Crusaders And Relics (Serpent In The Garden, Six.)

Onward, Christian soldiers!  Marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before. Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe; Forward into battle, See his banners go!

Onward, Christian soldiers!
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before.

~Onward Christian Soldiers, traditional Christian hymn.

So apparently, the Russian cruiser Moskva had some kind of relic aboard, a supposed fragment of the "True Cross" a woodchip embedded in a silver crucifix, basically. People have been claiming to find these things since at least the Crusades...and logic, normal decomposition rates and science dictate such claims are almost certainly bullshit.

How's your reheated Crusader bullshit working out for you, Comrades? It didn't work out the first time, either.

Even...perhaps especially, though...if these "Relic" claims are true, wouldn't you expect God would know what's going on, that Christianity is being used to justify murder, rape and war?

Wouldn't you think God would know that the Russian Army is flying the Hammer And Sickle? And I don't doubt the navy is flying the old Soviet Naval Jack, too. In other words, Comrades, if the stories you tell yourselves are true why do you think that shit would protect you? Do you think God is a fool and does not know the difference between Evil and Good? Between Godliness and Ungodliness? 

If that's what you think, Comrades, this whole religion thing probably isn't for you. I'd go back to Atheistic Soviet Communism and the worship of the State...as surely Putin must want to at this point. I mean, you fuckers are most of the way there already.

And you know, I'm not sure what the "Conservatives" are doing, but it doesn't look too much different from how Putin's Russia looked for most of the last decade. 

It doesn't sound any different from what comes out of the mouth of the Patriarch Of Moscow, so I'm going to go out on not-much-of-a-limb here and say it'll probably end up the same way if the rest of us don't tell these motherfuckers to go fuck themselves, continue to vote Republicans out of office, and reduce the influence of the far-right in the Republican Party and our government. 

What we need to do is make bullshit and racism unpopular again. 

I'm serious, the rest of us need to cut them off, tell them no, and back it up with a clear intent to use force if they push the issue. Stop engaging with these fucking people. Stop fucking these fucking people. Stop hanging out with these fucking people, and don't give them an inch politically anymore. Look at how all their private social media networks have fizzled out. The only thing these fucking people hate more than the rest of us is each other. They don't want to have a social network, they want argument and conflict with people they don't like (i.e. everybody else) and an attention and an audience.

The only thing that unites these motherfuckers is shared hatred of basically everybody else.

But their biggest fear and hatred these days is of being "Cancelled" i.e. ignored by everybody else in a capitalistic and pluralistic society and denied the attention that is the central currency of their Attention-economy. If you're only getting that from "your" side, chances are good it means you don't have as much attention and exposure to monetize. You end up being this dude. Kyle Rittenhouse is a rock star among far-right fascists...and nobody else cares. So, what's he doing? Hawking cryptocurrency and NFT bullshit, apparently.

Or like Trump and a lot of his goons, stewing in their own juices and endlessly plotting a return back to power and seething about who they're going to take revenge on if they can pull it off. They're so hyper-focused on themselves and their own bullshit that most of these people don't realize they've been replaced by Vladimir Putin.

They're relics of the Before Times, by which I mean before February 24th, 2022, and they'll never catch up. In effect, the only thing they would likely get out of "regaining" power if they ever did was that they would be forced to give it up to the Russians.

The problem though, such as it is, is that this is the future "Conservatives" (And some far-Left appeasers also) want, because then they figure they can force us to listen to them and be a (probably literally) captive audience, or have "Peace" or something something Gazpacho. 

It seems to escape these fuckers that we'd probably all be inmates in the same Soviet Gulag...but the real problem here is that as long as These Fucking People think they're a higher class of Gulag inmates than all the other Gulag inmates they're fine with that, or that said "Peace" is the peacefulness of the graveyard.

I saw this video earlier today, of a circle of people singing the Ukrainian State Anthem in a town square, cut with videos of protests against the invasion in various other cities around the world.

The absolute truth is that the only way we're going to defeat these damned totalitarian motherfuckers...be they American fascist-wannabes or Russian Neo-Soviets...is that we're going to have to fight tooth and claw against them just like the Ukrainians are doing, using absolutely everything that we can.

And I absolutely don't understand how so many people don't get this. You can't live with or reason with people who don't think you have a right to exist.

That the Russians would put a "Relic" they think is a piece of the "True Cross" on their flagship of war is these people telling on themselves. It's no different than American Q-Anon nuts ranting about "Snake DNA" and calling their enemies Satanic. They have no intention to operate in good faith and see everybody else only as an enemy to be destroyed in the name of a fanatical ideology they equate with some "god" or whatever.

All of these people, in one way or another, see themselves as modern-day "Crusaders" just like how the anti-Islam nuts of a decade ago kept putting the Crusader Cross on everything. They didn't know that their "Code" wasn't and isn't much of a code and a lot of the rest of us cracked it a long time ago.

They look at elites on both the Left and the Right studiously ignoring this shit in the name of keeping their positions or "Normalcy" or thinking Appeasement = Peace and they think that's everybody.

These fucking people themselves are literally desperate to claim they've seen the Burning Bush, but the truth is they listened to the whispers of the serpent in the garden when it started promising them power.

The Truth is, like the Crusaders before them, they're willing to put whole nations to the Sword to get what they think they want.

And there's people out there willing to let them fucking do it, too, because they think it doesn't affect them.

They're wrong. It will. Whether it's Putin or Trump or shitty little enablers like Lavrov and MTG...what these fuckers are after is total power. There ain't no exception for you.

And conviction, Truth and willingness to fight are all any of us have against this shit. The sooner we all get that, the better off everyone will be.

Part Five

Whether one draws one's certainties from religion or science, in order for one to push back against Power one must have one's feet set on a hard floor of Truth, and one must have the freedom to build and to have and to maintain that foundation. This can only exist in the context of a democratic, pluralistic society. Now I don't give a damn if the truth one uses for this is Darwin's theory of Evolution or that God created the Earth in six days and rested on the seventh. People have to have this, and conspiracy theories, false doctrines, junk science, quack medicine and religious extremism are nothing more than shades of the same effort by forces of Greed and Power to undermine Truth on a conceptual level.

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For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:27