Chavez Returns To Cuba for Renewed Treatment
Hugo Chavez has announced that Vice President Nicolas Maduro will take over his duties if he cannot reassume them as he rushes to Cuba for surgery. His cancer seems to have returned.
The president said that tests had shown a return of some cancerous cells and that he would return to Cuba on Sunday for the surgery, his third operation to remove cancerous tissue in about a year and a half.
CNN says Chavez made the announcement in a broadcast from the presidential palace. News that a dictator is in poor health often brings up conflicting emotions. On the one hand some have argued that natural death in general serves the purpose of renewal. Otherwise evil could persist indefinitely. ‘What if dictators could live for thousands of years?’ one website asked. “We can’t always kill them or depose them, so we’ll be outsourcing the assassination to nature.”
When Man can’t solve a problem, we think that maybe God can. But God works in mysterious ways. Many of the 20th century’s most odious leaders lived to a ripe old age and died in their beds. Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Papa Doc Duvalier, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Idi Amin are a few that come to mind.
Job asked this precise question: “Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?” Or Jeremiah, “why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?”
There appears to be no correlation between wickedness and longevity; and death when it comes brings no obvious judgment. If the grim reaper comes to renew the earth, then he compasses the brave and the cowardly, the dastardly and fair, the wise and the foolish; the good, the bad and the ugly.
The previous post touched upon the murder of 14 million people by Hitler and Stalin as described in the book Bloodlands. Timothy Snyder begins and ends his book with tight closeups of its victims.
“Now we will live” This is what the hungry boy liked to say, as he walked along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people
“I will meet her” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938.
“They asked for my wedding ring, which I ….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country.
Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin; her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death.
The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass grave alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.
——
Each of the living bore a name. The boy who imagined he saw wheat in the fields was Jozef Sobolewsky. He starved to death along with his five other brothers and sisters, in 1933 in a famished Ukraine. The one brother who survived was shot in 1937, in Stalin’s Great Terror. Only his sister Hanna remained to recall him and his hope.
Stalinslaw Wyganowski was the young man who foresaw that he would meet his arrested wife, Maria, “under the ground.” They were both shot by the NKVD in Leningrad in 1937.
The Polish officer who wrote of his wedding ring was Adam Solski. The diary was found on his body when his remains were disinterred in Katyn, where he was shot in 1940. The wedding ring he probably hid; his executioners probably found it.
The eleven-year-old Russian girl who kept a simple diary in besieged and starving Leningrad in 1941 was Tania Savicheva. One of her sisters escaped across the frozen surface of Lake Ladoga; Tania and the rest of her family died.
The twelve-year-old Jewish girl who wrote to her father in Belarus in 1942 of the death pits was Junita Vishniatskaia. Her mother, who wrote alongside her, was named Zlata. They were both killed. “Farewell forever” was the last line of Junita’s letter. “I kiss you. I kiss you.”
The problem of evil consists in whether humanity can show itself worthy of existing. Without man the cosmos would be simple: planets spinning through space and the galaxies glowing in their peacock spectrum. But it is what man beholds in the mirror that makes the complicates the universe and makes it incomplete. The shadow that humanity sees in the glass has the fatal power of choice. It is still unclear how we shall choose for it is not the empty Ukrainian wheat field that we cannot accept, but the possibility that someone should empty it to gratify his sense of power and never be held to account.
Perhaps in the last analysis all questions of belief come down to whether we can accept the Joseph Stalins dying on their beds and getting away with it all. But for now there are no answers to our questions upon the earth: why monsters should pass in pomp and attendance while the children they smote perish of starvation? And whether the man-gods of our own age should be allowed to live forever had we the power to extend their lives?
Or are there some problems who answers we can never see? To that question not even Job had an answer except to say “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
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And they asked where were the Americans? The opressed stil ask this question. We can’t save them all. And the current administration doesn’t care to save any. Shame.
Who said that all it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing? Is a man who does nothing good? And is “man” an inclusive term in this instance?
