innumerable forces at play upon our unchanging nature, tempting us to get all worked up. In such a state of knowing, the mask is but a mask. The inner mask falls away. The mandates are but mental constructs.

By day six, our former, repressed rage has evaporated, and we can now take refuge in the measured rhythm of the breath. The world at war with itself is a perpetual motion machine, a theatre of the ego. As we attend to the stale taste and fetid warmth of our self-saturated breath, we go deeper into the Void. The cure, we have come to accept,  is not to rip the mask away, not to shout at the injustice and deceit of the whole charade, but to accept our fate, comply with the container of our enlightenment, and retreat further within.

On day nine, thoughts of the future intrude: the end of the retreat, the conversations that will ensue when speaking is allowed again. We wonder If our heart will start to race once more at the very mention of that hyper-politicized word, Freedom. No, the next breath tells us, we can abide and keep our silence when the fifty Covidians around us start the program loops  running again: The experts are keeping us safe. The CDC is our friend. The WHO is endorsed by the Dalai Lama. Bill Gates is a philanthropist. Our elected officials deserve our trust. The public health authorities are divine beings of infinite worth just like ourselves.

On day ten, while the dining hall is alive with renewed chatter over the closing meal, our hero takes his plate outside and sits on the steps, removing the limp bandana and breathing deep of the clear island air. Reflecting on the overall experience of the retreat, his mind opens to a final insight, on behalf of the fifty Covidians; as if he is channeling the collective wisdom they have embodied: When the Buddhists say, “Meditate on death,” what better way to do so than with eyes closed, mouth masked, and ears encased in the silence of the tomb?

For our Divergent hero, this voluntary muzzlement of the self is indeed instructive as a ten-day reminder of our ultimate insignificance. He also knows that going from here back to the world, it is no way to live. To maintain true mindfulness, he realizes, Divergence is the way to go.

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In Covid Narrative Remix: Two Years of Dissent, Nowick Gray critiques the global agenda with the voice of the natural human spirit. These compiled articles from The New Now/Agora (2020-2022) shed light on the narrative sabotage carried out as the primary strategy of the war on humanity. Against that weapon of moral destruction, pen turns to sword in the ongoing battle for truth and freedom.

Order now from Amazon.

Nowick Gray is a regular contributor to The New Agora and also offers perspectives and resources for alternative culture and African drumming. Subscribe to his Substack (New World Dreaming) or visit his  writings website at NowickGray.com.