Another Old Soldier Has Faded

Another Old Soldier Has Faded

Nov. 25, 2016 – Fidel Castro is dead

    This evening, over Havana State Television, Raoul Castro announced the death of his brother. No details were given, but for the past several years Fidel  has been a fading soldier.

    But Fidel Castro is the sort of Old Soldier who shall fade into a butterfly. Since the Dialectic has increased the acceptance of Earth-Peoples’ medicine cults, the Cuban people have been looking for new saints. We should wonder whether the sod shall have time to settle properly over the Old Soldiers’ grave before St. Fidel begins to take his place beside St. Che. They shall become the photographs that sit in gilded frames upon the altars where voodoo candles are burned.

    Perhaps we shall need new saints to lead us to the New Civilization. After all, when we were struggling through the Piscean trenches, we discovered that the Old Gods had betrayed us.

    It is no doubt in this way, through the private devotion of the people, that the new civilization shall take form. The old civilization has become a machine without a ghost to move it. As a result, it has become, like the bulldozer which killed Rachel Corrie, an oversized mechanism controlled by a small clique of men who are indifferent to the effect that their actions will have on the world in the long run. Meanwhile the children who grow up will be the ones who have survived because they have become street-wise. They shall grow up mistrusting the old saints and the old gods, because they can see the ways that the Old World Order these Gods have sustained has betrayed them.

    “Our problem,” intrudes Renata, “is that we have been brought up in a system that has got everything reversed. Therefore we think we must create a new civilization, but really, when we look through a window of Higher Reality, we discover that this new civilization has already been created, through the fiat of the spirit. The problem, the thing that shakes us all up, is that we grow up thinking that what we have been taught in school is civilization. We feel the stirring of something new but we cannot trust it, because the jealousy of the old civilization is holding us in thrall.”

How the Franks Secularized the Qoran

    “I must confess for myself,” laments Renata, “that for a long time I was so enamored of Western Civilization that the Indian within me had become mummified. Then I began to remember my days in Arago, the very soil that gave birth to this much vaunted civilization. When I was there I could see, that just as the Spaniards built their churches over our sacred places whenever they could, so in Arago, there is often a Moorish foundation beneath the cathedral.1

    “As I investigated I came to realize, our Western Civilization is really a secularization of the teachings that are found in the Qoran. The frostbite of fanaticism has nipped the growth of these teachings in the Islamic homeland, whereas secularism gives every philosophy an opportunity, and enables the triumph of those philosophies which are the soundest.

    “Nevertheless, at the very moment of its foundation, Western Civilization was alienated from its roots. They even turned their Jesus into a blond haired Visigoth, even though the historical Easeua looked like an Egyptian and spoke a northwestern dialect of Arabic. But now that I am in touch with my Indian heritage I can be free of all that. I can leave the debate between los moros y los cristianos behind, now that I have discovered that we Natives had our own prophetic traditions, that give us advice that is much more in tune with the truths that we need if we are to return from the dead.”

    “It is likely,” observes Thieu, “that the liberation of individualized spirituality, which recognizes the sacred in those things that give life to the earth, and to ourselves, may in the end be seen as the highest accomplishment of the Cuban Revolution. It is even possible that in a future version of the Cuban Santa Maria, St. Fidel shall be the son of Santa Barbara, while St. Che becomes one of the faces of the Crossroads God. But in the meantime, each of us must strive to approach the enlightenment of the Buddha, because it is only when we are striving for enlightenment that the inclination towards virtue has any resiliance.”

    “How does one create a civilization? That might be a very nice mantra,” Ananda smiles. “That is the secret of the Buddha. It seems rather strange to reflect, that when Americans were living in the fool’s paradise of the ‘50's, the poets who were in touch with the spirit could only sing of despair, and of the meaninglesness of the times. Surely this would not have been the case, had the essential spirit of the ‘50's not been betraying the core values that must be adhered to if we are to have sustainable growth.”

    “So now that things are collapsing about us,” shrugs Thieu, “we should have happier visions, and arts that shall teach us to sing a happier tune? That is so absurd that I believe it.”

notes: (1)

The Moorish foundations of Western Civilization are examined in Henri Briffault, The Troubadours, 1948.

(2)  Illustration: By Jacquelinekato (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons