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recalcitrant america

In spite of their efficiency and dedication to order they were unable to keep up with the clean disposal of the bodies. When I was a child I saw in a documentary what remained to be taken care of by the liberating forces. Bulldozers had to be employed to move the haphazard piles of stiffened, shrunken corpses. The horror of those images would henceforth be with me, asking, if this is man ? (Primo Levi).  As W. G. Sebald (German author and academic) wrote, 'no serious person ever thinks about anything else.' Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust while at school in Obertsdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen. To allow the darkness, that is within each of us, to be off leash. To elect a leader who believes in his own hero fantasy, himself the crusader who liberates those who are willing and able from the restraints put upon them by those who believe that the means matters just as much the ends. This can lead only to utter destruction.  Th...
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Untouchable

Some say that President Trump does not have an ideology. He does — Might is Right — or Trumpism. Some men get this thing happening to them; they crave absolute power. Some have to limit their foray to tyranny within the domestic sphere. Others are given licence to enact it in the workplace or they create a business empire. A few get to land a Presidency and with no respect for law or constitution or national borders seek to make the whole world over into their own image. That is Trumpism. It takes whatever it wants, regardless of others. If there is resistance, it threatens and bullies. It lies about everything. It is constantly engaged in self-promotion. It does not tolerate anything that is not to its own liking. Some scramble to position themselves to take advantage of this disordered situation; others spruik it as a new world order and try to go with the flow. Others are outraged and keep pointing out every wrongdoing, to no avail. Because 'Might is Right' doesn't liste...

Mammon America

Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1918, 'Charles Birch started out as an agricultural scientist, switched to biology and ecology and soon confronted questions that were to occupy him for the rest of his life: where humankind was really going, preoccupied as it was with its its eternal conflicts and relentless pursuit of wealth. The world could not sustain this forever and he believed progress could only be made when spiritual values were married to the empirical world he probed as a scientist.' The Sydney Morning Herald , 23 December, 2009. https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-man-of-science-and-religion-20091222-lbpx.html  In 1976, Charles Birch said, 'Lip service is given to noble ideals, but in fact what is mainly served is mammon.' So it is in America, where the word s 'In God We Trust' inscribed on the coinage struck President Teddy Roosevelt as a vulgar mingling of God and Mammon. (Mammon derives from the Aramaic for riches and is a personification of r...

JD Vance’s cousin who served in Ukraine speaks out

The Speech Everyone’s Talking About – David Brooks at ARC 2025