"Live and Let Die"
A history of bloodshed and lessons ignored...
by Bill Bonner
"Let the Messiah... the king of the Jews...
come down from the cross now, so we can see and believe."
~ The Chief Priests of Jerusalem
Dublin, Ireland - "Sunday marked the beginning of Holy Week, and the day when Christ made his way, in triumph, into Jerusalem. He did not ride a warhorse. He didn’t swing a big sword, gaud himself up in royal robes or send drones to prepare the way. Instead, he rode on an ass... a donkey... and dressed in a modest robe. This was not some bogus victor, like Maxwell Taylor in Saigon or David Petraeus in Baghdad. It was a real triumph, the sort of victory that Steven Pinker might celebrate.
Even back then, the local priests saw Jesus not as a messiah, but as a provocateur... a poseur... an imposter, claiming to be “king of the Jews.” Blasphemy! They knew a king when they saw one; and he didn’t look like one. They treated him like a whistleblower or a terrorist. Then, Judas Iscariot betrayed him... the other disciples denied him... a servant girl denounced Peter... and the crowd wanted blood.
And it still wants blood. What has changed? The New York Times: "Gaza’s Shadow Death Toll: Bodies Buried Beneath the Rubble." "Gaza has become a 140-square-mile graveyard, each destroyed building another jagged tomb for those still buried within. The most recent health ministry estimate for the number of people missing in Gaza is about 7,000. But that figure has not been updated since November. Gaza and aid officials say thousands more have most likely been added to that toll in the weeks and months since then.
The buried make up a shadow death toll in Gaza, a leaden asterisk to the health ministry’s official tally of more than 33,000 dead, and an open wound for families who hope against hope for a miracle. Most families have accepted that their missing are dead..."
By the Sword: We have been a regular churchgoer for seventy years. We are not particularly ‘religious,’ but we keep an open mind. And whether fact or fiction, Bible stories are a good source of instruction. They tell us the way the world works... that the race goeth not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong... that he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword... and that where a man’s purse is, there also is his heart - among many other things.
This is not the world of material or scientific progress - racing ahead with gizmos and gadgets. This is the world of flesh and blood, not much improved over thousands of years. The ancient scribes and prophets - observing it over so many hundreds of years - didn’t miss much. What they described was a ‘moral’ world, like it or not. There’s always ‘more’ to the story. And always a moral to it.
Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, questioned Jesus when he was brought before him. He found no wrongdoing in him and suspected that the Jewish priests were just jealous of him. But the crowd insisted; ‘crucify him!’ they shouted.
Or course, people are not crucified anymore. Progress! They do not suffer on a cross for hours... days... before dying. Then again, they didn’t crucify children in the old days, either. Julius Caesar, in a display of mercy, had a group of pirates strangled before crucifying them. Who strangles the children today, before they are buried under piles of rubble?
A History of Bloodshed: One of the great triumphs of human civilization was the elimination of slavery in the 19th century. But slavery - compared to many other things - wasn’t so bad. The owner had a keen interest in keeping his slaves in good condition. Rarely did he kill them. Historian Jim Downs argues that more slaves died from freedom than from slavery. In the chaos of liberation during and after the War Between the States, an estimated one million former slaves died of disease or starvation.
Steven Pinker makes a persuasive case that we are generally less bloodthirsty today than we used to be. Few people attend a hanging for the entertainment. Few people go to insane asylums to gawk and laugh. Few people - with many exceptions, such as those who work for ‘security forces’ of the US, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia... or any one of dozens of other countries - still get a thrill by torturing people. Still, it is remarkable what goes on.
When George Floyd was snuffed by police, almost everyone thought it was an appalling act of violence or carelessness... perhaps having its origins in race hatred. There followed days of outrage. That was surely a milestone in the march toward a more empathetic, less violence-prone public. But scarcely two years later, wars in the Ukraine... and mass murder in the Holy Land... suggest substantial backsliding in the march of human social progress. And looking back, we see an almost unbroken string of butcheries - like a necklace made of human ears - stretching back to long before Jesus was born.
A Grim Record: Jerusalem must hold some sort of grim record in this regard. Placed as it is, on the likely path from Africa to the rest of the world, it might have seen extermination-level battles between Neanderthals, or other archaic human forms... and homo sapiens. Then came the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Jews, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmonians, Romans...we pause to catch our breath...
Pontius Pilate was recalled from Judea soon after the Resurrection and disappeared from history. But the history of massacre and conquest on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean continued. The Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuks, Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottoman, English, Zionists... a war in 1948... another in 1967 - from siege to battle... to mass murder and exile... and another massacre in 2023-2024.
Who took Christ down from the cross? Jesus’s message was that we should do unto others what we would have them do unto us. Win-win. It was such a revolutionary new creed... too bad it never quite caught on."
o
"Heaven On Their Minds"
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