Advice to a Pope evading arrest, and the real virus within: Annett's Weekly No. 4, November 10
Annett’s Weekly: A Free Inquiry and Commentary
Published without copyright or illusions every Wednesday
Posted regularly at https://republicofkanata.ca/category/annetts-weekly/
Issue No. 4: November 10, 2021
Quote of the Week:
“The pale people and the white robes will come like locusts but they will destroy themselves and the land will return to our people.” – Wandering Spirit, Cree medicine man, 1885
Part One
Wandering Spirit Revisited: An Indigenous Warning is issued to Jorge
News release, November 6, 2021: Aboriginal elders in Canada ban Pope Francis from entering their territories and offer to aid in his arrest
I first met Lillian Shirt in the land of our mutual ancestors, south of Edmonton in the long-grass prairie country. The elderly Cree woman was speaking to a group of other survivors about her imprisonment as a child at the United Church’s Charles Camsell hospital, where she was used in deadly drug testing experiments. As she was enduring that torture as an eight-year-old in Edmonton, I was being born only a mile away.
Perhaps this synchronicity in our lives is what helped us to hit it off right away. Over the years that followed, we worked together in our campaign to confront the Canadian Holocaust. And Lillian shared with me her extraordinary life as a spirit dancer and medicine woman, and how her rootedness in her land and the way of her ancestors had helped her to survive genocide. For she was the great-granddaughter of Wandering Spirit, the Cree visionary who had led the fight against catholic church missionaries and Mounties during the Riel Rebellion of 1885.
“Grandfather saw the coming of the white men in his dreams,” she explained to me as we drove through eastern Alberta to the place where Wandering Spirit was eventually hanged by the RCMP.
“In his vision, he saw these iron fences falling on our land, making it a prison for our people. And he saw it was the white robed priests who caused it all. So, when the catholics arrived and sent Mounties to pull down Grandfather’s medicine lodge, he went to the church of the local priest and said, ‘You have destroyed my sacred place, so I am going to destroy yours. But I am going to be fair and give you a day to leave my land.’ Well, the priest refused to leave so the next day Grandfather went into the church and shot him dead, then burned the church to the ground. Then he went and shot the Mountie and the factor of the Hudson’s Bay company. He knew those men would kill his people unless he stopped them.”
This past week, other indigenous warriors like Wandering Spirit have issued the same warning to the catholic church and to one white robe in particular whose name is Jorge Bergoglio. They are the elders of ten traditional nations across Canada, and they have given notice to so-called Pope Francis that if he comes to their territories he will be arrested. In their words,
“If the man calling himself ‘Pope Francis’ trespasses on our land he will be arrested by our warriors and surrendered to the International Common Law Court of Justice … We do not want or need an ‘apology’ from the polluted lips of Bergoglio and his church that has our blood on its hands!”
Nowadays, stirring the ire of indigenous elders is not the best thing for even an unaccountable autocrat like a pope to do. It not only makes him look worse than he already is, but it draws light to the crime that he is desperately trying to bury by his trip to Canada. But the trouble with thinking that you’re God is that you render yourself blind to danger, like the priest who snubbed Wandering Spirit and received a bullet for his conceit. Jorge Bergoglio was frankly quite stupid to have announced that he plans to return to the scene of his church’s crime at the mass grave of its little victims at the former Kamloops Indian residential school. That announcement helped trigger the native elders’ banning of Bergoglio from their territories, and could cause his arrest.
Whether or not this elemental fact penetrates the obtuse corridors and grey matter of the Vatican, the stage is being set in the land of Wandering Spirit for another bout of priest-hunting by unbought and unbossed Indians. Lillian's great-grandfather seems to be rising from his grave.
After all, surely the Vatican should know that crucifixion can never keep a good man down.
And on a personal note ...
Part Two
"Dear Jorge": A letter to a man considered above the law
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men ... There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. - Sir John Dahlberg-Acton, 1887, referring to the doctrine of so-called "papal infallibility"
Dear Jorge,
I assume you remove your white robe every now and then, presumably at bedtime or when you visit the crapper. I stopped wearing mine after barely a year in the pulpit, because it either scared the shit out of my congregants or made them think I was something I'm not. After all, as my Presbyterian grandmother taught me, we should never distract others from God. Or maybe my murdered aboriginal buddy Bingo Dawson put it better when he said, "Anybody who needs to look good all the time has a lot to hide."
Nowadays, Jorge, events are tugging at that gleaming robe of yours and threatening to expose what lies within. Take for example your recent decision to invite yourself into my country to do some damage control at one of your church's many crime scenes, namely the Kamloops death camp you like to call a residential school. Some bright boy in your office has even floated the media hook that you'll be offering an "apology" for all those aboriginal kids there that you and yours put in the ground.
Now I'm confused, Jorge. Since when are you sorry for your church's slaughter of native children? I know you're veering on senility, but have you forgotten how recently you "beatified" and praised that infamous killer of brown-skinned children, the California missionary Junipero Serra, who worked to death over 100,000 Indians on catholic slave plantations? And that was after he and his Conquistador buddies had slaughtered any native who wouldn't convert to your religion. Referring to Serra - who you now call a "saint" - you even told American reporters, "We are inspired by his zeal." So the world wonders how you can sanctify the mass murder of children in California and "apologize" for it in Canada. Even for a pope, that's pretty crazy thinking.
