On October 7, 2023, a significant and tragic escalation occurred in the ongoing conflict between Hamas and Israel. Early in the morning, Hamas launched a large-scale surprise attack on Israeli territory. The attack involved rocket fire and incursions by armed militants into various communities. This assault marked a particularly deadly day in the conflict’s history. It caused many casualties among both Israelis and Palestinians.
In response, Israel declared a state of war and commenced extensive military operations in Gaza. The violence quickly escalated, leading to airstrikes on Gaza and widespread destruction. The international community reacted with alarm, calling for de-escalation and urging both sides to pursue dialogue. The events of that day worsened the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. They also reignited discussions about the long-standing issues at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As the anniversary approaches, reflections on the events and their aftermath emerge. They highlight the ongoing tensions. These tensions have a profound impact on civilians in the region.
In my book, Sapience: The Moment Is Now, I trace the roots of antisemitism back centuries. These hateful sentiments stretch back to the First Crusades and even further back in time. The night (or rather early morning) of the attack, I had a dream about the Human Cake. It was the second time I had dreamed this dream. It is not a pleasant dream. Rather, it is a shocking, revolting, scary dream, and I could not image why I was dreaming about it again.
In this dream, I see a team of doctors all wearing white coats. They enter a sterile white space where I and others wait. They enter this room through shiny white double doors. Behind these doors is the operating theater where they have been creating their new thing. It is this Thing that they are giving a press conference about. It is clear they are very pleased with their work. I can see their pride on their sly smiles. I can feel their arrogance in the way they push the Thing in a wheelchair for everyone to see.
They spare no gory details on how they created the atrocity sitting in the wheelchair. This Thing used to be a man. Now, it sits as a helpless creature in its wheelchair for it has no legs. Nor can it express any emotions because it no longer has a face. The doctors are proud of these aspects of the creature. They say it is a break through and discuss each step they took to get to this featureless creature.
Everyone in the room sits in stunned silence. There is nothing left of the man except a mound of gory goo. The doctors take turns describing with excitement how they systematically cut off every recognizable feature of the man. They describe with joy how they took these pieces and reattached them to utterly unsuitable places of the body. Places never intended for a severed limb or an eye.
The result is disgusting, stomach-churning, repulsive, beastly, vulgar, and heinous. The doctors did it, but the man volunteered. I couldn’t understand why?! Then, I woke up to the horrible news of what was happening in Israel. I was overwhelmed by the news coming out of Israel. And overhanging this was the shock and horror of my dream that lingered in my mind like an evil specter.
Carl Jung calls such moments as these Moments of Synchronicity. When any human encounters a moment of synchronicity, attention must be paid. This is because often, there is something very important for the individual to know or understand. I knew this was important.
I was working on the final stretch of my book feeling an intense need to get it published by 4/24/24. After October 7, 2023, I stopped writing and editing my book. I could not do a thing in it for the rest of the month. I felt compelled to witness the harrowing stories of survival. And I listened to the tragic stories of death of innocence people at the hands of men filled with hate.
I made a playlist on YouTube called Remember. I saved every story I heard to this list. I was shocked again and again at the savagery described by survivors. The brutality inflicted on babies, children, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers shook me to my core.
After this month of bearing witness, I knew what I had to do with my book. I needed to write about the Human Cake. And I also needed to include the history of the Middle East. This new research and writing sidelined me for at least another month, but I did it.
If you get my book, you will encounter the Human Cake first. He makes his appearance in the book at about page 101. Brothers of the Levant… Before the Fall begins on page 173. Histories of genocides begins around page 320 with the chapter titled: Rise of the Machine.
You need to read all of these sections to gain a full history of current crisis in the Middle East. You also need to read other sections to understand how hate has risen inside of man. He has learned to harness it with machine-like precision. I cover many, many hate groups who have emerged and are growing like a cancer all over the world. In addition, I carefully show how no human being is immune to the infection of hate. These sections are cited for I have researched them intensely. I cite historians, psychologists, and philosophers. Additionally, I reference people who have specialized and written about all this stuff for a very long time.
In this section, I talk about the Human Cake. My character Rain recalls her grandmother’s words about fear and other strong emotions. Her grandmother was a wise woman, and Rain knows she needs wisdom now to survive.
A man who clings to his instinct to kill becomes a person aroused by murder and death. It fascinates him like a candle flame, but to keep the kill candle burning… such a man must kill… constantly. But doing so in a civilized society risks punishment and possibly his own death. And so, such a man fantasizes about murder, mayhem, and massacres inside the confines of his mind. Such a man feeds his fantasies with pictures and images of dead or dying people; kill porn. Such a man glorifies death and idolizes martyrdom. Such a man celebrates the wholesale slaughter of other human beings who he considers to be less than he considers himself to be. It is a false and insincere division made by his foul and increasingly warp light of consciousness that must be constantly fed. He becomes like a drug addict who needs a hit of heroin to feel normal again.
