Forsooth Diderot, Viva Chromatica

In 50 more years, will those born after look back at where we are now, and think of the horrors we are witnessing today - war in Ukraine, fascism on the rise globally, the collapse of the USA and the slippage of its mask of pretend holiness - the raging, unchecked genocide in Gaza - like we look back now at the genocides committed by previous colonizing and cultures?

In South America? North America? Africa? Australia? New Zealand? Asia? In a hundred different lands, in a hundred different times, places and cultures - in a hundred different faces in black and white and grey staring back at me from pages and screens, from the other side of Time, in documentaries... their testimonies - evidence of lives that were shattered, minimized, dehumanized, ruined, forever changed and even extinguished in the hallowed names of God, Christianity and the almighty, pristine, blameless Western Civilization and its perverse denial of universal Humanity? 

What will this moment in time look like from 50 more years hence? Will it be, on a day when I'm no longer here on this Earth, in Gaza then as it is in Auschwitz now? In Treblinka? In a hundred new blood-soaked ash-strewn fields of horror and tragedy yet to come? Will they be preserved as horrors and outrage against decency and what it means to be human - as indecent and imperfect beings? Or memorials of shocked humanity, as splinters, burning, lodged in ravaged Conscience? Salves and tokens to be observed, respected in ways never shown the victims? Or mocked and dismissed as "fake news" or "woke liberal fantasy" by "influencers", apologists and revisionists? Or will they be long paved over in streets of greed, hotels, pleasure palaces and gilded with obscenity and vile, vapid towers of "Progress" and amnesia, whereon nasty wealthy scabs and carbunkles frolic and play?

I look back over my years, my half century, and hold in one hand all I was taught - by teachers, histories, the general narrative, popular beliefs, and in the other - all that I have learned. The incongruities between them - the disparities - are immense and horrifying. The world I thought I lived in is revealed as a bold-faced lie, a pleasant fascade to cover up for the lies, deceit, brutality, conquest and greed that twisted the world into what it is... to protect and invent the reputations and positions of powerful white "Christian" men subject to insatiable greed - and always has been.

Beware the tools, my children, the tools of the System: "civilization", "morality", "law and order", "education", "freedom" - all these are illusions easily distorted and subverted to serve it, but most dangerously of all these, is "religion" - and those who hold the power to wield these. 

Truth - in truth - is not subjective, nor objective. How we perceive it, or accept it - or not - is. But it remains true, regardless.

Diderot was right.

The Human Race Is A Psychopath

Thought for the day: psychology hints at serial killers starting off with a loss or absence of empathy for others, and then working up to torturing and killing animals, before culminating in the torture or killing of humans. Isn't it interesting that this is also true for humans as a species?

How "Woke" Became A Right-Wing Slur, What It Means, And Why The Left Should Reclaim It

Greetings, good people.

I recently made a post on Facebook in response to all the "Christian love" being shown to anyone daring to criticize the rampaging Nazis taking over the US of A, as well as the loony wannabes here in South Africa - especially those who so notably embarrassed themselves via Afri-treason's trainsmash of an attempt to convince Trump to turn our country into the 51st state. But that's another story for another time.

Coming back to the topic at hand, I was described - derogatorily - as "woke" by a cross-section of these sorts of people. It is a word these days employed as a slur, an insult, a means of mocking those who exhibit human compassion and caring for others - most notably, for those hated by the traditional right wing - to whom I frequently refer to as either fascists, or more accurately sometimes, as outright Nazis.

Today I'll be taking a close look at the word "woke" - and what it really means, where and how it originated, and how it came to mean the things it does today.