Of Human Bondage

There was a major article in the (London) Sunday Times this week by Andrew Sullivan about Obama, and the "unleashing of a race war on" him. It was very insightful, and redolent of Things In Our Time. But my eye was also caught by an article below it on the same page: the concluding part of an article by a former Sunday Times editor, from his recently published book of his memoirs, this serialized chapter on the uncovering of one 'Kim' Philby - one of the 'good old boy' class network in the UK, finally fingered as the notorious 'Third Man' (after Burgess and Maclean) - as a Soviet spy ("The man running operations against Russia was himself a Russian agent"). At one point in the article the author referred to a conversation he had had with Philby's son, who said:

"My father told me the Russians had given him the task of penetrating British intelligence in 1933 and that it didn't matter how long it took."

1933. Ah. Interesting. And regarding Things In Our Time as well.

A little personal background, to my trip down memory lane.

I was born in the middle of The Depression (1934), in landlocked mid-America (Utah). It took me a while in my life to work out that a lot more had been going on in the country and the world at that time as well. I think my first real eyeopener to the larger picture was when I read Whittaker Chambers's autobiography 'Witness', while I was still in high school; then, or during the summer after my first year at university (the summer of '53), I forget which. I also forget precisely why I was drawn to reading it. I had been growing up in a normal way in normal America: high school fraternity and sports, the beach in the summers, getting good grades in order to win a scholarship to go to a good university (in my case, Stanford up in northern California, from southern California where I was living by then, with my single-parent mother) - daily life; the rest of the world being far away, not impinging on my consciousness. Until one of those lazy summer days.

After catching a few waves (no boards in those days; we were body surfers then; the boards had just barely begun to come in, first from Hawaii, big and heavy. Our big thing was frisbees)* I had joined a handful of my buddies on the blankets. A couple of them, who were more into 'politics' than the rest of us, were talking about a book just out written by a woman who had confessed to being a communist, and penetrating the American federal government, as part of a 'cell' of like-minded 'sleepers'. What was all that all about, I wondered, idly, all the way over on the other side of the country from Washington; and decided to look into the matter further. It was that chance beginning, as best as I can recall, that led me to Chambers's confessional.

It was, in retrospect, a real eyeopener. I had been aware of 'communism', of course, and 'the Cold War', which we were in at the time. But that was all international stuff. What was this business of things happening in our own government? Who were these people? What were they being motivated by?

Chambers gave me some of my answers. They, essentially, were motivated by such as The Great Depression (the note being sounded on planet Earth that I had come into incarnation on). Capitalism being unable to respond adequately to a major economic catastrophe. Capitalism being responsible for the major economic catastrophe, I was to learn.+

I was having my eyes opened slowly to the world - the real world; the larger world - around me.

And now here we were again, on the cusp of a major turning point.

We can go through 'all that' again. (We're really not through our pain yet. The horse that the Masters of the Universe were flogging for all it was worth has not stopped bucking; not by a long shot.) We can choose to stay on the same level as the built-in problem. Or not.

Personally, I prefer to go up a notch, and stop just revisiting the past.

I really don't think that I, and others like me, came here just to continue to stay asleep to the larger picture.

the REAL larger picture.

To be supported in our endeavors for ascension by the REAL Masters of the Universe.

-/-


* which we sunbleached gods on the beaches of southern California in our naivety - or truthfulness; I've never found out - felt we were responsible for; thinking we had inspired some enterprising capitalist-minded entrepreneur fellow sunbather to come up with a plastic model of what we used in our day and age of innocence: our mothers' clunky metal kitchen pie plates. Dangerous, but fun.


+ And for far more than that, I was also to learn. Starting from reading a report on the book that began my search, commented on one fine day on the beach of my youth. The woman's name was Elizabeth Bentley, or some such. She was essentially a courier, taking secrets from her contacts in the federal government to her Soviet controllers. One day she learned that one of their Controllers lived high up in one of the main apartment buildings in Manhattan.
High, high up.
In fact, at the top.
A capitalist, in other words.
A very important capitalist.
Go figure...
..which I 'figured' out later, by reading such as Antony Sutton's impeccably researched exposes on the capitalist underpinnings of communism.
In the creation of markets.
For the creation of wealth.
And power.
...which I also 'figured out' later by reading such as Prof. Carroll Quigley's massive tome 'Tragedy and Hope'.
Which tells it all, really.
'All': the story of power on Earth.
In Our Time.
...but not for much longer.