As to Chavez it’s too bad you already used up the title, “Bleeding from Behind”.
As to the questions of good and evil, doesn’t that get a little Manichean, polarizing? Survival has its imperatives that maybe don’t always line up with human morality. In chaotic situations the damnedest things happen. Certainly ignoring clear signs is likely to have consequences. Is blindness then immoral when it leads to disaster? How do you even begin to measure such things, SHOULD you measure such things, or is it better just to hide under the bed, or to take up arms and let Allah sort them out?
Its worth noting that all the great killers of the 20th century were atheists–including Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But that list also include Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein. The Baathist parties of Iraq and Syria are both communist parties of the Middle east. The Baathists were not honest atheists like Stalin and Mao but like Hitler dressed themselves up in the myths of their culture. Still they were atheists.
In a dark mood, are you.
‘We are the ones that we have been waiting for’,
Blessed Be The Name Of The L-rd.
I recently lost my wife of 33 years to cancer,
so I am also in a dark mood.
Remember that after the Saturday Night Massacre comes Sunday morning Redemption.
Where Will It End
Gird up thou thy loins and be men.
Whatever happens, I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.
Matthew 5:45
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
Sometimes we just have to be satisfied that there is a perfect witness and a perfect judge. And that makes the sentence passed down … perfectly just.
Chavez is faking his cancer. Whatever “cure” happens will also be fraud, and there’s your land beast for you. Maybe Bin Laden can be resurrected with a short cell phone video, also known as the sea beast… A few other lies, and it’s hello President Romney.
Let me ‘in’ on this scam… suckers deserve to be conned, I only pity their relatives.
Baobo,
Sorry for mispelling your handle in the previous thread. But I must admit sentences like this one “Maybe Bin Laden can be resurrected with a short cell phone video, also known as the sea beast… A few other lies, and it’s hello President Romney.” are hard to decipher.
Subotai’s post in the prior thread on IJN/Pearl Harbor exercises was worth a separate post all its own. Namely, are certain nations (Iran today, China tomorrow?) being backed into corners by the heirs of FDR’s arrogant State Dept.? While I despise the mullahs, from their perspective why NOT accelerate a nuke bomb if U.S./Israeli bombing is inevitable, with the only plausible way to avert it either to hope against hope for a diplomatic rabbit out of the hat or to blackmail specific Western leaders with knowledge that they funded Al-Qaeda in Syria?
9. Not Uncle Joe
‘from their perspective why NOT accelerate a nuke bomb ….’
Perhaps the choice now is just target the leadership of Iran and forget trying to negotiate with implacable enemies.
It’s time to hurt the bastards in charge not the peons who have no choice.
Charles @4…
I’m going to have to quibble with your assertion.
I’d say that these infamous despots literally held themselves to be a god; a god in the pagan sense, in the manner of Caligula.
For, their one constant ambit was to break the First Commandment.
In all of these vile regimes the proles were commanded to deify them.
So, it’s not a story of true atheism. Instead, it’s a tale of false gods, of paganism, of relativism.
IN SUM: Man over God.
Doling out capricious death was their rite. For these were all death cults, too. Like some barbaric Aztec god, killing and suffering — murder and torture, were lorded down from on high as a regime essential.
They are all remembered more for such cruelties than any other thing.
===========
The very first emperor of a unified China ( just Shanghai north and west to the mountains and deserts ) was as wacko as any 20th Century tyrant. Adjusted for time and place, he was the bloodiest military dictator cum monarch of all.
Before going quite insane from mercury poisoning, he laid his empire barren.
In a mania for immortality he swallowed the advice of his best: putting himself on a liquid mercury medicinal diet.
{
Any resemblance to Adolf’s kooky personal pharmacia is not all that coincidental.
}
Said mercury HAD to be embedded within some sort of confection, since a heaping of sugar makes the poison go down.