Grandmother said that anything done constantly in the mind soon grows boring to man’s fickle, flickering light of conscious attention, so a man clinging to his kill instinct must up the ante to feed his fading fervor and desire to butcher and decimate other living beings. Such a man may pacify his erotic passion by killing what he considers lesser forms of life. He can also fuel the instinct to kill with anger, regret, and rage. He can work himself up into a berserker frenzy by consuming a steady diet of fury and indignation.
Grandmother said that a man who fantasizes about death and celebrates killing is the devil he fears in others. Such a man cultivates his inner instinct to kill to a fever-pitch, he becomes a tube of intensity, a cannula of desperate excitement, a pipeline of frantic, frenzied, futile fear and rage. His magma tube of hate drops him below the animal realm of living beings, it plunges him below the daemon realm of human beings. He falls into a monster pit, a place where he embodies the wretched vermin that he accuses others of being. His invisible world where all his thinking is done is transformed into Hell’s Kitchen populated by unrecognizable things baked in the heat of hate and scorn.
Such a man uses his laser beam of hate to mutilate his inner man. He disfigures and desecrates his inner self by cutting off his inner man’s fingers and toes, hands and feet, legs, and arms. He pulls out his inner man’s hair and gouges out his eyes. He removes his nose and mouth and face and slops them onto the growing heap of hate he is becoming. Then he turns up the heat of his fear and loathing, baking himself into a human cake made of hostility, disgust, resentment, bitterness, antipathy, and apathy.
Such a dismembered and disfigured inner man can no longer recognize the humanity in himself, and certainly not in others. He becomes a thing of contempt and repugnance, a thing no longer recognizable as human or animal, except for one thing: his thinking and his words. Such a man uses these lingering abilities with deft callousness to beguile and enthrall, to rivet and fascinate, to transfix, super charge, and magnetize the ordinary man and woman… pulling them farther and farther out of the mainstream, tempting them to leave their reservoirs of wisdom with promises of everything but love. Then he destroys their inner equanimity and binds them to him with chains of fear that are firmly fastened to his crumpled wheelchair of cruelty. He must do this for such a man is crippled by his own fear and hate. And so, he needs others to do the terrible things he dreams up, but which he is too cowardly to do himself.
Commanding his army of human zombies from his wheelchair of hate, he must constantly recruit new people to his wretched world of scorn and loathing because he throws his foot soldiers to their deaths again and again. And they must die because they have been commanded to kill the women, kill the children, kill the babies, kill the goats and chickens and dogs and wheat and barley and water… to kill anything resembling life. So, anything resembling life must fight back or be killed and die by the killer human zombies who have been robbed of their souls by the human cakes baked by their own hate.
Just before the Fall, some of the biggest, most hideous, gut-churning, ghastly acts of hate are immortalized as mere numbers: 9/11, 2/24, 10/7. Days of infamy that plunged the highly interconnected world of the dawning 21st Century not only into bloody, gruesome, localized conflicts and war, but mind grenades carefully calibrated to inspire fear and fill the ordinary man and woman with hate for the other around the entire world. It doesn’t matter what side a person is blown to in the blast of gruesome cruelty. These mind grenades are simply meant to shock and to shake the fragile foundations upon which modern people must trust will protect them and keep them safe.
With the ordinary man’s and woman’s trust in humanity shook, it doesn’t take much more for the most hateful human cakes to shatter any common bonds still holding a civilized society together into a million, billion bits. Once shattered, the hate filled human cakes rearrange the shiny, reflective shards of human consciousness like tiny mirrors on a disco ball. The human cakes shine their light of hate on the remnants of the ordinary man’s and woman’s sense of safety and security. -- Excerpt from Sapience: The Moment Is Now
What else can I say about hate of Human Cakes?
I can only show you the drawing I made of this creature… the one I dreamt about on the morning of October 7, 2023 for the second time. The dream I knew I needed to pay attention to… and so I did.
Archetypal Animation
Images: Deborah M. Wunderman — All Rights Reserved
On this day six years ago, my father had a heart attack. First responders revived him after 15 minutes of CPR, and then he was flown by helicopter to the Mayo Clinic. There he was put into an induced coma and body cooled to help preserve as much brain function as possible. Nobody knew if he would wake up and if he did, how much of him would wake up. But after days of touch and go, dad came back all of him except swallowing and he had developed pneumonia due to CPR, and this was expected and Mayo began aggressive treatment of it because it turns out if you aren’t breaking ribs while doing CPR, you aren’t pumping enough blood to revive the individual.
Remembering Dad
I wrote all about this in the first anniversary of dad’s death, as well as the reasons why he did not make it.
How Narcissistic Abuse Severely Thwarted my Healing Journey
In addition to dad’s death, the CEO of a small nonprofit I was working for fired me for being by dad’s side. Most probably this CEO suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and she would be fired soon enough for this and a number of other things she did or failed to do during her tenure.
Adding insult to injury, my mother-in-law who is most definitely contorted and warped by Narcissistic Personality Disorder was about to launch one of her most hideous and disgusting campaigns to make herself appear as the victim so she could harvest attention and pity from her flying monkeys. This is what narcissists enablers are called by professionals who try to help family members and people abused by Narcissists heal. The fuel for her campaign of Narcissistic madness was her own children and grandchildren.
