Angie Riedel

Pretend, if you would for a short moment, that I have in my hands a magic camera which will allow us to take a snapshot of this moment in time, and freeze everything in the whole wide world in place. We'll then be able to step into the photograph and with everything frozen around us, we can explore and investigate, up close and personal, anything and everything we like.

The aim and purpose of doing this would be to figure out once and for all who's who and what's what and what goes on where and how, so that we will finally know why things are the way they are in this world. Because things are all messed up. Why are our stated values lived in direct opposites? Why do we claim to be moral people when the world around us, in many and varied ways, has devolved into phalanges of pornography?

The pornography of death and violence saturates us. The trauma, mass violence and destruction of war, tearing families apart, mocking justice, decency and life itself. The obscenity of this planet slowly choking to death from the toxification of military, industrial and chemical pollutants, pouring out nonstop belching streams in the millions upon millions of tons, poisoning our food by intent, our air and our water by unavoidable result, and penetrating every human body, including the unborn.

The pornography of influence, of power's demands, of profit's insistence that it is this world's highest good and single most important factor of life on earth and as such private profit must take precedence over all else and must always come first against all other interests, is an unstated truth. It is the obscene reality of our world. This degradation of life's beauty and meaning is an insulting and grotesque lie and yet it wins out over the same lingering unfulfilled needs and wants of the people no matter how many times these needs and desires have been expressed and demanded.

The unprofitable needs and wants of human life conflict with the pornographic greed and lust of influential desire. Battles must be constantly fought for rights and territory and ultimate dominance, and it is almost always the unprofitable human needs that lose out. The pornography soaked minds of the people have no problem with this due to misguided concepts of patriotism, compromised politicized religiosity, and the unwavering belief that might makes right, that the stronger deserve to win and the weaker deserve nothing. For the strong "right" is automatic. "We are number one" is the answer no matter what the question is. Hearts may strongly desire to be in the right place yet our physical bodies are by choice, by habit or by force pushed and directed into all the wrong places. To all who truly want to find their way in this world it becomes obvious that the externally generated road map of life we are given, is incorrect.

The worst sorts of people rule the world and influence our minds. Redefining all that is pornographic, ugly and destructive they present them back to us as the greatest and noblest things to embrace and take home to our children. We are slowly but certainly mentally morphing into something that others desire us to be, in a world others are designing with an undeniably heavy, central pornography motif. It is hardly surprising that those who would undertake such grand projects would not really be doing so out of the desire to do good for others. They will claim so when asked, but it's easy enough to lie about that. It's a necessary lie because the world does not want to be morphed into someone else's vision, it wants to be what it naturally is.

It would be fascinating to find out what it naturally could be but that is something we can only speculate about. Humanity will never be left alone to evolve on its own. The very concept of letting humanity be, of letting it evolve in freedom, unfettered, uncommanded, undriven, uninterfered with goes against every principle of so called civilization.

Indigenous peoples the world over have long been under siege from civilization. Natural humanity represents everything civilized people find intolerable and untenable. Somehow natural people living natural lives, not bothering anyone or holding up civilization from doing its civilized thing, are a threat to civilization. Natural people are savages we are told. Ungodly people with no morality, no shame running around with their genitalia and breasts exposed. They are vicious warriors and cannibals, worshippers of trees and earthly spirits, unable to read or write. They are less than human, an affront to our decency and nobility. Either through some notion of a mission of higher good or just out of hatred and ignorance, indigenous peoples everywhere have been slaughtered and mutilated, baptized and subjugated, enslaved, robbed and taught to serve their civilized masters.

There are those who would adamantly argue that this is all good. That it is right and noble, even a duty. The proselytizing Christians have the self elected mission of spreading their belief system to all corners of the world, and then to come around and do it all again. They will not be dissuaded from their task, believing that they are bringing the most valuable thing in the world to the wretched and forgotten, to the savage and the ignorant. They see themselves as workers for a higher good, a nobler cause, a last chance for salvation and acceptance into heaven by God.

