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Summer Reading

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Thursday, 1 Sept 2022, 12:42

So in between art attacks I was reading a lot over the summer. I finished the Tom Rob Smith Trilogy which includes Child 44, The Secret Speech and Agent 6.  I would definitely recommend them. Child 44 was made into a film, I haven’t seen it but my sons didn’t think it was up to much.

One of the local charity shops has a whole room of second hand books so I pick up most of my fiction there quite cheaply. They always get them back when I’ve finished with them, so it’s a win, win all round. I read some ‘womens’ fiction, if you’re allowed to call it that now. Anita Shreve’s, A Change in Altitude and one called Home but I cannot remember who wrote it, Trophy Child by Paula Daly, and The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan. You could rattle through them in a day or two and they won’t tax your brain too much. One of the reasons why I don’t particularly like ‘women’s’ fiction is that the central characters are always so bloody weak and drippy. And it’s all a bit ‘Oh no! Gerald is shagging the au pair again, and that’s the third time this week, whatever am I going to do? But I still love him so much!’ It hard to feel much sympathy for the characters when it usually turns out she started shagging Gerald at the Christmas party when his wife was 6 months pregnant. But they’re a cheap read and it’s probably the only way I would ever read them, I wouldn’t spend good money on them. One exception was Sail Away by Celia Imrie. I got this as part of my prize for winning the Haiku competition and really enjoyed it, so this is one I would recommend and will definitely read more of hers.

I’m not a great reader of fiction and prefer autobiography over other genres. But as I worked my way through The Gulag Archipelago, I needed a break now and again, as the brutality was quite harrowing at times and, more so, at present, as we seem to be sleep walking back into totalitarianism. Everyone should read this book, it should be on the Secondary School curriculum. It is an appalling indictment of man’s inhumanity to man and, as I’ve said before, Stalin killed no one, it was the ordinary Russians who ‘followed’ the orders of the tyrant. They estimate 14 million Russians died in World War 2 and 17 million Chinese. They estimate 65 million died under Stalin and Mao, killed by their own, murdered and starved. An appalling lesson from history that everyone should know about, but seems to have been forgotten by our glorious leaders and their minions. Ignore the lessons of history at your peril!

Other good reads were Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. The Geisha who the book was based on was not impressed with Arthur’s interpretation and wrote her own story afterwards.  I have it on the Kindle but haven’t read it yet, but I would still recommend Memoirs.

Other fictions were John Grisham’s The Appeal. I enjoyed this up to a point and it felt very relevant considering it’s themes of political and corporate corruption. There is no happy ending to this one so don’t read it if you’re feeling depressed, it just might tip you over the edge especially with ‘life’, if you could call it that, at present.

On the rest of the reading list was Wilbur Smith’s Blue Horizon, this is book 11 in a whole series about the Courtney family but I haven’t read any of the others. It was a bit of an epic and set in Africa in the early days of colonialism. I did enjoy it and will look out for the others.

John Case’s The Genesis Code was ok. I could see where it was going quite early on, part of the ending didn’t quite gel, but it was ok and worth a read, if you’re not looking for anything too taxing on the brain cells.

Since it was a bit of a Russian summer, I also read Shallow Graves in Siberia by Michael Krupe. This took me back to autobiography. He was a Polish national and this is the story of how he ended up in the gulags and managed to escape both them, and the Jesuits, eventually ending up in Britain. A happy ending for once! I would strongly recommend it. A great read and a reminder of just how amazing the human spirit can be and what we can endure and overcome.

And after all that, and to continue on the Russian theme, I was trawling through some music on Youtube and came across this stunning piece by Tchaikovsky. I’m a big fan of Tchaikovsky but I had never heard of this one, it is called Hymn of the Cherubim. It has to be the most beautiful piece of music I have ever heard and it gives me great pleasure to share it with you all today. It shows that even though we can be absolutely appalling to one another, we can also be beautiful and wonderful, and this is a demonstration of what humanity can produce when we are at our absolute best. Food for the soul that speaks to God. Turn out the lights, turn up the volume and let your soul soar to the heavens. Amen!

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Hymn of the Cherubim - YouTube


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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quote

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Wednesday, 16 June 2021, 19:00

I'm still reading the Gulag Archipelago and was researching a speech by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and came across this quote which I thought I would share: A good motto to live or write by - and never more relevant in this age of fake news and lying and corrupt politicians and media. 

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture (1972)

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Illuminat, Evil and Enlightenment

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Friday, 25 Aug 2023, 09:10

You can’t go online and research anything without coming across the ‘illuminati’.  Apparently, these are the elite who really run the world (and you can see just what a great job they’re doing!), they rope in all the top celebrities and are soooo evil because they believe in and worship the devil!!!  Wooooh! Scary stuff!