It would take me 6 years to understand what my mother-in-law was doing and why. But back in 2018 and 2019 I simply found myself in HELL.
I should not be here today. The only thing that helped me hold on during this time of pain and abandonment was the story I had started writing in 2012. I was reading dad the latest parts of the story when he died with me by his side on August 4, 2018.
Even though dad had slipped into a delirium due to the stress of life-saving procedures such as suctioning the mucous from his airways and reinserting a feeding tube he had worked out with the back of his tongue four times the previous day, he told the nurses caring for him that he was so proud of me for writing this book and that my whole life has been preparing me for it.
So in the dark days of the summer of 2019, with the help of a friend, I returned to my story and began editing the beginning to bring it up to the level of writing I had evolved into after six years of writing. My friend was then editing my edited version of book 1.
Then, Something New Began Coming Through
Not too long into this process, something new started coming through. I argued with myself… it was right around this time in 2019… for I knew writing something new would take more time.
The something new won took 6 more years to write! I finally published the book my father believed in so much on April 24, 2024.
Here is an excerpt of some of the something new that was coming through me after father died. This is from Sapience: The Moment Is Now — What Rain knows.
From the Book
"You cannot sell wisdom, nor can you buy it. You must earn it by living fully, living unself-consciously but not unconsciously. Wisdom is a group activity. Wisdom is kind. Wisdom shares its last morsel of food simply because that is what wisdom does. Wisdom knows that everything is connected, and what you do to someone else, you have done to yourself first. Wisdom is a baby crawling and giggling with its newfound mastery of getting around. Wisdom is an old man falling and laughing at his misfortunate mishap, knowing perfectly well everyone falls sometimes and it doesn’t mean a darn thing.
Wisdom knows sometimes you are going to win. Wisdom knows sometimes you are going to lose. Wisdom knows winning and losing doesn’t mean a darn thing because that is part of being alive. Wisdom knows navigating the ups and downs, the wins and losses, are much easier and mean so much more when you share it with the people who care about you and who you care about… this is love... caring and sharing, celebrating and mourning, feasting and fasting together as ever as one.
Wisdom is the joy of sharing life with the ones you love. Wisdom is the bliss of partaking equitably in the ups and downs of life. Wisdom is tolerating in another the things that annoy you most. Tolerance is a blessing, and wisdom knows this. Tolerance and wisdom are essential because life is complicated, too complicated for one insignificant human being to know everything it must to make a good decision.
A wise person knows this. A wise person knows a single individual can never consciously gather enough information to make a wise decision: so, stop trying to fool yourself and others that you can. A wise person understands action must be taken without foreknowledge of the results, but if the action is grounded in mutuality, respect, compassion, dignity, love, and a huge heaping of tolerance… mostly the results will reap good outcomes. And when they don’t, a wise person knows it is important to try again. Failure is simply the process of success.
Tolerance is an anti-gravity force to fear. Tolerance requires a person to broaden their bandwidth of consciousness rather than narrow and restrict it as fear does. Tolerance allows an individual to sit in discomfort, to sit in not knowing, to sit in the darkness of what is not clear yet and to wait for understanding of what is right action.
Timing is everything when it comes to action. Right action done too soon quickly turns into wrong action. Right action done too late will also not produce desired results. Action done outside of its proper time or beyond what is necessary to complete a task is easily twisted and corrupted by thinking that tries to justify it. Such action grows fat with inaccurate, incorrect, false, untrue, and mistaken attributions ladled onto it to get people to act. This sort of propped up action becomes more and more improper and unsuitable for the circumstances.
Such artificial action awakens the most wicked and sinful parts of a person, because acting outside and beyond the bounds of right action requires an angry mind, a brash, conservative, intolerant, mean, merciless, unfriendly, unsympathetic, biased, disapproving, narrow-minded, and prejudiced mind. People acting in this manner are cruel, brutal, savage, bloodthirsty, vicious people driven by narrower and narrower justifications loaded with fantastical and fraudulent fancies.
Wisdom knows this and knows tolerance is the only way to slow down enough to sense and see what is really going on inside and outside of one’s own mind and body. Only by sensing and seeing more of what is actually going on in the present moment can a person produce right action at the right time.
Right action does not inflict harm unto oneself or another without a really good reason why violence is required. Isaac Asimov got it right when his character, Salvor Hardin, says: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” This is true because it is so easy to lose wisdom when one is racing inside their mind, thought after thought conceived by lies, half-truths, or half-baked ideas and silly beliefs.
A person acting in such a way utilizes the narrowest bandwidth of consciousness possible yet still able to remain conscious. Any narrower, and the person would fall into a dumb, zombie-like stupor. Wisdom knows this. Wisdom knows thinking is a result of the constriction of consciousness due to fear. Wisdom knows thinking trumped up with false facts and fantastical beliefs is going to make a lot of mistakes due to its failure to grasp reality. So, like any good toddler, a person who thinks all the time and falls out of phase with right action will make more and more mistakes and will act in more and more rageful ways trying to cover up and hide all their blunders, miscalculations, gaffes, and ignorance." -- Pages 128-128
Note: the link to Sapience is supposed to be a universal link that will open to the book in whatever browser and language from which you operate; however, it has not seemed to be working, so you can also search by the ASIN: B0D2LM5B6K.
