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Gary Weglarz's avatar

Another excellent post on Gladio. I commend you for dealing with this tremendously important topic, indispensable to understanding our modern world. Ironically the very public execution of Charlie Kirk just as he turned away from full-throated support of Israel (and thus the Western monied power block/cabal) also feels very much like other "Gladio" executions. Why use an auto accident or plane crash when a bullet in the public square sends "other" unmistakable "messages" to anyone paying attention.

It is no accident that the cabal killed public figures like JFK, MalcolmX, MLK and RFK with bullets in full public view, when plenty of more discrete means were at their disposal. As McLuhan put it - "the medium is the message" - and the message sent by the medium of - "a bullet" - is rather clear to any who might hold similar thoughts or public positions with those who have just been publicly assassinated.

Sadly for the majority of people - their own "comfort" both physically/materially and emotional/psychically - seem to steer most away from the much needed self-reflection you suggest. So much easier to choose "a tribe" and to submit to its intellectual and spiritual - "entry fee" - than it is to think for oneself and to thus come face to face with the void at the very heart of our present world order.

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niko's avatar

Thanks for this series on Operation Gladio and related matters on how the world works. I first came across Gladio in a conspiracy primer called The CIA's Greatest Hits, by Mark Zepezauer, and then later with Daniele Ganser's NATO's Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe. Your review of and reflections on Williams' work is a welcome refresher course with a lot of valuable new material.

My life's journey has included social justice ministry rooted in (Protestant as well as Catholic) liberation theology, and formation of base communities, associated with people like Daniel Berrigan and movements like the Catholic Worker. I'm not at all religious as far as adherence to any creed or institution, settling for the label, if any, of reverent agnostic, as an old renegade priest once described himself to me. But I do think, in line with your observations above, that spiritual positions, inseparable from material reality, itself mystical, and broadly understood as basic anthropology, underpin politics and everything else we do with our lives, and like your words on worship, who we are, whatever our awareness, is determined by our ultimate concern(s), to borrow from Paul Tillich.

I originally became familiar with your writing, which I always find engaging and thought-provoking, at Lockdown Left, later Real Left. Long and loosely aligned with leftist politics myself, I've nevertheless found most of the modern left (or progressive pseudo-left) consistently lacking in clarity and commitment when it comes to a spiritual underpinning. That goes as well for the proverbial right, all the more when mixed with religious fundamentalism, which I'd say largely amounts here in the U$ to a self-righteous cover for ideology of American capitalism, useful as that's been for state power countering gospel egalitarianism and repressing liberation theology in colonizing missions of the empire.

And as much as I've learned about conspiracy, I'd also say much the same with those who make an idol of it, ironically reducing everything to some secret knowledge among the cognoscenti, often enough belonging to a leisure class who've made their own well-to-do way in a wicked world without much hesitation beyond esoteric theory substituting for spiritual practice, if not forever falling down diversionary rabbit holes serving as psyops for controlled opposition (e.g., QAnonsense) and reactionary resignation to elite machinations always behind popular resistance.

I roughly recall Abraham Heschel's various observations that the world is restored with wonder, radical awe and humility before the sublime nature of being, and no amount of information or knowledge alone, however necessary, enables the kind of metanoia or revolution to make another world possible. Waking up to our inalienable right as co-creators in the truth, goodness, and beauty of creation, however that's come to be, is at the heart of refusing to go along with bizzness as usual by the powers that (shouldn't) be and rising up to create a new world in the midst of the old.

You wrote at the start of this series that you don't know any longer since 2020 if trying to reach readers still thinking the world is sort of okay has become pointless, but that you now write for the hell of it. I'm not sure what you mean by that exactly and entirely, but nonetheless it resonates with me. After more than half a century of living for human liberation, only to witness the steady death march of the Beast system which has climaxed in 2020 and since, I'm no longer left with much else than habit hoping against hope, or just for the hell of it, that things can or could be different, if only our spirits would awaken to our power to live free of the powers and principalities that rule over us. Thanks for continuing to be a voice, even if seemingly crying out in the wilderness, for a better world.

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