They’re supposed to be interconnected with the Freemasons and a load of other secret societies who, allegedly, possess old ‘knowledge’ or ‘magic’. They share symbols (pentagons, all seeing eyes etc) and you go through a ceremony or initiation when you join. Miley Cyrus is supposed to be one, and that would be enough to ensure it’s a club that I, and I’m sure many others, would never want to join!

I have actively avoided mentioning any of this up until now because I think it is all just another load of old crap, designed to distract and divide us, while the mega-rich continue to plunder the world’s resources for themselves.

Now if you want to run around with your trousers up over your knees, give secret handshakes (like a bunch of schoolboys), cover one of your eyes in photos and make hand gestures to signify your loyalty to Satan, then you really need to take a long hard look at yourself and grow up. Just writing that shows how absurd and rather pathetic it all is, ‘Oh, look at us! We’re Satanists, how evil are we?!’

If you look at it logically, if you believe in the devil, then you have to believe in God, I mean, you cannot have the ultimate evil without the ultimate good, it goes against the laws of physics. And I know whose side I would want to be on.

In the Navajo tradition, they believe that man is bad and has to learn to be good, a bit like the old Catholic teaching on original sin but not as fascist. I don’t think the Navajo would have excluded a child from the family burial plot because someone hadn’t poured water on its head and said some ‘magic’ words. The more you break this stuff down, the more ridiculous it all appears.  How could competent and intelligent people have been persuaded to believe this?! Then again, look around!

There was a time when I believed that man was inherently good but the events of this last year have made me reassess that belief. When you look at it logically, again, we have to learn to be, not only good, but to be human/humane. As M. Scott Peak pointed out in The Road Less Travelled series, it is natural to defecate in your pants, but you learn to control it, just as you can learn how to behave and control your emotions and actions.

There are several well known cases of children brought up with animals who adopted the behaviour of the animals. Psychology will also tell you that if language and a host of other ‘human’ behaviours have not been acquired by the age of 7, then the chances of acquiring them after that become slim. It would appear therefore, that there are no inherent instincts or behaviours that make us human and our ‘humanity’ is something that has to be learned. We are animals, whether we like to believe it or not; I was going to say animals with manners, but I don’t think our manners are as good as many other animal species (eg: elephants).  In the face of that, I think we need to show a lot more humility, and a lot less arrogance, about who we think we are and what we know.

M Scott Peck in People of the Lie pointed to laziness as the source of underlying evil in humanity. Being good requires effort, being evil requires no effort at all. Consciousness is that effort and begins early in humans, anyone who has children will remember the three year old who asked why, why, why? We also learn what we are allowed to question and what we are not. If you live in a society where you are forbidden from challenging or asking questions about that society and/or the belief systems you live under, you never develop beyond the psychological boundaries of childhood and mature into full adult consciousness. You remain passive and obedient, mindlessly accepting and believing everything you’ve been told or, at least, pretending to.

Ireland has had one of the hardest lockdowns in the world over the ‘pandemic’ and has been one of the least vocal in speaking out against it and the restrictions. The consciousness of the majority of the population remains undeveloped and immature. Centuries of British rule and the autocracy of the Catholic Church have created a passive and cowardly population. Here in the north, there is an additional factor to that submissiveness.  On the nationalist side, many people still fear Sinn Fein and what they, or their cohorts, might do if they go up against them. The silence against lockdown has been deafening on the nationalist side, a side many would have thought would have been the first to object to having their freedom taken away. But it’s amazing what the Council for Foreign Relations (aka CIA) can buy for €4.6m (Political principles, Ms McDonald?  That’ll do nicely, Mr Haass.) See link below.

There have been several voices of dissent on the Unionist/Protestant side (Sammy Wilson, Van Morrison) which, when you look at history, comes as no surprise. The first ‘Irish rebels’ were Presbyterians, going back to Wolfe Tone in 1798 and, in the Easter Rising, there were many from the Presbyterian tradition initially involved in the fight for freedom and equality. It was only afterwards, on the issue of Home Rule, that the divide opened up across religious grounds, leading to the political division of a mainly Protestant North and a Catholic South. These were the same tactics the British used to divide India from Pakistan and set Muslim against Hindu, and vice versa.