Right behind them come their natural partners who also have a mission to spread their own belief system across the world. The state, specifically the state's military forces who exist for only one reason and purpose, to kill people. They are true believers and protectors of their faith who are never dissuaded or discouraged from their goal no matter the cost to others. We are fortunate that at least for the time being our military prefers to kill people somewhere else than here, though as they run out of easy foreign victims it is inevitable they will turn their gun barrels on us. After all, they need people to shoot or they'll be out of business, and that is simply unthinkable.

Speaking of business, the third mutant entity in this capitalist trinity, is business. Big business. Privately owned corporate enterprises who preach the gospel of the eternal growth of capitalism. Larger private corporate enterprises benefit profoundly from the religious/military extermination of indigenous peoples across the globe. It's nothing personal, it's just business. That justifies everything.

To the holy and faithful corporateers, indigenous peoples have no money, they buy or use no products, they are neither consumers nor workers. They have no saving graces in the eyes of business magnates and yet they rudely exist in defiance of holy capitalist growth doctrine. All of the earth's abundant natural resources that indigenous peoples live in, on and around are going to sinful waste when they should be put to good use, the best use of course being commodification and processing for resale in the endless teaming ocean of products and sellable materials of all kinds.

This is not trade in any sense of the word, it is the simple permanent crushing of bothersome competition in order to freely plunder the prosperity of others. Actual trade requires recognizing other's ownership rights of land and resources and the striking of deals and agreements of mutual benefit. Capitalism, once firmly established as Earth's prevailing religion, our trenchant right and noblest purpose, our savior and the answer to all life's questions, has no time to engage in trade. Genocide is quicker and much more profitable. Religious folk, armies and corporations have long gone out to remote and private paradises claiming only the highest purposes and have either subjugated or flat exterminated countless native populations, just as they continue to do today, minus the old fashioned version of on site religious folk. These have been incorporated into the military forces directly, lending a much needed air of righteousness and the bonus of guaranteed blessed approval from heaven itself. Today it is military force and corporate lawyers that arrive on foreign shores not bearing gifts but bringing death, misery, violence, exotic experimental weapons and depleted uranium munitions, lawless military contractors, terror, senseless destruction, mass murder and ready to sign business contracts generously allowing the vanquished to retain up to 5% of the profits made by selling 100% of their natural resources to corporations. These unbeatable teams cleanse the land of all but those who make up the necessary workers and facilitators of resource extraction and to direct the newest source of profitability into the Capitalist wealth stream.

Capitalism is much like a monster that must always keep eating or it will die. The apologist myth is that should capitalism ever be slowed, restricted or required to respect life, it would surely die. Hence wide berth is given all capitalist enterprise, rather all approved enterprise, and little to nothing is said or suffered to be mentioned about the continuous genocides that nourish the beast. Human blood and mass sacrifice is the food of this monster and its appetite is never appeased. It only grows more hungry, more voracious, no matter how much it eats. And when it looses its bowels upon the earth, out pours death and poison, babies bones and partially digested flesh, pollution and waste, depravity and degradation of the pristine, undermining of human rights, and denial of the sanctity of life. Capitalism exists for itself, in spite of life, in spite of the world. It never connects the fact of its own existence being parasitically dependent on its prey and consumer base. So it kills both and consumes all with gusto and lusts for its next meal. Capitalism is a glutton that can never be satisfied and it will consume this world to death.

The exercise of capitalism is a great planetary blood sacrifice in a literal sense. All human life and much non human life is routinely, knowingly, and very specifically targeted for slow and steady, or fast and efficient, ever increasing acts of involuntary extinction. Is the blood of innocents being offered up to some unknown god in the grandest blood sacrifice that any god could be offered in true devotion by its faithful worshippers?

What god is it that capitalism worships? It isn't the God of Abraham and Isaac. It is not the God of life and love and Thou Shalt Not Kill, or steal, or covet thy neighbor's wife, or life. It's not the Do Unto Others God. It's not that God at all. It's some other god. A god who ostensibly created this world in order to have it murdered back for him in his honor? That does not make sense.

The question then is who benefits from this? Who is undeniably benefiting the most from the pursuit of capitalism? Who benefits beyond mundane levels, beyond the norm, beyond the minimal benefit of the vast numbers of people who still after centuries of capitalism, after working their entire lives away have nothing much to show for it but failing health, mounting debts and unwanted excess body fat? Who becomes more free because capitalism rules the world? Who is better educated? Healthier? More empowered? Who is truly stronger as a result of it? Who is getting rich?

