Recent posts and articles:
A Story for Lent
March 14, 2012
THE WAY HOME
It was hot, really hot. “Hot like h…”, Thomas Twinson started to think, but then he stopped. He didn’t feel like cursing at the moment, so he ended his thought: “Hot like purgatory.” The air was also hazy and heavy with smog or some strange kind of fog, making it hard to see clearly. Thomas had not experienced such a heat before, at least not at this time of year. It was not even Easter yet. “Talk about global warming…” Thomas thought.
If he had been in his air-conditioned car, it wouldn´t have bothered him so much, but Thomas had had to leave his car behind quite a while ago. He wasn´t sure what had been wrong with it, it just wouldn´t drive any more. However, the heat was having a stifling influence on Thomas’ mind, and at the moment, he was not sure about anything. He had, for instance, lost all sense of time. He didn´t know how long he had been walking already, his watch didn´t seem to work anymore and neither did his cell phone. The only thing Thomas wanted at the moment was to get home, and to get there as fast as possible. So he kept on walking…
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Geir Haarde, the Icelandic Scape-Goat and his Show-Trial
March 14, 2012
In biblical times the sins of a whole people were symbolically placed by the high priest on a single goat, which then was sent into the desert.
Last week the trial of the Icelandic ex-prime-minister Geir Haarde for negligence in office has begun. While several other politicians had been indicted at first, the Icelandic parliament had decided to bring it down to a single defendant.
The trial is held in Iceland´s national museum by a special court that has no precedence in the history of Iceland’s democracy.
The trial is also a great media circus with constant life reports after every witness testimony.
Witnesses contradict each other, and for outsiders the personal culpability of Geir Haarde for the banking crash remains unclear.
Most people expect him to be acquitted, and maybe this is the actual purpose of the whole exercise. It should show the Icelandic people, who want some kind of justice done, that the political system is not responsible for what has happened.
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Divide and Conquer: Why Wahhabi Islam and Christian Zionism were created
March 12, 2012
If we want to counteract an agenda of war and oppression, lies and deceptions, we need to overcome our tendency to fall for sectarian hate-mongering. This is exactly the way of how we are being manipulated.
Everybody can be manipulated regardless of faith or non-faith, religious people as well as secular, as we have seen in the anti-Vietnam-war movement in the past as well as in the human-right movements of the present.
Today secular NGOs like Amnesty International provide the cover for “humanitarian” wars as the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and of Libya last year, after western intelligence agencies had before been arming violent insurgencies for many years. The same is happening in Syria right now.
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Cooperation Needs Respect and Maturity
March 12, 2012
I have not posted here for quite a while, because I have trouble communicating my thoughts to others. I felt that that I cannot make myself understood. For some time now it has been my strong conviction that there is no hope of defeating the elites’ drive to implement full-blown fascism on the western world without the help of the vast majority of the western population. It must be a peaceful opposition though, violence is counterproductive.
While I did not write, I still kept on reading the opinions of people from all sides of the political spectrum. I read articles written by members of the progressive left and also some from the libertarian right as well as from religious conservatives. And what I have seen there is a large field of common ground but far too little recognition of it. Instead I see – more often than not – far too much evidence of hatred and distrust between the supporters of the different sides.
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Dr. Aafia Siddiqui abducted, tortured and sentenced to 86 years in prison
December 6, 2010
The failed attempt of American war-planners to create a female AlQaeda “mastermind” for the “War on Terrorism”
Aafia Siddiqui and her son Ahmed
Aafia Siddiqui is an educated Muslim woman, a Pakistani citizen, who had earned her degrees in the US, a bachelor´s degree at Boston´s MIT and a PhD in Neuroscience at Brandeis University with the thesis “How children learn”.
By those who knew her during her years in the US she is described as a kind woman, devoutly religious, compassionate, caring for the disadvantaged, working for charities and teaching classes to small children on Sundays.
While living in the US she became mother to two children of her own.
In 2001 Aafia returned with her family to Pakistan, where her youngest child was born.
However, after a rather difficult divorce and custody battle Dr. Aafia Siddiqui decided to return to the US in late 2002 to pursuit her career. A short time thereafter in early 2003, the U.S. Department of Justice denounced Dr. Aafia Siddiqui as a so-called “Al-Qaeda facilitator.”
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The Harry Potter book series – a tale of egalitarian ethics fighting fascist ideology
December 2, 2010
Recently I went to the newest Harry Potter movie, featuring the first part of the seventh and final Harry Potter book. However, as a hard-core fan of the books, I was thoroughly disappointed.
Important scenes were left out or altered in such a manner that their deeper meaning was lost. Nonsensical scenes were added for comic relief or gratuitous action so that any real message would be trivialized.
From the very first Harry Potter book written for a children´s readership and in the simple language which children would understand, J.K. Rowling made her intention of writing a tale on political philosophy quite clear.