Welcome to TOTALITARIA! A wonderful world based on the highest ideals, most moral codes ever conceived by man!
Oooops! Do you really want to live in a Totalitarian society where your neighbors and creepy people spy on you and report you to the Morality Police overseen by the Minister of Interior, a guy responsible for the interior thoughts inside your mind?!
Totalitarian Mindset
This blog explores Joost Meerlo’s chapter on the Totalitarian Mindset, which is a mindset that serves as a fundamental building block of totalitarian societies. This mindset does not just infect Totalitarian Rulers. It infects lots of people in a society who become susceptible to it for a variety of reasons
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. -- Totalitarianism -- Wikipedia
In fact, there are recognizable personality traits for forming and holding a Totalitarian Mindset.
These traits include conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. -- The Authoritarian Personality -- Wikipedia
There is even such a thing as a totalitarian democracy, which is a state is said to maximize its control over the lives of its citizens by using the dual rationale of general will (i.e., “public good”) and majority rule.
Recap & Current Events
Previous blogs of this series explore why we need heroes, super heroes, and strong stories that activate and workout the body parts of our mind: Archetypes. Like the rest of the world, I am shocked and horrified by Hamas October 7 attack and anyone celebrating this attack. What were they thinking is beyond what a normal person can conceive. Only people who have broken their minds and eviscerated their hearts are capable of cutting the fingers off a little boy before executing him and cutting heads off of babies. Only people who have turned themselves into monsters spend 16 years and billions of dollars building underground tunnels while not dropping a dime to build a bomb shelter for the 2.2 million people of Gaza and then build their underground bunker headquarters underneath refugee facilities and hospitals.
The killing of any innocent person–baby, child, woman, or man–is wrong… be it by knifes and guns or bombs… and yet, here we the people of the world, stand again looking into the jaws of violence, which breeds violence, which breeds violence and revenge and more violence. The same killing is happening in Ukraine implemented by another crazy totalitarian monster who is cozying up to this favorite totalitarian dictators in Iran, North Korea, China, and now Hamas, Hezbollah, and any and all extremists, violent visionaries who want to rule the world.
I have been devastated by images of death and destruction in Israel and Gaza, but one picture caught my attention in a curious way. This is the picture of the captured soldier recused by the IDF from Gaza.
I cannot fix or change this torn and tattered world. I can only reflect and notice and try to understand what makes a person lean into a Totalitarian Mindset and Life that never ends up serving the good of all. It only ever seems to serve a few living like rats in tunnels or cockroachs in golden palaces.
So let’s dive into Joost Meerlo who was a Jewish psychiatrist who survive the Nazi holocaust and thought a lot about what makes such men do such monstrous things.
There actually exists such a thing as a technique of mass brainwashing. This technique can take root in a country if an inquisitor is strong and shrewd enough. He can make most of us his victims, albeit temporarily.
What in the structure of society has made man so vulnerable to these mass manipulations of the mind? This is a problem with tremendous implications, just as brainwashing is. In recent years we have grown more and more aware of human interdependence with all its difficulties and complications.
I am aware of the fact that investigation of the subject of mental coercion and thought control becomes less pleasant as time goes on. This is so because it may become more of a threat to us here and now, and our concern for China and Korea must yield to the more immediate needs at our own door. Can totalitarian tendencies take over here, and what social symptoms may lead to such phenomena? Stern reality confronts us with the universal mental battle between thought control (and its corollaries) and our standards of decency, personal strength, personal ideas, and a personal conscience with autonomy and dignity.
Future social scientists will be better able to describe the causes of the advent of totalitarian thinking and acting in man. We know that after wars and revolutions this mental deterioration more easily finds an opportunity to develop, helped by special psychopathic personalities who flourish on man’s misery and confusion. It is also true that the next generation spontaneously begins to correct the misdeeds of the previous one because the ruthless system has become too threatening to them.
My task, however, is to describe some symptoms of the totalitarian process (which implies deterioration of thinking and acting) as I have observed them in our own epoch, keeping in mind that the system is one of the most violent distortions of man’s consistent mental growth. No brainwashing is possible without totalitarian thinking. The tragic facts of political experiences in our age make it all too clear that applied psychological technique can brainwash entire nations and reduce their citizens to a kind of mindless robotism which becomes for them a normal way of living. Perhaps we can best understand how this frightening thing comes about by examining a mythical country, which, for the sake of convenience, we shall call Totalitaria.
While writing this blog, I heard this on NPR. If you are interested in Totalitarian Societies and Mindset and what can happen to ordinary people just trying to live their lives in such societies, you should listen to this episode that tells how things can go sideways really fast, especially with social media and modern technologies.
In this episode, you meet a man in Iraq and the new app called Snitch, a woman in the US who was giving birth at home and arrested because her baby was a still birth, and what has been happening in Iran for decades with its brutal Morality police. The very same Iran supplying Putin with drones and Hamas with rockets.
