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March 23, 2002
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
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Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
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Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
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Wayne
Saunders
Memo
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Anthrax
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Alexander
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When
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March
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Kay Lee
Dangerous
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The
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US
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March
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Hani Shukrallah
This
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Bush's
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March 24 - March
30, 2002
CounterPunch's
Easterweek Reading:
"Christ is the infant tied down
or filled with nuisance drugs until it vomits, not knowing why
all is so terribly painful, and slowly settling down into a living
death, to grow into a future murderer of Christ.
"Christ is the agony of a boy or
girl of four lying in his bed in the darkness, desperate because
God is stirring in its little body, terrified that mother or
father might come and yell or hit because the hands are not above
the covers."
Gethsemane
By Wilhelm Reich
Reich published The Murder of Christ
in the early 1950s. It was billed as Volume One of The Emotional
Plague of Mankind, and dedicated thus: "To The Children
of the Future." Gethsemane is the fourteenth chapter, subtitled
"True Justice; the Meaning of Christ".
When the Emotional Plague strikes its victim,
it strikes hard and fast. It strikes without mercy or regard
for truth or facts or anything else except one thing: to kill
the victim.
There are public prosecutors who act
as true lawyers, establishing the truth by evidence from many
sources. There are other prosecutors whose only goal of the prosecution
is killing the victim, no matter whether right or wrong, just
or unjust.
And this is the murder of Christ today
as it was two thousand and four thousand years ago.
When the emotional plague strikes, its
victim is exposed to everybody's eyes and judgment; all accusations
against it are spread out in full daylight. The victim stands
naked before its judges like a deer in the open clearing in a
forest ready to be shot by the hunter well hidden in the bushes.
The real accuser rarely appears on the scene, his identity is
kept secret until very shortly before the final kill. There exists
no law to punish the sniper from ambush.
To be standing in the middle of an open
clearing in a dense forest, widely visible to everyone, and to
be shot at from the bushes on all sides is the situation of the
victim of the emotional plague, no matter what form it has.
When the emotional plague strikes, justice
quietly recedes, weeping. There is nothing in the ancient books
for justice to call upon to prevail. The sentence of death is
perfected before the investigation of the crime. The true motive
of the prosecution never meets the cleaning force of God's daylight.
The reason for the killing remains in the bushes well hidden
from anybody's eyes.
When you meet the accused but not the
accuser, the charge but not the defense, the exact point of formal
law but not the true reason for the accusation, you are dealing
with a killing by the plague.
When the plague kills, it kills for wretched
reasons. Therefore, to assure the murder, it will not permit
weighing accusation against the true, full being of the victim.
It will tear down the victim's honor, besmirch every bit of innocent
intention or act; it will pronounce innocuous details in a tone
and with a slant of intonation which is meant to kill the last
vestige of love or esteem for the victim in the hearts of most
devoted friends.
When you hear the deadly, poisonous intonation
of the prosecutor, you know a Murder of Christ is going to happen
again.
Who in this world has not at any time
dreamed of removing a king, or of living a forbidden love, or
of cursing God for injustice suffered; or who has never touched
his genitals or thought of "adultery" or seen in his
dreams the temples of the whole world tumble together with their
emperors and kings and dukes and fuehrers and God-sent liberators?
Nobody has not done all this except the image of a Babbitt, manufactured
for the purpose of making thoughtless obedience and deadly conformity
the idol of a wretched nation.
The victim of the plague has done all
this, one way or another, early or late, with or without real
intent to execute the dream. And this, together with the exclusion
of justice from the court of justice, renders the victim mute
and helpless.
When you see in the victim a gentle face
and a sad, helpless look in his eyes, you may be sure that another
Murder of Christ is about to be committed.
True justice operating according to the
laws of life and truth does not tear down the victim's honor.
It tries to understand how it came about that a Son of God (and
all men are sons of God) got himself into the predicament of
being brought to court in the first place.
True justice will find the particular
setting of living Life in which any man or woman has violated
an existent law.
True justice will even judge the very
law it is about to apply. Does it fit the case? How old is the
law? When and under what conditions was it made, and who was
it who made this law? Are the conditions still valid that created
such a law? Were there specific reasons at the time of the making
of the law which are no longer alive nor valid today?
When you meet a court which does not
judge the law itself which is to be applied in a living case
of human fate, which does not ask for its history, its function,
its maker, the reasons for its existence at the time of the new
application, you are dealing with a potential or actual tool
of the plague which is intent on committing another Murder of
Christ.
When a law was given two hundred years
ago at a time when nobody knew anything about the love of God
in the child and in the adolescent, a law that made it a crime
to love before reaching a certain age; and when two hundred years
later such knowledge is widely available and well secured in
the mind of man, and a judge refuses to apply this gap in his
judgment, you are dealing with a law made to secure the Murder
of Christ by the emotional plague. And the true criminal is not
the victim but the law itself which refuses to change in accordance
with the change of living Life.
When you meet with a law that was given
six thousand years ago, you must be six thousand times more careful
in applying it. How otherwise shall true justice ever be done?
Such laws are the most powerful tools in the hands of evil men
to be used against Christ which is Love and Truth and movement
onward with the rest of the Kingdom of God. Here are rooted the
reasons which keep man in bondage, which make the dictators because
people are afraid to talk and to say what they so well know,
deep down and well hidden, to be true and just.
If you hear somebody talk of progress
and freedom and happiness and peace and the brotherhood of mankind,
and he does not say which law is to stay and which is to go,
he is a hypocrite and he means nothing whatsoever. He is only
out for votes or riches or power or a seat in this or that chamber,
or he is out to continue the Murder of Christ.