We know that the mercury had to be elemental because all oxidized mercury is so lethal that its effects would toll way too rapidly to match the written record. ( It took him years to go mad and die. )
======
W
WRT, your concern about the longevity of tyranny:
The Emperor did inform his sage that if he failed to come back with the location of a mythic island of perpetual life — no excuses would be tolerated — it would be his head.
Somehow the expert from afar went very far… and was never seen again.
He may have booked a passage to India.
In any event, his prescription terminated the Emperor’s life at least thirty years before one might have expected.
{
Where have I read of such before?
}
His super tomb/ burial mountain is now understood to be so toxic with mercury that even the Red Chinese are unwilling to exhume the corpse.(s)
[He didn't go solo, being undiscriminating in his blood lust among his technical staff and concubines.]
His terracotta army has been exposed for years. It is now accepted that its purpose was to ward off the spirits of the dead — those that HE violently placed in the afterlife.
Hence, he needed a huge spirit guard.
=========
Mercury is famed for making gold ‘disappear’ — i.e. form an amalgam/ soft alloy of gold and mercury.
This fascinated the ancients — and since gold was equated with the Sun — it was reasonable to imagine that mercury could draw the power of the Sun down from Heaven, too.
And on this basis, the first emperor had himself buried in a diorama of bronze and mercury; with the lakes, seas and rivers replicated in liquid mercury. The entire enormous scene underpinned in a foundation world of bronze.
All of which means that he’d prequeled Lenin and Stalin’s death ‘art’ on a Biblical scale.
==========
And, it’s now obvious how he was able to conquer China. His kingdom had all of the most productive mercury, gold, tin and copper deposits. His bounty was so great, he could commission enough bronze weaponry to equip a Roman legion — just for his death diorama. (!)
[ It wasn't even faked. The terracotta crew had fully functional sharp weapons! ]
=======
All the World wonders: can America survive Barry Soetoro?
W
Or are there some problems to whose ends we cannot see?
We certainly cannot see the end, but the mechanism at work is perfectly clear:
The Selfish Gene.
This gives the next problem: is the end quantity or quality? The Selfish Gene again answers: – quantity = all, and quality = me.
A message of hoplessness? Perhaps not.
Christ’s message of love and humility gave rise to the “most likely to succeed” gene, as evidenced by Western civilisation.
Others’ genes are coming to terms with this. The mayhem we see in the world is this realisation working its way out.
Not all genes will meet the quantity end.
ADE
There are limits on the pretensions of evil. In the end arithmetic wins. Unfortunately the host pays the parasites bill. Venezuela pays for Chavez with reduced oil production and increased pollution and foregone wealth. The same will happen to America as we have to pay for Barry.
Capitalists proved that wealth can be created, that the world can be made better. In doing so they put common men in the positions of gods. That was a role that in traditional societies was reserved for the Few. In agricultural communities priests and rulers, think Pharaoh, controlled the surplus grain supply, and the size of the transient Design Margin. That gave them the power to make Law. Capitalism diffused that power to the individual, from the Few to the Many.
Under the Democrats/Socialists/Feudalists the US is reverting to a primitive Client-Patron political culture and extractive economic model. We are in effect becoming Latinized. When the US has lost its Design Margin then we will be unable to rescue the world from future dictators. Who will be able to rescue us?
#13 BFTP
“Capitalists proved that wealth can be created, that the world can be made better. In doing so they put common men in the positions of gods. That was a role that in traditional societies was reserved for the Few. In agricultural communities priests and rulers, think Pharaoh, controlled the surplus grain supply, and the size of the transient Design Margin. That gave them the power to make Law. Capitalism diffused that power to the individual, from the Few to the Many. Under the Democrats/Socialists/Feudalists the US is reverting to a primitive Client-Patron political culture and extractive economic model.”