When Harry confronts Voldemort at the end of both the first book and movie, Voldemort declares:
“There is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to seek it.”
Condensed in this single sentence is the political philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the ideological foundation of modern-day fascism.
And J.K. Rowling answers Nietzsche in the voice of little Harry when he declares:
“You´re a liar!“
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Collection of posts and articles on religion and philosophy:
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Older Posts and Articles:
Ending the Propagandocracy by Returning to Reason, Ethics and Truth
Posted in 911, History, Media deceptions and propaganda, Philosophy, Religion and Politics, War and Imperialism on July 8, 2010 |
What we believe in the western world to be our democracy has turned into something wholly different, since the point where we turned away from the path of reason, ethics and truth.
Rather than a democracy, the system we now have in the western world might be called a “propagandocracy”.
It is through the power of deceptive manipulation that we are ruled by an arrogant elitist plutocracy, one that has lost an understanding of basic ethics, a respect for honesty and truth, and a sense of compassion. And although this plutocratic ruling class sees itself as the intellectual elite, it has, in reality, also lost most of its capacity for reason.
But this loss of reasoning capacity doesn´t only afflict western society´s elite; it has spread down through all levels of western society.
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The Corruptive Influence of Power
Posted in Dictatorship, History, Philosophy, Religion and Politics on July 2, 2010 |
“Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely”
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887
Supporters of Marxist theories often imply that the motive for what they call the capitalists´class war against the working class is greed for money, not greed for power. Power, according to some of the Marxists I read, is just a means to an end.
I´m not an expert in Marxist theory myself, therefore I don´t know if Marxism deals with the issue of power at some level.
But if I understand Marxist theory correctly, then capitalists only seek power in order to protect their wealth and the comfortable life-style they fear to lose if wealth were to be distributed more equally.
But how much money do you actually need to live a comfortable life?
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Dreams of Palestine
on June 22, 2010 |
In the spring of 2007 I spent a short seven weeks in the Palestinian West Bank, working as a volunteer with the human rights group ISM.
It has been over 3 years now, but sometimes at night I still dream of Palestine.
Some dreams are nightmares full of fear, others full of sadness, and sometimes anger engulfs me.
And then there are those other dreams, memories so hard to describe.
They show me that good does indeed prevail over evil. That goodness defeats hatred, violence and despair.
The memories I took with me from my weeks in Palestine and from the Palestinian people, a people who in spite of so much suffering have never lost their courageous spirit and their basic humanity, these memories will stay with me for as long as I live
- while I´m awake and in my dreams.
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Volcanic and Political ashes in Iceland and the maybe anarchist and possible mayor of Reykjavik
Posted in Iceland on May 28, 2010
The Icelandic economy has past away and it´s dying wish was to have its ashes spread all over Europe
These and similar jokes we tell each other here in Iceland. And the Icelandic TV reporters who cover the Eurovision song-contest in Oslo at the moment tell us they have heard hundreds of volcano jokes whenever they are around other media people.
Now you in the rest of the world have heard a lot about the recent volcano-eruption over here and even more about the Icelandic bank-collapse and our Ice-Save troubles. Iceland was all over the world media in the last couple of years and more so in the last few weeks.
“We want cash, not ash,” said the British government.
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But there is still a long way to go. The referendum for or against taking over the Ice-save debts unconditionally by the Icelandic tax-payer has brought a clear “No” vote with 93.2% of those who voted, while participation of voters in the referendum was at 62,7%. Publicly both the British government, as well as the [...]
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Dear people of the world, thank you for supporting us Icelanders
Posted in Economy, Iceland, Media deceptions and propaganda on January 6, 2010
Never before have I gotten so many positive responses as I have gotten over yesterday´s post: The Icelandic President listens to the voice of the people I am so grateful that so many of you support what the Icelandic people are trying to achieve: The preservation of our national sovereignty, by a refusal to the [...]
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The Icelandic President listens to the voice of the people
Posted in Economy, Iceland, Media deceptions and propaganda, Money-Systems on January 5, 2010
Icelanders say: No to Ice-save – No to Ice-slave The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimson refused to sign the Ice-save bill, which would have obligated the Icelandic tax-payer to pay unconditionally for the debts of the Ice-save division of Landsbanki, a private bank, which had collapsed in 2008. A large percentage of the Icelandic people [...]
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Hollywood, the Greatest Asset of Warmongers in our Propagandocracies
Posted in Dictatorship, Media deceptions and propaganda, War and Imperialism on January 1, 2010
A new narrative is needed to open our eyes to the truth about war and occupation. But don´t look for Hollywood or other mainline media outlets, either corporate or state-owned, to provide us with such a narrative of truth. Occasionally Hollywood changes its tune somewhat, but that´s only part of a new approach in the [...]
