Opinion

Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations blend Indigenous customs and European thinking in surprising ways

(The Conversation) — The Aztecs deliberated on how to continue their traditions and preserve their group identity following the Spanish invasion.

Ezekiel Stear
October 28, 2024

(The Conversation) — Every year, five hours west of Mexico City on Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, residents flock to the island of Janitzio to visit the graves of their departed relatives.

On the evening of Nov. 1, the Noche de animas, or Night of the Souls in Purgatory, families will bring a meal to share with their ancestors. They will also use the time to clean the graves and decorate them with elaborate displays of candles and marigolds. Some will spend the night sleeping among the tombstones.

In Mexico City, parades will feature people in colorful customs with large skull masks while skull-shaped floats move through the streets to the rhythm of Aztec drums. Marigolds, skull-painted faces and swishing skirts will fill the downtown from the main square of the Zócalo to Bellas Artes, the Palace of Fine Arts.

This vibrant scene reflects the blending of Indigenous, European and specifically Mexican customs that define Day of the Dead celebrations today.

As a scholar of colonial Mexico, I study how Indigenous people have maintained their traditions despite the Spanish invasion. Whereas scholars once thought that these cultures simply blended – a phenomenon called syncretism – researchers today understand more about how Indigenous people intentionally deliberated about which of their own traditions to continue, and how.

Celebrations for the dead had an important place in Indigenous cultures before the Spanish came. But, as historian James Lockhart explained, the Spanish, in their attempts to impose their religion and customs, often did not recognize what was most important to local cultures. As long as Indigenous celebrations for the dead did not contradict Spanish preaching, they could go unnoticed.
Indigenous choices

The immediate effects of the Spanish invasion brought hard choices for Indigenous people. Most of the Indigenous deaths of the conquest came not by the sword, but by epidemic diseases such as smallpox and salmonella, for which the native population had no natural immunity. In the 16th century, whole towns depopulated, and people needed to decide where they would go to find the best opportunities.

After the Spanish came, around Lake Pátzcuaro, displaced families suffering the effects of European illnesses and the deaths of family members moved to cities and towns. On the shores of the lake and on the island of Janitzio, they continued their customs of sharing harvest produce with the dead.

Setting aside time to care for the tombs of the dead became a yearly observance during the colonial period. After independence from Spain in 1821, a series of state decrees in Michoacán even encouraged residents to honor the war heroes buried on Janitzio.

Since the island had already been sacred for hundreds of years, it was a logical site for the veneration of the new heroes of Mexican independence. So, patriotism strengthened the Indigenous tradition of honoring the dead, which was already underway.
How Indigenous practices survived

In Mexico City, colonial policies also ironically allowed Indigenous practices to survive. Before the Spanish came, the Aztecs displayed thousands of skulls of sacrificial victims on a skull rack, called the tzompantli.

In their view, the vital energy released from sacrificed bodies fed the Sun and ensured that the universe continued.

Aztec ritual human sacrifice.
Via Wikimedia Commons

The Aztecs honored many of their sacrificial victims before these rituals with days of feasting, fine clothes, luxury lodging and other pleasures. Each year, during the festival of Miccailhuitontli, the “little feast of the dead” in the ninth month of the Aztec calendar, children were ritually killed. In the tenth month, it was the adults who were sacrificed during the festival of Huey Miccailhuitl, “great feast of the dead.”

Although Spanish military invaders suppressed these celebrations, they also unintentionally gave the newly colonized Aztecs ways to combine their beliefs with Christian celebrations.

Franciscans and other religious orders who followed brought the medieval rituals of religious theater and processions as part of their efforts to convert the local people. Both of these highly public medieval practices gathered large numbers of spectators, as Aztec rituals had done before the invasion.

The Indigenous actors in these plays, themselves recent converts, portrayed pageants during Christmas, Holy Week and other observances.

While the friars did not plan to draw on Indigenous beliefs, these religious plays had parallels with the preconquest Aztec practice of deity impersonation. For example, before the Spanish came, in the festival of Toxcatl the Aztecs would dress up a specially chosen prisoner as their deity of divination Tezcatlipoca. The impersonator danced and paraded through the city on his way to be sacrificed atop the main temple.

When Catholic religious theater came to the city, local actors continued to take on the persona they represented to such a degree that one local actor even hanged himself after portraying Judas in a Passion play.

During the long colonial period, from the 16th to the 18th century, religious processions became a mainstay in the city. Historian Susan Schroeder recounts the chronicles of the Indigenous writer Domingo Chimalpahin about multiple processions as a source of Indigenous communities’ civic pride.

Over time, taking cues from the “mascaradas” – the large, papier-mâché heads of Spanish processions and festivals – Day of the Dead began featuring enormous, colorful skulls parading through the streets, just feet away from where the Aztecs once displayed human skulls.
Beyond graves

Besides the usually cited All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on Nov. 1 and 2, more covert European elements have influenced Day of the Dead practices. One of these is the belief in the soul and an afterlife. Historian Jill McKeever Furst explains that in the Aztec view, only death in battle or during childbirth earned immortality.

Most people went to Mictlan, the Land of the Dead, releasing their vital energy into the universe and ceasing to exist as individuals. Today, depictions of the living interacting with the dead, singing to or talking with them, such as in the movie “Coco,” likely reflect adapted ideas about the afterlife from Christianity, as cultural critic Anise Strong has noted.

European influences have also shaped home altars with their seven or nine levels, representing layers of underworld, Earth and paradise. Research has revealed that many Indigenous communities in what is now Mexico viewed the universe as flat and placed Mictlan far away from the living, rather than below the Earth.

Historians Jesper Nielsen and Toke Reunert have noted that it is likely that Indigenous images of the universe as made of three realms, with a reward in the sky, Earth in the middle, and the world of the dead below, come from Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. Dante’s literature depicts the universe in a vertical fashion – from the heights of heaven, through purgatory, Earth and with abysmal hell at the bottom.

As local people converted, they left horizontal views of the universe and moved toward a positive up and a negative down. The vertical cosmos contrasts with ancestral Indigenous views of the universe as a plane where humans and supernatural beings interacted.

People gather on the island of Janitzio, Mexico, to clean the graves of their deceased loved ones, decorate them with marigolds and bring baskets with offerings for the Day of the Dead in Mexico.
Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Celebrations continue

The island of Janitzio on Lake Pátzcuaro and Mexico City show how Indigenous choices helped their traditions survive despite Spanish influence. In the city of Pátzcuaro, sharing food with the dead during harvests continued alongside All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the history of public ritual sacrifice gave way to the religious pageantry of Spain’s Renaissance.

