Putin invokes Joseph Stalin, and the American Empire invokes God Almighty.
Meanwhile, out in the wilds of the Olympic Mountains, dozens of Big
Foot are quietly gathering at the place they claim is the beginning of
the Universe. One by one they climb up on the rocky ridge and step
into the glowing hole where they disappear without a sound. My guide,
a fellow of about eight feet in height, covered with silken fur and
weighing in at about 500 pounds, whispers that they have been
witnessing Man's progress for about 100 years, this time around. They
will return in another 100 years and if Man has continued to be
violent and destructive of the Earth, they will bring what he called,
"The Exterminator".
I seldom discuss my encounter with Big Foot, because folks are quick
to laugh and proclaim me balmy. So I keep my piece. Still, to this
very small, very intelligent group of blind people, I feel I can at
least tell a quick version of what I have been witnessing.
It began back about 25 years ago. That was before we had replaced our
cabin with this lovely three bedroom, three bath house, with it wall
of glass doors opening onto a deck that was 100 feet long and 12 feet
wide. Back then we just had the cozy 12 foot by 15 foot cabin. Cathy
and I would rush away from the City on Friday evenings, make the two
and a half hour drive to this totally quiet, remote piece of pure
Heaven. We had purchased the ten acres back in 1987, and after a year
or two I began to build a trail up the steep hill behind us. The plan
was to find a level spot to set a large water tank. We would have a
well drilled and pump the water up to the tank, using gravity flow to
bring it to our house, once it had been built. So I toiled, often on
my hands and knees, chopping through the dense, tough under brush.
After finding a perfect spot for our tank, I decided to continue on to
the far back of our property. There was a great number of downed
trees, and I decided I could drag them in sections to a place near our
cabin. There I could buck up the logs and split them into fire place
size. By the end of the second year I must have had over twenty cords
of wood, drying under tarps.
We had hauled a small TV to use for playing movies. Cathy was into
something or other, too much action for a totally blind man to make
any sense out of, so I grabbed my brush axe and headed up to the back
of our ten acres, to work at widening the trail. It was a gloomy day.
Heavy, leaden clouds dragging their fat bellies on the tops of the
towering Cedars, Hemlocks, Spruce and Douglas Fir. Suddenly in the
shadows of a dense cluster of Salmon Berry bushes, I heard a whimper.
Quickly I dropped to my stomach and froze right where I was, gripping
the brush axe by my side. There it was again. A soft, mournful
whimper.
I belly crawled along the trail until I was almost in the cluster of
thorny stalks. There I saw it. A small child dressed in what looked
like a full furry snow suit. Although small, the boy weighed at least
one hundred pounds. Still, I was much younger back then, and I lifted
him over my shoulder and headed back to the house, thankful that it
was downhill all the way.
When I opened the cabin door, Cathy gasped and leaped to her feet.
"What sort of animal do you have there?" she demanded. "I think it's
a young boy", I panted, placing the quiet form on the Murphy Bed. "He
looks human" Cathy said, "But he's covered with fur from head to toe,
and he has no clothes on, or shoes either."
At that moment the "boy" came to his senses and sat up, looking wildly
around. Cathy took his hands in hers and spoke to him in her calm,
soothing voice. The one she uses on frightened horses. The boy
settled down, but began pointing toward the door, and then at himself.
"First we need to see if you're hurt, and then whether you're hungry",
Cathy murmured.
We sat out a gallon jug of water and turned to dish up some of the
Chili Cathy had just cooked. Turning back with a big bowl, we saw the
boy tossing off the entire gallon of water. He did the same with the
Chili, preferring to gulp it down from the bowl rather than to try
using the soup spoon. After downing my stash of candy bars for his
dessert, he actually gave us a huge grin.
Just then the cabin shook. Heavy footsteps sounded on the cabin deck.
A huge shadow passed by our side window and the back door whipped
open. There stood as huge a creature as I've ever seen. He looked in
at me, lowering his hairy head so as to look into the cabin. The boy
leaped to his feet, squealing and grabbing at the massive monster.
The boy jabbered and chattered in a language unknown to us.
Finally the large creature spoke in a deep rumbling voice. "My boy
said you saved his life. Thank you. I will take him home now, but I
must hear you promise that you will not say a single word of this day
to anyone, until we have gone home through our Channel hidden in these
mountains."
And so we kept that promise. Even when, ten years later there was a
knock at our door, and upon opening it I was confronted by a tall,
very furry Big Foot. He told us that he was the same child we had
saved back ten years previous. He told us many things, assuring
himself that we would keep quiet until the, "Passing". He said he
would come for us if we wanted to watch from a distance, but that
would not be for another ten years.
And so we have just returned from seeing a most unbelievable sight.