Charismatic figures always end up at the top, even in capitalist societies. It isn’t just dictatorships and extractive societies that have this occur. CEO’s and industrialists will be created in free enterprise situations because talent, intelligence, wisdom, skill, and work ethic are not uniformly distributed amongst our species. The difference between this arrangement we have had for 200 or so years and the pharaonic/French revolution one is that there are correctives in place in the true American model, namely the dispersal of power/earning potential, and a written Constitution which prevent power accumulation, and the Invisible Hand of economics, none of which occur in the pharaonic/French revolution model.
However, as you correctly point out, BFTP, it isn’t necessarily the actual top figures in a client/patron society that maintain this power on a day-to-day basis. It is the clerisy, those who are of low competence but have the ability to ingratiate themselves to a dictator. And dictators typical value loyalty over competence. This then becomes a closed loop, and in our case lately a runaway one. The results of our last election, the complete coopting of the public sector workforce (which is four times larger than it was two generations ago and growing), and Romney’s factually accurate 47% comment all lend credence to this notion.
Amoral, mediocre people always loath free-enterprise, merit-based, power-dispersed societies, because it is impossible for them to gain upper level standard of living and status. The clerisy of today – public sector workers, rent-seeking businesses, and the regulator/bureaucrat class – are moving this country away from a system that promotes the concept of leaders being chosen on the basis of accomplishment and output because they know that a return to that sort of society will very negatively affect them, financially. They don’t care if wealth is created or stolen, so long as it ends up in their wallets. They don’t want the America of pre-1930′s. Better a dictator, to whom they can sell something anyone can pony up if they wish – unthinking loyalty – and be well compensated for that.
Disgusting communist Dalton Trumbo wrote the antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun” right before WW2 (in the period W describes where evil was proceding unabated). When Hilter betrayed Stalin, Trumbo pulled the book out of publication lest it hurt his Soviet pals war effort. So in the grand tradition of the antiwar Left, he wasn’t really antiwar, just on the other side. I guess he never realized that if he lived under a Soviet government, he wouldn’t have been allowed to write an antiwar novel in the first place, let alone control its publication based on his own desired political outcome. Oh, and the story goes that he was contacted quite often by America Firsters for copies of the book. He turned those names over to the FBI because they were “right wing”, an act he supposedly later regretted, (only after the same tactic was used on him in the 50′s of course). My point being that the common man is by and large inclined to resist evil, actively even on behalf of someone who cannot resist themselves. But our supposed intellectual betters spend a lot of time and energy using their media enabled nationwide megaphones to muddy those moral waters. Way too many people are inclined to grant them credibility, evil thrives as a result, and we gradually lose confidence in the moral rightness of the only culture which has ever actively resisted evil and advanced the human condition.
We create leaders that will solemnly (or not so solemnly) tell us that we we can engage in self destructive behavior with out consequence. And when we suffer and/or die from the results of our own favorite perversions, no one is left to care, for outside our shabby bed of pain, the party goes on!
9- I know that looks slightly loco, but I’m not the one claiming these are End Times so let’s do our head-banging exercises… My point was that it’s all a cruel hoax.
If some people fall for it, good. They deserve that prison. But I promise you most of the billions living on this planet don’t care whether Chavez is miraculously cured, or if he was never sick to begin with.
For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Eph 6:10-12)
If you take Paul’s words literally, and based on the context in which they were written I think you must, the enduring presence of unspeakable evil in the world begins to make sense. That’s quite a lot to chew on for the Moderns but how else can the 20th Century be woven into the fabric of world history after the Enlightenment freed men from such silly superstitions? A few extra chemicals here and there? I don’t think so.
Wojtyla, Reagan and Thatcher, each in his own way, performed a Rectification of Names to prove once more that Truth spoken plainly is more powerful than 100 divisions. You can’t measure that. Apparently that’s something that each generation must learn on its own, or suffer the consequences.
BftP @ 13: “Who will be able to rescue us?”
We will. Ourselves. At least, those of us who survive the coming bumps in the road.