Today, individuals and groups continue to decide how to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Whether it’s about communicating with the dead, letting go, or believing they remain among the living, the holiday’s strength lies in its ability to hold many meanings.

As long as Indigenous, Spanish and modern Mexican customs continue in home rituals and public celebrations of past lives, current lives and cultural heritage, the Day of the Dead will be alive and well.

(Ezekiel Stear, Assistant Professor of Spanish World Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Auburn University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Could Two New Docs Subtly Change the Presidential Election?

Steven Zeitchik
Sat 7 September 2024 


Adam Kinzinger had turned down more than a dozen requests to make a documentary. Then the director of Hot Tub Time Machine walked in.

The Illinois Republican congressman who famously — and largely solitarily — turned on Donald Trump after Jan. 6 was reluctant to participate in a movie that focused on his fading hopes to retain his seat. But Steve Pink, the aforesaid auteur of the jacuzzi, wanted to get more personal than that.

“Everyone else was interested in re-election,” Kinzinger said in an interview with THR as the Toronto International Film Festival was set to start Thursday. “But when I talked to Steve and the team their interest was in the human element — what’s the cost to you and your future kid?”

That conversation was more than two years ago. Now the resulting film, The Last Republican, could make an impact on more than just Kinzinger when it premieres at TIFF 2024 on Saturday. That film and Carville — a Telluride documentary about the maverick consultant James Carville and his long lonesome bid on the other side of the aisle to move the Democrats off Joe Biden — could thrust movies into the thick of the election. But how much are film companies interested in these stories — and will it matter in the grand voting scheme if they are?

Carville, at least, has answered the first question. CNN Films bought the movie (subtitle “Winning Is Everything, Stupid”) just before Telluride and will debut it on-air October 5 with an eye toward capitalizing on electoral interest. The Last Republican still seeks its own home when it plays for distributors this weekend, making the case that a good way to defeat Donald Trump is to popularize the backboned Republican who defied him. Submarine is handling sales on the film.

“Things are dark, Trump is still ascendant and shenanigans to call into question this year’s election seem inevitable,” Pink said in an interview. “And here’s someone who, even though his political views I abhor on a good day, lives by his beliefs in an active and tangible way. I think that will resonate with people.”

Both Republican and Carville could make a splash in the 2025 Oscar documentary race, which has seen scattered contenders but few runaway favorites. But the campaign impact could be even greater.

At a crowded screening Saturday afternoon that included a number of distribution executives, Kinzinger and the Last Republican filmmaking team took the Toronto stage to make their case.

“This is the wrong job if you’re scared to do the right thing,” Kinzinger told one questioner while also saying that the GOP has “lost its mind.”

Pink’s movie took shape when he and producer Jason Kohn, known for directing the Andre Agassi documentary “Love Means Zero” circa TIFF 2017, made their bid to Kinzinger that his story belonged on screen. And what a story it is: longtime Air National Guard pilot and conservative ideologue who spoke out against Trump’s role in January 6 and even joined the mostly Democratic Congressional commission, causing Republicans to shun him and eventually re-district him out of office.

A rapport even developed between Pink, an avowed liberal, and Kinzinger; the film suggests an odd-couple affability. “At some point this started to feel like the national Thanksgiving dinner we haven’t been able to have since 2016,” Kohn said wryly.

The filmmaker known for the temporal-shifting power of chlorine and the filmmaker who once told of tennis betrayals would not seem like obvious choices for an inside-Rayburn account. But the former’s sense of improbable story and the latter’s ability to capture a maverick serve them well. Kinzinger helps his own cause with a personality that is brash and often funny, a world away from Congressional starch even as he is facing death threats.

To MAGA Republicans Kinzinger is a Judas; to liberal Democrats he’s a martyr. But even as the 46-year-old courts attention — he did agree to the movie, after all — he says he is neither. “I’m not courageous. I’m just surrounded by cowards,” Kinzinger said in the interview, echoing a theme from the film.

For distributors, the calculus on Last Republican is a tricky one: they could buy the film now and see its value skyrocket if Trump wins. But if Trump is defeated on Nov 5, possibly for the last time, the film might be worth a lot less.

Should a distributor choose to take a flyer on a pre-election release, it could model for solidly Republican voters a way to go against Trump, depicting a man who still did so even though he paid with his career.

“Maybe I’m deluded but I think that a story can compete with Trump’s. Trump’s story is that Adam is disloyal, Adam is a RINO, Adam doesn’t represent his party,” Kohn said. “But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a conservative audience to pick up on another story.” On Friday, Dick Cheney furthered that narrative when he added his name to the list of Republicans endorsing Kamala Harris.

A film release would also jolt viewers into recalling the attempted insurrection, depicted here in evocative detail, as well as the many mainline Republicans who quietly about-faced after first condemning Trump. (Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy comes out particularly worse for the wear.)

A party’s dangerous groupthink is also the subject of Matt Tyrnauer’s “Carville,” which shows scene after scene from earlier in the year of its subject in vintage form, joyfully growling, cussing and eye-rolling over what he sees as the party’s dangerous deference to an unelectable incumbent. For months, that seemed to be an irrelevant message.

“It was almost a lost cause type of movie — you know, too late the hero,” Tyrnauer recalled in an interview.

The film was actually being screened for friends and family on the night of the fateful Trump-Biden debate in June. The minute the lights went on in front of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, Tyrnauer knew he had a new ending on his hands. The film now ends with a pivot to Harris.

Still, Carville now runs the opposite risk — having been ahead of the curve for months, it could seem like old news. Carville and Tyrnauer say the movie — which also revisits its subject’s famous work on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, his improbable marriage to Republican operative Mary Matalin and the generally colorful Louisiana personality always beaming from the airport TV — still carries a timeless message of both the shrewd game of politics and the nobility of public service.

But the principals also believe their film has a role to play as the campaign heats up. Tyrnauer said an explicit goal was to get it out before balloting begins, while Carville says he sees the film’s potential to influence voters’ 2024 behavior.

“I don’t know how many people watching it are going to change their vote, but maybe somebody’s gonna write 100 more postcards or maybe somebody’s gonna volunteer at a phone bank,” Carville said in an interview. “There are a thousand things people can do to get inspired. My hope is this movie inspires people to get involved with the election.”