The false humility promoted by ‘Christianity’, along with nationalism/republicanism, has created a culture of victimhood and martyrdom. The nodding assent on display is the result of a population who are not used to thinking for themselves, or questioning authority, or rather the authorities who are supposed to be on their side. Religious, political and community leaders continue to exploit this victimhood mentality to maintain power and control over the masses. (A strategy not confined to Ireland and now being used by the manipulators behind the BLM movement). This is not to say that the Irish haven’t endured some horrific abuses over the centuries and there is a kind courage in bearing suffering that is beyond your control. But none at all, when it is fully within your control as a grown adult.

When it comes to being good or evil, I don’t care if you worship God or Satan.  I do however, believe that both those entities are the excuse many use for a lot of self-righteous hypocrisy and some extremely questionable behaviour. I believe the choice between good and evil is ours and our alone, but it does require consciousness, and that can only be fully achieved with the right support and advice growing up, and begins with observing, thinking and asking questions. People may be able to control your actions at times, and we may not always be allowed to openly question what we are being told, but the majority of us still have the capacity to think, even if we can’t always express those thoughts.

Some believe that we need religion to provide the moral framework for the development of a conscience and that, without religion, people would not be good at all and evil would flourish. I disagree; there are some religions/belief systems that are fairly benign, eg: Buddhism, but the evils committed under Christianity would do Hitler proud and are no guarantee that a person will act morally or from a place of consciousness.  Religion may tell us what to believe but consciousness makes us think.

When we think about evil, we think about the great evils of Stalin or Hitler who as I pointed out in previous posts, never actually killed anyone. As Scott Peck pointed out, there is another low level of evil, within all of us that we need to be aware of and recognise. We would consider breaking a child’s bones an evil act, but would we feel the same about a resentful and jealous parent breaking a child’s spirit? Or what about the overly involved parent, who gives their child everything, as a way of emotionally manipulating the child and sabotaging their autonomy?

Then there are the diabolical horrors committed by humans against each other when in a state of war, or in defence of an ideology. I’m only a couple of chapters into the Gulag Archipelago and I’m appalled to think about the minds that dreamt up the tortures detailed in it. It’s easy to think the perpetrators were psychotic, and I’m sure there were a few psychos among them, but they couldn’t all have been, or maybe the devil made them do it.

As Solzhenitsyn points out in Chapter 4, ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil, cuts through the heart of every human being’.

He acknowledges the potential within himself to do what his tormentors are doing. He wonders how he would behave if his life had taken a different direction, and questions what makes decent men complicit within these types of situations. He concludes that it is because they believe they are doing good and, as the old saying goes, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.

The corruption on display around the world by those in power today could make one think that maybe they are minions of Satan and Old Nick, himself, is running the show. But I’m not convinced.  They say the devil makes work for idle hands but I think it is the weak minded who are most easily led towards corruption.

I don’t know if the Illuminati are a real thing or are just a few deluded celebrities desperately trying to give themselves some ‘street cred’. Illuminati means enlightened and if they really are seeking enlightenment, then they will have difficulty finding it in the vileness that Satan represents. As Jordan Peterson says, ‘truth is the path to true enlightenment’ and truth is the very antithesis of the devil, aka, the Father of Lies. 

The population, at present, are being lied to on a grand scale. The powers behind the lies have been doing this for decades and are well practised in making a lie appear as truth, and the truth, a lie. They use censorship and propaganda to confuse and misdirect us, and people have been manipulated into believing they are doing good by wearing masks, social-distancing and taking ‘vaccines’, without any real scientific truth being presented to validate those claims . Debates rage in families and online regarding the efficacy of these measures and keep us divided and distracted, again.

The only defence against a lie is to consciously seek the truth and be authentic, and that begins with us and us alone. We have within us the power to do good or evil, and recognising and acknowledging our capacity for evil, as well as good, is the first step towards consciousness, and that requires honesty and effort. As we try to navigate our way through the web of lies and deceit that has been created as part of this ‘crisis’, remember the words of Edmund Burke, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing’, so think on.

Apologies forgot to add in the links:

https://theirishsentinel.com/2021/03/20/sinn-feins-deal-with-the-devil-e4-6-million-was-just-the-start/

https://rense.com/general81/miley.htm


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Weddin

Tyrants

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Thursday, 1 Sept 2022, 12:58

So, what did I do in my six weeks of off? Well, I read the entire Harry Potter series, and very enjoyable they were too. I didn’t want to read anything political or anything ‘real’ and I’ve carried on reading more fiction since. I’ve just finished the excellent Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. It is about a serial killer and is set at the end of the Stalin era in Russia. It is based on the story of the real-life serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo who murdered 56 people in Russia in the 1980’s and 90’s. I’ve also ordered the two sequels, The Secret Speech and Agent 6.

There are some statistics at the back of the book relating to Russia under Stalin that are chilling. The two that stood out for me are; it is estimated that 14.5 million people died during this time (the proletariat whom communism was supposed to free) and they would even execute children as young as 12. Absolutely brutal!