Click Here is a five-part special series telling true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. Hosted by former NPR Investigations correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, Click Here uses deep reporting and investigative journalism to introduce listeners to the people behind today’s cybersecurity and intelligence headlines. You’ll meet not just the hackers, but the people who are chasing them – without all that insider jargon that makes tech shows hard to understand.
What happens when authorities use digital weapons to impose their vision of morality on the people they are supposed to serve? Across the globe, rulers have launched apps, tracked phones, and used personal data in increasingly hostile ways, and it has sparked some very creative responses. -- Listen to this and other episodes of the Click Here podcast at clickhereshow.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Peace Forward
Hoffer seeks to provide non partisan and non bias information from both sides to help people understand the different sides, perspectives, and history of the conflict in the Middle East. It is a big lift and hard to do, and it is hard for people to reach out and seek more information to understand more about the horrors taking place. It is the only way forward for every individual to do this work, to check one’s own biases and blind spots. It is hard work, thinking, but without this hard work… there is only one place the world is going to land… and it’s not a peaceful place.
Following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, Harvard University junior Shira Hoffernoticed a lot of one-sided and polarizing narratives around the conflict.
In an effort to promote peaceful dialogue across differences, Hoffer launched the Hotline for Israel/Palestine, an educational texting hotline that seeks to provide users with nonpartisan information and resources.
The initiative already has two dozen volunteers, spanning across religions, ethnicities and countries.
Here & Now's Jane Clayson speaks with Hoffer for more details on this peace-forward effort.
Microsoft Word – Tao Te Ching – trans. by J.H.. McDonald
Ancient wisdom blended with modern images and music.
Chapter 3
First Archetypal Animation& Stanza
If you overly esteem talented individuals, people will become overly competitive. If you overvalue possessions, people will begin to steal.
Second Archetypal Animation& Stanza
Do not display your treasures or people will become envious.
Third & Feature Archetypal Animation& Stanza
The Master leads by emptying people’s minds; filling their bellies, weakening their ambitions, and making them become strong. Preferring simplicity and freedom from desires, avoiding the pitfalls of knowledge and wrong action.
For those who practice not-doing, everything will fall into place.
Last Stanza& VideosRelated to Not-Doing and Falling into Place
Four Letters to the World of Free Men and Women: Letter to the Ukrainian People; Letter to the Free World; Letter to Russian people; Letter to Americans
First Letter
Letter to the People of Ukraine
Dear People of Ukraine —
I have let you down and the Free World has forsaken you.
You are dying because we are weak and afraid.
Please forgive us. We have forgotten how to live in the Present and how to be Present for each other.
If I could kill Putin with my thoughts, he would be dead 10,000 times already. And I would just be getting started.
The Russians don’t remember how Scythians fight, how long your unique and long history is.
They will remember when they see your eyes.
Know that you have already won.
Putin, his followers, enablers, and supporters wherever they are in the world will be uttered in the same breath as Hitler, Stalin, and all men who have chosen to become monsters instead of men.
The oligarchs full of piss and fear, the Chinas suppressing their people, the stupid ones like Trump and his menagerie will snivel like snails beneath the shadow of your courage, compassion, and willingness to die to live free.
If only the Free World had a smidgen of your dignity, courage, and spirit.
Instead, we sit and watch your pain, your suffering, your deaths like the spineless creatures we have become hiding under out fragile, artificial shell of civility.
We are not civil or modern.
We hide our barbaric nature with platitudes and policies and lies.
What good is civility when evil manifests in men like Putin?
Would Hitler have stopped his demonic rage had the Free World not finally intervened?
You have warned us: Putin’s madness will not end when Ukraine falls.
An evil like this is never satisfied by what it has.
It only has an endless hunger for more of what it already has and is willing to inflict great pain, agony, and destruction to get it.
How can we (the people of the Free World) abandon you at your greatest time of need?
How can we let this happen on OUR WATCH?
You are showing us (the Free World) how to be human when evil rears its ugly head.
Your dignity, courage, and spirit show us that to be fully human and not simply shells filled with doubt and fear, we show up to help our brothers and sisters.
Humans show up when their brothers and sisters are staring down the demons of destruction trying to devour their freedom like snakes from hell bent on turning our shared reality into a field of horror and our world into a living Hell.
You are precious. Every life Putin takes is a crime. I feel so helpless watching this happen to you. Please forgive us. Our failure to not do more is wrong.
Reactions of aHelpless Watcher Witnessing Evil Live on TV #1
Instagram Posts Beginning Night of Russian Invasion
Second Letter
Letter to the People of the Free World
To All People Who Value Freedom in the World —
This is a struggle in which the Free World cannot sit on its hands and watch. This is a struggle for all persecuted, suffering people anywhere in the world. People who are persecuted for any reason–racism, religious beliefs, gender, sex or political beliefs. The Ukrainian people are being overrun and killed by a ruthless dictator.
Do you think this ends when Ukraine falls? Putin’s vile plan seeks to destroy freedom and democracy anywhere it appears in the world. He has chosen evil and he will keep moving steadily destroying democracies and freedom wherever it appears in the world. I do not agree with Biden saying it is going to be OK. It is not OK watching the Ukrainian people being slaughtered. In what world that values freedom and human life is this OK?
