7) Freedom Or Tyranny?

We all have an idea of what a civilized society looks like. We like classical music, we go to the theatre, we play the piano, we like to read nice novels, we like to hear poetry and we take our children for walks in the countryside. We think all those things make us civilized.

But look at Reinhard Heydrich: he had a piano in his office and would play Mozart at lunchtime. Then, in the afternoon, he would organise countless deaths in the concentration camps. He would sign away the lives of millions of people with the sweep of a pen.

It’s easy to say that Hitler was a deranged lunatic assisted by a gang of criminals, but the truth is more nuanced, and it should force us to think about ourselves.

Not many of us would be among those brave and individual thinkers who would stand up and say, “This is wrong”. Just check out Congress after Donald Trump followed Hitler’s path as a dictator President. 

In 1938, when Austria was being invaded, [Franz Stengl] was a police detective in the Austrian police force. Somebody told him that the Nazis were coming in one Monday morning, so he forged a Nazi Party membership card and put it into his personnel file.

When the Nazis occupied, they immediately went through the files of all the policemen and identified Stangl as a party member. It enabled him to keep his job.

Because he was seen as a reliable person he was placed in in the T-4 programme euthanasia programme that killing the physically and mentally handicapped.

Stangl then got the job of a commandant at Treblinka, which was a pure and simple death camp. He was responsible in one year for nearly a million Jewish deaths.

It should not come as a surprise that a social strata that prides itself on the Renaissance of Greek and Roman culture engages in a form of slavery where everyone besides them belongs to them.

The first known major slave society was Athens, providing for the prosperity and leisure time of the aristocrats and creation of Western civilization’s high culture, as well as, it seems logical to deduce, the working class’s hunger for freedom, also central to Western civilization. Rome’s prolonged wars resulted in enslaved conquered peoples composing roughly 30 percent of the population within Rome’s borders – not counting the extraction of tribute from the conquered nationals in their home territories.

On September 15, 2016, Urmila Bhoola, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, presented a report on slavery in the modern world, in particular debt bondage.

Sex trafficking is a massive, worldwide problem. There are more than 4 million victims of sex trafficking globally, 99% are women and girls. Profits from forced sexual labor are estimated at $99 billion worldwide. In its 2019 report, the U.S. State Department found the top three nations of origin for human trafficking victims were the United States, Mexico and the Philippines.

ILO provided a figure in 2012 of 20.9 million people being victims of forced labor of all forms.

Call it what you will, extraction of more labor than is recompensed is the currency by which self-indulgence, wealth, status and power is always obtained, individually and socially. Our industrialized societies continue to extort labor, we just simply don’t call these practices “slavery” while exploiting workers at home through low wages and heavy taxation and in foreign countries by extortionate trade agreements, sweat-shop factories and agricultural toil in plantations in remote countrysides. 

And the Caucasians who were fortunate to be born into status, wealth, opportunity of the Christian Western nations want to maintain a privileged lifestyle at their expense.

  • We view minorities and the vulnerable as less than human. What’s more, the inclination to dehumanise starts early – children as young as five view out-group faces (of people from a different city or a different gender to the child) as less human than in-group faces.
  • We experience Schadenfreude (pleasure at another person’s distress) by the age of four, according to a study from 2013. That sense is heightened if the child perceives that the person deserves the distress.
  • We believe in karma – assuming that the downtrodden of the world deserve their fate.
  • We are blinkered and dogmatic. This seems to occur in part because we see opposing facts as undermining our sense of identity. It doesn’t help that many of us are overconfident about how much we understand things.
  • We are vain and overconfident. Ironically, the least skilled among us are the most prone to overconfidence (the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect). This vain self-enhancement seems to be most extreme and irrational in the case of our morality, such as in how principled and fair we think we are. In fact, even jailed criminals think they are kinder, more trustworthy and honest than the average member of the public.
  • We are moral hypocrites. It pays to be wary of those who are the quickest and loudest in condemning the moral failings of others – the chances are that moral preachers are as guilty themselves, but take a far lighter view of their own transgressions.
  • We favour ineffective leaders with psychopathic traits. The American personality psychologist Dan McAdams recently concluded that the US President Donald Trump’s overt aggression and insults have a ‘primal appeal’, and that his ‘incendiary Tweets’ are like the ‘charging displays’ of an alpha male chimp, ‘designed to intimidate’. A meta-analysis published this summer concluded that there is indeed a modest but significant link between higher trait psychopathy and gaining leadership positions, which is important since psychopathy also correlates with poorer leadership.
  • We are sexually attracted to people with dark personality traits. One study found that a man’s physical attractiveness to women was increased when he was described as self-interested, manipulative and insensitive. One theory is that the dark traits successfully communicate ‘mate quality’ in terms of confidence and the willingness to take risks. Does this matter for the future of our species? Perhaps it does – another paper, from 2016, found that those women who were more strongly attracted to narcissistic men’s faces tended to have more children.