A CNN spokeswoman, Jordan Overstreet, declined to comment on the network’s aims for the film.

The history of movies trying to shift electoral maps is a checkered one. “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s blockbuster 2004 documentary that sought to get people not to vote for George W. Bush, failed in its main goal. But other modern documentaries from “Blackfish” to “Citizenfour” have succeeded in changing consciousness, and experts say that’s not hard to conceive of here.

“The idea that a filmmaker can make a difference on an election has been proven wrong — we’ve seen how that doesn’t work too many times,” said veteran documentary expert Thom Powers, who runs the doc section at TIFF. “What I think can happen is a film hits the zeitgeist in just the right way and can change how people think. The Last Republican and other films playing at this year’s festival have the potential to do exactly that.”

Kinzinger says he’s trying to keep his eye on something even bigger.

“If you fast-forward to 2124 and the administration of President Zarkon 3 or whatever we’ll call him, we’ll probably still be debating the same issues we’re debating now,” Kinzinger said. “But we can’t get there if the environment becomes one where people have lost faith in a system and even turn to violence because they think they don’t have a voice.”

The Hollywood Reporter

‘The Last Republican’ Review: Adam Kinzinger Makes an Engaging Doc Subject in Portrait of an Anti-Trump Conservative

Frank Scheck
Sat 7 September 2024 


It’s a sign of the truly bizarre political times in which we live that the new documentary about former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger was made not by any of the usual filmmaking suspects. The Last Republican, receiving its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, wasn’t helmed by, say, Michael Moore, Errol Morris, or Barbara Kopple, but rather Steve Pink. It only makes sense when you find out that one of Pink’s previous directorial efforts, Hot Tub Time Machine, is Kinzinger’s favorite film. “It’s the thing that sold me,” Kinzinger jokingly comments, well aware of the director’s ultra-liberal leanings. “You have contempt for what I believe, in terms of political viewpoints,” he acknowledges.

Now that Kinzinger has become a media personality, best-selling author, and darling of the Democratic Party (he recently spoke at their national convention), it’s easy to gloss over how much courage he displayed in standing up for democracy. Ironically, that wasn’t the reason he was forced to leave office; rather, it was a redrawing of the congressional map, one that put him in deep MAGA territory, that led him to conclude he couldn’t win a primary.

The filmmaker clearly had generous access to his subject during the intense period after the events of Jan. 6 that led him to defy the majority of his own party. “I thought, naively, that there’s no way people aren’t going to wake up from this,” Kinzinger says about that infamous day. He blames Donald Trump, sure — but he blames Kevin McCarthy, who resurrected Trump’s political fortunes with his kiss-the-ring visit to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, even more. After all, he points out, Trump is “nuts,” but McCarthy, a canny political operator, knew exactly what he was doing.

Kinzinger admits that he had absolutely no desire to serve on the Jan. 6 committee. “I thought, dear Jesus, not me,” he recalls, but says that he couldn’t refuse when Pelosi tapped him, only learning about it from her appearance on a Sunday morning political show. She did call him in advance, he admits, but at 5 a.m. that morning, when he was asleep.

The hearings naturally form the centerpiece of the film, with the footage inevitably feeling ultra-familiar. (Anyone interested in watching this documentary probably consumed them avidly.) But the personal comments by Kinzinger and his wife Sofia — who vividly describes her anxiety watching the events of Jan. 6 in real time and fearing for her husband’s life — prove fascinating. She says that, after the gut-wrenching testimony by several of the Capitol police officers, she texted and advised him to tell the officers that they had prevailed. He complied, tearfully comforting them, “You guys won.” Naturally, his heartfelt emotionality was mocked by the likes of Newsmax and Tucker Carlson.

Kinzinger paid dearly for his courageous acts. We hear recordings of phone calls to his office in which people threaten him and his family members in the vilest language imaginable. He received a handwritten letter from 11 family members disowning him and telling him that he had joined “the devil’s army.” And he, along with Liz Cheney, was censured by his own party. He was eventually forced to have 24-hour security at his home. “Yeah, people want to kill me,” he comments in deadpan fashion. “It sucks, right?”

Kinzinger’s less familiar backstory proves fascinating, such as the fact that he was obsessed with politics from a very early age. He once dressed up as the Illinois governor for Halloween, and even turned his bedroom into a mock campaign office. As a child, he was a Civil War reenactor. “For the North,” he’s quick to point out.

An incident from his past provides evidence that his valor began early in life. As a young man, he impulsively intervened in a late-night incident in which a man was attempting to stab his girlfriend on the street. Kinzinger was unharmed in the resulting fight, although he thinks he still suffers from PTSD as a result. There’s even surveillance footage of the harrowing event, providing the sort of cinematic emotional hook that documentary filmmakers can only dream of.

The handsome, charismatic and extremely articulate politician proves a natural camera subject (there’s a reason he’s become a television staple) and self-deprecatingly takes pains to downplay his moral stance. “I don’t believe what I did was courageous. I think it’s just that I was surrounded by cowards,” he says.

He also fascinatingly relates how, after the impeachment vote, he attempted to persuade the other nine Republican congressman who voted alongside him to join forces and try to regain control of the Republican party by taking advantage of the suspension of corporate donations and Trump’s (temporary) exile. He sorrowfully says that the others instead went silent, resulting in a missed opportunity. It goes unsaid that we may pay the price for it this November.

The Hollywood Reporter


‘We’re in a constitutional crisis’: Adam Kinzinger warns of chaos at documentary premiere

Radheyan Simonpillai in Toronto

THE GUARDIAN
Sun 8 September 2024

Adam Kinzinger attends the premiere of The Last RepublicanPhotograph: Brian de Rivera Simon/Getty Images

Adam Kinzinger reiterated his support for Kamala Harris in the US presidential election at the Toronto film festival on Saturday, but warned that there may be more eruptions of violence should she win.

The former Republican congressman, whose party turned against him when he voted to impeach former President Donald Trump after the January 6 insurrection, was speaking to an audience following the world premiere of The Last Republican.

The crowd-pleasing documentary, with healthy doses of comic relief in its coverage of outrageous and tragic political events, follows Kinzinger for over a year as he endures the fallout from his efforts to hold Trump accountable for inciting the riots as part of the United States house select committee on the attack. The film is a portrait focusing on the costly personal sacrifice to do what both Kinzinger and the director Steve Pink repeatedly remind is simply the right thing.