Our world has drastically changed since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
The Free World is weak. It stares at its own navel hung up on its own comforts and conveniences. We (the people of the Free World) have left so many people behind who have been struggling for freedom, self-determination, and sovereignty over their own lives. The United States was particularly cruel and careless in its withdrawal from Afghanistan; however, the Free World has done far too little for the peoples in countries where “Arab Spring” protests were brutally put down, where protests in Hong Kong were harshly suppressed, where the military takeover of Myanmar and Rohingya genocide was savage, and this list goes on and one.
The Ukrainian people are fighting for their lives and freedom. They are standing up against a vastly superior force. They are showing the entire Free World how to fight for freedom. How to be human! Their courage, compassion, and dignity stands mighty before the rest of the world concerned about themselves and sadly it seems little more.
Putin is a maligned, demonic force of evil in the world. Such evil must be fought by all who stand for the right for life and freedom. This evil is never satisfied by what it has. It constantly hungers for more than it already has. It takes pleasure in inflicting senseless horror and pain on others. This fear, this pain that we are watching the Ukraine people suffer feds this kind of evil. It will never rest until it destroys all free people and all freedom in all lands everywhere in the world. Only then, will it finally turn on itself and devour itself.
Putin is a man who has chosen to become a monster. His madness is spawning thousands of minions who are carrying out his biddings. Yes, there are Russian soldiers shocked at what they are being asked to do and surrendering to Ukrainians.
But, there are also soldiers who are dragging people out of apartment buildings, lining them up along a wall, and shooting them. The longer this goes on, the more harden and brutal some soldiers will become to accomplish Putin’s ruthless wishes, indeed, they will be ordered to become ruthless killers. Huge explosions are being now used to destroy and level civilian infrastructure (e.g., apartments, schools, hospitals, colleges), not military as Russian “officials” said would be the focus. There are also reports of Russian soldiers shooting fleeing civilians in their cars as well as desperate phone calls to family members who made it across the border to Poland or Hungary of Russian soldiers coming into family homes and terrorizing loved ones who could not escape in time.
Putin lives in a world of savage fantasies. He lusts for ultimate power and glory, which sprouts from the demon seed buried deep in his depraved soul. His heart has been corrupted beyond all repairs. And his barbarism is being carried out with cold calculation by suicidal army meticulous trained to turn off their humanity and act like Putin’s attack dogs from hell. They have only heard and been fed a constant stream of distortions, lies, and misinformation. It keeps them in a foggy, soggy, sub-human conscious state of being, making them perfect puppets who carry out one man’s mad rage upon the world.
Deep down they know what they are doing is wrong. But I doubt it will burn away fast enough to save the people of Ukraine. And then, Free World, we are next.
This episode discusses what is happening in Ukraine with Leila Fadel (reporter on the ground in Ukraine), Kurt Volker (former US Special Representative for Ukraine), and others in the know about what is going on. What jumped out to me were the following elements.
Leila Fadel told about one woman she met on a train going back into Ukraine. She told Leila she felt Ukraine is a proxy war, a game being played by Russia, the US, and China for influence and power in the world. She is right.
Leila also talked about how all lives matter. She told about how she has met and talked with individuals who fled other war zones (e.g., Syria, Afghanistan, and many other places where the super powerful have violently suppressed the super vulnerable) and settled in Ukraine and now they are fleeing again.
Kurt Volker talked about how there is much more the US can do for Ukraine while walking the line of avoiding an outright conflict between nuclear powers. Yes! That is what I feel and desperately want the Free World to push it leaders to do (no more watching!!!).
And they discussed discrimination that African and Asian individuals in Ukraine have faced. They are also trying to flee violence and annihilation. Sara Sidner (American journalist with CNN) is in Poland and talked with individuals facing this sort of discrimination and says that they just don’t understand why they are being treated this way. There have been terrible documented treatment of foreign nationals with dark skin, but also many instances of compassion and humane treatment.
This is a very complex, fast moving tragedy that is changing constantly. All experts of this episode urge watchers, especially on social media, to dig for the latest information, not media and posts that are several days old. They also warn of misinformation efforts launched by Russia and Russian sympathizers around the world–vet the information you consume and vet your own systems of belief!( I get into this much more deeply in my letter to Americans.)
#RunRussiansRun
Third Letter
To the Russian People
The Free World is not at war with you. We are not your enemy. The anger you see from the world is directed at Putin. You are as precious to the world as the Ukrainian people who are being slaughtered by your President Putin. You are not being told the truth about this war.
You know all the courageous Russian journalists who have been assassinated or killed in Russia between 1992 and 2022.
This list goes on to account 58 journalists who have been killed in Russia between 1992 and 2022 with Motive for Death Confirmed as accounted for by the Committee to Protect Journalists. You may not trust anything except Putin’s State TV, but you know who are the Russians who have died.
You know critics of Putin have ended up dead.
Boris Nemtsov, 2015 — political leader of Russia’s “young reformers.”
