There must be a God, because there sure as Hell is a Devil.
Not a red devil with enormous ram’s horns, prancing about a stage - that’s for a charlatan preacher who puts on shows for gullible young Americans (and yes, I’ve seen footage.)
No, he speaks through people. How else can you explain Madeleine Allbright justifying the deaths of half a million Iraqi children? Or John ‘never met a war he didn’t like’ Bolton, with his grave mien and sweet white moustache?
They may not realise who’s running them - I guess that’ll be Joe Biden’s defence in the Big Trial upstairs. The poor man may be demented, but not half so demented as the people behind him.
Still, if ‘the common enemy of man’ exists, then God too; no yin, no yang.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is, you may be meeting Him rather earlier than you planned.
President Biden is warning of ‘Armageddon’ if Putin uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine. The US government and the EU are stockpiling drugs to treat radiation sickness - Nplate, iodine. Wait for a re-run of that 1951 safety film about getting schoolchildren to cower under their flammable desks.
Of course another reading is that nukes are America’s plan. The first use since 1945 could come from amping up Ukraine’s attacks to the point where the Russians have to drop The Bomb to halt a massive surge; or there could simply be a false-flag ‘dirty bomb’ set off by Western forces, blamed on Putin and so justifying a barrage of atomic explosions in ‘retaliation.’
Fanciful? How about Zelensky’s call for ‘pre-emptive’ strikes against Russia?
Zel doesn’t have Biden’s excuse. His brain works just fine.
I emailed a veteran journalist six weeks ago to ask, ‘Does anyone else look at Zelensky and see a thug?’ He replied, ‘No, I see a prisoner of oligarchs.’ We were both wrong.
Zel isn’t just a prisoner, or if he is, he’s a hard-working ‘trusty’ - how very diligently has he cultivated the West’s war party!
And how the Press has helped! Think of the Daily Mail’s Ian Birrell, the spooks’ stenographer, who has gone from describing Putin WWI propaganda-style (‘snarling rat backed into a corner’) to spinning neo-Nazi Ukrainian atrocities as ‘revenge on the collaborators who've betrayed their neighbours - and country - to the Russians.’ One more step and he’ll be cheering the ‘kill list’ that Zel still hasn’t closed down, the one that even targets independent foreign journalists like the intrepid Eva Bartlett.
Nor is Zel just a thug. Clearly now, he’s a genocidal maniac.
But so are the times. What for, all this? Is it a religious thing, to turn the planet into a burnt offering to God?
Or is just the opposite? Are we ruled by people who have no fear of the Last Judgment because this now is all we have, they’re sitting on top and ‘let the Earth be consumed by fire’ when they’ve gone?
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Is it crazy to be sane when the world is mad?
As Auden said, ‘We must love one another or die.’
‘"We’re trying to figure out what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where does he get off? Where does he find a way out?" Biden said at a fundraiser in New York City’
Stop provoking them then!
Our insect overlords have found the hill they want to die on. A hideously corrupt ersatz nation caught up in a neighbourhood spat that we have zero historical or national interest in.