Christ does not hide from the law and
the prosecutor, as the prosecutors hid their true motives for
the killing, and the ancient law hid its actual meaning from
Christ. He does not try to escape. Whereto shall he escape? Why
should he escape? He would carry his way of Life everywhere with
him and he would meet the same fate in any place on earth.
Therefore, he does not hide or flee.
Neither does he conspire. He has nothing whatsoever to hide.
When he tells his pupils not to talk about his healing power,
he does not hide, he only tries to curb their fantastic thirst
for miracles.
Christ knows the soldiers will come and
get him. He awaits them and meets them. And Life knows so perfectly
well how the plague works, that it says to the captors:
Have you come out as against a robber,
with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I was with
you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let
the scriptures be fulfilled. {Mark 14: 48,49)
Two thousand years later, the discoverer
of the Life Energy will be held for police investigation of his
activities, to find out whether he was a spy of this or that
country. They could simply have asked him, since he had nothing
whatsoever to hide and would have been glad to tell them what
he was doing. So they themselves sneaked around like thieves
to neighbors who knew little, to find out what he was doing.
They avoided the clean air of his workshop. And nine years later
they still did not know what he was doing, in spite of thousands
of pages written and published by him. They did not know because
they were not capable of understanding. They had no organs to
know about Life. And therefore they sneaked around like thieves
in the night to see what was cleanly and clearly to be seen in
full daylight. They lay hidden in bushes with gun muzzles pointed,
while he stood on the meadow to be seen by all.
And this again is how the plague works
and thinks and acts.
Christ is Life. And Christ was manhandled
just as Life was manhandled long before him and long after the
crucifixion and is still manhandled today.
And all his admirers fled and forsook
him while he was captured, just as they all had fallen asleep
again and again before he was taken and while he went through
the agony of the innocent one in supreme distress.
And even his God seemed to have abandoned
him. But Life within had not abandoned him. His Life within kept
acting as Life acts, up till the last breath. And this is so
because God is Life within and without. God did not abandon him
at all, except as an image of misled men, corresponding to no
reality.
Life had known who would deliver it to
its enemies. It had known it for a very long time. It saw the
traitor step up to it and kiss it on the cheek as he still said,
" Master! "
And this, again, is the plague.
Christ's story has moved and stirred
humanity to tears and sorrow and great art because it is humanity's
own tragic story. Men are Christs and victims of the plague,
helpless before their own courts and fleeing disciples and sleeping
admirers and Judases kissing the Master with a kiss of death,
and Marys who give Christ a forbidden, godly love, and deadened
bodies that seek in vain God's sweetness in their frozen limbs,
but never cease to sense his presence within and without themselves.
Men, basically, in spite of all armoring and sin and hate and
perversion, are living beings who cannot help but feel the Force
of Life within themselves and without themselves.
Christ is Life, dying innocently for
many millennia at the hands of a Life that had lost and could
not restore God's ways, and therefore kept guarding the ancient
laws with glowing, murderous eyes, and swords ready to kill whoever
has lived God's life.
Christ is the infant tied down or filled
with nuisance drugs until it vomits, not knowing why all is so
terribly painful, and slowly settling down into a living death,
to grow into a future murderer of Christ.
Christ is the agony of a boy or girl
of four lying in his bed in the darkness, desperate because God
is stirring in its little body, terrified that mother or father
might come and yell or hit because the hands are not above the
covers.
Christ is the nightmare of a suppressed
God in God-made genitals in infants and children in the first
puberty, returning from suppression as terror of ghosts and robbers
with knives, and bleak shadows at the windows, as multiarmed
octopuses and devils with glowing forks, and a fire burning in
hell to engulf the little, poor souls jammed in between God's
stirring in their bodies and the parents, the representatives
of God on earth, who punish for feeling God in the limbs. This
is the source of all sin punished in Dante's inferno, a man-made,
madman's nightmare.
And the Judases are the educators and
the councils for mental hygiene and the doctors and the priests
who guard the entrance to the knowledge of God with threatening
words and flaming swords. Did you ever think of how many billions
of small children on this earth went through the nightmare of
Christ at Gethsemane and Golgatha over the millennia? Did you?
You did not. You were " social" and " good to
your neighbors " and " liked your enemies like yourselves
" and you sent prayers up to heaven for salvation and redemption
of your soul, and you knelt before altars of many kinds to obtain
forgiveness of your sins. But never, never did you think of the
billions of babies and children who bring the very sap of God's
fresh life from your endless universe into this miserable world
of yours; and you maimed and punished and frightened these children,
and do to this very day, for knowing God and living the Life
of Christ. And you guard well every single entrance to the houses
of knowledge against intrusion of the truth about these countless
Murders of Christ committed by you and your appointed ones in
the name of God.
And you, defender of the honor of God
in some darkened room in some village in some country, don't
you think right now, hard, of how you could get at the writer
of such " blasphemies " and tar him and put feathers
on his skin and put fire to the tar and feathers and make him
run screaming with agony through the streets, a warning to every
good citizen? You are doing this this very minute. But the times
are against you. Some well-guarded gates at the entrances to
some of the palaces of knowledge have been broken down and we
begin to get an inkling of what has been committed in the name
of God for such a horribly long time on so great a number of
innocent little Christs, sons of Life and God.
The knowledge of God as the love in your
body, which you persecute, is breaking down your guards at the
entrance to paradise, which you yourself have put up in your
dreams, and your obstruction of living Life on this earth.
You kept brooding over the riddle of
the Murder of Christ for centuries and it is your failure
to find the answer which revealed you as the true and only murderer
of Christ. You kept hiding this well and for a long time. But
not much longer will hiding be possible.
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