"In Feb. 2015, just hours after urging the public to join a march against Russia's military involvement in Ukraine, Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by an unknown assailant within view of the Kremlin. Putin took "personal control" of the investigation into Nemtsov’s murder, but the killer remains at large." -- Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways | Washington Post By David Filipov, March 23, 2017
Boris Berezovsky, 2013 — A self-styled tycoon who become a fixture in Yeltsin’s inner circle in the late 1990s, Berezovsky is believed to have been instrumental in Putin’s rise to power (including a media campaign that smeared Nemtsov)
Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, 2009 — Markelov was a human rights lawyer known for representing Chechen civilians in human rights cases again the Russian military.
"Markelov was shot by a masked gunman near the Kremlin. Baburova, also a journalist from Novaya Gazeta, was fatally shot as she tried to help him. Russian authorities said a neo-Nazi group was behind the killings, and two members were convicted of the deaths." -- Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways | Washington Post By David Filipov, March 23, 2017
Sergei Magnitsky, 2009 — Lawyer who uncovered evidence suggesting that police officials were behind the fraud
Natalia Estemirova, 2009 — Journalist investigating abductions and murders that had become commonplace in Chechnya.
"Estemirova was kidnapped outside her home, shot several times — including a point-blank shot in the head — and dumped in the nearby woods. Nobody has been convicted of her murder." -- Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways | Washington Post By David Filipov, March 23, 2017
Anna Politkovskaya, 2006 — Russian reporter for Novaya Gazeta whose book, “Putin’s Russia,” accused the Kremlin leader of turning the country into a police state.
"She was shot at point-blank range in an elevator in her building. Five men were convicted of her murder, but the judge found that it was a contract killing, with $150,000 of the fee paid by a person whose identity was never discovered. Putin denied any Kremlin involvement in Politkovskaya's killing, saying that her "death in itself is more damaging to the current authorities both in Russia and the Chechen Republic ... than her activities." -- Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways | Washington Post By David Filipov, March 23, 2017
Alexander Litvinenko, 2006 — Former KGB agent
"Alexander Litvinenko was a former KGB agent who died three weeks after drinking a cup of tea" laced with deadly polonium-210 at a London hotel, as Business Insider wrote a year ago. "A British inquiry found that Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were acting on orders that had 'probably been approved'" by Putin." -- Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways | Washington Post By David Filipov, March 23, 2017
This list goes on. Again you may think the Washington Post is fake news, but you know these Russians are dead.
You know Alexei Anatolievich Navalny sits in prison because Putin fears him. And you know that Navalny has called Putin insane and urges anti-war protests. Putin is insane. What man would kill innocent children?
The Free World knows you are afraid. Putin has terrorized you with his slow steady trickle of threats, deaths, assassinations, and unjust imprisonments of anyone Putin fears. Heck, he’s even afraid of a fragile but brave old woman.
You have every right to be afraid, but should this also inform what you know?
The world stands with you, but please wake up to steady lies Putin feeds you to put you into a catatonic state of frightened inaction. Putin does this to you, the Russian people, because you have collective power. He knows that and he is afraid that you will wake up.
Look at what Putin’s restrained and targeted attacks look like on the ground by your brothers and sister in Ukraine.
Please wake up. The world needs you now. We need you conscious and alive and human more than ever!
We stand at a precipice inside the human soul. This precipice exist inside every human being alive right now.
People of Earth, do you call yourself human or monster?
Your actions (and inactions), your words, your thoughts tell us which you chose to be.
Those who call themselves human must reckon with this moment fully to the very core of who they are and what they believe, what they love, what they hate, what they know (or think they know) and what they don’t know.
Each person alive on this planet right now is choosing a stream of thought and system of belief that inform your actions in the next weeks, the next days,the next hours, the next minutes, and the next seconds.
And each second that goes by, each choice made realizes who lives and who dies in this brutal war waged on the innocent people of Ukraine.
We must chose something different than we have ever chosen before to stop this senseless slaughter that stalks the entire human race ever since we crossed the demarcation line that lets us know that we know who we are. The lists of genocides and ruthless slaughter is very long. It will not stop unless we change it inside ourselves. Each person must embark on this work. It will hurt, but it will not hurt you. It will wake you up.
Peoples of the World, you must chose to protect and sustain all life or let it continue to be destroyed by men who have chosen to become monsters.
Every human choice matters to alter the course of our shared fate.
What will you choose?
Reactions of aHelpless Watcher Witnessing Evil Live on TV#2
Twitter Posts Beginning Night of Russian Invasion
Fourth Letter
Letter to American People
If you call yourself a patriotic American, you don’t root for Putin and you don’t spread Russian misinformation.
Americans rooting for Putin are imitating evil. It will lead us to the same remorseless, ruthless state that Russia has become.
American rooting for Putin, do you really want to cut your soul off from your humanity? From the very essences that make you human? Do you really think it is worth it to become a demon just so you can control everybody and everything to your desires?
Yes, I hear your complaints levied at the liberal left. You feel that you are being overlooked and left out by political correctness and cancel culture, but you have persuaded yourself to feel this way. You know darn well you have the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges as every other American, except those who are not white. You know darn well you fear the power that white male supremacy has conferred to you is slipping away. And this is why you bawl and brew and stew.
