A week ago, a Taliban fighter detonated a car bomb near a police checkpoint in Kabul. Ten died, among them two members of the United Nations delegation. They were not engaged in military operations. Both the men were Afghans, as was their assailant. Over fifty Afghans were injured in the blast. The UN expressed its distress at the loss of life, but does not intend to close its operation in the Afghan capital. Life must go on as usual, it seems.
The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered this war. When the US invaded Afghanistan it was to remove the ruling Taliban who had created a safe haven for al-Qaeda. Hamid Karzai was installed as president after the rapid defeat of the Taliban. The Americans, who have never dislodged Osama bin Laden’s terrorists, effectively bungled the operation, and are still—eight years later—fighting the Taliban and looking for bin Laden.
There is a clear winner in this conflict:
• It is not America and its NATO allies, led by Britain. They are mired in a war that threatens to kill increasing numbers of troops and, some commentators have said, could last 50 years at the rate things are going.
• It is not the Afghan people, who are dying in increasing numbers in a conflict that they never asked for and that causes great suffering.
• It is not the Pashtun ethnic group, which we simplistically identify as the Taliban. They call the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan their homeland. Pashtuns see the war as an unfinished struggle for freedom and self-determination.
• It is not Pakistan, which has seen its borders invaded by NATO’s army and is now suffering from a hail of deadly explosions in its urban areas at the hands of the Taliban insurgents.
The winner—already—is al-Qaeda.
Despite losing some of its top commanders, the influence of this fundamentalist Islamic group has seen its campaign strengthened immensely by this war. Intending to win more hearts and minds of radical Muslims throughout the world, it has more than achieved its objective in every month of each of the eight years of conflict. In mosques and madrassas, in big groups and little terrorist cells, the world has seen an enormous rise in acceptance among Muslims of al-Qaeda’s anti-Christian, anti-Zionist thinking and organization. Were the Americans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden today, the event would only strengthen the movement’s radicalism. The West is infinitely more in danger of terrorist hits by al-Qaeda now than it was eight years ago.
WODEN SAYS: Sir Francis Bacon once called revenge “a kind of wild justice,” and there is plenty of revenge in this tangled situation.
I am reminded of the story of the old French farmer who had a traffic accident with his horse-drawn cart and a much younger neighbor riding a modern tractor. The magistrate ruled in favor of the neighbor, although the farmer was without doubt the injured party. So the farmer dragged the broken cart into his driveway, where the neighbor would see it every day. For years the farmer looked upon the cart and seethed in fury, plotting revenge. For years the neighbor passed by the gate thinking, “That old, broken-down cart looks quite picturesque there.”
The farmer’s wife knew the anger that was in her husband’s heart, a desire for revenge that paralyzed and sickened him. Worrying about him made her so ill that she died. Their son, a businessman, came from Paris for the funeral. Seeing the driveway blocked by the cart, he asked a neighbor to pull it to the dump with his tractor—yes, same neighbor, same tractor.
Without the cart to remind him, the farmer forgot about the injustice and lost his desire for revenge. He felt better, and even struck up a friendship with the neighbor’s widowed mother, and in the fullness of time, they married.
The NATO forces in Afghanistan include the German army, formerly a sworn enemy of France and Britain, Poland and the Netherlands, all of which are also with Germany in the European Union. Japanese goods and people are welcomed in the United States, which formerly opposed Japan and dropped atomic bombs on her cities. Making peace can be done, and has been successful. The symbol of change is the Berlin Wall that fell 20 years ago this week.
Revenge is indeed a wild justice, and it motivates this impossible war in all its aspects. So, with all the power that an Anglo-Saxon deity can muster, Woden says: “Enough is enough. Mr. Obama, pull out of this war.”
Woden on the Gulf Oil Spill
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010It happens quite naturally in the Gulf of Mexico that plumes of oil come bubbling up from the ocean bed and rise to the surface. That is not as astonishing as you would think—you should see (and feel) the underground volcanoes in several parts of the major oceans. One range of such is in the Gakkel Ridge below the waters of the Arctic. These thermal vents may well be one reason for the current warming of these waters and the consequential loss of Arctic ice.
So if it happens naturally, why the uproar about the failure of British Petroleum to contain the oil spilling from one of their wells in the Gulf? Well, the sheer size of the spill and the massive ecological and human loss for starters. If it had been Nature “wot dun it,” we would have had to shrug our shoulders and take steps to clear things up, as the Americans did in the same geographical area following hurricane Katrina, and the Chinese did following the enormous Qinghai earthquake in April of this year. But the reason for the angry uproar, which is resounding across the globe, is that this oil spill appears to be a man-made disaster.
Was it a mistake, a human error? Most people would say so—now. Although experts tell us it’s “really quite safe” (there are 40 such deep sea operating wells at present around the world), many wise heads would nod at the statement that it is dangerous to “drill, baby, drill” in waters over a mile deep. So yes, it was human error in that sense. From the testimony we have heard we might conclude there was slipshod management and feeble inspection of the oil rig in question. Also probably true. But when all is said and done, there is another explanation, one that will strain your credulity a wee bit, as it has mine.
The Spirit Masters tell me that, from their perspective, what essentially happened was an explosive blowout that was created by Nature itself. The planet Earth is a sentient being that is suffering from all that human beings are doing to her. This was a time for redressing the balance. In the run up to the Winter Solstice 2012 we will see a good number of such events, plus a much heavier load of earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, flooding, drought, volcanic eruptions clouding the sky. Earth is shaking herself as a dog shakes water off its back. It isn’t fun, and it will be a lot worse in coming days.
The big thing to remember (or to discover for the first time) is that your eternal soul and mine saw it coming when we were planning our life this time around. This is especially true for young people, well over 30% of whom are Crystals, Indigos, or Star Children—much closer to the Other Side than we regular folks. So at a deep level we are not terribly surprised, even if we do not welcome chaos. What all this will mean in practice for you and me has to be worked out, but whatever happens to our body in the chaos, we know our eternal soul always survives.
So what is this about? Ecology? Disaster movies? The breakdown of society in the face of chaos? Who knows! Even Woden (with his advantage as an Anglo-Saxon god) doesn’t know what is going to happen. But there are things we can do to provide an energetic balance. You and I can be a lot more grateful for Nature, and for the loveliness of the Earth, our temporary home. We can show that gratitude by conserving resources together. We can plan our human future with an Earth-friendly approach. We can redress the balance to help Mother Earth, who is hurting so much from so many unwise things we as a society and as individuals have done—the Gulf included. The Spirit Masters tell me that this work of redressing the balance is in fact being done by many individuals and groups on Earth, and that it has already had a beneficial effect. Let’s do it!
Tags: Gulf oil spill
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