The Good, the Bad and

The Conundrum of Activism

The Trigger: This article was triggered by an interview of Francis A. Boyle, Human Rights Activist and Professor of International Law on CHD TV. What we learn in this interview is that the U.N. banned the use of biological weapons in an International Convention adopted in 1971.The United States signed on in 1972 with both bodies of Congress voting for it. In 1989 the U.S. added to the International Law its own prohibition with the U.S. Code 175-an addition to the Terrorism Act! Code 175 says “whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains or possesses any biological agent toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon shall be fined or imprisoned for life or any term of years”

So, it is a criminal offense to be developing these weapons with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment (the lawyers and politicians who drew up the act didn’t like capital punishment lol) And yet since at least the 80’s under Ronald Reagan American scientists have been doing exactly that and keeping it undercover! We can understand their justifications: ”The Russians and the Chinese are doing it so we musn’t get behind”. Excuses, excuses! This is VERY dangerous stuff. And at this point ,I am convinced that Covid-19 Sars 2 is a product of that research! And it could get worse!

The thought immediately came to mind:  ”How could people be so evil, so reckless, so self-serving? I guess I am still naïve! This kind of evil has been going on for a long, long time. The Romans crucifying people and throwing them to the lions. The medieval tortures like the Iron Maiden. The Jews led into the gas chambers. The list goes on and on!

I still remember Sheikh Nazim in Peckham , London during one Ramadan in the 80’s saying “We are now under the hegemony of shaytan” and thinking “I think he’s going too far”! And hegemony was a word that should have been outside of his TurkEnglish vocabulaty lol. But, no, he was absolutely right. And those wooly-minded thinkers like Steven Pinker (“The Better Angels of our Nature”) and their data-analysis approach are sorely out of touch. No news there lol!

So…can it really be that bad?! And the simple answer is “Yes!”. Besides the usual human rights abuses like those of the Uighurs in China, the Chinese harvesting organs from Falum Dung members(that’s a new one but not dissimilar to the Nazis doing “scientific” experiments on Jews and not so long ago the Japanese torturing Chinese and Korean opposition forces, we now have a new slew of evil habits.

Let us name a few. So we have researchers in the U.S. and then in China doing “gain of function” research and calling it vaccine research which it clearly wasn’t. We have American pharma companies, exempt from all legal liabilities, having public health authorities mandating their ”safe and effective” vaccines (which were neither) to the entire population. We have large institutions- private and public- including universities (no surprise there .New and critical thinking left those premises a long time ago.)We have prestigious medical journals blocking the publication of useful research into repurposed medications for treatment and instead publishing misleading research some of which was so bad they had to retract the articles themselves. We have decades of vaccine mandates for children without any placebo-controlled studies and no long-term research on their overall effects on children. The list goes on and on! Man’s creativity in the field of mischief is truly astounding! No lack of new ideas there.

Once our inner vision begins to see all this, we may well feel overwhelmed and hopeless. How could this be and what can we do about it?” we may well ask. In Islam we were recommended to go to the hills with our sheep when the Last Days were approaching! Are we there yet?! We may well be but before we all become forest dwellers and hermits ( but btw the forests are no longer safe either nor the water in remote areas. In the forests we now have a plethora of ticks and Lyme disease and some of the most remote lakes are so contaminated with heavy metals that there are no fish left!) So there is no real refuge left!

There may however be a simpler answer. We need to seriously remember that, in any case, we are only here for a temporary period. As I like to remind myself and others from time to time, “the fatality rate of Earthly existence is 100%!” Sorry for the bad news, but none of us is going to survive anyway! So perhaps we should be thinking of the after-life and how best to be right with our Creator. Nothing else will do and nothing else can be so beneficial. All the religions teach that more or less! As say the A.A. people: ” Let go and let God”. He (the Light of the Heavens and the Earth) is the only trustworthy protector. All the others are destined to fail.

But what I really wanted to address in this article ,since good and evil have been contemplated from the beginning of time, is the question of activism. This question emerges out of the observation of endemic evil and what do we do about. Many times in history social activism and political theories have tried to address and redress the problem. Perhaps the most obvious in recent history was and still is Marxism. According to that philosophy, the problem is the exploitation of the working class and the solution is “The dictatorship of the proletariat”. We see where that got us when we look at Russia and China and North Korea to name but a few examples.

But nowadays we have newer and more limited actors in the field of activism-like “Doctors without Borders” trying to help people in war zones and “Amnesty International” trying to protect political prisoners, and Greenpeace and other environmental groups trying to protect the planet. One thing that surprized me in my practice as a psychiatrist was that the clients I saw who were in intimate relationships with these N.G.O. types were some of the people who were most disappointed by their relationships. It made no sense! Good people, no? Amnesty International, Médecins sans Frontières-how could these be bad people! As I contemplated this conundrum, I realized what was going on. These N.G.O. types were ideologues-people of principle! Often their hearts were dead. In fact they were so insensitive that it took really gross abuses in their environment to be able to fell anything! It sort of made sense!

Btw, I have my own personal history with activism! It started with student newspapers in high school and university, continued with protests against Canadian complicity in the Vietnam war and ended with Marxist medical services in a Community Clinic. It is a long story that I will only be able to tell it adequately when I eventually write my autobiography. Inshallah. But let me highlight a few episodes that eventually led to my disillusionment with this approach.

