{"id":272751,"date":"2024-09-02T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T11:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=272751"},"modified":"2024-09-01T08:03:06","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T07:03:06","slug":"mirages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/mirages\/","title":{"rendered":"Mirages"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

30 Aug 2024 <\/em>– I am sitting on the beach at the National Seashore, a forty-mile long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean seashore on Outer Cape Cod, established in 1961 by President Kennedy.\u00a0 The wind is whipping hard and the waves are running wildly high against the shore, and, to paraphrase Thoreau \u2013 the sand is rapidly drinking up the last wave that wets it.\u00a0 I am looking far out to the horizon where the sun shimmers on what seems to be the world\u2019s watery edge, creating a strange mirage that I wonder at but find hard to describe.\u00a0 Earlier, I was rereading Thoreau\u2019s Cape<\/em> Cod <\/em>in which he mentioned this phenomenon 150 years ago, not just the mirages across the water but those here along the great stretches of sand.\u00a0 Now I am confused and my mind wanders to other mirages that make me shake my head in wonderment.\u00a0 It is hard to grasp what one is seeing these days.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a presidential aspirant, folded his cards and conceded the current pot to Donald Trump \u2013 what he euphemistically called suspending his campaign for the presidency \u2013 he let his justifiable hatred of the Democratic Party, their undermining of his campaign, and their pro-war and genocidal agenda get the best of him.\u00a0 His trust in Trump is na\u00efve in the extreme.\u00a0 With the issue that Kennedy has made central to his work in recent years \u2013 Covid and the \u201cvaccines\u201d \u2013 Trump is in the opposite camp.<\/p>\n

The investigative journalist Whitney Webb has said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe inevitable embrace of the Trump campaign by RFK Jr. will see one of the Covid-era\u2019s most prominent (+ promoted) skeptics embrace the man whose administration established the early Covid policies and Military-run Op Warp Speed. What a world and what a disappointment.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Furthermore, Trump\u2019s campaign is backed by a host of people \u2013 Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and Trump\u2019s vice-president sidekick, JD Vance, among others \u2013 who are big promoters and investors in mRNA and DNA vaccine technology.\u00a0 Thiel and Lonsdale are cofounders of Palantir, a company that collects American\u2019s health data while it also works with the CIA.<\/p>\n

Mirages?<\/p>\n

And the independent journalist Vaness Beeley, while being equally scathing of the Democratic Party\u2019s masters of war, has said the following of this odd coupling:<\/p>\n

With Trump and Kennedy you have a combination that is 100 times more likely to lead us to Armageddon and idiots are saying Trump supplied less weapons to Israel. Of course he did because he was destroying Syria through unilateral collective punishment economic sanctions, assassinating Resistance leadership and paving the way for greater Israel, Clean Break through Abraham Accords and Jerusalem, giving Golan to Zionist occupation. He didn\u2019t NEED to start wars, he certainly didn\u2019t end them, he increased the hybrid war strategy to pave the way for the final solution and Kennedy is fully on board, whatever his title. It\u2019s astonishing to watch people whitewash the Trump role in the empowerment of the Zionist entity which has led to the genocide we are witnessing. There is no one or the other (Trump or Harris) they work as a tag team, oligarchs and deep dark state create the road map. We are already in WW3 and Trump will go to war with Iran, effectively with Russia and China. Why continue supporting a putrid corpse of a US political system? And, by the way, Kennedy support base is not anti-Zionist. They are generally apathetic and prepared to excuse Kennedy\u2019s criminal genocide denial and defence of Zionist apartheid and ethnosupremacism because \u201cAmerica first\u201d. Genocide is the Red line that Trump and Kennedy will erase and normalisation of genocide is a clandestine policy of this partnership. We are already in WW3. Trump will not end any wars, he never has. Iran and China are in his crosshair.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This too is true, and it runs counter to RFK, Jr.\u2019s pledge to end all foreign wars.\u00a0 One may have noticed that in his speech suspending his campaign Kennedy said that he disagreed with Trump on certain matters, but he did not conveniently mention that they were in accord with each other and the Democrats in supporting the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians and its push for war with Iran and therefore Iran\u2019s ally Russia.\u00a0 That sounds like one big foreign war to this observer.<\/p>\n

