March 28, 2022
Whatever Putin wants, he is going the wrong way. If he carries within himself a vision of the Russian Empire of a thousand years ago restored, he is going about it in the wrong way. If he intends to annex the Ukraine, it hardly helps to reduce the entire infrastructure to rubble.
And he has already lost this war. He has hoped to splinter NATO, but unified NATO. He thought the world would turn a blind eye, but the world has resoundingly condemned him. Financial sanctions have brought the whole of the Russian economy to a standstill, and he may not simply destroy the Ukraine, but destroy the Russian economy itself.
His long cavalcade of tanks has stalled, and his army was not prepared for the spirit of defiance among the Ukrainian people.
He has a choice. He can attempt to roll back the clock, attempting to recreate the Russian Empire, condemned by the whole world for doing it, or he can return to the present, and become a respected member of the modern financial system.
As I write this day, Biden has given the talk of his life in Poland. It was an eloquent picture of democracy; of the kind of freedoms, we have that we have so recently taken for granted. Of how we do things in a democracy, through freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.
Democracies generally embody a deep faith in humanity, an orientation of the Love impulse.
He contrasted this with Putin’s style of leadership—shell schools, kindergartens, maternity hospitals, theaters and so on, targeting the civilian population. In Russia itself, shutting down the media, the television stations, the radio stations and much of the internet. Filling the airwaves with his propaganda, all of it based on lies, threatening 15-year jail sentences to anyone even using the term war or invasion, arresting protestors everywhere.
Democracies need to take a good look at why we love them so much, and the ways they are threatened everywhere. I am speaking about a world based on Love and Truth, that is the world of democracy as Biden described it. The fact that so much of the world has come out of the woodwork to block what Putin is trying to do, attests to how far we have moved into this new orientation.
Putin represents the old male ways, the kind of male energy that has run and ruled things here for centuries, how the patriarchies functioned, a reminder of the struggle to emerge beyond them.
And Biden spoke also of the need to guard democracy, not simply in the Ukraine and other countries as well, but in America at home. And he needs to come home and create a vigorous response to the threats to democracy everywhere.
His last line in the talk, not in the original script, was something like, Putin cannot remain in power. The whole world seems to have picked up on this remark. I would say that this remark opens a new chapter in the whole discussion. Essentially, we are looking at the old ways and the new, the ways of the past, moving into the new ways of the present and future, the old ways represented by Putin and the new by Biden.
Why is it so easy to recognize the lies, fear and control, the attempt to rule by force, suppression of protests and people’s freedom to express themselves in self-determination abroad, but not at home? The whole attempt now being made to overturn a free election here.
Biden has given a very full account of what freedom and democracy are all about, ushering in what he has been calling a renaissance within democracy itself and a whole new orientation toward Love and Truth is ready to begin.
Now, let us get serious.
War is a male invention, a male way of dealing with our differences. Why males have to do this beyond me.
Why can’t men say to one another, okay, so that is how you govern your country, through fear and control, we govern ours by freedom to descent, to arrive at truth through shared discussion.
So, we differ. So what?
War is just obsolete at this point. War has run things here for a few thousand years. The philosopher Hobbs defined peace as an absence of war.
The futility of war, as a way to solve anything, is in full expression of what is taking place in the Ukraine. Annexing a small country by destroying the whole of the physical infrastructure and murdering civilians, while destroying the economy at home, it doesn’t make any sense.
But the old habits die hard.
I recently attended a writer’s meeting. At the beginning and older woman read a few lines from war poetry, I believe it was Auden: First he laughed, then he cried, and the next day children died in the street.
And many writers felt it was a very clear protest against war.
At some point, there were two young women sitting next to me who spoke up. One of them said: You know, if we were in charge, I don’t think we would have a war over a problem. We would call one another up, and say: Look, let’s meet for tea and discuss this thing together.
At that point, the woman who had read this war poem said: No, no, no, we must always have wars, there must always be wars.
Now, I can imagine a world where child do not need to die in the streets.
People look out at the chaotic murder and mayhem in the modern world, and they say: It’s always been like this.
I believe that we are in a moment of history where it does not need to go on being like this, because the impulse at the heart of history is changing.
Up until now we come out of centuries of male domination. Empires have risen and fallen, boundaries shifted and changed, but the impulse at the heart of history, has not changed. The masculine impulse has not changed, and now, we are in a new time in history, a day of shining hope for us is here. Because these are the times of the Reappearance of the Feminine in history.
The prophet Nostradamus long ago foresaw these times in our history as the most important times of all, our Springtime, because of the Advent of Women. “Long ago, the brothers put their sisters down and have ever since walked the world with such a heavy tread that now almost nothing is left.”
And he foresaw the Reappearance of Women in history, now emerging up out of the shades and shadows of the past, into the light of this historical day, as the only hope for ending what he calls, “ the barbarian empire of patriarchies.”
The hope for the planet is that the long repressed and buried Feminine Principle is reappearing in history, putting to flight the darkness before it.
And Nostradamus makes a stunning prediction about war: Women will enter the military with the result that the Feminine energy will blunt the whole of the male aggressive thrust, to the point where the armies just wander aimlessly about, and then go home.
And so, let me give you more of my reasons for hope.
So, stay tuned.
