The two years prior to the Pandemic had me mildly obsessed with Nazi occupied Europe and Russian totalitarianism. A lifelong interest so I try to read the diaries and memoirs more so than the dry as dust history. Vichy France was the 12 months before the Pandemic. In a later post I will mention the writers and what they were at this time, more high literary than medium or low as again a long interest in Camus had drawn me in to visit circles I still haunt today.
I read this because as a 65 young yeared man with both legs and half his torso buried in quicksand I lived a very free bohemian American life fascinated by unfreedom. My surrealist idea was to learn to see like a fish out of water in the middle of the end of history. A child of atomic America in all respects. Remote Viewing with my own co-ordinates, a little surf, a little weed, a bit of music, some wine and the divine poetic inspiration of my beloved Blakean imagination.
What is effective action in Nazi occupied USA, in Vichy USA, of Joe Biden's USA, the former "land of the free and so forth?” Seriously if protests or voting worked we would be free from this hideous clutch from a horror movie. How were unions formed? We are being killed my fellow humans. Even Naomi “Woke” Wolfe has pointed to the eschatological aspect. And she is right to so. As Archbishop Viganò too is right to speak out.
This is a spiritual crisis. I once went to a rural evangelical tent meeting in Kentucky when I was 8 or 9, ‘65 or ‘66.
Mother’s family came from the "relative" unfreedom of Bremen, Germany in 1740 and pioneered Western Kentucky ( with other Germans ) led by Daniel Boone. I am then on my mother's side from Wendell Berry's Kentucky where we have roots now long dug up and soil no longer good and small towns larger with more strangers. On my father's side Germantown, Wisconsin was blessed with a large Polish Catholic population. My father had a large nuclear family that at some point in the 20's maybe moved to Toldeo, Ohio also blessed with a large Polish Catholic community. My mother was a Methodist and my Dad a Catholic intellectual gone so far from Holy Communion as to make a communist blush at the atheism. Dad watched the planes bomb Pearl Harbor because he was a civilian employee at Diamond Head in Hawaii. Dad knew Pearl was a set up and told me so. JFK being shot maybe, I do not recall because this moment in time saw my father fishing with me and having a heart attack and coming close to death about one week before JFK was rubbed out.
And murder is what we speak of when we speak precisely on Covid-19.
The mass murder of as many living humans as possible. We already are in Mass Formation Psychosis after all and everything except our imagination adaptively responding is war gamed. From Rogan to Tucker to Trump to Berenson to the Grand Guiginol’s cast of thousands. If you recall The Christic Institute then a nudge is as good as a wink. There is a play afoot within the Resistance and using Fox News as the tool because A.I and algols scooping processing punch carding typifying quantifying RESISTANCE. Creating a momentum and faking us out. Pay attention for everything is a great lie except the consequences of failure to fight back. Neitzsche admired Greek warfare because the Greek played for keeps. Or as Kazantzakis puts it so well Eleftheria i thanatos, Freedom or Death.
What a long, strange trip it's been
Phenomenal post, Bruce. A nudge is as good as a wink? Pithy to the core. You've got such a trove of layered meaning going I was smiling (to myself) at every turn. Although I was raised/indoctrinated in England, with all that entails, I emigrated to the US, or should I say California in the patchwork American quilt. I had the best/worst of both worlds. Now I find myself back in the UK/Europe since 2012. It was here, when in France about 3 hours from the Pyrenees in the Midi, old Occitanie, that I read a paperback of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française, written during the Occupation while she was hiding out in the French countryside, with a sense of 'urgent foreboding'. She was eventually captured and died in a concentration camp. While reading it, the parallels were too uncanny to miss - I was hiding out in the French countryside, there was a sense of urgent foreboding as the fascism of the pandemic swept across Europe, across the world, stories of concentration camps being set up. This was a turning point for me. While I saw fascism was appearing, it was only while reading this book that it hit home, that the Third Reich had become the Fourth Reich. I subsequently read many more books set during the Occupation, of the Resistance, the British SOE agents dropped into France, the entire milieu of that period, of the Vichy government, of what it meant to be a collaborator.
So yes, the parallels are unmistakable. And yes, A.I. is machine-learning everything about us in the approach to the Singularity. But we can't just give up in the face of its relentless inevitability. We have to keep speaking, shouting the truth in all its multifaceted forms, even if it means preaching to the choir, which only makes the choir sing louder. Remember the Estonian Singing Revolution?
And yes, we have a fight on our hands. Saddle up.