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Bernie Gunther

by Philip Kerr
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During this Christmas holiday season, I am currently reading one of the Bernie Gunther series of books, written by the late Philip Kerr, which brings back memories of the great Fascist and Communist tyrannies which flourished last century.
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That period also occasioned the final end stage of the Eurocentric Christian religion; started in no small measure by the disastrous engagement of the churches in supporting rather than opposing the rivers of blood flowing from the First World War.
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Bernie’s sixteen book life spanned both World Wars and continued into the start of the East German Communist/Socialist era and the modern Capitalist Corporate Fascism.

His creative involvement with the highest levels of both Soviet Communism and Nazi Fascism, draws vivid pictures of how Evil looks.
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The death of millions of people, by perpetrators with fanatical desire for power and wealth and control is graphically portrayed in figures like Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann, Goebbels, Stalin, Mielke, Honecker etc, figures that dictated fear and death).

In Bernie’s era, the almost century long conflagration was started as a clash of empires leading up to 1914.
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It is remarkable how in this century’s era it is again a clash of empires – Military, Economic, Cultural, Technological – that is seeing the rise of great Evil once again; or perhaps still.
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It would be interesting to be able to foresee one hundred years into the future and relive what dangers the new Bernie Gunther of our evolving era was facing.

Given the greater power reach of modern tools it may be a horror story of quite some magnitude,
centred on the battle of cultural disintegration in the ‘West’s centre of Empire – the USA and spreading out to its satrapies?
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Probable great power wars encompassing all avenues of hybrid war.

• Mass propaganda
• Economic destruction
• Diplomatic failure
• Pandemic biological warfare
• Fossil fuel effective depletion
• Changing climate extremes
• Loss of civil liberties and the demise of human rights
• Secrecy and despair
• Topped off with nuclear war

Bernie’s readers at that time will be looking back through his window and marvelling at how we let it all happen.
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That is if there is anything left of this great 14 billion year experiment in consciousness by then, or if what is left will be able to read and write and review.
Maybe some old monastery like sciptoriums producing some manuscipts may still operate somewhere in the dark.
What a bugger it will be if there is something like a domain of consciousness into which one transitions when one physically departs this coil, but, where the shame, pain, sorrow and regret remains from seeing the fruits of one’s wasted chance at physical life.
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Still it seems that perhaps as the 1994 Oliver Stone film suggest: there are Natural Born Killers, even in our supposed enlightened time.
Not gender specific though and perhaps that has been an advance of sorts along the road to perdition.
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As always, pity the genetically hybridized children. Just sit around and do nothing and perhaps the so called white trash of Asia will be no more as well!
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