The answer is, roughly, five percent of the world's population. Five percent, and within that even more so, the top one percent who alone reap the sweeping majority of all of the wealth capitalism creates. It is interesting too that this small percentage of people don't have to work for their wealth. They get it simply by taking it out of the wealth that other people labor to create. The excess production of capitalism, that which is not needed after those who do the work get what they need to stay alive and keep working, the entirety of that excess is the wealth that is taken and given to the wealthiest people in the world. That is the portion of the worlds' wealth that is unwaveringly reserved for the few, the very few, who have entrenched themselves into government, into military power, into religious icons, into every avenue of influence and power, into fiction and myth, into the minds of people everywhere who are trained to believe that they too can be amongst the richest of the rich and live the lifestyles of the richest people in the world, if only they keep on working hard. It doesn't strike a great many people that this is preposterous to the point of idiocy, but reality is no deterrent when fantasy is so compelling.

Indeed there is something profoundly exciting at the idea of being able to have anything one desires at any time one desires it and to have it in the form of the finest there is to offer. Money becomes personal power, personal achievement, the only measure of success in life. Money is a great replacement for good looks and for manners too. With money you don't need an education. With money you can be a depraved child molesting murderer and it's fine. Money is one heck of a handy tool and it's the road to human happiness and fulfillment.

Everyone needs money to survive, everyone wants money to accumulate well beyond survival levels. They want to express their personal success for everyone else to see. They know with money they will be treated better, be respected, be given more, have more opportunity, a greater voice, and will possess the ability to make their own rules and impose those rules on others even though those others hate their rules. Money provides their families with the finer things in life, the better education, the better clothing and entertainment and a much greater quality of life and existence on this earth than those without money can even daydream about. The pursuit of personal wealth is the number one activity on planet earth and all else must by necessity fall by the wayside. Nothing must stand in the way of capitalism and profits. There must always be more to be had, more to shoot for, more to compete over. We can never run out of more. For if we do it will all come to a crashing halt and there would be no more products. No more food. No more hospitals. No more opportunity. No more schools or higher education. No more travel or entertainment or hope for the future. If we ran out of more then only those who had all the money in the world to themselves at the moment the supply ran out would survive. Five percent of the world's population would survive.

They would survive and survive comfortably and they would no doubt continue practicing their capitalist religion. They would continue their worship of money. They would continue seeking ways to exploit whatever was left to exploit and since they'd have little else to do, far fewer left to exploit and plunder they would be unable to curb their bottomless appetites for more and would inevitably turn to exploiting, consuming and conquering each other.

This has been the natural, accepted, expected, condoned and protected course of global capitalism. In the end there can be only one "winner" left standing. Winner take all. All of the world's life. All of the world's people and cultures and children and grandparents. All of the artists and singers and musicians, the writers, teachers and story tellers. The actors and librarians and bakers, the care givers and healers, the chefs and engineers, scientists and athletes, farmers and historians, the accountants and lovers and parents and friends. The life in the finally dead oceans, the life forms dependent on those life forms starved to death in the unavoidable domino effect of species after species dying out for lack of food and environments conducive to life. But there will be one man left standing with all of the gold, and all of the paperwork on digital disc that mathematically proves he owns every inch of soil and every drop of water, every plant and organism, every right and every thought and action in the whole wide world. He is the consummate winner. The king of the world. Who unfortunately has nothing to do and no one to brag about himself to.

And therein lies the truth of capitalism. It is all for naught. It achieves the opposite of what it says on the box. It is not the great provider of opportunity and prosperity, it is the grand and final destroyer of these things. It is an every man for himself belief system, a financial warrior's way of doing pussy battle, a life and death competition for the never ending quest of getting more and more and more for no reason. The monopolies that cut off and murder the competition, that favor the strong and steal from the weak, that force the workers to work ever harder and ever longer for ever less and then die, are the cumulative result of the strong joining forces against the weak, true to form, to take their prosperity and land and lives. They would say this is all an absolute necessity to keep capitalism alive and growing. To the capitalists, capitalism must survive. Everyone else can die but capitalism must go on. It must continue and grow forever because if it doesn't, they themselves will finally die. They will lose it all.

