RANTING AND RAVEN

Raven is reading (and translating) a transcript of Fidel Castro’s speech from yesterday’s Non-Aligned (aka Anvil) Countries summit conference:

“We are living in difficult times. In recent months we have heard chilling words and concepts more than once. In a speech to cadets at West Point on June 1, 2002, the president of the United States declared: ‘Our security requires that we transform the military force that you will be leading into a military force that must be ready to attack immediately in any dark corner of the world’...That is what we are: ‘dark corners of the planet’. That’s how some people see the countries of the Third World. Never has anyone defined us better, nor with more disdain.”

“Dark corners of the planet, huh.” Raven is peering out the window at the sunlight bouncing off the waves of the Pacific .

Manicheism, Rave. Black or white. Good or evil. With us or against us.

“Who was Maniche?”

You’re thinking of Malinche. It’s Mani. He was born in what is now Iraq in the 3rd century of the Christian Era, and was called the Illuminator.

“Sounds like another Saddam Hussein best-seller in the making. Apparently this Mani was mixed up in Gnosticism. Didn’t the Catholic church condemn all that stuff as heresy and barbecue the followers?”

That was later. During the time of the Crusades there was a late minor crusade against Catharists in the south of France. It was minor because there were no spoils to be had, and nobody took it seriously. They built some bonfires, but they all died down pretty quickly.

“I see the connection. The Petroleum Crusade. Fidel says:

“After the last global massacre in the decade of the 1940s, we were promised a world of peace, the reduction of the distance between the rich and the poor and that the most developed countries would help the less developed countries. All of that turned out to be false. They imposed a world order on us that can neither be sustained nor tolerated. The world is being conducted to a dead end street. In only 150 years the gas and petroleum that it took the world 300 millions of years to accumulate will be exhausted.”

Well, yes. They´re starting the Crusades all over again, using dualist thinking as a justification.

“The Holy Grail is an oil barrel....”

Sadly, yes. And Rave, the tales of this crusade will be censured in such a way that any vestige of truth will be lost in the propaganda. Robert Fisk wrote yesterday in The Independent:

"In a further and even more sinister message dated 31 January this year, CNN staff are told that a new computerized system of script approval will allow "authorized script approvers to mark scripts (i.e. reports) in a clear and standard manner. Script EPs (executive producers) will click on the colored APPROVED button to turn it from red (unapproved) to green (approved). When someone makes a change in the script after approval, the button will turn yellow." Someone? Who is this someone? CNN's reporters aren't told. But when we recall that CNN revealed after the 1991 Gulf War that it had allowed Pentagon "trainees" into the CNN newsroom in Atlanta, I have my suspicions."

Raven seems to sniff the air. “Is that the scent of oil fields burning? Or napalm in the morning?"

Smells like the Reichstag Fire to me, Rave.