Once upon a time, people tasted the elixir of freedom all over the world in the 90s.
Sadly, they did not treasure it or try to share it. Instead, they hoarded the bountiful and chose to exploit others.
One by one, reformers failed. The opening of China was met with greedy and corrupted officials. When they were exposed, they chose to return to Mao's gun-barrel doctrine. The dissolution of the USSR heralded in the Russian mafia and the remnant of the KGB. Putin was the misbegotten. Even in the U.S., after enjoying the peace dividend in the Clinton era, the marriage of cultural reactionaries and the financial libertines gave us first Bush Jr and now Trump.
With Xi, the product of the Cultural Revolution, Putin, the product of the KGB, and Trump, the protege of Roy Cohn, wielding their corrupted power, demonic forces are unleashed all over the world, Duterte, MBS, Erdogan.
In Candide, Voltaire said this is the best of all possible worlds but also implored people to tend to their garden. Sadly, collectively, humanity has not tended to it and it has become poisonous.
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And just in time for Halloween.
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President Putin is an anamoly.
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It seems to me, the majority of the world’s population live under heel. Living out lives of exploitation, millions in desperate poverty and squalor with no hope of relief. But anyone with eyes can see the desecration of the planet. The bugs and birds are visibly fewer in the race to suck the last drop of oil from this earth. These millions oppressed are finding community in dissent and this has moved the few of the world to grind that heel. We in America sit in our cars in choking traffic trying to get to unfulfilling jobs that never seem to be enough for a family to enjoy life and think it won’t happen here, we’re not like them, we’re unique. We’re not and if you open your eyes you can see it here. We get just enough to think we’re unique. Think harder.
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Remember Grigori Rasputin! Vladimir has much to be worried about. He will be gone by 2021. The Russian soul, like the American soul, is steeped and cured in the vaults of irrational mysticism that buries the mind and heart in the darkness of death and causes the spirit to aspire to something beyond rationalism and science. History does not repeat but it does ryhme.
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Shaman can’t use exorcism. That is limited to priests and paladins.
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Can we get him to come over here?
News item:
A long-haired fur-clad shaman, dragging a cart with yurt poles, will walk from faraway lands to the White House gates where he will perform an exorcism. Lighting a bonfire, he will feed it an offering of fermented mare’s milk, dried blood of a weasel, and a lock of Trump's hair. He will then bang a leather drum and perform a prayer inviting the evil to fly into the sky with the smoke. Crowds stand silently in awe as Trump, in a rite of self-abnegation, crawls out of the White House with his resignation stapled to his forehead.
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Can we invite him to Washington?
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The is the government supported by Trump for his own reasons (probably those provided by the former M16 officer.)
But remember too that the Republicans and Trump have their own propaganda organs, those owned by Murdoch (ie Fox News) only being the most prominent.
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This Guy is tougher on Putin than the GOP is.. why is that?
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A 21st century Rasputin except on the other side? I sincerely hope things turn out better for this guy than they did for the "Mad Monk."
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How interesting that the thousands of years old ways of the Shaman are still alive and practiced today. I wish I had faith that the exorcism would work - but perhaps this is actually an exorcism of the people themselves, not of Putin. They are waking up from their long slumber of condoning indignities, violations of basic rights (guaranteed under the Russian Constitution) and ignoring the gross corruption of the government and the few powerful at the top of the food chain who rape the country for their own benefit while depriving everyone else of what is rightfully theirs. Sounds like the situation here. Where is our Shaman? We need one in the USA, too.
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@Jan N
There are.
The most important things Obama did in office were visiting a prison, visiting Hiroshima, and restoring the name of Denali.
In Siberia, shamans associate the power of the mountain with the name itself. All power and causation is governed by the mountains. With Trump we are going through a massive readjustment for having once changed the name of Denali to Mount McKinley and now changing it back to its 10000 year old name. Imposing dualism on the land by naming mountains after people, or building occult buildings as the Freemasons and others did in the building of America, interrupts the natural workings of the mountain and causation—thus, in restoring the name of Denali we have temporarily entered into what seems like “Upside Down Land” but it is actually more stable than before.
The shaman in the article is 100% correct in direction and spirit—but perhaps he needs to go to Mount Elbrus, or connect to Tibetan mountains to achieve a satisfactory workaround since he is blocked on the direct path. Or perhaps the workaround is occuring here in The NY Times comment section.
The Thunderbird myth is found all over North America, including Wisconsin. Perhaps they are waking up?
