For nearly three years, pundits in the mainstream media have mused and amused themselves with the question: What will this incompetent, chaos-generating president do when he is confronted with a real international crisis?
Well Trump fabricated one with another stupid phone call, this time with President Erdogan of Turkey. Betraying and abandoning America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East, the Kurds, this malevolent man opened the gates of hell on those long-suffering people.
He echoes what the devil itself would say as he rationalizes his perfidy: “They’re not angels.” Make no mistake, evil exists, and Trump channels it.
Americans are running on two opposing tracks, and a collision is inevitable. One track, the professional pundits of mainstream media, preaches to the choir in their own echo chamber, wishfully believing that they’re slowly cornering the sob. Perhaps they are, but that only makes him more dangerous.
The other track is the depressed and dispirited American people themselves. Having long given up on visionary leadership from Washington, they elected the warmongering Bush Junior, then were conned by the status quo loving Barack Obama, before turning to the wannabe tyrant Trump.
The American people as a whole are responsible for this hideous leader, not invasive Russian bots, or repulsive Republican hypocrites.
America’s arrangement with the Kurds was a true quid pro quo. A small number of American troops acted as a buffer for stateless Kurds in exchange for protection from enemies all around them. They were willing to do our dirty work against ISIS, which was grown in the putrid petri dish of Iraq after the Bush-Cheney invasion.
President Trump, angry that his “perfect” phone call with the president of Ukraine demanding dirt on the Bidens in exchange for military aid in their war against Russia became grounds for impeachment, retaliated by throwing a working quid pro quo to the dogs of war.
Trump gave new meaning to betrayal of allies, by allowing hundreds of thousands of Kurds to come under attack and making them flee for their lives. Erdogan pronounced, in Trumpian/Orwellian style, that his ethnic cleansing of the Kurds is a “a great day for civilization.”
This is what happens when UN peacekeeping falls to mercenaries and nationalists. This is what happens when the United States, the builder of the ‘international order,’ takes a wrecking ball to it.
The international order is history, and American leadership is dead. The United States will continue to project the enormity of its military power, but without any pretence about extending democracy, protecting human rights, and making progress toward the rule of international law.
Truth be told, the post-World War II international system had become a procrustean bed in an interconnected global society before Trump rose to the sewer’s surface with his “great and unmatched wisdom.” The question is, what, if anything, the can be done now?
To begin with, we need a non-theologized, non-psychologized philosophy of evil. Why does evil, a man-made phenomenon that can no longer be theologized or psychologized away, continue to rule and expand in this world?
Without self-knowing, which has always been and continues to be rare, darkness is an inevitable by-product of ‘higher thought,’ accumulating over generations. Since the beginning of modern man (about 100,000 years ago), the residue of tribalism, ignorance and hatred has congealed into collective intentionality in human consciousness.
That is, evil, and much philosophical and psychological work remains to be done to understand and dispel it.
Evil does not originate in any individual, but flows like electricity flows through copper through dividuals without character, people of immense moral weakness.
You can see this phenomenon exemplified in Trump, who is as completely ignorant of his motivations and conditioning as he is unempathetic of others. He literally doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he sure as hell doesn’t know what things are metaphysically pulling his strings.
Nothing attests to the spiritual bankruptcy of Christianity in America more than evangelical support of this venal, amoral, corrupt and narcissistic president.
Don’t conflate the word ‘metaphysical’ with ‘supernatural.’ There’s nothing supernatural about evil.
There is no cosmic battle between good and evil. There is God as immanence, but there is no personal God, as there is a personal devil. Demons are human things requiring the walking dead as vessels, and we need not fear human things.
In a culture saturated with darkness, we have to regularly ask ourselves: am I conduit? Conduits are people through whom collective darkness flows unimpeded, even as they’re certain they are their own persons.
To be self-knowing means seeing and remaining with hate as hate, or envy as envy, or any other negative trait as they arise within one, which shuts off the inner valve to collective darkness.
Then one is one’s own person, learning from the darkness that we all have within us, to one degree or another.
Martin LeFevre
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