We have paid a terrible price in the United State for nursing our grievances by using the fake news and misinformation spread by Putin to further our own cause. Now evil grows on American soil inside American minds and it will not be long until Ukraine’s fate is America’s fate as well.
Think hard about how easy your comfortable American life is, even poor Americans have it 10,000 times better than the people in Ukraine right now.
It is so disheartening to hear a poll after Biden’s first State of Union address that said 60% of listeners thought the US economy was more important than Ukraine.
This is why we are not doing more to help the brave, compassionate, and beautiful people of Ukraine survive. This is why we are watching them being slaughtered.
Because we prefer our own comforts over someone else’s?
Yes, it has been a hard 2 years. There are still supply chain issues and higher prices, and these are probably going to get worst. Yes, wearing masks to protect others who are more vulnerable to COVID has been hard, but it is worth it, isn’t it to save someone else’s life?
Or are we a people who just think about ourselves obsessively and shallowly?
These things have made life harder to juggle, but American people, you can still juggle these things. You still have homes. You still have jobs. You can still go to the store without being shot at or bombed. You can still go outside and go about with your life without fear of being burned alive in your car. Ukraines are being burned alive in their cars. They are being shot. They are being bombed. They are being hunted like animals.
Are so many Americans really so blind and so heartless?
This is a disgrace.
We are a nation disconnecting from our capacity to empathize with other people.
How heartless the American heart seems tonight.
The frontline that Ukraine is fighting is EVERYWHERE!
There is no place to hide from this kind of evil for comes from inside us. If Ukraine falls, this horror rests on us for failing to put aside our differences as Americans, our comfort, and our policies and act like human beings.
Ukrainians are showing us how human beings act. Human beings help each other when trouble descends, especially when evil manifests its ugly power in the world.
Are you going to be human or monster?
I know my words are harsh. Please look into your heart. Please feel the pain of the Ukrainian people and the pain of all persecuted people because you can do something about it. It may hurt, but it will not hurt you. It will wake you up.
The choice is yours.
From the Perspective of Americans Working to Destroy Democracy
The Letter to the American people is informed by a former friend who I e-mailed the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. My husband and I had happened to see Matthew Chance putting on his flak jacket the night the first bombs started dropping all over Ukraine. We were shocked and horrified knowing we were witnessing the beginning of the War.
The next morning, I sent an email to a person who I have been very tolerant of in his support of Donald Trump. Knowing how cowardly Trump was in standing up to Putin, I asked my former friend flat out, who does he support–Putin or Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine. Here is his reply.
I sent him a scathing reply, then blocked him. I told him he is not my friend, his beliefs are cat poop, and I stand in opposition to him. Even 10 days into the heroic fight the Ukrainians are giving the Russians, some Americans are still rooting for Putin.
These are not Americans that believe in freedom and democracy. These are wannabe dictators who are just as insane and mad as Putin. I say lock them up just as they chanted to lock up Hillary, but really they are just sad anti-Americans who have every right to voice their cocky, cockeyed opinions. And, they are really, really sad examples of being human in this century.
From the Perspective of Americans Working toSave American Democracy
One of the guest said, “This is a fight to be a human or a monster. Every person on this planet is part of this fight,” one speaker said today. I have been echoing this too. Action is required NOW.” #UkraineRussianWar#Ukraine#Zelensky#StopPutinNOW
Another guest said, “Two weeks ago, Zelenskyy was unknown. Today he is the most loved man on the planet. Courage is the sexiest trait a man can have…so don’t be afraid!” says one of the speakers today. Listen to this. #UkraineRussianWar#Ukraine#Zelensky
This is what makes America and democracy great. Diversity and lots of different people with different ideas who can come together to do something worth doing, something essential, something that will leave a mark on the world of mankind that is good, that humane, that is for life and all living beings not against it.
Images for this animation come from the video featured at the top of this blog and from my previous blog: Moonlight Shaken from a Cranes Bill(Oh how so much can happen in such a short amount of time. I published this blog 7 days ago when the world was a different place.)
First Archetypal Animation
Music: [3] Anybody Out There 3:48 | Ouroboros | Saint Punk
Image from: Ouroboros, the World Serpent & Jörmungandr | Symbols from Folklore & Mythology — “The depiction of a serpent or dragon consuming its own tail is an old one. A symbol of the cyclical nature of things – and linked to the end of the world and immortality – it’s woven its way through time and across cultures for over a millennia.”
Image from: Ouroboros | Nether Realm on SoundCloud
Image from: Legends and Secrets of the Cosmic Ouroboros “There are few creatures that evoke the range of emotions like the earthbound snake. Across ancient cultures and civilizations, snakes have been viewed as mystical, dangerous, repulsive, and ultimately one of the most fascinating beings in the animal world. However, there might be a deeply rooted reason for human’s fascination with this creature, one that is embedded in the oldest mythology known to humans: Ouroboros, or the one who devours itself.”
“It’s an ancient circular symbol, dating back to 5000 BC, which depicts a snake or dragon eating its tail. Archaeologists discovered the oldest known example of an ouroboros on a jar that is possibly 7,000 years old. It belonged to the neolithic Yangshao People, who lived along the Yellow River in what is now eastern China.”