Wouldn't you agree that when any one contrived belief becomes supreme, when ideology, an idea, a political vision is held, defended and protected above the sanctity of life itself, and when such a concept fails to respect others, fails to follow the basic rules of life and morality and common sense, that it proves itself invalid? When someone believes that they alone are entitled to life and prosperity and may take it by killing others, by cheating others, by lying to others, by brutalizing others and that it is all good because it benefits them, in other words when greed is good, don't we already know it isn't good? Aren't these the beliefs of an enemy? Have we yet recognized that everyone, including us, is on the menu of this monster that must consume to survive?

Is there something about the idea of being the last one left standing on a smoking, toxic earth, with all of the gold and all of the ownership that is attractive to us? Do we have a desire to annihilate our world? Is it just a projected death wish that feels better carried out on others? Are we subconsciously enamored with the idea of blood sacrifice? Do we believe like the primitive peoples did that we must offer up babies and young virgins and entire races to a god who delights in the scent of their burning flesh on his altars?

More than likely the vast majority of people don't think about it. They just want and need to get money for themselves in order to survive because life itself has been commodified. Birth costs money and death costs money. Healing medicines cost money. Food costs money. Water costs money and if there was a way to prevent people from getting air to breathe unless they paid for it, that would cost money too. It costs money to stay alive, and it requires someone's death or exploitation to get money. Every dollar in our pockets is covered in blood, the blood of indigenous people from all over the world, throughout time and history. The paper itself is woven from the flesh and bones of children and old people, poor people and working people, good people, innocent people, ordinary people of all kinds, hundreds of millions of people who are all dead. Every dollar is the symbol of a dead body, somewhere, sometime. Dollars are not backed by gold but by human sacrifice. The accumulation of dollars, unneeded dollars, excessive personal wealth is the collective agreement and acceptance of the doctrine of human sacrifice for personal fun and profit far beyond levels of wealth that could ever be needed, used, reasonable or necessary. The richest people in the world are the planet's sacrificial priests, who themselves will never be forced to lay down on their altars for their god. They are facilitators of human death and suffering, the waiters and waitresses to their death loving god, who rewards them with tickets that represent their kills.

It is not our choice by and large to live in a system based on human sacrifice and the sacrifice and death of all life forms. Yet we are dependent on the system of sacrifice to sustain our own lives. It is forced on us and all other choices are precluded and illegal. We are in a cage that only feeds us when someone else dies. It is little wonder that we can watch horror and death in films we call entertainment and have no interest in the horrors and deaths being carried out around us to keep our system empowered and forever growing. Opportunities come to us when children are slaughtered on the altar of private wealth, and we call this democracy and freedom. We call it the best system in the world, even though we know it isn't. Yet it is sacrilege to suggest otherwise.

Those who rule our world are not the pictures they have painted of themselves for us like Egypt's pharaohs commissioned grand statues to make the people see them as gods. The images portrayed to the people are of heroes and kindly decent people who are leaders possessing wisdom and truth and knowledge. That they always call for war is not noticed. That they themselves always live in the lap of luxury is excused and even expected. Why they call for war, why they are always very wealthy, we never ask ourselves.

The only way to survive in this modern world is to not care about others. It is to not care who is dying from our bullets and bombs. It is to not care who is homeless in our streets and which cops are beating the poor to death for fun, out of hate, out of the misguided notion that poverty is the sign of the enemy. Those who have nothing are nothing. We don't have to care about them. Those who are different offend us, we don't have to care about them. Those of a different color, a different race, a different belief system, a different church, they are unwanted competition, they threaten our system of accumulation through human sacrifice, we don't have to care about them. War is good for the economy. Economic crashes are good for the economy because those with money can swallow up what everyone else is forced to lose. True patriots support this so much they will sacrifice themselves in order to perpetuate the system and enrich their leaders who always profit very nicely from every war. They profit more with each annihilation of any sector of society that competes with them, any message that undermines their own, any trace of other perspectives or viewpoints. All such alternative views and values are called evil and will not be tolerated. All such are traitorous and undemocratic, they are communist and socialist and evil. We must all support the system of human sacrifice to enrich the few because it is good and noble and right and the church itself will agree and tell you that God is on our side.