There is an evolving view among some historians that the Dark Ages following the collapse of the Roman Empire were not really so dark. The Empire taxed, regulated, and abused its citizens so badly that they welcomed the Barbarians as better overlords. The people simply went back to growing food & making babies, told jokes about the incompetent tyrants of Rome before forgetting about them altogether, and ceased writing reports in Latin about the doings of the ruling class (hence becoming “Dark Ages” to future historians).
Maybe that is the only justice a Stalin or a Mao gets on this plane of existence — to become an object of ridicule for a future generation, and to be totally forgotten by the generation after that.
Wretchard, God works in mysterious ways.
If we lived in a world free of such evil, what would there be to strive for? What would be the challenge in life? You can gauge the glory in good works, only when pitted against great evil.
Perhaps we should think of life as one long obstacle course – a test as to whether we are worthy to enter the kingdom of God. And as such, we should view these monstrous evils as just challenges to be overcome in this earthly test for our souls.
Some say the good die young. Or maybe they pass the test early and are just ready to enter the kingdom long before others.
Nothing under the Sun is new.
He will be succeeded by a contemptible person who has not been given the honor of royalty. He will invade the kingdom when its people feel secure, and he will seize it through intrigue…he will act deceitfully, and with only a few people he will rise to power. When the richest provinces feel secure, he will invade them and will achieve what neither his fathers nor his forefathers did. He will distribute plunder, loot and wealth among his followers.
[He} will send out a tax collector to maintain the royal splendor.
He will do as he pleases. He will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will say unheard-of things…
Book of Daniel
Campaign social media, data mining. Targeted messaging. It’s still the same old, same old..
They boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage…These are the people who divide you.
Book of Jude
“Evil exists because good men don’t kill the government officials committing it.”
Kurt Hofmann, Twitter 9/20/12
And at the other end of the horror spectrum:
Several years back, a homosexual activist said that the failure to develop cloning techniques that would enable him to clone himself “constituted an act of genocide.”
At an anti-war demonstration, where the cops were picking up people lying across a road and carrying them off, a protest leader said, “I can’t believe the police are being so brutal.”
A few months prior to 9/11/01 people rushed into college newspaper offices to protest ads taken out by David Horowitz stating that reparations for slavery were a bad idea. Said one protester, “This hurt me really, really bad.”
All that is necessary is for evil to triumph is for good men to fritter away their Design Margin on stupid stuff like that above.
As Wretchard put it, we have to build up our Design Margin to insane levels. Consider the 1950’s. Just for airplanes, we had the USAF in all of its thousands (1500 B-47’s, alone), all the Air National Guard units, and the Air Force Reserves. Then there were Navy and Marine reserve air units. Some were flying WWII vintage aircraft but even so could have dealt well with 95% of the militaries of the world.
God seems to prefer quality to quantity. Look who the chosen people are. A people full of flaws. Read the Old Test. Brothers who steal inheritances. Men who have sex with the wrong people. A group who, while Moses is up on the mountain, rush to worship a false idol. David, the worlds worst parent, unfaithful, yet with a heart for God. God doesn’t seem impressed by what the world is impressed by. Numbers do not impress Him. A warning for mega-churches.
It isn’t that we do things to impress Him, to earn “crowns” for heaven. For those of us who know Him, we worship a God of intimacy and awe. He invites us to join Him as partners, not puppets. It isn’t “I do something for God, He does something for me”. Insert prayer into slot, get benefit. He asks us, like He asked James and John, “can you drink this cup?”
The more i study astronomy, geology, quantum mechanics, the more unlikely our existence becomes. Most stars in the galaxy are too close to the lethal center for life to exist. Our orbit, which keeps us far from the danger of the center, seems required for life. If our galaxy was like most, in a galactic cluster, galactic crashes would have made a stable long term orbit impossible. When we collide with Andromeda in a few billion years, most stars will be swept from their orbits as the two merge.
