Auguries of Innocence

22 April 2007

Auguries of Innocence

Some recent news items in Signs of the Times and on the web have moved me to pain and tears. An Arab woman speaks of her sorrow; Israel imprisons mothers and wives of political prisoners to pressure confessions; Guatemala's women being murdered in the thousands; children in Sudan enduring "unspeakable" abuse; Baghdad being turned into a prison; and a small disturbing example of everyday inhumanity: women laughed as they forced their toddlers to take part in a 'dog fight'. It is the Terror of the Situation: a world tormented by psychopaths.

Meanwhile, many in 'developed' countries of the Western world enjoy the comfort of their daily lives undisturbed.

The stark contrast and contradiction of human life reminds me of the last lines of William Blake's poem 'Auguries of Innocence':

Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet Delight.
Some are Born to sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro' the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in the Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?

If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, not withstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.

"Unitary Executive" = Dictator

"It bothers me that the executive branch is taking the amazing position that just on the president's say-so, any American citizen can be picked up, not just in Afghanistan, but at O'Hare Airport or on the streets of any city in this country, and locked up without access to a lawyer or court just because the government says he's connected somehow with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. That's not the American way. It's not the constitutional way." Laurence Tribe - Carl M. Loeb University Professor and Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard University - Source: interview on ABC's Nightline

Masters and Slaves

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. In the Middle Ages when the feudal lords who inhabited the castles whose towers may still be seen along the Rhine concluded to enlarge their domains, to increase their power, their prestige and their wealth they declared war upon one another. But they themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war.

The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell.

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives.

Eugene Debs, 16 June 1918

The speech was given to about 1,200 people and was later used against Debs to make the case that he had violated the espionage Act. The judge sentenced Debs to ten years in prison

Signs Of The Times - SOTT.NET

22 April 2007