While the mainstream media relish ripping Kennedy, they rarely if ever mention his unequivocal support for Israel, for to do so would bind them to him (and Biden\/ Harris, and Trump\/Vance) in being full-fledged supporters of Israel\u2019s genocide of the Palestinians. \u00a0Indeed, there is one taboo that the mainstream corporate media, mouthpieces for the warfare state, assiduously maintain: it is to never report the truth about the power Israel maintains over U.S. Mideast policy through its Israel lobby, and their own complicity in Israel propaganda.\u00a0 Politicians of both parties are venal reprobates who parade with American flags on their chests as they betray their country.\u00a0 They can only be described as traitors, as the current Biden\/Harris administration\u2019s full-fledged proud military backing for Israel\u2019s ongoing slaughter of the Palestinians substantiates.\u00a0 The recent Democratic Convention was a Hollywood spectacle directed by an American version of Nazi Germany\u2019s Leni Riefenstahl, replete with shouts for the destruction of Russia as well as the Palestinians.\u00a0 (The Biden-Harris administration has just approved its 100th arms shipment to Israel since October 7, 2023.)\u00a0 That they are pushing the world toward nuclear war didn\u2019t disturb them in the least, as they sang and laughed and acted out for a fan base deluded by mirages and auditory delusions produced Tinseltown style.<\/p>\n

So American voters are offered a choice of a political alliance of an odd couple in Kennedy and Trump, along with Vance, and a conventional one in Harris and Walz, based on the fallacious assumption that a choice is being offered between the war parties whose raisons d\u2019\u00eatre are to wage foreign wars for the teetering American empire.\u00a0 Hovering over and behind this pathetic travesty lies the controlling power of the national security state and its corporate media propaganda for these endless wars and corrupt politicians. \u00a0Only a skeptically acute mental knife, constantly sharpened, can cut through the propaganda campaign aimed, not at a foreign audience, but at the American people by its own government.\u00a0 Mind control is the name of its game.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What would Thoreau, a man who didn\u2019t vote and refused to his pay poll tax to support war and slavery, think of these strange alliances hiding behind glittering mirages?\u00a0 Though written more than 150 years ago, his words are more than apropos today:<\/p>\n

Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts \u2018all aboard\u2019 when the smoke blows away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over \u2013 and it will be called, and will be, \u2018a melancholy accident.\u2019<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He made it very clear that one should not lend oneself to the wrongs which one condemns, such as the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or the US\/NATO war against Russia through Ukraine that is leading toward nuclear war.\u00a0 By voting for the so-called \u201clesser of two evils,\u201d one is voting for evil and lending oneself to the wrongs one condemns.\u00a0 It is blatant hypocrisy and a vote for the warfare state.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As synchronicity would have it, down the winding road a short walk from where we are staying, sits tiny Rock Harbor in Orleans where a fleet of fishing boats are docked on Cape Cod Bay.\u00a0 Directly across the road rises a massive tower and huge stone basilica that is part of the compound for The Church of the Transfiguration.<\/a>\u00a0 It describes itself simply as the Community of Jesus and across its front is a long large sign in red, white, and blue emblazoned with a star and the word JOY.<\/p>\n

Since I first saw this anomalous place a few of years ago, it struck me as more than strange and out of place, a ritzy \u201creligious\u201d enclave to a capitalist God.\u00a0 I wondered how it was financed.\u00a0 Intuition told me it was something more than a community of 275 members who claim to be an ecumenical Christian community in the Benedictine monastic tradition, but I didn\u2019t take time to investigate.\u00a0 From the little that I did learn, I was reminded of the American Orthodox Catholic Church in the Little Italy section of the northern Bronx.\u00a0 As Peter Levenda has reported in his trilogy, Sinister Forces<\/a>, this church was a front for U.S. intelligence agencies in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.\u00a0 He says<\/a>,<\/p>\n

