N O RTH
C O A ST
TIM E S
EA G LE
V O L27N O 6 50C E N TS
'In a dark time the eye begins to see ’
MARPRIL 2006
-THEODORE ROTHKE
SPRING
TIME
FOR W
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
DRA WING BY DALE FLOWERS
“Peace on earth will only come when the last king
is strangled with the intestines o f the last priest. ”
-A FRIEND OF VOLTAIRE
“Mythology is every other religion but one's own.”
-ROBERT GRAVES
The millennial lust to decimate anyone and everyone
whose theology is different is once again prevalent, and who can
guess how many centuries before it is assuaged — the last time,
in the mode of Christian Crusaders against Islam's occupation
of previously abandoned holy lands (by Jews, whom Christians
loathed nearly as much as Muslim heathens; and by Rome,
projenitor of the Crusaders) lasted three centuries until it was
safe to openly make war for more sincerely advocated secular
purposes.
Yet Europe, after losing interest for a few centuries in
the apostasies of Oriental pagans, hardly wasted time tearing
itself apart over Christian schisms, a bloody internecine period
that lasted into the 17th century (Christian calendar) with the
horrible Thirty Years War — wars of reformation that redivided
the Western world into Protestant and Holy Roman states.
This epoch was followed by an eschatological quest to spread
Europe’s contagions across the greater world, baptizing and
colonizing the peoples of the great landmasses East and West,
unmindful of the lifestyles and spiritualities of tribes and civiliza­
tions in their paths.
The cusp century to this new Millennium was of course
the most horrifying — a nearly successful eradication of the
biblical Old Testament, the Holocaust of purportedly Christian
believing Nazis exterminating Jews — in reality a determined
reversion to pagan ferocity attempting to destroy monotheism
in savage renaissance of old Teutonic gods.
The real schizophrenia of all this theolitical fervor is
the conquest and decimation of peoples and cultures for world
domination by zealots of one crusading patrimony or another.
This zeal for earthly empire creates various sorts of
disasters and tragedies, each proselytized for the benefit of
empiricists by demagoguing their enemies, however transparent
their mercilessly sanguinary deceits
High priest of this nouveau millennium's New World
Order is an evangopathic, a Nero sort of man, imperially vain
and autocratic but not especially stupid, just absolutely certain
he is the chosen emancipating instrument of God. He worships
the conquering heroes of past ages and ardently wishes to be
remembered as one himself — but with scepter only; others are
his sword and sacrifice.
He is surrounded by a piously corrupt cabal of empirical
despots whose response to any problem or controversy (such as
about their gross inefficiency in governance, which might be
more damaging than their arbitrary suppression of civil liberties)
is to destroy anyone responsible, either through defamation or
misuse of law to jail (and perhaps torture) any who criticize or
dissent against their misrule; and if a problem is of a foreign
nature, to do as Crusaders of yore, smash them with armies
and bombs It is difficult to positively determine if their harsh
doctrines are motivated by power or vengeance, or if they
imagine themselves as Caesars exalted to any impulse or
caprice they imagine.
»
While publicly exclaiming their purpose is to replace
despotic theocracies with democracy by flame and sword (the
usual spread of religion) they seditiously work to establish a
militant theocracy in the glorious Homeland in defiance of the
nation’s temporal Constitution that is rightly adverse to any form
of theolitical usurpation of democratic principles.
These warmakers are themselves war virgins, very
protective of their combat chastity. They think of themselves as
the Best & Brightest, but in truth are hardly more than schoolyard
bullies, mean-spirited, avariciously corrupt with little but callous
regard for anyone else.
They equate disagreement with their war policies as
tantamount to treason, and blitz the national consciousness with
mendacious bromides to conceal their specious deceits that
needlessly slaughter overseas civilians and their own soldiers in
a specific war that was fomented by lies and commenced by
savage disregard of dissenting opinion. To counter disapproval
of their policies they engage in a campaign of psychological
terrorism such as illegally wiretapping their own citizenry under
the rubric of protecting them from terrorist (Islamic) enemies.