After the screening, Kinzinger said history could repeat itself at a time when his party “lost its mind” but doesn’t believe the violence will play out in exactly the same way. The battle grounds won’t be Capitol Hill, according to the politician who recently spoke during a prime slot at the Democratic national convention, but individual states.

“Look at Arizona for instance,” Kinzinger said. “Assume Arizona goes for Kamala. But it’s a Republican legislature. The legislature has to be the one to certify Kamala as the winner. I can see a pressure campaign where these people simply will not vote to certify her the winner. And what happens then? We’re in a constitutional crisis. According to the constitution, if the state legislature decides, it’s just going to certify Trump, even if its [voters] went the other way, we have to accept that in the federal government … That’s a real concern I have. You can see violence at these statehouses that don’t have the security, we have. Our security got overrun that day for God’s sakes and we have 500 times the security that state houses do.”

The Last Republican is directed by Steve Pink, a self-described leftie who Kinzinger suspects has contempt for his politics. The film opens with Pink sharing his admiration for Kinzinger’s resolute stand – he was one of ten Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment, and the only one next to Liz Cheney to sit on the January 6 committee. Kinzinger reciprocates, explaining that he’s agreeing to ignore the ideological gap and take part in the film because Pink directed Hot Tub Time Machine, which he loves.

Pink’s first foray into documentary is a handshake between liberal Hollywood and a Republican that occasionally leans into odd couple comedy. The director and his subject rib each other throughout for opposing political beliefs that the film shies away from interrogating. At one point Kinzinger admits his pro-life stance, but his voice wavers a bit, hinting at the slightest opening that he could be swayed. During the same interview, Pink declares: “If this documentary helps you win the presidency and you enact horrible conservative policies, I swear to fucking god!”

His profile on the extremely charming Kinzinger certainly makes the case that the kid who once dressed up as Illinois governor Jim Edgar for Halloween and grew up practically indoctrinated into Republican politics would have made a decent presidential candidate. The film revisits a heroic act, when Kinzinger, in his 20s, rescued a bleeding woman from an attacker with a knife. The act of self-sacrifice, the film gently suggests, foreshadowed his recent actions.

The Last Republican doesn’t reveal anything particularly new about January 6 and Kinzinger’s work as part of the committee, but forensically revisits the damning moments before and after the attack. Kinzinger reflects on the Republican conference call, when Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy says he would be voting against certifying Biden’s election win. Kinzinger says he warned McCarthy on the call that such an action could lead to violence. McCarthy’s response, which can be heard in the doc, was a dismissive “Ok Adam” before he called for the “next question”.

As The Last Republican cycles through testimony, McCarthy offers personal reflections and feelings about how things happened, describing January 6 as a bad bender that the Republican party should have woken up from and sipped water to cleanse its system and recover. Instead, they backed Donald Trump. “You could always fix a hangover by starting to drink again,” says McCarthy, tying up the analogy.

Kinzinger expresses that he was angrier at his old friend Kevin McCarthy than Trump. “He’s just nuts,” Kinzinger says of the latter.

He admits he wanted nothing to do with the January 6 committee. “Please dear Jesus not me,” he would say before Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be seeking his participation without calling him first.

Following the screening, Kinzinger tells the audience that almost every Republican congressman knows the 2020 election “wasn’t stolen” and “most of them would tell you that they think Donald Trump is crazy”. He adds that before impeachment, he believed there was going to be 25 votes in favor, instead of just the 10 who did, because many were too scared to take that stand. “I would have people come up to me all the time and say ‘thanks for doing it because I’ll lose in my district if I do it, but thank you.’” He’s exasperated by the gall of it.

Kinzinger not only lost his district but was bombarded with hate while ostracized not just from his party but his own extended family. In one scene, his mother Betty Jo Kinzinger recalls a phone call from an old community friend who tells her she doesn’t like Adam anymore. “You don’t have to like Adam,” she says, “but you don’t have to tell his mother that”.

In the film, Kinzinger’s staff can be heard sorting through the relentless phone calls to his office, ranging from angry voters to terrifying threats, deciding which calls should be referred to Capitol police. The vitriol is so much that they keep a cabinet near their desk filled top to bottom with what you would think is an apocalyptic supply of Kleenex boxes. The reveal elicited a hearty laugh from the audience. But the trauma behind it is all too real.

“Over time it takes a toll that you don’t recognize on you,” Kinzinger told the audience. He said that the threats we hear in the film aren’t just a tiny sample, reciting one caller who wishes Kinzinger’s son, who was six-month-old at the time, would wander into traffic and die.

“The people that call the death threats are probably not the ones that are going to come,” Kinzinger continued, who says he was swatted just a week before, a common occurrence when he speaks out. “The ones that are going to come are not going to let you know ahead of time that they’re going to be there.”

“I would always conceal and carry,” Kinzinger continued, “not because I’m just some crazy gun guy. But that was my way to defend myself in security … You’re living with security [with] your work. You always make sure to lock the doors and arm the system at night. But after a while I realized that I’m keeping distance from people. And I don’t want to be that way.”

When pressed about why it’s so hard for his fellow Republicans to question the party line and Donald Trump, Kinzinger said that many are just clinging to what they feel is their identity.

“When you see yourself as a member of Congress,” he said, “and you walk into any room, except the White House, and you’re the most powerful person there, and you have everybody’s attention, it’s really hard to walk away from that … I’ve learned that courage is rare … you have to walk away from your identity. And unfortunately, so many in the Republican party were unwilling and are unwilling to do that.

“Since we filmed this, there have been more people elected into the Republican party that actually are batshit crazy and truly believe some of this. So that’s a scary thing.”

The Last Republican is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date

 

The Vietnam War Protest Songs are as Relevant Today as When They Were Written

by David Penner / September 3rd, 2024

The Vietnam War protest movement left us with a number of timeless anti-war songs, which are, despite the absence of a draft and large numbers of American soldiers dying, still extremely pertinent as they underscore the growing dangers posed by Washington’s pathological addiction to war.

