{"id":276171,"date":"2024-10-07T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2024-10-07T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=276171"},"modified":"2024-10-02T07:21:13","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T06:21:13","slug":"octobers-surprise-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/octobers-surprise-party\/","title":{"rendered":"October\u2019s Surprise Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

28 Sep 2024 <\/em>– As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England.\u00a0 Call it October\u2019s Surprise Party.\u00a0 The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth\u2019s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.<\/p>\n

Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with \u201cA Hard Rain\u2019s A-Gonna Fall.\u201d Listen<\/a>: \u201cI heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin\u2019\/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Black Swan event or the expected?<\/p>\n

And if that hard rain does fall, it won\u2019t just be those ravishing leaves that will be pounded down and die. First comes the beauty, then the dying follows, as every fall decrees. \u00a0And while nature always brings the rebirth of spring, in their hubris, humans, thinking they are gods, have devised a technological solution that can bring all life to an end for good \u2013 nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

That their government is provoking their use by waging a war against Russia via Ukraine and backing the Israeli Middle East slaughter and genocide is not a thought that most Americans choose to entertain as they blithely go about their lives.\u00a0 Such lucidity is deemed too depressing.<\/p>\n

Dylan wrote that song in the summer of 1962, 62 years ago (a symbolic number by the way), shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis that October when nuclear annihilation was avoided at the last minute when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came to their senses.<\/p>\n

Today we are even closer than ever to a nuclear war, as those who closely follow such events tell us.\u00a0 Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector who tried to stop the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 by reporting that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is one.\u00a0 He is joined by a host of lonely voices crying out their warnings: Michel Chossudovsky, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, journalist Pepe Escobar, the late Daniel Ellsberg and Randy Kelher, the author James W. Douglass who has been writing and demonstrating (with his wife Shelley) against nuclear weapons for nearly half-a-century, peace activist and former CIA officer Elizabeth Murray, et al. (my apologies for limiting the list).\u00a0 Many of these irenic and fatidic voices warning the world of the closeness of nuclear war have appeared on Andrew Napolitano\u2019s illuminating Judging Freedom<\/em> interview show.\u00a0 Their voices are easily available, for now.<\/p>\n

Ritter, who is being hounded by the U.S. government, has just written an article, \u201cLife Pre-empted\u201d<\/a> whose opening line reads as follows: \u201cIf you\u2019re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you\u2019re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news.\u201d <\/strong>[my emphasis]<\/p>\n

He is right, although contemplating our nearness to nuclear war no doubt gives most people such a serious case of the megrims that they turn away. It is understandable but must be resisted if the world is to avoid disaster.\u00a0 A world-wide antinuclear movement is necessary, one that links the dangers of the U.S. aggressive Ukrainian proxy-war against Russia with the U.S.\/Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its expanded war throughout the Middle East together with the U.S. provocations of China.<\/p>\n

Even the corporate mainstream media are here and there starting to recognize the growing danger of nuclear war.\u00a0 Of course, they blame Russia for this, as they do for everything, even as most of the world correctly points the finger at the United States.<\/p>\n

For it is the USA together with its NATO lap dogs that have brought us to this point, as they have spent decades surrounding Russia with troops and missiles and waging a war to conquer Russian via Ukraine.\u00a0 For those who don\u2019t know this history, they are in for a big surprise if Russia responds and the nuclear missiles fly, as Pepe Escobar recently tweeted about a statement by Russia\u2019s Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and presently the deputy chairman of its Security Council:<\/p>\n

IT\u2019S THUNDERBOLT TIME Medvedev Unplugged does know his Latin. But then Russian educational standards are in a class by itself, as I never cease to learn here in Moscow. Commenting on the update of Russia\u2019s nuclear doctrine, Medvedev noted, \u201cThis change in our country\u2019s guidelines for using nuclear weapons, in and of itself, may cool the ardor of those of our opponents who have not yet lost their sense of self-preservation. As for the dim-witted, only the Roman maxim remains: caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem Horace\u2019s Odes. AnRegnare \u2026\u201d All of us who studied Latin know that comes straight from Horace and it goes straight to the point: thunder out of the sky reminds everyone that Jupiter rules. Medvedev\u2019s metaphor is a beauty: the only way the \u201cdim-witted\u201d \u2013 Hegemonic and the vassal swamp \u2013 will learn is when the Russian Jupiter releases a thunderbolt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let us hope it doesn\u2019t come to that.\u00a0 But the danger of a nuclear war has increased dramatically as the Biden administration continues to up the ante with its support for Ukraine and Israel. \u00a0If it approves the Ukrainian request to use U.S., British, and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, all bets are off.\u00a0 And the world awaits Russia\u2019s ally Iran\u2019s response to the current Israel bombing of Lebanon and the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader\u00a0of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, a war crime of another government that believes there will be no repercussions for their actions.<\/p>\n

