Franz Kafka was a modern Golem of Prague. His book, The Metamorphosis, is a symbolic account of his awakening and subsequent treatment by his family and friends, to whom he had become an awkward homunculus. The story of his death is that he was interred in a sanatorium for tuberculosis and ended up dying from not being able to eat. When he died, he was working on his short story, A Fasting Artist.
I had a strange dream set in that time period several years ago about being involuntarily interred in a sanatorium and abandoned there by a sister for whom I appeared to have tender feelings nevertheless. I woke up with Kafka on my mind and the need to know more about his life. Interestingly, I was quite depressed at the time and had not eaten for 2 weeks. Here in the 21st century USA, despite its manifold faults, it's not easy to have a person involuntarily "committed to an institution."
When I was a child, sometime in the early 70s, I stayed home from school one day with a fever. In my altered state, watching The Three Stooges on a black & white television set, I got a glimpse of the criminal malice that those so-called entertainers embodied. Now I know that it was that criminal malice, so common in people of that time, that led some to do the most awful things to other people during World War 2. It would be unbelievable if not for the mountains of documentation that exist.
That war was a global war against "leftism" that the United States, England, and France were compelled to fight on the side of the people because majorities in those nations were committed to the international struggle of workers and to human rights more broadly. Unfortunately, those majorities were disabled politically immediately after the war, and the capitalist West, brimming with Nazi assets, went back to being an enemy of the people in the name of so-called democracy.
It was from that inhumane cauldron that Israel was born, conceived by Herzl, who was in favor of encouraging anti-semitism to force its birth, and delivered by the likes of the Stern Gang, "which, with the Final Solution already under way in all but name, sought out German cooperation in the setting up of a Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis.” That's why Israel is such an inhumane piece of fascist work. It's a relic of the brutal racial and ideological politics of World War 2, like the battle that hasn't ended, like Stalingrad in Palestine.
This world is an existential nightmare and I have been made to feel that I am not welcome here anymore. I would feel sad for myself, but I know that it's not personal and I reserve my sadness for the other gentle people who suffer and have suffered the same marginalization and alienation. More than seventy million people lost their lives in World War 2, in the attempted fascist takeover of the world. My heart aches for them, for what they went through.
After everything that humankind has been through, it beggars belief that the United States and Israel are still pouring fuel on those old fascist fires, as if to invoke capitalism's saving disgrace. It's obscene. Fortunately, the events of January 6, 2021 showed that only a relative few brainwashed punters were willing to answer the call. Despite that, the capitalist republican ruse continues. The Democratic Republicans and the Republican Republicans with their malprivileged (through sexism, racism, nativism..) constituency work together to stymie the democratic impulse.
If I'm not welcome here as I am, I want not to be here, please. Sometimes it feels like I was born behind enemy lines. Sometimes in my dreams I can see the imposing walls that divide and contain us, and the world appears to be a prison. Now I know what it means to be sacrificed for the sins of others. It means that organized criminals have too much pleasure and pain invested in their hegemony over humankind to allow anyone to stand in their way. This existential inferno is their reward and punishment regime and the truth is its nemesis.
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