Country Joe McDonald’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die” let loose a volley of vitriol directed against conscription, the war on students, and American oligarchs who have long sought to solve all problems with violence. The song makes use of humor and sarcasm to remind listeners that imperialist wars are invariably rooted in hubris and an assault on reason:

Well, come on all of you, big strong men
Uncle Sam needs your help again
Yeah, he’s got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun
Gonna have a whole lotta fun

And it’s one, two, three
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam
And it’s five, six, seven
Open up the pearly gates
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

How many Americans would reply with “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn” if asked why we are waging a proxy war on Russia – a war that could easily result in a direct NATO-Russia conflict and a nuclear exchange? “I Feel Like I’m Fixin to Die” emphasizes the self-destructiveness that goes hand in hand with launching wars devoid of any moral purpose:

Come on, mothers throughout the land
Pack your boys off to Vietnam
Come on, fathers, and don’t hesitate
To send your sons off before it’s too late
You can be the first ones in your block
To have your boy come home in a box

Famously performed by Barry McGuire, P. F. Sloan’s “Eve of Destruction” warns of the danger that Washington’s penchant for warmongering could eventually lead to an apocalyptic confrontation that would threaten the survival of our species. Even more apropos in light of NATO’s Banderite proxy war on Russia, “Eve of Destruction” warns of the dangers of direct superpower confrontation and fulminates against the exploitation of America’s vulnerable youth:

The eastern world, it is explodin’,
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’,
You’re old enough to kill but not for votin’,
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’,
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin’,
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Don’t you understand, what I’m trying to say?
And can’t you feel the fears I’m feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no running away,
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave,
Take a look around you, boy, it’s bound to scare you, boy,
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.

Billy Joel’s wistful “Goodnight Saigon” questions a system that preys on callow youth and laments how easy it is to turn impressionable teenagers into hardened killers:

We met as soul mates on Parris Island
We left as inmates from an asylum
And we were sharp as sharp as knives
And we were so gung ho to lay down our lives
We came in spastic, like tame-less horses
We left in plastic as numbered corpses

A key point made in “Goodnight Saigon” is that once the bullets start flying, it is no longer possible to question the rationale behind a conflict, as once a man’s life is in danger the fight-or-flight instinct is activated, and reduced to an animalistic existence, men will do anything in their power to survive:

Remember Charlie, remember Baker
They left their childhood on every acre
And who was wrong? And who was right?
It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight

Neil Young’s “Ohio” engages the massacre at Kent State and the growing hatred between the anti-war movement and a government hell-bent on killing “commies” and making money for the military industrial complex. “Ohio” makes the important point that once an individual realizes they are being lied to about their government’s foreign policies their life is irrevocably upended:

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin’
Four dead in Ohio

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are gunning us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

While the current ruling establishment is too media-savvy to fire live rounds at Free Palestine protesters, their contempt for the rule of law and the First Amendment is no less egregious.

Often forgotten today, there was a second massacre of students carried out on May 15, 1970, at Jackson State College in Mississippi who were protesting against the Pentagon’s attacks on Cambodia and the expansion of the conflict.

Bob Seger’s “2+2=?” correctly points out that imperialist wars demand blind obedience and a population that has become impervious to logic and common sense:

All I know is that I’m young (Two plus two is on my mind)
And your rules they are old (Two plus two is on my mind)
If I’ve got to kill to live (Two plus two is on my mind)
Then there’s something left untold (Two plus two is on my mind)
I’m no statesman, I’m no general (Two plus two is on my mind)
I’m no kid I’ll never be (Two plus two is on my mind)
It’s the rules, not the soldier (Two plus two is on my mind)
That I find the real enemy (Two plus two is on my mind)
I’m no prophet, I’m no rebel (Two plus two is on my mind)
I’m just asking you why (Two plus two is on my mind)
I just want a simple answer (Two plus two is on my mind)
Why it is I’ve got to die (Two plus two is on my mind)
I’m a simple minded guy (Two plus two is on my mind)

Jimmy Cliff’s “Vietnam” bemoans the unimaginable evil of a government champing at the bit to send its sons off to die in a faraway land, and the terrible toll that this took on the families who lost their sons forever:

Yesterday I got a letter from my friend
Fighting in Vietnam
And this is what he had to say
‘Tell all my friends that I’ll be coming home soon
My time it’ll be up some time in June
Don’t forget, he said to tell my sweet Mary
Her golden lips as sweet as cherries’

And it came from
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam

It was just the next day his mother got a telegram
It was addressed from Vietnam
Now mistress Brown, she lives in the USA
And this is what she wrote and said
‘Don’t be alarmed’, she told me the telegram said
‘But mistress Brown your son is dead’

The Byrds’ ethereal “Draft Morning” encapsulates the surreal atmosphere of a draft whereby vast numbers of American men were press-ganged, brainwashed, and trained to kill people on the other side of the planet – human beings of whom they knew absolutely nothing:

Sun warm on my face, I hear you
Down below moving slow
And it’s morning

Take my time this morning, no hurry
To learn to kill and take the will
From unknown faces

Today was the day for action
Leave my bed to kill instead
Why should it happen?

One of the most talented American folk singers, Tom Paxton’s “What Did You Learn in School Today?” draws the connection between imperialism and a reactionary education system, a motif also engaged in “Buy a Gun for Your Son.” As the public schools have gotten considerably worse and the mass media brainwashing apparatus much more powerful, “What Did you Learn in School Today?” strikes an even more poignant chord with many listeners in the 21st century:

And what did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?

I learned that war is not so bad
I learned about the great ones we have had

We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance

And that’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school

And what did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?

I learned our government must be strong
is always right and never wrong

Our leaders are the finest men
And we elect them again and again

And that’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school

“What did you Learn in School Today?” acknowledges the grim reality that Americans who are raised in a jingoistic environment often remain intellectually as children all their lives. Another excellent Paxton song, “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation,” raises a theme which has repeatedly reared its head throughout the history of American imperialism, which is that of a government that continually manipulates and deceives its young men into marching off to fight wars based on ludicrous lies:

I got a letter from L. B. J.
It said this is your lucky day

It’s time to put your khaki trousers on
Though it may seem very queer

We’ve got no jobs to give you here
So we are sending you to Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson told the nation
‘Have no fear of escalation

I am trying everyone to please
Though it isn’t really war

We’re sending fifty thousand more
To help save Vietnam from Vietnamese.’

Chilean folk singer Victor Jara left us with the lovely and elegant “The Right to Live in Peace,” likewise a noteworthy and moving Vietnam War protest song:

Uncle Ho, our song
is fire of pure love,
it’s a dovecote dove,
olive from an olive grove.
It is the universal song
chain that will triumph,
the right to live in peace.

Despite being brutally murdered by Pinochet’s soldiers, Jara’s “Manifiesto” remains one of the most beautiful folk songs ever written and has outlived the satanic forces that so pitilessly ended his life. (Legend has it that while being beaten, Jara is said to have sung Allende’s campaign song “Venceremos”).