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All over the world the disenfranchised are protesting their excruciating plight. They know little or nothing about banksters,global criminals,secret societies and international cabals etc. They can only focus on their presidents by whom a few of them, are fighting against those that have enslaved them. The whole world will benefit when the U S is truly free to be able to help the rest of the world as everything,for good or bad, is centered there.
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After the Mystic performs his exorcism of Putin, we welcome him to come to the U.S. and build a bonfire outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. And then for getting good measure, on to Mara Lago.
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@Frank Little After the Mystic exorcises Putin, we welcome him to the US Congress driving every member and staff to psychiatrists for anti-psychotic medication.
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Just in case the effort to exorcise Mr. Putin is successful, who will tell the American president what to do?
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Grassroots spiritual movements coming from outside the conventional structures of government and law - which are entrenched in corrupt and mistaken thinking - will save the planet. From the outside they may appear to be crazy or quixotic, and they will likely be mocked as well. Greta Thunberg, another unlikely leader, comes to mind. This shaman is part of the movement to heal the world. There will be many more, in my opinion, as humanity wakes up to the fact that our conventionally-minded official leaders are leading us over a cliff to mutually-assured-destruction.
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Thank you, couldn’t agree more. You see this resurgence in the art world as well. Healing and retracing back to ancestral living. Equality doesn’t mean communism. It means the original concept of communal living.
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@Sanctimonious Stu I'd put Marianne Williamson in this group as well.
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@Sanctimonious Stu
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Learned from my mother.
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This is a fascinating story. Mystical Russia endures.
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The story is lyrical, and inspiring. It recalls the Singing Revolution in Estonia in the waning days of the USSR. Neither Putin nor Trump want to make either Russia or America great for the citizens, only for themselves. A leader’s vanity and deep insecurities often cause millions of humans to suffer in the end. Both Russia and America are presently hostage to men without grace or true greatness.
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This is a beautiful modern tale, plenty of poetry, embedded in the old Russian soul, which reminds me of great Russian people, like Solsjenitzin or Tolstoi. But it is also very real; the shaman leads the same battle as Navalny does and both are persecuted, and both continue to EXPRESS THEIR OPINION, nothing more nothing less. Courageous men and women everywhere in Russia, I love and admire you all.
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@robert The Shaman isn't Russian. Neither ethnically, nor culturally, nor religion wise. "Russian soul" you associate with Tolstoy and Solzenitsin of 19-20 century Russia have nothing to do with the culture of tribes of Asian part of Russian empire besides being invaded and systematically eradicated under the pretext of modernization.
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Perhaps the plight of the Russians may improve if their leader wasn’t consumed with the desire to topple the West. Good luck to them. At least they are taking it to the streets , while we sit back and watch Trump and the Republicans destroy our nation.
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Don’t sit back! Join a group, any group, working to restore democracy and sanity to our country.
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@Thomas G
I'm not sure that Putin wants to topple the West at all. He needs a stable partner. What he seems to want is to restore Russia to its former level of influence, negated by the West for decades after the Wall fell, with Nato creeping in. The Russian Federation is ageing, with an economy the size of that of Italy. Yet it is still a bear with claws. So he's using that, in an asymmetrical way.
I'm no friend of Putin and his ilk. But he and the Russians now seem smarter, more stable and rational "partners" to talk to than Trump and much of the US administration, which have been stabbing EU countries in the back, especially mine, several times (Alstom and GE, BNP Paribas ...).
Fool me twice ...
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Once you understand the concept of the "Russian soul", you will be able to see how the Russians will tolerate a Putin until long after he has worn out his welcome. It is the average Russian's fate to be ruled by strong men who deceive them and fail to deliver economic and social improvements. There are still a few around who pray for the return of Stalin. Trump hopes that members of his poorly educated partisan base will act like the average Russians.
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@Mister Ed More than a few pray for the return of Stalin and Mr. Putin is one of them.
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These people are members of what many others are referring to when we say the words, 'the real world'. Putin, and a few others that I could mention, appear unable to see it, or them. Whether a shaman gets to exorcise evil via a small fire in the square, putting some light in a dark place, he calls our attention to a bonfire of vanities.
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“ Emboldened by cheap, expanding and mostly uncensored high-speed internet access, Russians are becoming braver in speaking out, knowing that even if the state news media ignores their voices, millions can hear them online.”
This would be a good time for the USA to deploy some active measures of our own into Russia. Why aren’t we doing so?
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@JH I think because people are afraid of Putin, who is truly the most powerful man in the world despite Americans believing it is the president.
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@JH
Perhaps the illegality and immorality of what is usually meant by "deploy active measures" has given the USA pause. I doubt it, though.
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@JH How do you know that we’re not?
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