Sept.10: Evil

So, as I sit here in my worthless self, I shall write about evil--an evil that has a history as long as human existence.

Evil is very much a part of our daily lives and our history. And it is very much a part of our existence today.

As I've written before,-- evil is very much a human characteristic. Animals are not evil. They can be fierce. But that is part of the process of getting food to stay alive. We are pretty fierce, too. in killing animals for our food. That's not evil. That's survival.

But the deliberate and constant abuse of other animals of their own species seems to be peculiar to humans - and it seems to go all the way back to the first appearance of homo sapiens. From the start, we humans have enslaved, abused, starved other humans. (Show me an animal--say a cat--who is evil and abuses other cats. Such things happen, almost always on a small and temporary scale. But human evil is massive.)

Enslavement, mass murder have always been characteristics of us humans. And that makes us unique among all the animals.

Scholars suggest this happened with the earliest humans, and has only worsened with the years. And it has been a characteristic of humans - on a grander scale with the earliest years. Nor has religion been the slightest deterrent. Indeed, the churches have almost always been supporters of mass murder and plunder - that was true of the Jews of ancient Egypt who murdered their way to the 'promised' land, It was true of the Romans. It was true of our ancestors who murdered indigenous people to steal their land. The British Empire was quite possibly the most brutal empire in history, murdering some 400 million people, and brutalizing the survivors. And the Anglican church in all this? It clapped hands for the killers. Winston Churchill was as evil a killer as one could hope to find. He deliberately starved at least 3 million people in India to death. He was a pioneer in the aerial bombing of undefended,  civilian villages in his 1920 bombing of Kurd villages and towns. He also, with the U.S., pioneered the bombing of civilians as in Dresden. The U.S. airforce since then has made it a practice to target civilians, especially children, in all of its bombing since 1945.

And it's nuclear bombing? A pioneering effort in the deliberate killing of civilians and children. It is now toying with the idea of a nuclear war on China which would kill many, many millions. Oh, joy, say Christians as their churches prepare to bless the bombs.

Hitler ( who had the blessing of Christian churches in Germany and of German Christians) almost exterminated the Jews. Would Canada or Britain or the U.S. have done such a thing?

Think hard. The governments of those countries knew damn well what was happening to the Jews. And they refused to offer shelter to those Jews who escaped both before and during the war. We made a big noise about how shocked we were to learn of the death camps. Hell! We knew about it from the start. And we still refused to accept Jews. Canada would not accept them until three years AFTER the war. Britain was more honest. It created Israel to get rid of its own Jews.

The U.S. incidentally, spent some 15 years of the 1950's and 60's murdering Guatemala's Christians - including priests and nuns. It did away with some 200,000 of them. (No. It never to this day has made our news media.) The director of this mass murder, by the way, was the church-going George Bush Sr.

The Christian churches, as usual, said nothing. Ever heard a  sermon criticizing our murderous ways? Not bloody likely.

And all that is entering a worse phase.

The very,  very wealthy Bill Gates has been commissioned by the governor of New York to upgrade the New York school system, the largest school system in the U.S. His qualifications to do that? None. He has no training as a teacher. So what will he do with the schools?

He'll play the old educational game of propagandizing them. When I was a kid in school, we saluted the British flag and pledged allegiance to the king of England for whom we fought three wars. The first was the Boer War which was none of our business. Then there were two world wars, both of them we were trained to right for God Bless the King. (Yes. I know Hitler was evil. But the record of the British Empire was even worse.)

Then, very abruptly, the Union Jack at the head of the classroom came down as Canadians learned to forget the empire and serve the U.S. empire. Thus the Canadians served a new master in the form of the American Empire. And so Canadians have served - and died - to please our new king, the president of the U.S. in Korea, Afghanistan, Latin America (notably Haiti where we helped destroy democracy). We fight for our American owners, not the British ones anymore, in places like the middle east and, most recently, in the United Arab Emirates. We help American billionaires plunder the region's oil fields. This is the old game of fighting for our master. If The Legion were serious about caring for our military, it would be asking questions about why we have troops fighting for the profit of foreign billionaires.

So what will Bill Gates do for New York school students? He'll play the old and evil game of propagandizing the children to fight and die for "their" country, to produce more generations of Americans who fall for the game of learning to hate in order to make money for the rich.

That has been the pattern of human life for thousands of years with the leadership and power of the human race geared to carry out it's evil. We are now at the final stage of greed and manipulation. We are now at the stage at which our evil, manipulating leaders can take us into the final war.

Evil. It all began long ago, so it is said, with the creation of Homo Sapiens, a human with a larger brain than other creatures. That larger brain gave us greater intellectual power to manipulate each other. Now, combined with so much else that our more powerful minds can do we have the final power - to destroy ourselves.

Unlike all other creatures. our brains give us the power to be evil.

Please. I know this sounds crazy. Okay. Tell me another animal with a brain that makes it capable of developing nuclear weapons, of sponsoring world migrations, of devising religions...

Only we have the power to be evil.