Berlin: Judgement Day

The Wall Street Journal had an opinion piece on the use of a truck in a terrorist attack in Berlin:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-terrorist-truck-in-berlin-1482277893

 ... Europe continues to reap the bitter fruit of America’s unwillingness to lead a full-blown war against Islamic State in its Syrian and Iraqi heartland, and of Europe’s inability to provide its own leadership in the Obama Administration’s vacuum. The cost of that failure will be tragically measured this year in empty chairs at Christmas.

Sorry, Wall Street Journal.  What you are seeing is the karma, the pay-back for your gruesome support of the illegal war in Iraq. These attacks are the fruit of your own perfidy, your own lack of moral spine.
And you have learned nothing, proving that what goes around certain minds comes around again and again and again.

Is it the merest coincidence that the truck looks like the one driven by the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day? The one that was driven down into the ditch at the intersection of Plummer Street and Hayvenhurst Avenue:

--

Karma: The Executioner's Cat

I remember... that Saddam Hussein was executed in an orgy of disorder on December 30th.
It was recorded on iPhone videos.

The USA and the Provisional Authority washed their hands - more Pontii Pilati - and sent Barabbas to be hanged, this Barabbas whom they had embraced for years and to whom they had supplied arms and weapons.



--

Child Martyr

It was common to read in the Lives Of The Saints titles such as "St. Stephen, Deacon, Martyr", which served to sum up Stephen's role in the early church and add the important point that he was a martyr, and we all knew that martyrs went straight to heaven...
They passed by Purgatory and went to their reward, martyrdom having cleansed them of all remora of human sins.

There is a special category of Child Martyr for children who were murdered for the faith. Saint Vasilissa is one, and St. Prisca is another.

When the Roman Empire had passed away, and no longer were Christians, children nor adults, being persecuted for their faith, there still were children martyrs:
http://www.roca.org/OA/71/71h.htm

The holy youth Martyr Gabriel was born in 1684 in the village of Zverka, Zabludov diocese, to a pious peasant couple, Peter and Anastasia Govdel. He was baptized in the Dormition church of the Zabludov monastery and received the name Gabriel in honor of the Archangel.

Besides the meekness and guilelessness normally found in children, the young Gabriel was marked by characteristics uncommon to his age. He had, for example, a reflective nature and a mature perception of the action of Divine Providence in people's lives. It is not surprising that he inclined more towards prayer and solitude than towards the amusements which occupied his peers.

In 1690 tragedy visited the GovdeI family. One day the unsuspecting mother, leaving the six-year old Gabriel alone in the house, took some food to his father who was out plowing the fields. While she was gone a local tenant came to the house. Taking advantage of the parents' absence and the child's trusting nature, he kidnapped the boy.

Gabriel was taken secretly to the town of Bialystok and given over to sadistic torture. His side was pierced and a special instrument was inserted which gradually drained his blood. After nine days of such treatment the boy died. Desiring to conceal such a vile deed, the murderer secretly took the body and threw it onto the edge of a field near some woods in the vicinity of the boy's home village.

The holy Feast of Pascha approached. Hungry dogs began gathering around the lifeless body, predatory birds circled overhead. Miraculously the body remained untouched. Not only did the dogs refrain from devouring it, they even guarded it against the birds.

This account very much reeks of the Blood Libel, by which Jews were accused of sacrificing a Christian child for Passover.

In fact, if you look up "blood libel" in Wikipedia, you come across an identical account:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

The only child-saint in the Russian Orthodox Church is the six-year-old boy Gavriil Belostoksky from the village Zverki. According to the legend supported by the church, the boy was kidnapped from his home during the holiday of Passover while his parents were away. Shutko, who was a Jew from Białystok, was accused of bringing the boy to Białystok, poking him with sharp objects and draining his blood for nine days, then bringing the body back to Zverki and dumping it at a local field. A cult developed, and the boy was canonized in 1820. His relics are still the object of pilgrimage. On All Saints Day, July 27, 1997, the Belorussian state TV showed a film alleging the story is true.

It never dies.
It is not just an excuse for a pogrom against Jews.
No, it is an Apotropaic Rite mankind uses to turn their minds away from the evils they do, for by focusing on a legendary abuse of children, we forget our own child abuse and child beatings and child murders.

Let us remember the children of Iraq.
Let us remember the children of Syria.
Remember the children of Palestine and Israel!

Remember the Five Daughter Martyrs of Tali Hatuel!

Remember Ali Dawabsheh,  child and martyr, sacrificed to our politics!

Remember all the children so harshly sacrificed to the Moloch of This, Our Age!

Forgive us,

--

Ironic Karma

Wikipedia
Smiling Buddha was the assigned code name of India's first nuclear weapon explosion on 18 May 1974. The device was detonated on the army base Rajasthan Pokhran Test Range by the Indian Army under the supervision of several key Indian army personnel.

Perhaps this was to balance out J. Robert Oppenheimer's reference to Shiva the Destroyer at the Trinity test in 1945.

Perhaps it was an ironic karma.

--

Hurricane Karma

The unusual weather system called Hurricane Karma (which has a circulation termed "what goes around, comes around.") has been blamed for the drought in the USA this year. It has also been linked to disturbances in the finances of San Bernadino, California, and the increase in volatility in the world's stock markets.

Most recently, Hurricane Karma hit the mainland of King Capital and wiped out $440 million in poor stock buys within 30 minutes. Clean-up operations are still ongoing.

Hurricane Karma has been demonstrated to simultaneously caused moral synaethesia as well as moral blindess.

Wikipedia:
Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation" — is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...

Thus, when we see the weather pattern known as "what goes around, comes around.", we tend to experience a sudden moral shame at our blindness, or we double down our inability to see the forest for the trees.
--

Slavery

Ben and Baysage and I had some palaver about the history of slavery in the Americas. I wish to add this:

But how poorly were these unsuspecting natives repaid for their generous hospitality to the Puritans! Their numbers constantly increased, and their intrusion upon the country of the natives continued, pressing them step by step farther into the interior, committing various acts of cruelty upon individual Indians who violated their laws, or dared to come upon the ground which the Puritans themselves had acquired by acts of trespass upon the natives, in which the Pequots were driven to rebellion; and within two years after the famine before alluded to, we are informed by Trumbull that a party under Captain Stoughton surrounded a body of Pequots in a swamp. "They took eighty captives. Thirty were men, the rest were women and children. The Sachems promised to conduct the English to Sassacus, and for that purpose were spared for the present."

The reader will doubtless feel some curiosity to know what was .done with the women and children who were saved by those who had massacred in cold blood thirty men, save two taken prisoners in battle. The same historian thus details the sequel: "The Pequot women and children who had been captured were divided among the troops. Some were carried to Connecticut, others to Massachusetts. The people of Massachusetts sent a number of the women and boys to the West Indies, and sold them as slaves. It is supposed that about seven hundred Pequots were destroyed."

 The Puritan historian, alluding to the rebellion of the natives, which was thus terminated, says: " This happy event gave great joy to the Colonists, a day of public thanksgiving was appointed, and in all the churches of New England devout and animated praises were addressed to Him who giveth His people the victory and causeth them to dwell in safety. But the Puritans, it seems, were not satisfied with the fate of the rebellious natives, but seemed to glory in their acts of barbarism—a remorseless spirit not credible to a people professing so much Godliness and Christian devotion."

 
 Page 45 of  The American Indian (Un-nish-in-na-ba), by Elijah Middlebrook Haines , 1888

The Colonists also acted as procurers of slaves.
--