Another historically significant American folk singer, Phil Ochs combined a mellifluous voice with sound political acumen. His “One More Parade” denounces the authoritarian conformity that often accompanies the waging of wars, a stifling of liberty that can only result in a dissolution of empathy:

So young, so strong, so ready for the war
So willing to go and die upon a foreign shore
All march together, everybody looks the same
So there is no one you can blame
Don’t be ashamed
Light the flame
One more parade

“One More Parade” ridicules bellicose Americans, their depraved love of war, and how they regard it almost as the sane do a party. The song is strikingly pertinent with regards to the growing risk of an apocalyptic NATO-Russia conflict, a war involving China and the United States, or a devastating war in the Middle East involving Israel and Iran which would likely draw in the US. Indeed, the American ruling establishment is so accustomed to dropping bombs on defenseless people lacking any air defense or modern military technologies that there are times when they appear to be living in a fantasy world incognizant of the fact that in a full-blown conflict the aforementioned countries could actually inflict serious harm on US military and economic power.

Ochs’ “What are you Fighting For?” exudes a profound understanding of America’s war machine and our corrupt ruling establishment. Egregious poverty inside the United States, a mainstream press infested with pathological liars (granted, this problem is much worse today), a government that holds freedom of assembly in contempt, and how the wars waged abroad often serve as a distraction from the wars at home – all are brilliantly captured in these inimitable lyrics:

And read your morning papers, read every single line
And tell me if you can believe that simple world you find
Read every slanted word ’til your eyes are getting sore
Yes I know you’re set for fighting, but what are you fighting for?

Listen to your leaders, the ones that won the race
As they stand right there before you and lie into your face
If you ever try to buy them, you know what they stand for
I know you’re set for fighting, but what are you fighting for?

Invoking the ghost of the American soldier, Phil Ochs’ “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” calls for an end to the warfare state and a ruling establishment that has long been intoxicated with violence and bloodshed:

For I’ve killed my share of Indians
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I heard many men lying, I saw many more dying
But I ain’t marching anymore

It’s always the old to lead us to the wars
It’s always the young to fall
Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun
Tell me, is it worth it all?

For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes, I even killed my brothers
And so many others
But I ain’t marching anymore

For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh, I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain’t marching anymore

As evidenced by his “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” Ochs understood the hypocrisy and treachery of the liberal class even long before they went off the rails in embracing Russophobia, biofascism, censorship, unfettered privatization, identity politics and “humanitarian interventionism.”

Famously performed by Pete Seeger, Ed McCurdy’s heartwarming “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” was another song popular with Vietnam War protesters:

Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war

I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with men
And the paper they were signing said
They’d never fight again

Pete Seeger’s “Where have all the Flowers Gone?” (also rendered beautifully by Peter, Paul and Mary) embodied the finest spirit of ‘60s radicalism. Imbued with an illimitable sorrow, the song pleads for an end to violence and to the execrable scourge of war:

Where have all the young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone?
Gone for soldiers every one
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?

One of the great American poets, Bob Dylan penned a number of superb anti-war songs, one of which was “With God on Our Side,” where like Paxton he repeatedly drew the connection between militarism and indoctrination in the public schools:

Oh, my name, it ain’t nothin’, my age, it means less
The country I come from is called the Midwest
I’s taught and brought up there, the laws to abide
And that the land that I live in has God on its side

Oh, the history books tell it, they tell it so well
The cavalries charged, the Indians fell
The cavalries charged, the Indians died
Oh, the country was young with God on its side

The Spanish-American War had its day
And the Civil War too was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes I was made to memorize
With guns in their hands and God on their side

The First World War, boys, it came and it went
The reason for fightin’ I never did get
But I learned to accept it, accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side

Dylan’s “Blowing In The Wind” laments how, despite a reasonably educated population (albeit no longer the case today) and a strong protest movement, the war machine, fueled by apathy and jingoism, inexorably rages on:

“How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Yes, and how many years must a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
And how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?” laments the death of boxer Davey Moore at the end of a heated bout in March of 1963, and how after the fight everyone involved from the referee, to the rabid crowd, to Moore’s manager (“It’s too bad for his wife an’ kids he’s dead but if he was sick, he should’ve said”), to the gambler and the sports writer all seek to absolve themselves of responsibility. Even Moore’s opponent, “the man whose fists laid him low in a cloud of mist,” seeks to distance himself from Moore’s tragic death:

I hit him, I hit him, yes, it’s true
But that’s what I am paid to do
Don’t say ‘murder,’ don’t say ‘kill’
It was destiny, it was God’s will

Indeed, one could replace Davey Moore with hundreds of Native American tribes and countries the United States has mauled, brutalized, and ravaged over the centuries and ask, “Why, and what’s the reason for?”

Moreover, one could tinker with the lyrics to tell the tale of the Branch Covidian putsch where the medical school professor, the physician, the nurse, the presstitute, the anchorman, the FDA employee, the CDC employee, the employer who enforces a rigid mRNA vaccine mandate, the WHO official, the hospital administrator, and the medical journal editor all deny any involvement in what was perhaps the greatest disaster in the history of medicine.

Another iconic Dylan song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” is not an anti-war song per se, but is nevertheless apposite to our discussion in that it warns of the dangers of economic inequality becoming so severe that the foundational basis of democracy begins to fracture resulting in different criminal justice systems for the rich and the poor:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel, society gath’rin’
And the cops were called in, and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face, now ain’t the time for your tears

William Zanzinger, who at 24 years, owns a tobacco farm of 600 acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders

And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes, on bail was out walkin’

One of the most unforgettable American anti-war songs, Dylan’s “Masters of War” unleashes a torrent of wrath directed against the armaments industry which he identifies as a demonic force – an insatiable Kraken at war with civilization:

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

In a conclusion that might get one arrested in modern-day Britain for violating hate speech laws and for hurting the feelings of war criminals, Dylan openly calls for the head of the Antichrist:

And I hope that you die
And your death will come soon
I’ll follow your casket
By the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand over your grave
‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead

While minuscule numbers of American soldiers have died in Ukraine and Gaza, these are still American orchestrated wars which the Banderite entity and the Zionist entity would not be able to wage without unconditional military, diplomatic, and financial support from Washington and its European vassals.

It is a curious and somewhat lamentable irony that many of the old ‘60s radicals have become the most bloodthirsty hawks on the planet, and this is intertwined with the fact that the American ruling establishment learned a rather strange lesson from the Vietnam War, which is not that there is anything wrong in committing genocide per se, but that the information war is more important than the actual war fought on the ground.

