Part 1 - Goodbye Lenin
I read a fascinating story about the deception being narrated to us - ‘The deception behind America’s support for Ukraine Congress is looting from its own army’, by Malcolm Kyeyune, and in the story he brings up another story, a movie - ‘Goodbye Lenin’, about a similar deception.
“In the German movie ‘Goodbye Lenin’, the mother of an East German family falls into a coma right before the collapse of the Berlin wall. When she eventually wakes up, communism has already collapsed, and East Germany no longer exists. Her children, having been told that her mother’s heart probably can’t handle the shock of that revelation, then set out to create an illusory world around their mother …
Today, America increasingly resembles a sort of capitalist funhouse mirror version of this. Its political class is more of a grey-haired gerontocracy than that of the late Soviet Union, and they very much were born in a time when US wealth was limitless and US military power was without equal. Yet in order to protect that belief that nothing has changed, a much more systemic deception is being maintained …
In ‘Goodbye Lenin’, maintaining the illusion that the DDR still exists becomes impossible in the end, and the ailing mother goes to her grave having realised that the state she lived her life in collapsed years ago.”
Unfortunately, the North Atlanteans today are not ‘a grey-haired gerontocracy’, but are more like King Canute, trying to maintain an illusion of their invincibility. And we are not the quaint, naïve children of that woman in a coma - because instead of having our old mother die because the illusion has ended, rather, today’s situation finds us dealing with an insane, enraged – and nuclear-armed - monster, that cannot find a way to blackmail or bribe or threaten its way to immortality.
For death awaits all of us mortals, even the North Atlanteans.
So, how do we deal with a nuclear-armed monster that refuses to see reality, without having the monster unleash a holocaust on our world?
Here we seem to be faced with the same fatal decision as Victor Frankenstein once faced - how do we deal with our monsters?
And so, it would behoove us to go back and re-read that brilliant insight into human nature, written by Mary Shelley – ‘Frankenstein’.
Note: Please don’t read the Hollywood perversions or the cartoonish stereo-types, but read the actual, unedited short story written by our heroine, Mary Shelley.