Forgiveness is the Shortcut

and heaven on earth is the goal

This is a short and snappy, unscripted Sunday rant. It looks at the following:

• Forgiveness is the shortcut but not the answer. The solution has already been set and accomplished by God, only awaiting our recognition.

• Time is under our control and we can decide how many generations it will take to wake up—10, 20, 30 or now!

• A Course in Miracles is a series of exercises in forgiveness, starting with people you love, moving to people you like, then are neutral about, then who irritate or enrage you. These are all part of the same continuum of ‘other.’

• You and you alone have the power to shortcut the long cycles of blame and retaliation, saving thousands of years. The ability to change it all is by changing your mind.

• Forgiveness is NOT the superior belief the other person is undeserving and has done the horrible thing but because you’re the bigger person, you’ll forgive them.

• Forgiveness is giving forward the benefit of the doubt you’d want extended to you, putting yourself in the other person’s circumstances and trying to understand from their point of view.

• The crux of forgiveness is two realizations: 1) the person is doing the best they can and 2) if I were in their shoes, I couldn’t do better.

• Forgiveness can be helping someone do better by changing their circumstances or perspective, or taking away their power to do harm.

I’m in the process of the yearlong Course workbook, which I started on my middle daughter’s birthday. My current reading is on the second coming, which says:

The second coming of Christ, which is as sure as God, is merely the correction of mistakes and the return of sanity. It is a part of the condition that restores the never lost and re-establishes what is forever true. It is the invitation to God’s word to take illusion’s place; the willingness to let forgiveness rest upon all things without condition and without reserve.

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A year ago I decided to do this spiritual exercise of forgiveness with the face of evil himself—Hitler. I put out an episode called Forgiving Hitler, which I’ll link at the end. While this was a spiritual experiment, there were things about WWII that didn’t make sense to me. We know that at the end of WWI, Germany was subjected to onerous reparations, a hunger blockade and hyperinflation. Hundreds of thousands died and others were defrauded of everything just to stay alive. What changed? How did they get out of that and become an economic powerhouse so quickly?

One question led to another and I did more and more research, coming to this astounding realization: Hitler never gave a written order for the extermination of European Jews or showed that he was aware of any such program. David Irving offered $1000 cash to anyone who could show a written order. No takers. And in the lawsuit, the defense had $13M to find one direct order or an indirect one where his officers said, “This is what Hitler wants us to do.” They failed.

On the other hand, before the war, Hitler helped Germany’s Jews emigrate to Israel and take their wealth with them. The Jews were 1% of the German population but owned a third of German wealth, most appropriated during the starvation years, causing great resentment by the other 99%. Hitler arranged for them to buy equipment and resources from Germany to be shipped and sold to Israel, with payment going into bank accounts there.

And there are three pieces of evidence on the other side. First, a Reich officer writing that Hitler wanted to put the Jewish question on the back burner until after the war. Second, Hitler’s frequent mention of resettlement in the East for the Jews. And third, his repeated reference to Madagascar as a place for the Jews after the war.

So my spiritual exercise, I feel, came back with a definitive answer. You could take the very face of evil itself and, once you examine it, find out that things are not as you’d assumed. I don’t know what the truth is, but I know I’ve been lied to. And from that, I need to re-examine everything I think about villains and heroes.

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At the same time, I started wondering about fascism. I’d been using what I thought was Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the collusion of business and government. But I couldn’t imagine anyone voting for that. Then Margaret Anna Alice linked to an article called What is Fascism?

What is fascism?

I commented and my long-tailed friend Rat replied:

The original founding document, so-called Fascist Manifesto (Manifesto dei Fasci italiani di combattimento, June 6, 1919) reads as a boilerplate leftist program today: universal suffrage, minimum wage, eight-hour workday, reduction of the retirement age, progressive taxation… well, confiscation of religious property stands out a bit. English (wikipedia): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto

From Wikipedia: Politically, the Manifesto calls for:

• Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all ages 25 and up;

• Proportional representation on a regional basis;

• Voting for women;

• Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector;

• The abolition of the Italian Senate (at the time, the Senate, as the upper house of parliament, was by process elected by the wealthier citizens, but were in reality direct appointments by the king. It has been described as a sort of extended council of the crown);

• The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.

In labor and social policy, the Manifesto calls for:

• The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers;

• A minimum wage;

• The participation of workers' representatives in the functions of industry commissions;

• To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants;

• Reorganization of the railways and the public transport sector;

• Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance;

• Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.

In military affairs, the Manifesto advocates:

• Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities;

• Armaments factories are to be nationalized;

• A peaceful but competitive foreign policy.

In finance, the Manifesto advocates:

• A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive nature, which takes the form of true partial expropriation of all wealth;

• The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor;

• Revision of all contracts for military provisions;

• The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.

I would vote for this program. Imagine taking 85% of profits from military contractors! Rat followed by saying:

The Manifesto is the sane side of early fascism.

For the insane side, you have to look into Gabriele d’Annunzio w/ friends and Impresa di Fiume. There you’ll find a fine mix of violence, mysticism, drugs, orgies and historically first recorded use of aircraft to steal pigs. (Guido Keller was the perpetrator in that one; I remember reading an absolutely hilarious article on the incident but somehow can’t find it anymore. The one linked is a different article.)

strangehistory.net/2014/04/17/fiume-and…

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To bring it back to the mundane, one of my commenters has written that he believes the most dangerous people are those who think people are inherently good. He says we’re all X number of missed meals away from murdering our neighbors and he’d rather be around people who are honest about that.

I’m 99% sure that I’d figure out a way to off myself before killing my neighbors. What am I going to do then, eat them? None of them even have the right level of marbling—we’re all tough old birds in my hood. And who would want to live in a world like that?

I’m certain also that those who incinerated Lahaina were under no illusion that people are inherently good. I think the most dangerous people are those who believe in their own superiority.

I suspect the oligarchs believe themselves to be fully evil. They’ve sold their souls to the devil and are now beyond redemption so they might as well keep going. Calling them evil perpetuates that. But what if you could change it through forgiveness?

Not forgiveness from a position of moral superiority but imagining what could make you do the same. What’s it like to be a child of a power-hungry oligarch? Is that a life you’d wish on your worst enemy?

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I’m just one cell in the brain and you’re one synapse away. We’re all seven degrees of synapse away from each other. This all could change in a seven-synapse snap!

For the full journey from a year ago, here is Forgiving Hitler:

I examine the spiritual, psychological and geopolitical reasons to forgive Hitler, not by absolving his guilt but by questioning the WWII official narrative. As the personification of evil, is Hitler a projection of a systemic brutality that was only spurred by his defeat? I question the cause of the anger invoked and how it relates to 'triggers' of 9-11 or the CoVax. I end by looking at the hope and possibility for social change when we give all people the same integrity we give to ourselves.

and this is The Trials and Tribulations of David Irving:

David Irving wrote Hitler's War and 30 other volumes that document the history of WWII. Then Deborah Lipstadt attacked him in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. This is the story of his ruinous libel suit against her and Penguin Books and his subsequent imprisonment in Austria, all for taking history at its word.