One by one these massive Beings stepped into that soft violet light,
fading away as they went deeper. Finally our guide said it was his
turn. He gave each of us a huge bear hug and then marched behind the
others. As he faded, so did the light. In only seconds we could not
tell where the opening had been. We looked at one another and
wondered if anyone would believe us. And even more important, would
the People of Earth do anything to keep Big Foot from carrying out
their promise.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/11/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://themilitant.com/2016/8006/800604.html
> The Militant (logo)
>
> Vol. 80/No. 6 February 15, 2016
>
> (front page)
>
> Putin invokes czars, Stalin to justify
> Moscow's intervention in 'near abroad'
>
>
> BY NAOMI CRAINE
> In recent remarks, Russian President Vladimir Putin staked his claim to
> the legacy of both the czarist empire — the most reactionary in Europe
> until it was overthrown in 1917 — and the counterrevolutionary regime of
> Joseph Stalin. He denounced the revolutionary course led by communist
> leader V.I. Lenin of supporting the rights of oppressed nations to
> self-determination. Putin's statements are not a historical question.
> They aim to promote national chauvinism and justify Moscow's territorial
> and political claims to its "near abroad" today.
> Lenin "planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia,
> which later exploded," Putin declared at a Jan. 21 meeting of the
> Presidential Council for Science and Education. He expanded on this
> point at a Jan. 25 conference in southern Russia, saying he was
> referring to the debate "between Stalin and Lenin regarding the creation
> of the new state, the Soviet Union."
>
> Putin blamed Lenin's insistence on a voluntary federation formed "on the
> basis of full equality with the possibility of seceding" for the 1991
> coming apart of the USSR. He said the borders of the Soviet republics
> were "established arbitrarily, without much reason," leading to
> "nonsense" such as including the industrial, proletarian Donbass region
> in Ukraine, not Russia. This is the region where Moscow's forces have
> backed a separatist war against the government in Kiev for nearly two
> years now.
>
> These remarks were given to a Russian Popular Front forum of pro-regime
> "civil society activists" in Stavropol. According to a transcript
> released by the Kremlin, Putin complimented the "efficient work" of
> officials in nearby Chechnya putting down nationalist struggles by the
> majority Muslim population there.
>
> Ukrainian officials complained to the United Nations Security Council
> Jan. 27, saying that Putin's statements "publicly questioning the
> territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of
> Ukraine" were "unacceptable."
>
> When the workers and farmers came to power in Russia in the October 1917
> Bolshevik revolution, the old czarist empire was what Lenin aptly called
> a "prison house of nations." In September 1922, Stalin proposed
> absorbing the independent republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan,
> Georgia and Armenia into the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
>
> Lenin's final fight
> "We consider ourselves, the Ukrainian SSR, and others equal," Lenin
> argued, and must "enter with them on an equal basis into a new union, a
> new federation, the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia."
> The record of this debate, in which Stalin derided the "national
> liberalism of Comrade Lenin," can be found in Lenin's Final Fight,
> published by Pathfinder Press. The Socialist Workers Party traces its
> political continuity to Lenin and the early years of the Russian
> Revolution and stands on Lenin's legacy in this fight. It is the only
> road to unite working people in struggle.
>
> Writing a couple months later about the necessity of combating Great
> Russian chauvinism inherited from the czars, Lenin said,
> "Internationalism on the part of oppressors or 'great' nations, as they
> are called (though they are great only in their violence …), must
> consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but
> even in an inequality, through which the oppressor nation, the great
> nation, would compensate for the inequality which obtains in real life."
>
> The political course led by Lenin was crushed as part of the
> counterrevolution against the working class carried out in 1920s and
> '30s by the bureaucratic caste that consolidated under Stalin. The USSR
> became not a voluntary union, but an oppressive "Soviet" superstate in
> which patriotism was used to justify the resurgence of Great Russian
> chauvinism. Whole peoples — like the Crimean Tatars in 1944 — were
> deported from their homelands at gunpoint. It was this course that made
> it inevitable the re-imposed prison house of nations would break apart.
>
> Speaking in Stavropol, Putin also sought to smear Lenin and the
> revolution as brutal, unpatriotic and a disaster for "Mother Russia."
> Bemoaning the fall of the czarist empire, he complains that the
> Bolsheviks "lost" World War I "to a losing nation," saying it caused
> "colossal losses" for Moscow in territories surrendered. This refers to
> the Bolsheviks' decision to sign the onerous 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace
> treaty with Berlin to defend the revolution from being overthrown.
>
> Among other contributions to the working class worldwide, the Bolshevik
> leadership exposed the secret treaties that had been drawn up between
> the imperialist rulers in London and Paris — and the czarist regime in
> Moscow — to carve up the world among themselves, the real aim of the war.
>
> "Everyone accused the tsarist regime of repressions," Putin added.
> "However what did Soviet power begin with? With mass repressions." As
> evidence he cited the killing in 1918 of the former czar and his family.
> He accused the Bolsheviks of murdering Russian Orthodox priests, as he
> seeks today to bolster the church's hierarchy as a cornerstone of his
> regime's rule.
>
> Putin praised the "concentration of national resources" under Stalin, a
> euphemism for the forced collectivization, murder of political opponents
> and consolidation of a massive police apparatus in the 1930s. Without
> this, he said, Moscow would have risked "catastrophic consequences for
> our statehood" in World War II.
>
> Putin's goal is to justify his course today as he seeks to stabilize
> Russian capitalism, win working-class subservience and sacrifice in the
> name of greater Russia, and extend its grip over the "near abroad."
>
>
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