Maybe I shouldn't be confused or surprised by such titanic hypocrisy. After all, you mastered the art of making black seem white when you were gaining favor with General Videla and his bloody military junta as their public relations man during their Dirty Wars in Argentina. No doubt you were "inspired by their zeal", too, as they butchered over 30,000 people, including your own priests and nuns, as you blithely had lunch with Videla, and trafficked the children of his political prisoners for lots of cash.
Of course, Jorge, Vatican Crimes didn't begin nor will they end with you, unfortunately. They will persist as long as humanity needs to place old men in robes above the law and make them, in your words, "infallible". You actually believe that as the 'pope', you are incapable of error or of doing wrong, even when you do it. Or maybe you're just lying, which seems to come naturally to you. But let's assume that like anyone who climbs to the sordid summit of Rome, you've committed the very human error of believing what others say about you. For your church blasphemously instructs its followers that the Bishop of Rome sits higher than either God or Christ, that he is in fact Christ on earth, or as your official title calls you, "Vicari Christi": "the one who replaces Christ."
Normally, that kind of insane megalomania ends up in a straitjacket, unless of course it commands billions of dollars and followers, and it calls itself the Church of Rome. Then the insanity becomes institutionalized. And for that reason, Jorge, you head the most dangerous lie and power in our world. Just look at your church's guilt-free body count over the centuries.
Now of course all of us like to pretend we're infallible, every now and then. It's a desire that ruins marriages, creates unhappy children, and brings war and genocide to millions of people. But to make a career out of pretending you're God not only breeds unaccountable tyranny, but it's crazy-making for the one assuming the role, which I guess explains your whole apology-thing.
Part Three
The real virus within
Speaking of crucifixions, our lives and lingering civil liberties were impaled again yesterday, when Pfizer Pharmaceutical’s media spokesman, otherwise known as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, announced that Canada’s version of the apartheid pass laws will be required by everyone in the Great White North no later than January 1. Soon, everybody will have to dutifully wave their so-called vaccine passports to go anywhere or do anything; at least, if The Turdo gets his way.
But wait, there’s more! According to an impending announcement leaked by a government insider, anyone who defies this latest “Moi, je suis l’etat” dictate from our domestic Louis IV-wannabe will have to appear before special administrative tribunals that will have the power to summarily fine you, imprison you, and shove needles in your arm, with or without your consent.
C’est l’absurde, n’est-ce pas? Absolutement! But as always, there is a method to such state level madness, and it’s not especially original, especially for a Jesuit-educated office boy like Justin T. It’s called the Inquisitorial technique, and it always works. And we don’t have to go as far back as the Middle Ages to see why, and how.
I’m reading a book that delves into this, entitled Timelines. It’s the autobiography of the American playwright Arthur Miller, who is best remembered for having done two memorable things in the 1950’s: telling Senator Joe McCarthy and his witch hunters to bugger off, and being briefly married to Marilyn Monroe. I’ll let you judge which was more important.
Miller’s experience with America’s homegrown Inquisition and its anti-communist hysteria is hauntingly familiar to us today. He summed up the nub of the evil with these words:
“The air was growing hot with belligerence to anyone who voiced even the mildest doubt of the frenzy growing in Washington. One had to speak out against it or forfeit the right to complain in the future … The House Committee on Unamerican Activities had become a permanent kind of thought police by then. It was the blacklisting time when the careers of many people were being destroyed and any effective resistance to this bloodless American fascism was hard to detect … A profound moral confusion and fear gripped everyone, fed by the government’s stance that everyone’s beliefs were suspect and on trial. Everywhere teachers were being fired for their ideas, as were scientists, writers, postmen, indeed anyone who did not submit to the new orthodoxy that betraying one’s conscience and neighbors was a moral qualification test of true patriotism. But behind this obvious degradation lurked something more heinous: a power that asked us to strip away our own humanity and deny our certainty of right and wrong at the command of faceless officialdom. What would remain of ourselves after this loss of essential freedom was frankly not worth preserving, which made any talk of personal security pointless.”
Or as Benjamin Franklin observed, “Those who would surrender their liberty for security deserve neither security nor liberty.”
Now, let’s remember not to demonize the Americans. The same year that Arthur Miller was referring to, in 1953, a national opinion poll revealed that 83% of us "nice" Canadians wanted to ban Communists from voting or running for office, 66% wanted to use the atomic bomb in a first strike against the Soviet Union, and 58% of us supported Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent’s position that public criticism of Canadian foreign policy or the RCMP should be punishable by ten years in prison or in some cases the death penalty.
Nowadays, things seem a lot worse. The same madness Miller describes so acutely grips our entire world. The virus of totalitarianism in our political bloodstream is morphing humanity into a slave population ruled over by a single Omni Corporation. And staging ritualized protests against that monster has not budged it one inch, because after all, how do we protest against ourselves? For who among us doesn’t pay for and vote for the status quo? Who among us does not ultimately go along to get along?
Frankly, Justin T. and his Big Pharma bosses won’t have to set up special Inquisitorial tribunals to jail or inject us. At the end of the day, we all cooperate to varying degrees with the facts of death we call civilization, and then we lie to ourselves and others about our complicity.
But don’t believe me. See for yourself. Just take a long and honest look in the mirror - and then do something about it.
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