Think you’re safe here, in America, instead of Nazi Germany? If you look at history as an investigative journalist instead of an unquestioning patriot, you’ll see that America took over Nazi Germany’s elitist and eugenics war agenda.

As early as 1960 US military manuals encouraged intelligence operatives to ally themselves with “smugglers” and “Black market operators” to defeat communist insurgents…the CIA did just that. Take Southeast Asia…the agency allied itself with…the Hmong in Laos, who…were trafficking opium. Or Afghansitan…in the 1980s the CIA backed the Mujahedeen against the Soviet Union….the same Mujahedeen have controlled up to one third of the opium (used to make heroin) reaching the United States.

a three-decade war pitching the CIA-backed Colombian military and allied rightist paramilitaries …involved in Colombia’s drug trade…of about 80 percent of the world’s cocaine, the base substance of crack…By so doing, the CIA has facilitated crimes involving both human rights and drug trafficking.

August 18, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News:

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found…

Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world…helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons…

Stories had previously been written about the Contras’ alleged ties to drug trafficking…Rumors about illicit activities on the part of the Contras had also been probed in Senate hearings in the late 1980s. However, the Mercury News series contained — or at least many readers interpreted it to contain — a new sensational claim: that the CIA and other agencies of the United States government were responsible for the crack epidemic that ravaged black communities across the country. The newspaper articles suggested that the United States government had…either knowingly permitted…or turned a blind eye…

2011: The United States has found itself in a seemingly endless series of wars over the past two decades. Despite frequent opposition…the foreign policy elite operates on a consensus that routinely leads to the use of military power to solve international crises…

the notion that the United States and its allies were now free to project power to “do good” has remained intact…

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The most important assassination of the 20th century

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was assassinated in 1961by American and Belgian governments in order for the US to acquire a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, especially uranium to manufacture the first atomic weapons.

Patrice Lumumba’s determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo’s resources in order to improve the living conditions of the Congolese people was perceived as a threat to western interests.

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Joseph-Desiré Mobutu managed to destroy the third largest – and potentially the richest – country in Africa.

Early in his rule, Mobutu consolidated power by publicly executing political rivals…and other threats to his rule…before an audience of 50,000 spectators.

In 1968, Pierre_Mulele, Lumumba’s Minister of Education…was lured out of exile…still alive, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals were ripped off, and his limbs were amputated one by one…

Mobutu nationalized foreign-owned firms and forced European investors out of the country, handed the management of these firms to relatives and close associates, who quickly stole the companies’ assets. 

The infrastructure virtually collapsed overnight. The soldiers supported themselves by robbing the civilian population.

While Zaire received nearly half the foreign aid Carter allocated to Sub-Saharan Africa, The man who diplomats allege could pay off Zaire’s entire debt with a personal cheque had more than 20 luxury properties in the West, cruised on the Congo on his yacht, erected a palace, the Palace of Versailles of the jungle, chartered a Concorde from Air France for shopping trips to Paris.

Mobutu led one of the most enduring dictatorships in Africa and earned a reputation as one of the world’s foremost examples of Kleptocracy and Nepotism. The evening newscast opened with an image of him descending through clouds like a god…He held such titles as Father of the Nation, Messiah, Guide of the Revolution, Helmsman, Founder, Savior of the People, Supreme Combatant…

Mobutu enjoyed a very warm relationship with the Reagan Administration, visiting the White House three times. Criticism of Zaire’s human rights record by the US was effectively muted while Reagan praised the Zairian strongman as “a voice of good sense and goodwill”.

Mobutu was the first African head of state to visit George H. W. Bush at the White House.

Mobutu was befriended by televangelist Pat Robertson.

A new study has found that as much as a sixth of foreign aid intended for the world’s poorest countries has flowed into bank accounts in tax havens owned by elites.

Thoughtful consideration of the available options must lead to a realization that identifying with, through shared ideology, means becoming victims of the narcissistic elitists of this dog-eat-dog world.

During the past twenty-five years, scientists have challenged conventional views of evolution and the organization of living systems and have developed new theories with revolutionary philosophical and social implications.

In The Web of Life, Capra offers a brilliant synthesis of such recent scientific breakthroughs as the theory of complexity, Gaia theory, chaos theory, and other explanations of the properties of organisms, social systems, and ecosystems.

Capra’s surprising findings stand in stark contrast to accepted paradigms of mechanism and Darwinism and provide an extraordinary new foundation for ecological policies that will allow us to build and sustain communities without diminishing the opportunities for future generations.

The truth is that only by changing the way we as individuals treat each other from exploiting to sharing resources will we be able to reconcile broken families, resolve race relations, and bring about the peaceful and just international relations we need to ensure the survival of the species.

And that is the original program, and the offer of salvation by redemption back to, in the guidebook written by the Creator God and Sustainer of all existence.

Pick a side. Fodder for the elite’s exploitation, or fall on the mercy of a Supreme Being whose mercy toward helpless humanity is legendary.

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Published by kingdomcome777

A grandmother who loves to study the Bible and bases life on "know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

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