We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Why I left the cult

Click here to access article by Avigail Abarbanel from Mondoweiss
There is a powerful force field, some kind of a lead-lined shield inside you, that protects your belief from the truth, from reality. You don’t deny that you ‘came back’ and settled the land, you just can’t see what it means. So let me spell it out for you one more time. When a group of people comes into a territory (no matter their reason), removes the indigenous people and takes their land and resources, it’s called settler-colonialism. Settler-colonialism is immoral and it is a crime against humanity.
Absolutely excellent article from a survivor of the Zionist cult! And, it got me thinking--which is another mark of an excellent article.

Occasionally I have toyed with the concept of "cult" as a quite useful way of understanding my fellow Americans (and even my own sister) who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the mythology of Americanism (see this, this, and this). 

Most every nation with which I have become acquainted has their own mythology that gives its inhabitants meaning about what it means to be a part of a nation. What is entirely missing in the mythologies of contemporary nations is that they are divided into classes where one class is a ruling capitalist class, and this class imposes their self-serving ideology on all classes. Of course, the very concept of class structure is essentially missing from these mythologies.
  
Isn't this exactly the same as what we normally regard as cults? Do we not see cults as imposing an ideological structure on its members in order to use them for some self-serving purpose of the cult leaders? This we can easily see with conventional cults within our nations because their ideologies are so different than the dominant one, but we most often fail to question our own native mythology to see that we, too, are taught beliefs that serve a ruling class that have very different interests than ordinary people.