Francis Berger
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Well, As Everyone Knows, Once The Sorcery Gets Started . . .

8/1/2020

5 Comments

 
 . . . there's no stopping it. 

The line is from Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. It appears midway through Book One and refers to the black magic-induced chaos Woland and his devilish crew unleash upon the unsuspecting citizens of the Soviet Union. I've been picking away at a rereading of the novel for over a month now, and every time I pick the book up I can't help but draw parallels between the witchcraft contained within Bulgakov's pages and black magic I sense in our own contemporary world. It's not so much a similarity of events, but rather a similarity of essence. As is the case in Bulgakov's novel, the devilry that has started in our world grows more intense (and absurd) with each passing day. 

For example, earlier this week we learned that the US economy shrank at 32.9% annual rate between April and June - the steepest decline since the US government began records of this in 1947. How steep is steep? Well, the second steepest decline, which happened in 1958, clocked in at a mere 10%. Despite this awful figure, US stock markets continue push toward record highs, with the Nasdaq making all time highs (if I'm not mistaken). It's good to know the several trillion dollars of stimulus the government pumped into the financial system via the Federal Reserve is being put to good use. Trillions. A trillion contains twelve zeros - a number so big it would take you 31,000 years to count the number out. Where is this money coming from? Where is it going? What is it doing? 

That contemporary economics is voodoo should surprise no one, but the dark sorcery does not end there. It spills into nearly everything, and it shows no signs of stopping. On the contrary, it looks like the bulk of it is just getting started . . .  
5 Comments
Michelle
8/2/2020 03:58:35

It's strange that I had very similar thoughts today.... we are not nearing the end of this, we are only at the beginning. And the conclusion that I came to today is that this is never, ever, going to end.
They will never let it end. There will be endless vaccine news, vaccine ineffectiveness news, vaccine death news, news about forced vaccines, news about forced vaccine protests, mandatory closures of whatever businesses remain, mass protests, mass suicides, mass homicides, and endless studies about how the 5% of remaining vaccine holdouts are the cause of all the death and destruction in the world. Then, once the remaining 5% are held down and drugged, whispers of covid-22 will be heard.
Sorry, I had a really tough day of SD and tonight I considered assimilating with the Borg.

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Francis Berger
8/2/2020 09:55:28

@ Michelle - I'm not sure if you read Bruce Charlton's Notions blog, but I found this recent post of his quite sobering and helpful concerning all things birdemic-related.

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2020/07/because-we-are-already-living-in-black.html

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Michelle
8/2/2020 10:57:00

No, I hadn't but I just did. Wow. God is at work, mobilizing.

Serhei
8/2/2020 05:13:35

It never struck me that Woland was particularly evil, in the sense of being opposed to the order of creation. Some of his magic is unfortunately Dionysian but he seems to act to balance out the much deeper evil of the Stalinist order. It is deeply comforting to the Soviet psyche that the assembled forces of the regime can’t do a thing about Behemoth the housecat. There are as many theories about Woland as there are commentators (for an outlandish example, one suggests that Woland is an avatar of the Master who takes revenge in Count of Monte Christo fashion), but it’s uncontroversial to say that he resembles the actual Devil about as much as Bulgakov’s Yeshua resembles the actual Jesus.

For me, the nastiest and most stifling devilry in the book by far is the state-of-the-art high-technology Brave New World psychiatric hospital where the government puts Woland’s victims, and the government agents in the epilogue who ruthlessly ‘explain away’ the strange occurrences and unresolved events as instances of ‘hypnosis’.

Actually, Ahrimanic evil that disenchants the universe pops up in another Soviet fantasy. The Strugatsky brothers have the Tri-Person Committee (Troika) for Rationalization and Utilization of Unexplained Occurrences. There are two variants of the story, one in which the Troika is appointed by the government to classify and get rid of a vast backlog of mythical artefacts and beings that are no longer useful to the Soviet order, and one where they are a trio of deranged bureaucrats who make their way to an alternate dimension and begin to destroy it. They have an unfortunate ability to enact Official Reality by stamping their orders with the Great Round Seal.

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Francis Berger
8/2/2020 09:52:07

@ Serhei - Yes, those are good points. I didn't develop the idea I was driving at in this post as thoroughly or well as I could have. My intention was not to draw attention to Woland so much, but rather to the black magic and his associates conjure. Like the Soviet Union, we now live in a bonafide totalitarian system - a totalitarian system that relies on quite a bit of wizardry to achieve its aims. However, the sorcery the system uses also draws forth magic of a different kind - the kind no one expects.

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