(The Banderite incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast is illustrative of this phenomenon: the operation is absurd from a military standpoint, as it exacerbates Kiev’s already critical manpower deficiencies, and yet it represents a good PR victory – albeit a fleeting one). The rise of this ministry of truth has spawned the cult of neoliberalism, whose acolytes are frequently more belligerent than “the far right,” and who have lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

In order to survive, the West will need leaders who cherish human life, and who place an inestimable value on something other than money and power. As these enduring songs so vividly and eloquently remind us, bereft of love, compassion, and liberty of thought human beings are stripped of their moral compass and doomed to live out their days as remorseless beasts and fleeting shadows.

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David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry can be found at Dissident Voice, Mad in America, and redtailedhawk.substack.com. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at 321davidadam@gmail.com. Read other articles by David.

1,600-year-old fragment identified as oldest written account of Jesus Christ's childhood

NO MENTION OF TRUMP

Sheri Walsh

UPI
Wed, June 12, 2024 

A papyrus fragment, dating from the 4th to 5th century, was recently deciphered after being stored for decades in a university library in Hamburg, Germany. It has been identified by researchers as the earliest surviving writings about Jesus Christ's childhood. Photo courtesy of Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg/Public Domain Mark 1.0


June 12 (UPI) -- A recently deciphered manuscript, dating back to the 4th or 5th century and stored in a university library in Hamburg, Germany, has been identified by researchers as the earliest surviving account of Jesus Christ's childhood.

"Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' was originally written in Greek," said papyrologist Gabriel Nocchi Macedo from the University of Liège in Belgium.

The papyrus fragment, dating back more than 1,600 years, had gone unnoticed for decades at the Hamburg Carl von Ossietzky State and University Library, until Macedo and Dr. Lajos Berkes from the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin identified its true origin.

The small fragment, which measures just over 4 inches by 2 inches, contains thirteen lines of Greek letters from late antique Egypt. The content was originally thought to be part of "an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting is so clumsy," said Berkes. "Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized it could not be an everyday document."

The researchers believe the copy of the Gospel was created as a writing exercise -- given the clumsy handwriting and irregular lines -- in a school or monastery, which would make it a much earlier surviving copy of the gospel than the 'Infancy Gospel of Thomas' manuscript from the 11th century.

"The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research," said Berkes. "On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text."

While the words in the document are not from the Bible, they describe a "miracle," according to the Gospel of Thomas, that Jesus performed as a 5-year-old child as he moulded soft clay from a river into sparrows and then brought them to life.

Newly deciphered manuscript is oldest written record of Jesus’ childhood: ‘Extraordinary’

Andrew Court

NY POST
Tue, June 11, 2024 




A newly deciphered manuscript dating back more than 1,600 years has been identified as the earliest known account of Jesus Christ’s childhood.

The manuscript, written on papyrus in either the 4th or 5th century, had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany, for decades and was long believed to be an insignificant document.

However, two experts have now decoded the text and say it is the earliest surviving copy of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

“The papyrus fragment is of extraordinary interest for research,” Lajos Berkes, a theology lecturer and one of the two men who deciphered the document, declared in a press release.

“It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting seems so clumsy,” the expert explained. “We first noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document.”

The papyrus manuscript had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg / PD

The piece of papyrus contains a total of 13 lines in Greek letters and originates from late antique Egypt, which was a Christian society at that time.

The manuscript describes the beginning of the “vivification of the sparrows” — a story from Jesus’ childhood in which he turns 12 clay sparrows into live birds.

According to the text, Jesus was playing beside a rushing stream where he molded the sparrows from soft clay. When rebuked by his father, Joseph, the 5-year-old Jesus clapped his hands and brought the clay figures to life.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas describes Jesus’ childhood, but it is not included in the Bible. 

That story, described as Jesus’ second miracle, is a well-known part of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT).

The IGT describes Christ’s childhood, and its stories were both popular and widespread in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

However, the apocryphal text was not officially included in the Bible as some early Christian writers were doubtful of its accuracy.

The IGT is believed to have been first written down during the 2nd century; however, until now, a codex from the 11th century was the oldest known Greek version of the text.

“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the Infancy Gospel according to Thomas was originally written in Greek,” Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, the other expert who helped decode the papyrus fragment, said. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg / PD

The newly deciphered papyrus fragment predates that document by an astonishing 600 years.

“Our findings on this late antique Greek copy of the work confirm the current assessment that the Infancy Gospel according to Thomas was originally written in Greek,” Gabriel Nocchi Macedo, the other expert who helped decode the papyrus fragment, declared.

Both Macedo and Berkes believe the manuscript was written onto the papyrus fragment as a writing exercise at either a school or a monastery.

“From the comparison with already known manuscripts of this Gospel, we know that our text is the earliest,” Berkes stated.

German researchers decode earliest known written record of Jesus' childhood

Anders Hagstrom

FOX  NEWS

Wed, June 12, 2024 

German researchers decode earliest known written record of Jesus' childhood


Researchers in Germany have decoded what they say is the oldest-ever manuscript detailing Jesus Christ's life as a child.

The papyrus manuscript dates back more than 1,600 years old to the 4th or 5th century. The document had been stored at a library in Hamburg, Germany, as no one believed the document was of any significance.

"The fragment is of extraordinary interest for research," Lajos Berkes, a professor and one of the researchers who decoded the document said in a press release. "On the one hand, because we were able to date it to the 4th to 5th century, making it the earliest known copy. On the other hand, because we were able to gain new insights into the transmission of the text."

"It was thought to be part of an everyday document, such as a private letter or a shopping list, because the handwriting seems so clumsy," he continued. "We first noticed the word Jesus in the text. Then, by comparing it with numerous other digitized papyri, we deciphered it letter by letter and quickly realized that it could not be an everyday document."


Researchers in Germany have decoded what they say is the oldest-ever manuscript detailing Jesus Christ's life as a child.

Berkes said the document is a fragment of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal book that was not included in the Bible. The gospel offers details about Jesus' life as a child before his ministry.

The poor handwriting in the document led Berkes to believe the manuscript was made as part of a writing exercise in a monastery or a school.

While there are only a handful of words in the manuscript, the researchers were able to determine that it is retelling the apocryphal story of the "vivication of the sparrows."