So it may well be that in the entire universe we are the only life that knows it can sin. Knows it can sin so it can be forgiven. The reason they haven’t come is that they died long before anything larger than bacteria existed. The universe is a dangerous place. (Speaking of bacteria and viruses, the only reason i am writing this is that rather than be in church, i am at home fighting off a “cold”, I see no reason for colds. Yet this suffering is part of life. Can I drink this cup?)
So are we just the lucky jackpot winner? Or did God in just this one place in the universe give us the product of a galaxy in the right place, a sun in the right place, a giant planet in just the right place, a hit that created the moon in just the right place, and a stable orbit in just the right place. Not to mention a universe designed for free will and life.
Yet this God doesn’t want puppets. Free will seems designed into the place. To do great good, the chance to do even worse evil seems required. If good is the only option, so what. Jack Chalker in one of his stores writes of a universe where good is required. A painful place, there can be no obedience when “good” is the only outcome.
In the great confessions of the church, is one line that explains much. It says that Jesus suffered. Not just that He died, but that He suffered. We don’t like suffering. No one prays for suffering. No one wants the cancer that killed my brother before he turned 50, leaving 3 children under the age of 10 with no father. A cruel God? Capricious? Yet God came to suffer for us. Not just die, but suffer. Can we drink this cup?
David Weber, the science fiction writer, has a sword and sorcery series that starts with “Oath of swords”. His universe has multiple gods of good and evil. Evil gods reward if you serve them. Good gods seem to think people will follow them just because it is the right thing. In many ways good seems handicapped in this set up. Why don’t the good gods intervene? Why do they let evil “win”? Weber’s whole series is permeated with the same theme as this post. Why does a good god allow evil? He has some thought provoking answers. Read the books.
Can you drink this cup? Will you do what is right with no reward?
#9 @ Not Uncle Joe wrote: Subotai’s post in the prior thread on IJN/Pearl Harbor exercises was worth a separate post all its own. Namely, are certain nations (Iran today, China tomorrow?) being backed into corners by the heirs of FDR’s arrogant State Dept.?
Can you link to that post? I’d very much like to read it but cannot find it in the archives…
Solzhenitsyn, writing of those times often asks why the people didn’t rise up. After all, the evil were few while the mass of decent people were many.
The Russian civil war demonstrated what would happen. The detachment would be followed by a battalion, the battalion would be followed by a corps, the corps by a front. By the time the corps or front arrived, you could safely assume that they we made up by mostly decent men, but they were under military disciple after all. No doubt the commissar would hold up the example of the Kronstadt sailors if any wavered. One only need read Lenin’s letters if he has any doubt that this sequence, this piling on was precisely the intent of the leadership.
My personal belief is that God challenges each generation anew with the choice between good and evil. There is no break — only a a few years of quiet perhaps when the new evil is still gathering its strength and only the most perceptive have yet to notice it.
We live in a time where so many have so much, yet they won’t even make small sacrifices to continue man’s (and God’s I think) story. They will tell you that it is too hard to bring up children in an apartment. Or maybe its not fair to them if you can’t guarantee them an Ivy League education. They never reflect for even a moment on the conditions that 99% of the human race was born into and lived its lives.
Another way of looking at the problem is that Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were inside the decision cycle of the decent. They could do evil more quickly and more copiously than the good could defend against, let alone contemplate counter-attacking. Genghis Khan with a telegraph.
Jomini is far out of fashion for thinkers these days, but an argument could also be made that the totalitarians had interior lines. The good folk of the land had to maneuver and communicate around the bulk of the state in that geometry. Thus hobbled, they could never mass, and were therefore defeated in detail.
Looked at that way, maybe the only thing that good men have to do for evil to triumph is fail to communicate, plan, and prepare? Action after the Center is established is much too late.
Killing is not an issue, does not equal evil.
The concept of evil is in the context that a human’s existence is paramount. Since every human will perish, this is absurd.
We have to remember that we exist in a spiritual universe in which all mortals eventually die.
I regret I cannot express these ideas more cogently.