How We Live Now

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...

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...

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...

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009999341/georgia-factory-trump-doge-usaid.html?smid=url-share

 https://omny.fm/shows/please-explain-1/the-evidence-is-in-trump-is-an-agent-of-putin

He is like a mad king buffeted by the winds of chaos breathing bombast and casting blame, believing his own delirious fantasies, railing at the world to relieve itself of its pitiful love of order and decency, goodwill, honour, and adherence to facts. His followers crowd around, applauding and cheering at every stumble and reversal, in this upside down world. The intelligent and the good stand by silenced by the roar of madness that defies reason and rationality. He believes that this is power but real power does not deal with destruction, it creates. He presents no vision for the future, except empty, simplistic words. It's going to be beautiful he says, such as has never been seen before, we are going to have money pouring in ... And the rest of the world stands by abandoned by a nation that once was great, trying to take seriously, and deal respectfully, where there is only delusion and bullying overbearing ignorance.  He is wedded to untruth, and deeply anti-social. Trying to e...

'Trump has long shown an interest in deploying U.S. troops domestically for demonstrations of force, whether to deter migration or to crack down on civil protests.' The Washington Post , 1 March 2025, ' Pentagon orders up to 3,000 troops and Stryker combat vehicles to border'. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/01/hegseth-border-troops-mexico-stryker/ 'In moods and mentalities, it seems, Volk and Führer partook of the same troubled Danubian brew. On the one hand, the people with their peculiar 'despair of politics' (as Trevor-Roper has put it), their wallowing in petulance and perversity, what Haffner calls their 'resentful dimness' and their 'heated readiness to hate', their refusal of moderation and, in adversity, of all consolation, their ethos of zero-sum (all or nothing, of Sein oder Nichstein ), and their embrace of the irrational and hysterical. And on the other hand the leader, who indulged these tendencies on...