Burnie Gunther Again
1

Back with Bernie again, however this time it is in Berlin of 1938 and the business end of the NAZI tyranny take over of the Police.
1
Bernie had left the Murder Commission four years or so earlier (resigned before being pushed) due to the demand to follow the political line – Join the Party or become redundant – permanently!

Bernie, being a social democrat, took the second path and went private. – Not married, no kids, no mortgage, no debt of any appreciable size; but was any of that really the reason underlying his choice?
1
Although the author Philip Kerr doesn’t explicitly state it, Bernie hadn’t lost his humanity and more importantly his moral structure. Albeit, the need for justified killing (well staying alive) was not far from his capacity.
If we remember from our modern history classes, Germany from the early 1930’s had fallen into a state of mass psychosis where it became in effect a follow the leader dictatorship.
The problem was, that with the expulsion of those police who did not follow the party line, the ranks were filled with second rate performers and thugs and as a result actual crime increased while reported crime decreased. The new police got in on the crime act as well. Trouble was, when a politically embarrassing series of horrific crimes erupted, there were no officers of the highest calibre left who were needed to solve the cases.
1
Bernie gets a Gestapo invitation to visit General Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office and off to the races we go. Trying to solve the crime, while himself staying one step ahead of the moral monsters and their preferred method of crime control – a bullet in the head, or having it chopped off, or having a visit to a concentration camp, – is the caper. His trouble of course was, how could he trust leaders like that and similarly, how could he trust the people he had been given to work with and for him. And of course, they seemed to hate his guts as well.
1
I think that today he would be called ‘not a team player’ or ‘herd adverse’, or … , or something. – Oh! The Jews had already been eliminated from the serve / game by then as well.
1
This book was one of the first that introduced Bernie and his travails with mid 20th century German fascist tyranny, to his many dedicated readers. This is little wonder as it sits so easily into recent Western life experience, triggering strong emotional understanding and connection.
1
For pew sitters, it is a view into a further nail in the coffin of European Christianity.
1
The Fuhrer leader, through the agency of his propaganda minister Reichsführer Joseph Goebbels, set out to destroy the Roman control over the German Church, not by overt murder or physical suppression, but he intuited that when push came to shove, the prestige, pay and perks of the religious community leaders and their followers would be enough to run them to ground.

This little book is a real corker and for anyone who hasn’t met Bernie yet, starting off with the Berlin Noir trilogy (of which this is the second) is a great way to commence. Be warned though, you may finish up becoming a fanatical follower.
1
Oh I forgot to mention, you even get to meet Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in his guise as a patron of a satanic cult within the senior SS hierarchy. What a ride! – Well before its time, or perhaps Kerr had a bit of the second sight himself. One wonders what he might be thinking of the last two years from the vantage point of his grave?
1
Opening quote in the book:

“Much about your good people moves me to disgust, and it is not their evil I mean. How I wish they possessed a madness through which they could perish, like this pale criminal. Truly I wish their madness were called truth or loyalty or justice: but they possess their virtue in order to live long and in a miserable ease. – Nietzsche”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ * * *
1

An affliction of the power-seeking drunk
1
This seems to be a condition associated with the religious pursuit and it is, but not confined just to the great wisdom traditions of the world.
1
++++++++++++++++++++ * * *
1
Having said that, Europe has had copious examples of ‘Church’ led crusades, but they were not quite as effective as the massive Secular Religion’s upheavals, particularly visible during the 20th century.
1
All perverted Messiahs need a vehicle to ‘save the masses’, accompanied by character flaws that allow this type of spiritual madness to grow and flourish.
The two great power systems from last century affording the Messiah a platform, Fascism and Communism have carried over into this century and are gaining strength again.
1
The pseudo messiah’s great character flaws (besides pathologies) are hubris; power worship; envy; greed; humbug.
It depends at what point on the Messiahship vertical scale the candidate sits, as to the ratio of money to power that becomes the prime motivator. That of course does not include the fool and fanatic whose activating passion is lack of love. One also needs to look at the preferred method of applied oppression; on the violence scale.
1
It is unavoidable to look back to last century’s manifestations to see behaviour similarities and in how the Messiah’s of that era affected the young. This of course needs to be broken up into two halves:
1
Pre 1945 and post 1945.
1
Pre 1945, the major affect was death on a gargantuan scale, accompanied by the loss of freedoms instituted to fight WW I, and then never reinstated after 1918.
Post 1945, the predominant factors have been; robbing people (particularly the young) of their humanity, continuing loss of freedoms, and their indebtedness to a state of penury.
1
Overarching all this was the continuing transfer of wealth from the majority to the few, albeit with the democracy hiccup from 1945 to the mid 1970’s slowing this for a while.
All of this is in plain sight today.
What is surprising to see are young people (and not so young) starting to see through the futileness of the cultural collapse in values, meaning and purpose that this current political economic system inculcates, and they are rejecting it.
This is becoming evident more so in the 80% – 90% who have been formed through education in all its forms to fill the roles of the servants and a growing proportion seeming having no use and hence inviting elimination.
The upper comprador set 10%-20% or ‘new internationalists’ had a brighter future appearing ahead of them until the financial crash of 2020/2021, piggy backed onto the pandemic. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the years ahead, as the work for this cohort goes where the capital goes, and that is increasingly leading East. In a bifurcated world being sought by the Eurocentric World, opportunities are likely to shrink.
That is presupposing that serious size war is not resorted to and then nothing will look familiar again.
1
So much for the secular religion.
1
What about the Western Christian tradition that still tries to hang on?
1
Well, its demise got a tremendous kick start with its support for war in 1914-1918. – a colossal blunder of the first magnitude. But one only needs review Germany 1934-1945 to see it starkly, with the name “The Confessing Lutheran Church” as an exemplary standout example.
1
The dark Messiah of that time, intended to destroy Christianity but understood that it wasn’t necessary to use massive violence to achieve that end. He understood that the majority of Churched Christians would not in the end give up their positions, perks, prestige, livelihoods etc and would be brought to heal.
It turned out that people like the Confessing Church who would only give their allegiance to God, where ones needing elimination.
1
When viewed from afar, Christian Fascism and Christian Communism/Socialism seems to sit so shallowly under the surface that it takes little to provoke it.
1
The next 10 years are set to be quite cataclysmic.
1
++++++++++++++++++++ * * *
1

by Philip Kerr
1

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.
1
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.
1
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.
1
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.
1
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.
1
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?
1
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.
1
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.
1
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.
1
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!
++++++++++++++++++++ * * *
1

under threat or fear of death
1
The way we walk determines our tread.
How? Obvious by the way we have and hold our own head.

++++++++++++++++ * * *

Take for instance the love of one’s own self. –
How many people are to be worthy of themselves, as an individual life player?
How many regard themselves as a citizen of the earth living planet?
1
How can one become a responsible being of a human race without that of a worthwhile, life-lived-in state?
1
How are we people of the earth to be secure, if worth as is love as is whole as freedom too, is not part of a religious type intent to become such as these who do?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ * * *

The whole is what the earth is and in that being so, surrounded by and instigated too by a force or source, substance, or engineering of which a scientist can but eventually contend is a ‘beyond’, a normal exercise to relatively explain entirely.
1
I am a vegetable, or not?
Can one be sure if not to self enquire; who is this me, I am and can be in a world as different in so many forms as are ways?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ * * *
1