The American public\u2019s problem is not really ignorance of Latin (that is a symptom of a much greater ignorance), but being unable to recognize the truth about its leaders\u2019 insane aggression and nuclear gamesmanship.\u00a0 A knowledge of the Roman and Greek Classics reminds us that evil is real and tragedy descends on those who surpass the limits.\u00a0 The tragic flaw \u2013 hamartia \u2013 is not part of the American lexicon.\u00a0 Disney World talk is.<\/p>\n

Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently issued a warning<\/a> to the US\/NATO that Russia\u2019s nuclear policy has changed as a result of US\/NATO\/Ukraine\u2019s attacks inside Russia.\u00a0 \u201cAggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,\u201d he said.\u00a0 As a result, he added, \u201cWe reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against Russia and Belarus.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the Biden\/Harris administration\u2019s idiot leaders push the nuclear envelope thinking Russia is bluffing.\u00a0 In their desire to conquer Russia, they have lost all reason and continue on a trajectory that started long ago but has now hit a crisis point.<\/p>\n

For those who think this war against Russia will come to a peaceful conclusion, I refer them to a series of articles in the propaganda organ of the U.S. \u201cdeep state,\u201d which is really very shallow and obvious \u2013 the journal Foreign Affairs<\/em> ( January\/February 2023) \u2013 the mouthpiece for the Council of Foreign Relations.\u00a0 There you will read articles promoting the destruction of Russia, regime change, and the removal of Vladimir Putin, etc.\u00a0 All justified by America\u2019s God-given right to rule the world.\u00a0 One article by Robert Kagan, the neoconservative adviser to Republican and Democratic administrations and the husband of the infamous Victoria Nuland, a central figure in the 2014 US-engineered Ukrainian coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, is laughable, but that it is taken seriously is a sign that the ruling elites are so deluded and intent on never stopping to try to destroy Russia that they will claim anything, no matter how contrary to obvious facts.\u00a0 They just make things up to fit their narrative.<\/p>\n

In \u201cA Free World If You Can Keep It,\u201d Kagan writes, presumably with a straight face, the following: \u201cSimilarly, Putin\u2019s serial invasions of neighboring states have not been driven by a desire to maximize Russia\u2019s security. Russia\u2019s never enjoyed greater security on its western frontier than during the three decades after the end of the Cold War. . . . But at no time since the fall of the Berlin Wall has anyone in Moscow had reason to believe that Russia faced the possibility of attack by the West.\u201d<\/strong> [my emphasis]<\/p>\n

This crap is so laughable if it weren\u2019t so dangerous and delusional.\u00a0 If Kagan actually believes what he is saying, which I doubt, then he is dumber than a rock. Since the end of the Cold War, US\/NATO has, contrary to their promises, continually moved east, surrounding Russia right up to its borders with troops, bases, and missiles aimed at Russia. \u00a0Clear provocations and threats that Russia has been complaining about for a long time.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

So October approaches, the month of Halloween, actors, and masks.\u00a0 Gore Vidal got a laugh when years ago he referred to Ronald Reagan as our \u201cacting president.\u201d\u00a0 But we\u2019ve had six acting presidents since and their acts have left millions dead and wounded around the globe, including thousands of American troops.\u00a0 The American electoral system is a horror show, a spectacle in what Guy DeBord called \u201cThe Society of the Spectacle.\u201d\u00a0 Many Americans have acquiesced in this ongoing tragedy, playing their parts in this deadly charade.\u00a0 The ghosts of all these victims walk among us, and they will haunt us until we come to life by admitting our own complicity in their deaths.\u00a0 The show must not go on, but it will, as long as we keep acting our parts.<\/p>\n

The Classical scholar Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set: \u201cAncestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre<\/em> or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.\u00a0 All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis <\/em>(army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.\u201d<\/p>\n

So many Americans mask themselves from this savage truth in a futile, face-saving, phony performance.\u00a0 The act is wearing thin.\u00a0 It is time to see through the illusion that a world war is not in the making, unless vast numbers arise from their sleep and oppose it.<\/p>\n

It is not just our \u201cleaders\u201d who perform at the Devil\u2019s Masquerade Ball, which is the charade we call American Exceptionalism or The American Way of Life.\u00a0 I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, <\/em>meaning mask.\u00a0 Another Latin word, larva, <\/em>occurs to me, it too means mask, ghost, or evil spirit.<\/p>\n

The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days.\u00a0 The murdered ghosts demanding retribution, and the spirits of the brave and truthful ones urging us to oppose the killers.<\/p>\n

While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well.\u00a0 Shakespeare was right, of course, \u201call the world\u2019s a stage,\u201d though I would disagree that we are \u201cmerely\u201d players.\u00a0 It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor\u2019s show and tell.<\/p>\n

Who are we behind the masks?\u00a0 Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks\u2019 mouth-holes (the per-sona<\/em>, Latin, to sound through)?<\/p>\n

October\u2019s surprise party is coming.<\/p>\n

\u201cI heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening,\u201d sings Dylan.<\/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":"

28 Sep 2024 – As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins. Yet as November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected. A Black Swan event or the expected?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":274660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276171","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=276171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":276181,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276171\/revisions\/276181"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}