While I was at the community Clinic in East End Montreal I participated in a legitimate strike at a company called Carter White Lead. Many of the  workers there   were actually suffering from documented lead poisoning. We had a toxicologist on board who confirmed the diagnosis. In my mind I still held the slogan of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”lol. That was our salvation!.Boy can we be delusional at times! As an example it took Sartre, admittedly a brilliant man, more than a decade after being made aware of it  to denounce what was going on in Russia at the time of Stalin . In the meantime he had denounced Camus who was his informant in this matter as “intellectually not up to the task of analyzing the subtleties of the Russian Revolution ”(paraphrasing here).I still know very intelligent scholars who are unwilling to denounce Stalin. Their names will remain anonymous lol

 

When I saw this “proletariat” at Carter White Lead, my gut reaction was: ”These people in charge of our government?! No, thanks!” I had my first breakthrough!

Then I went to China with a group of community workers. That was 1973 and the Cultural Revolution was still going on but well-hidden from our view. We went to a school and when one of my companions, a College teacher at the time, realized that the principal of the school was earning much more than the workers and he confronted the workers about this inequality (which went against all Marxist principle) they said it was alright. He literally had a melt-down and a few hours later had to be rushed to the hospital with acute pneumonia! If you ever needed a clear example of a psycho-somatic reaction, this was a spectacular one. This fellow’s entire world had fallen apart Many people lost their faith in Marxism after that trip! Some melted into the “soft left” like the N.D. P. in Canada . Others, like myself, left activism and politics for good!

The third event that closed the chapter on Marxism for me was a large meeting of leftists, unionists and hard-core Marxist Leninists under the umbrella of a Marxist Group called “En Lutte” . At the head table were all the major leaders of the left wing. And when I saw them, it was obvious. ”No way, José” This group would be far worse than the current government under Robert Bourassa at the time. That was the last straw .Bye-bye Marx.

Another paradoxical thing I realized during these events, and I believe it is still true nowadays, is that the left-wing leaders treated their intimate partners much worse than their conservative homologues! Doesn’t make sense, right?! They are humanists and progressives and yet in their relationships they are egotistical, unfaithful and hedonistic.

You can see the same phenomena in American politics! Compare how the Bush’s and Reagan were with their wives to the string of philandering Kennedy’s all the way down to the present iteration. Yes there were exceptions like Carter and Obama on the Democrat side and Trump for the Republicans. But “the exception confirms the rule” as they say. If you are a woman, I would stay away from progressives lol

There is so much more I could say but the two major points I really wanted to raise in this article were the state of the world -where evil reigns forcing us to adapt to it and the particular conundrum posed by the latest iteration of a Kennedy, in the person of RFKjr,

The latter has presented a particular dilemma for Truth-seekers like myself. On the one hand, I agree with almost everything he says. It is all well-documented and referenced and he is very careful to get the facts right. I agree with almost everything he proposes to do in getting rid of the “captured” health agencies and government institutions. Perhaps the only thing I disagree with is trying to run for the Democratic party. I am convinced they will run him out of the primary as they did with Bernie Sanders in a previous election . But RFKjr. is a very strategic person and may well be using the Democratic platform to gain visibility and then planning to run for a third or fourth party once the Democrats succeed in running him out of town as they are almost sure to do.

None of this is problematic for me! But what is seriously problematic is his “ghoulish” presence! There is something deeply wrong with this man and it has nothing whatsoever to do with his voice. I have tried to come to some convincing conclusion about what that is but for now it evades me. Could it be what he calls “the lust demons” which have been haunting his family including his father and two of his uncles going all the way back to his grandfather?! Or could it be unresolved substance use which he has apparently conquered (Btw I saw a similar thing in the famous Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and then learnt that he uses Ayahuasca as a means of spiritual upliftment. Ok. Case closed there!)

But there may be another explanation-at least a partial one- which applies to many, many people-Activism!? You see the real problem of activism is that it focuses on the negative. Even though it is attempting to resolve the problems, it can easily become obsessed with them. I saw that in medicine and psychiatry as well. My first wife, a true California Spiritual seeker nlol, confronted me with that: ” That’s the problem with you psychiatrists” she said in a moment of fury. You are in love with neurosis” She had a point.

My own Dad, who was by no means an intellectual, had the same issue. Although he had some dyslexia, I believe, he was so interested in history and politics that he worked his way through the entire set of volumes by Will and Ariel Durant called “The History of Civilization”! His conclusion: “Man is worse than animals ”. That was his final statement about Reality! And despite the fact that his argument is well-taken, it ultimately led him in the wrong direction. My own direction is the opposite! I go, rather, by the statement of Sheikh Hashimi of Damascus. ”Fi kooli shay khairan”(in everything there is good)What a revelation?! God created us, He knows more than anyone else our foibles and our defects. He created us that way. And he will lead us to the right path, if we trust in Him and follow His guidance. If, on the other hand, we follow the god of our own minds we are doomed to failure and disappointment. I am still working on it. And I hope you will be inspired to do likewise. Salaams, Sufi Ibrahim