If the detail in the book is anything like it really was, the levels of paranoia and fear, it must have been hell for the citizenry. I remember in Wild Swans how people were the same under Mao, paranoid and ready to sell out their family, friends and neighbours, and how in the blink of an eye you could fall out of favour with the authorities and the dangers that brought.  The frightening thing about this is when I look around me today, I see we have learned nothing. It would take very little to turn society into that again, we are halfway there already. I’ve seen and experienced first-hand in the last year, how people who I thought had a modicum of sense and intelligence, completely caved into the fear and propaganda. I have been ostracised by family members for not taking the virus ‘seriously’. (What was I supposed to do, invite it around for dinner and talk to it?!) And the ‘covid cult’ has caused divisions that debates about Trump, global-warming and Brexit never even came close to.

I have also refused to wear a mask, (I will not be complicit in my own enslavement) something which pisses some people off. I think part of it is because it highlights their own cowardice - they don’t want to wear it but haven’t the nerve to go out without it. I tell people now I have a rare condition, it’s called CSIT, it stands for common sense and independent thinking, and believe me it’s a rare commodity around here, I just didn’t realise how rare!

The ‘covid cult’ also reminded me of the early days of the Troubles, especially Bloody Sunday, when a wave of collective insanity seemed to grip the population and which I’ve seen again this year. The change in society was palpable after Bloody Sunday, you could almost taste the anger and hate. Northern Ireland descended into darkness and fear, paranoia and brutality reigned, and every nut job with a grudge had an outlet in which to exercise it. There were also those who took advantage of the anger and the nut jobs, and used them for their own ends, financially and politically. The fear generated then still haunts NI, (they haven’t gone away you know) I see it when I post anything critical about Sinn Fein on Facebook, and it is collectively ignored.

People have remarked privately, that they thought I would be burned out or shot after my letters to the paper. I really didn’t care and knew they wouldn’t because what I have realised is that, underneath it all, Sinn Fein and the rest of them are just another bunch of cowards, who are just as corrupt as the rest and always were. If the last year has shown me anything, it is that all the ‘hard’ men around here are nothing more than a shower of gutless wonders. Pathetic!

Anyway, getting back to the books, I’m reading Carl Sagan’s Contact at the moment, (and hoping for a worm hole to open up to another galaxy!). I had started it before Lent but set it aside to read the Harry Potter’s. I will then get back to some of the heavier stuff which is starting to pile up. Next up is Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago, for some real insights into life under Stalin and Nietzsche’s, Beyond Good and Evil.

It was good to take that time away from the world and switch off from all the hysteria and misery, especially when the government denies you the right to live your life. There’s another year gone which I’ll never get back. Man cannot live for work alone and neither can I.

The fear is also starting to recede and I can see people beginning to question themselves and their actions. The media are still doing their best to ramp it up, with all eyes on India, but with a bit of sunshine and people getting out and about again, the tensions are definitely easing.  Well done too, to all who turned out to march last week in London, it was great to see, especially for those of us living in the outer reaches with little or no support.

When you look back at history and read the literature, whether fictional or not, from the Roman Empire to the present day, you wonder why tyrants never learn and continue with their insane plans for world domination and human enslavement. Because, it doesn’t matter how successful they are initially, in the end, empires always fall and their leaders die, whether it’s Josef Stalin, Mao or Lord Voldemort. Could someone please tell the Rothschilds/ Rockefellers, George Soros , Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, the Democrats, the Zionists and Xi Jinping? It could save us all a lot of time and trouble, and spare us a lot of pain and misery.

Enslavement is not sustainable in the long term, not matter how brutal they make it. Eventually, some people tire of it and decide to fight back for freedom, to die on their feet rather than live on their knees. What is the point of a life, if you cannot live it as a free human being, especially when none of us are going to be here very long anyway!

The one factor that could have stopped Mao and Stalin was the people, if people had not complied with the orders and stood together, they could have done nothing. Because there are always more of us, than there are of them.

I watched a lecture of Dr Jordan Peterson’s recently where he talked about what a miracle it was that we existed, and how many pairs of males and females it took to successfully mate and produce a healthy child over thousands of millennium for us to be here now. Our ancestors in Europe have lived through the rise and fall of many empires, the Black Death, the Inquisition, famine, starvation, invasions and wars, and here we are cringing in fear with our face nappies, over a flu that has a 99.97% recovery rate. Just think about that for a moment then, grow a pair, take that rag off your face and man up, ffs!  

Vivir con miedo es como vivir a medias!

 


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