Critical Mass

I have the image from John Vaillant's The Tiger, of a baboon troop surrounded by lions, with no escape, giving up and sitting there, hands over their faces, waiting for the end. In a book on JFK by veteran nonviolent activist James Douglass, he writes of the "unspeakable" evil in the world (quoting the Christian mystic and poet Thomas Merton), the evil that took Kennedy's life when the president converted from a cold warrior to a leader seeking genuine peace. Now we find ourselves in a perpetual state of "citizen denial" - our hands over our faces - as the U.S. government openly admits it is waging a permanent global war, and one of its intelligence analysts has exposed the cyber-technology placing virtually every communication under surveillance.

Meanwhile for the first time in sixty years, there is a large presence of media and aggrieved public surrounding the secretive Bilderberg conference in Britain, where once it was denied and now must be admitted that 140 of the world's most wealthy and powerful are meeting to plan in secret (definition of conspiracy - no longer "theory" but speakable fact) the fate of the world's economies, governments, and, by the way, people. Another definition that still gets swept under the carpet, fascism: according to Mussolini, "the merger of corporate and state power." Sound familiar?

Orwell saw it coming, but most of the rest of us chose, consciously or not, to look the other way, our virtual hands over our heads. Totalitarianism, fascism, these spectres of the twentieth century did not go away, they just retreated behind the scenes, became more sophisticated, learned to cover tracks by smokescreens of misleading rhetoric, paper tigers, consumer gadgets and toys, bribery and blackmail, false-flag concocted "terror events," assassinations, coups by economic hit-men, mind-control both overt and covert, and the bottom line of choice, appeals to "national security."

No longer relevant in the twenty-first century, if they ever were, are the artificial divisions of left and right, liberal and conservative, socialist and fascist, christian and muslim and jewish, black and white and yellow. The relevant picture in this savannah of a world is the lion and baboon. If you have enough lions to surround the poor primates, it's game over and the hands rightly stay over the eyes. But if, as David Icke pointed out to the assembled thousands in the protesters' "corral" at Bilderberg, we are many and they are few, and we are committed to conscious, nonviolent change, there is hope. If we bother or risk taking our hands off our eyes and ears, we will notice, under the chemtrail-shredded skies, that those self-appointed lions are 140 (or 300, or 1%, pick your billionaire cutoff) and we are 7 billion. Now, maybe now, we are ready to press "reset" and play this game for real.