A sinister irony permeating the corridors of empire
is that the neo-emperor, who attained and maintains power
fraudulently, demands unsurpassed and unquestioned power.
Power does after all absolutely corrupt, and whomever attains
it is corrupted absolutely. The essential reward of power is the
opportunity for unlimited corruption.
The significant aspect about a democracy is that despite
clamors for censorship by warmakers who claim dissent ought
never be tolerated during wartime (which would grant them
extraordinary power to espouse perpetual war), is that citizens
of a democratic government are virtually obligated to vigorously
argue and incessantly question the purpose of any and every
war, which our revolutionary ancestors realized was the absolute
imperative of a free society.
It should be remembered the first patriots of the nation
were traitors to their motherland, and that dissent even in war
time is not treachery but rather the highest order of patriotism
A growing clamor to bring the nation’s armies back from
the Middle East wars has an underlying menacing irony — those
who are weary or saddened by the sacrifices and crimes of
WAR
Throughout our human history we have been
faced with the conflict of war
Some wars change how we look at other nations
All wars leave a mark on human history
-A N N A M Y E R S
empire, as well as those who never wanted anything to do with
it from the beginning, are pitted against those whose wish is for
enough troops to return to the Homeland to destroy the pacifists
who never wanted them to leave in the first place.
It might seem simplistic and naive to think humans will
any time soon or ever put an end to warfare, but it will never end
if effort is not made to abolish it, to perhaps attempt the impos­
sible such as change human nature — yet over thousands of
millennia the directions of human nature have been changed
to survive fluid circumstances or take advantage of them, which
complicates and enlarges the possibility of fundamental change.
Warfare has considerably advanced civilization, at least
surfacely; it has also primarily advanced the likelihood of its
destruction.
For most of their histories our ancestors spent their lives
in terror of each other They lived in cities that were sacked and
decimated to the last living creature They were impressed into
armies and navies and died horribly on the pikes or were blasted
to bits by the cannon of other shanghaied serfs or citizens They
were tortured and slain for the slightest infraction, and worked
unbearably hard for so little that most died considerably young
if not slaughtered in the interminable wars.
We have not done much better. The 20th century began
with the most brutal butchery in history — not so much through
the usual homicidal fervor than by weapons of mass destruction:
machine guns and artillery, and introduction of the aerial bomb.
We have enough power at the beginning of the 21st century to
obliterate the entire planet. Just as with the feudiciaries of our
ancestors, we have made armed camps of our nations, and like
our ancestors, we have never seriously sought peace except
circumstantially.
Perhaps the only method of preventing the ultimate
war lies not with merely scrapping the weapons of its probable
conduct — though it is necessary as a beginning, they can
always be rebuilt — but with recognition of all of us as members
of the human superfamily The term “utopian’’ has been scorn­
fully applied to almost every idea or attempt toward what Albert
Einstein (and undoubtedly Schweitzer) called a “universal civil­
ization," and world federation is generally dismissed as unreal­
istic and impossible (possibly except as a "New World Order"
dominated by the world’s reigning superpower, whose adherents
are nearly pathological in their aversion to the United Nations)
Yet our histories suggest a drawing together For
thousands of years, separated by the massive barriers of
mountains, oceans, deserts, and vast prairies of time as well
as space, the species inexorably moved its separated parts
into resumed contact (accepting a single origination place of
homo sapiens sapiens) through exploration and by burgeoning
overlapping populations Families grew into tribes, which allied
with to vanquish or were conquered by other tribes and formed
cities and nations Since World War 2, divided by ideology and
weapons of mass destruction, we have yet become a global
civilization; nuclear power has truly rendered the nation/state
obsolete
World unity, a debatable dream throughout history, is
the only long-range solution to universal devastation, otherwise
the horrors of the 20th century might well be prelude to greater
abomination of the upcoming, perhaps incomplete millennium