"Jesus plays at the ford of a rushing stream and molds twelve sparrows from the soft clay he finds in the mud. When his father Joseph rebukes him and asks why he is doing such things on the holy Sabbath, the five-year-old Jesus claps his hands and brings the clay figures to life," the press release stated.

While there are only a handful of words in the manuscript, the researchers were able to determine that it is retelling the apocryphal story of the "vivication of the sparrows."

Original article source: German researchers decode earliest known written record of Jesus' childhood


SEE

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for JUDAS 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for GNOSTIC JESUS 

 

If The Wars Go On

by Edward Curtin / May 30th, 2024

I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .  

Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.

It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song, Masters of War:

(Verse 1)

Come, you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

(Verse 3)

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

Indeed there is a system of war that guarantees that the various wars go on and on ad infinitum, and they are linked.  It is why the warfare state has killed our anti-war leaders, first and foremost JFK for turning against war in the last year of his presidency.  Then in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in quick succession.  It is why if you dare to look around the world today, you will see that there is a series of wars happening, not only in the obvious places like Ukraine and Gaza, but in places that you may never have heard of, and if you peek a bit further into their causes, you will discover that a familiar culprit with 750 plus military bases around the world has its hand in most of them – the United States of America.

These wars have their cold and hot phases.  There are days when the corporate media let them sleep and other times when the same media wake them a bit, but never enough to wake their readers up to the reality of the deadly game.  That is the media’s job as stenographers for the warfare state.  Wars being essentially the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote long ago, they provide vast profits for the military-industrial complex/Wall St., whether they are in preparation or in operation, awake or asleep, hot or cold.  Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst with a moral conscience, has aptly named this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, MICIMATT.  It is a complex that blatantly serves the interests of the masters of war who “ain’t worth the blood/that runs in [their] your veins,” in Dylan’s words.

The preparation for war is war.  What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration.  These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers.  For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic.  They are so intertwined.  It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.

The U.S spends nearly $900  billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.  The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence.  That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them  not.  It is a death cult.  Some – as I myself have done mistakenly – talk about the “deep state” or some other deceptive phrase that conceals the truth that the official state is the “deep state.”  It stares us in the face, but many refuse to stare it back down.  It is too obvious, standing, as it does, in the way of a life of illusions.

And what is equally apparent today – or should be if one is not asleep – is that because of the war policies of the U.S., the chances of another world war and the use of nuclear weapons is rising by the day.  Despite all its denials to the contrary, the US/NATO is pushing for open warfare with Russia that will involve the use of nuclear weapons.

Our masters of war are pushing us toward a nuclear abyss.

In a recent perceptive article, “Russia and China Have Had Enough,” Pepe Escobar writes truths many prefer not to hear.  That there is no split between Russia and China but the opposite – a rock solid Russia-China strategic partnership and a determination to oppose and defeat the U.S./UK/NATO hybrid war tactics across Eurasia and the Middle East.  That the more these U.S.-led forces attempt to destroy Russia, the more the expanding alliances involved in the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement (SCO) and the expanding BRICS partnerships of emerging economies (originally just Brazil, Russia, India, and then South Africa; now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, with many more countries waiting to join) will gain in power.  In Escobar’s words, “. . . the Global Majority is on the move: Russia is closely cooperating, increasingly, with scores of nations in West Asia, wider Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

Despite this fact, the United States and its allies blithely continue as if their control of the world order is secure.  That they can butcher and badger the world into submission.  The insane are usually deluded, but when they control nuclear weapons, the people of the world need to awaken.

Ray McGovern, a Russia expert, (see raymcgovern.com) has echoed Escobar on the absurdity of the Russian China split; has emphasized how Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has made it an isolated but desperate pariah state; and how the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine is leading to the increased use of  U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that could lead to full-scale nuclear war.  He is not alone in this warning.

There are many signs that we are moving toward a nuclear war with calls for U.S./NATO to support more strikes inside Russia, crossing a very dangerous Russian red line.  Russia has made it very clear they will respond.  As politicians of various stripes – French President Macron, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, et al. have ecstatically been urging the Biden administration, who needs no urging, to escalate the war in Ukraine by attacking Russia proper (“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told The Economist.), Mike Whitney has written about a recent such attack that should send chills down everyone’s spines –  “Washington Attacks Key Elements of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Security Architecture.” – but  since the corporate media ignore it, most will dream away and get their barbecues ready for Fourth of July celebrations.  They and the flag-dressed Dolly Parton can sing all they want about when Johnny comes marching home again, but Dolly and no one will be jolly if there are no homes to march to, no Johnnies marching anywhere but to death, no anything.  Just a wasteland.

Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation.  Cassandras all, I fear.  Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades.  It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control.  But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later.  The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss.

Former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, in a recent article – The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks – writes about how the Biden administration’s policy toward Russia-China, not to say Israel-Palestine, being nothing more than more of the same, is stupid, self-defeating, and very dangerous.  Rather than accepting that its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a disaster, the U.S. is escalating the conflict to a terrifying level.  Rather than accepting the obvious deep alliance between China and Russian exemplified in the recent hug between Putin and Xi and their joint 8,000 word joint statement, Biden has said, “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.” 

It doesn’t get any stupider.  But when more of the same doesn’t work and you can’t accept the reality of a changing world order, you do more of the same.  Crooke writes:

The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.

President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.

The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.

More of the same, yes, that is Biden’s approach, inflamed regularly by the anti-Russian hatred spewed by The New York Times and its ilk.  It is an obsession bordering on full-fledged madness, yet it is integral to the belief that the U.S. is an empire and will remain one while the rest of the world can go to hell.  Such a mindset is behind the U.S.’s abrogating all the nuclear weapons treaties that provided a semblance of security that nuclear weapons would not be used.

Crooke ends his piece with these sobering words:

Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov [Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister] sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.

Let me repeat that last understated sentence: “Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.”  And so?  More of the same?

Ray McGovern suggest what is more likely:

Israel [is] becoming a dangerous pariah; Ukraine/US/NATO a dangerous loser. As Israel defies the UN, and as the “exceptional” geniuses around Biden ignore Kremlin warnings regarding provocations re Ukraine, the likelihood increases for US use of tactical nukes.

Desperadoes do desperate things.  In Biden and Netanyahu we have two blood-thirsty nihilists at the end of their ropes.  These masters of war make me think that a better title for this piece would have been:

If the World Goes On.

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Edward Curtin writes and his work appears widely. He is the author of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies. Read other articles by Edward, or visit Edward's website.