None of this could happen, none of it would go on if indeed we the people were truly moral. If we honestly knew right from wrong and if right and wrong really mattered to us. If we honestly believed in the sanctity of life, if we truly felt that life was precious and that life mattered more than profits for the rich, we would not participate in this system. We would not admire and envy those who symbolize what success looks like in our system of human sacrifice for personal wealth. We would not condone the lying and thieving of the rich and powerful and protected, we would not excuse their law breaking and wrong doing, we would not reward them with legal loopholes and special laws that excuse them from all responsibility for the pollution, death, inequality, genocide and harm they do. We would not idolize them, be jealous of them, want to be them, if indeed we were truly moral people.

Are we too cowardly to experience hunger en masse for a while if it means ridding ourselves of this death cult that rules our world and our lives? Is it more important that others should die so that we may have cell phones, buy green cars and pay our rent? Is it just that the messages of human sacrifice for private wealth so thoroughly saturate our TV sets and magazines and school curriculums and boy scout clubs and secret societies that we can't find each other any more to talk about it and do something to stop it? Do we care? Do we believe we are powerless? Do we think it would be wrong to stand against it without their permission? They would never give permission, they would only come back at us with deadly force. Do we think that is reasonable?

At some point some generation of brave and moral people will not be impressed with the system of human sacrifice for fun and profit we have been forced to, led to, addicted to and become dependent on, then accepted as normal, then embraced as good, and now extol as supreme. They will simply stop. They will not participate. They will silently stand still until the last machine comes to a grinding halt. Until the last gun stops firing and the last bombs stop dropping. And when the bankers run screaming from their boardrooms in panic, when the government officials are besieged with angry phone calls from the rich, when the corporations aren't selling any more poisoned sugar water and chemicalized pseudo food products, they will be down on their knees to those moral people. Down where they belong. Because it is true that they are wholly dependent on the rest of us to play out their games and carry out their human sacrifices in the name of personal wealth accumulation. What little good they've done society is only that which is necessary to perpetuate the myth that capitalism is good. It is good for them, it is great for them, but it is not good for anyone else.

Unless and until that day comes when truly moral people cannot be swayed from what they know is right, who will not sell their souls for wealth and pleasures and comforts and prestige, the high priests of some unknown god who loves the smell of burning flesh and the sounds of human suffering, those priests will continue to tighten their control over all our lives, until they can literally shut off everything at the flick of a switch and watch the whole world starve to death. The greatest human sacrifice of all time, the ultimate gift of love and worship to their god of death and destruction. And if you doubt they would ever go that far ask yourself why not, if they've come this far already.

May I ask, who or what is your God? What are your morals? What matters most to you in life? What kind of world do you want to live in? These are questions we should ask ourselves. We already know the answers we've been given by external entities, our leaders in politics, religion, education, science and business. Are their answers the right answers for the rest of us? Do they know or seem concerned about what the right answers are for the rest of us?

Who else do you think will be alone with your conscience in the solitude of your dark and lonely nights? Who else will be there to bear responsibility for your life and your own actions?

What mortal men would guide us more faithfully than we could guide ourselves? Which of them should we trust with our lives without knowing who they are? Which men among us have such superior wisdom that they should dictate to us what is right and what is wrong but more importantly, which men would care more than we do about the right and wrong we do?

We have long taken our answers from the powerful men of this world who have nothing in common with us but eternally preach the gospel of human sacrifice for personal profit and power. These ordinary mortal men say they are our masters, our superiors and betters to whom we must forever be devoted, obligated to, obedient and dutiful to; and to win their approval we must kill others to bring more profit to the world, for them.

It's a fair question to ask. What God are you worshipping, really? Are you sure? Whose covenants are you upholding and living and standing for no matter the cost? Don't tell me your answer, tell yourself. I only asked because I was afraid that if I didn't, neither would you.

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By Angie Riedel 'Human Sacrifice for Fun and Profit' http://thinkorbeeaten.blogspot.com/2009/02/human-sacrifice-for-fun-and-profit.html