As it turns out, the AOCC was a front for American intelligence, specifically anti-communist activities in the United States and abroad. It was created by a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with impeccable credentials who ran anti-communist crusades in the States in the 1940s-1960s. Suspected Kennedy assassination conspirators David Ferrie and Jack Martin were members.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was not until earlier this year when I was contemplating and mourning the self-immolation of Adam Bushnell, the US airman who burnt himself to death outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, that I thought again of The Church of the Transfiguration.\u00a0 Bushnell, who was once a member of this church, left these words:<\/p>\n

Many of us like to ask ourselves, \u2018What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?\u2019 The answer is, you\u2019re doing it. Right now.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His powerful words and tragic death moved me deeply.\u00a0 I thought of Roger LaPorte, a former seminarian and a Catholic Worker who in 1965 immolated himself in front of the United Nations building in New York City protesting the U.S. war against Vietnam, while the Catholic Church, led by Cardinal Spellman of New York supported the war with the vigor of John Wayne in The Green Berets<\/em>.\u00a0 Ruthless jingoism then and now, the lust for killing \u201cothers,\u201d such as Vietnamese and Palestinians over the decades.\u00a0 Worthless people to the War Party.\u00a0 And two young men whose consciences drove them to extreme acts of protest.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I remembered what I read in The New York Post<\/a> and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigation<\/a> in February about Adam Bushnell and The Church of the Transfiguration.\u00a0 These reports assert that the church is a cult and that Bushnell grew up here in the Rock Harbor community where his parents still live. The reports claim that members are mind-controlled and abused, and they are raised to strictly obey and follow some secret agenda.\u00a0 The church says it stands with Israel, which is what Bushnell emphatically came to reject, for he stood with the Palestinians, even literally standing as he courageously took his life in flames.\u00a0 Like all cults, money doesn\u2019t seem a problem for this strange community.\u00a0 One thinks also of Jim Jones and the People\u2019s Temple and its strange intelligence connections.\u00a0 As John Judge has documented in \u201cThe Black Hole of Guyana\u201d:<\/a><\/p>\n

The connection of intelligence agencies to cults is nothing new. A simple but revealing example is the Unification Church, tied to both the Korean CIA (i.e., American CIA in Korea), and the international fascist network known as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The Moonies hosted WACL\u2019s first international conference.[217<\/a>] What distinguished Jonestown was both the level of control and the openly sinister involvement. It was imperative that they cover their tracks.[218<\/a>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

The sky and ocean here on Cape Cod are very restless and constantly changing, even as people come here to rest, to be still for a while.\u00a0 The movement of the waves and clouds, the shore birds flitting and floating before and above one, the constant breaking of the waves on the shore, and the long looks far out to where the ocean seems to disappear, create dreamy minds, if one allows it.\u00a0 I am no exception, and this place no doubt increases my tendency to mental vagabonding. \u00a0Yet I am one with Thoreau when he says, \u201cI fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough.\u201d\u00a0 For I began with mirages and will drift back to them.\u00a0 They come in many forms, but all contain the sense of being deluded.\u00a0 This is the lesson of Plato\u2019s Cave and Eastern philosophy\u2019s idea of maya, among many ancient warnings. \u201cShams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous,\u201d Thoreau said truly.\u00a0 Yet when we turn to the realm of politics in our times, as we must when vacations cease, we are forced back to contemplate the insidious nature of the scoundrel politicians and leaders of all sorts who capture so many minds with lies and mirages of false hope on the horizon.<\/p>\n

Most people don\u2019t like to see the summer end, but another Fall is approaching.\u00a0 A different reality beckons.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward J. Curtin, Jr., Ph.D. is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: <\/em>Behind the Curtain<\/em><\/a> – email: <\/em>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Aug 2024 – Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. let his justifiable hatred of the Democratic Party, their undermining of his presidential campaign, and their pro-war and genocidal agenda get the best of him.\u00a0 His trust in Trump is na\u00efve in the extreme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[392,1223,109,1929,249,70],"class_list":["post-272751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-elections","tag-henry-david-thoreau","tag-politics","tag-robert-f-kennedy-jr","tag-trump","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272753,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272751\/revisions\/272753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}