Witch

                                                                           

     “Don’t make me send the flying monkeys,” she said. But it was a sarcasm. Send them she does. It is what she does.

     And this took me back. Her threat. Back to dark times when her vile creatures had flown before. When they, in their legions, had laid waste.

     They are always legion. Always the witch dispatches them in numbers. In numbers, safety —right. Yes, but that isn’t the all of it. It’s much more sinister with her gang. In numbers she cloaks them, hiding away their own faces in the mingled countenance of the many. Becoming a gang obscures the quality in them they and she despise, their own individuality; enabling them to do their dirty work. As cogs of the collective, as faceless members of the mob, she knows they are emboldened to work her bidding, a bidding that is always destructive.

     So it always was. Is. With her monkeys, who can know when was the first time ever they flew? Too long ago it was when first she put them on us, too far away to know the first day they swarmed to attack that she fears most. But they would have done then in that dark time what still they work at today. TODAY. In a time when there ought be plenty of light to shine in their black eyes and blind them. Even in our time she sends them out boldly to enforce her sway. In this modern age — our age — the hag believes her goblins can still cowl each of us into submission with their number of beating wings.

     You know they came one time and it was only in a movie, fiction on the silver screen. Though made up, the story in that film stands as exemplar anyhow of what they are and what she works them for in real life. What the witch wants in your real life and in mine. 

     In that old movie she made her minions fly to take away our heart and stamp out our courage but what they attacked most viciously was our minds. She fears this most in you and me —that we should think for ourselves. The mob is unthinking, the collective of monkeys on the wing individually mindless, not capable of articulating for themselves the millions paths you and I choose for ourselves to walk. She sent her monkeys strongest against the straw man; he she knew to be blessed with a strong mind. In the movie it was the scarecrow the witch feared most.

     Why him more than courage or heart? They frightened her too, for it is those resources that give power to the individual mind. Without those stout allies a mind cannot much accomplish. No doubt. Yet it is the director of those twin strengths that terrifies the bitch. She instructed them to do her violence on the tin man and lion, yes, but she had her mindless monkeys rip the scarecrow to shreds. She needed him eviscerated.

     The witch wears many faces. Not now in a Hollywood movie but flying her broomstick amok in our real world today, she shows herself to us, as to free men who came before us, in a most contemptible countenance she often favors. The name she goes by when she wears this face is called censor. 

     stalin courted her in this guise of hers. She abetted him in concealing the true nature and extent of the gulag. She whispered sweetly in his willing ear that the people of his land should not know his true design to steal their minds by silencing their voice and in consequence forfeit their right to self-determination. Tell them they exist not for their own sake but to serve the state, she hissed. The monkeys will snatch away their voice to say otherwise.

     stalin took her counsel. Of course. He had solicited it. His madness gave it sanction. Though he did not invent this witch, who was much older than he, it was he who set her loose on the Russian People. The supper he let her feast on was his people’s liberty. Censored as they were, their ignorance of the true soviet state was the bone in her stew. By not permitting the people to speak freely nor the press to herald his true intention the dictator robbed the common citizen of the power to know and to speak of all that he was stealing from them. Monster and witch gorged themselves together at banquet while her legion monkeys beat the oppressed people into slavery with their bloodied wings.

     stalin’s nemesis, his hateful and hated adversary, the two were cut from the same bolt of soiled cloth. The witch, she was this other one’s handmaiden, serving him perhaps best of all. More than mere handmaiden, she was soul mate to this monster. And even more than that —she became bride to his minister, goebbels. 

     Kristallnacht. Her flying monkeys wore brown shirts that night. On their arm bands they proudly displayed the mark of this beast: swastika. The witch silenced —censored— that frightful night of the broken glass all the Jewish Folk of Germany by effectively muting them as citizens of that nation as it devolved into corrupt state. Her scepter of authority was the swastika. The yield of the swastika was blood, always blood. Nectar to the witch. This warm liquid, her fuel, it is ever on her mind. It seeps, spills, flows when the witch wins her way.

     It can be your blood. It can be my blood. If she is allowed to reign in our day, in this land named liberty, the eventual consequence could be that the witch first sips then gulps your essence and mine. Maybe we dodge the actual spilling of our crimson, maybe, but if she and her monkeys succeed in robbing us of our minds and our willingness to employ them in the pursuit of our own individual liberty, then it will be a massacre all the same. Massacre of our souls. Death of our self-determination. 

     Orwell named it. thought police. That potent, mindless evil army marches not in 1984 but in present day America. thought police. It is the flying monkeys. These demons are obedient to the witch. Her name now, the same as it was with those two murderous tyrants in Russia and Germany and the same in Orwell’s hopeless dystopia, is censor. The nazi piled books in the town square and burned them in an attempt to kill the power books hold. goebbels wickedly substituted for the sacred thinking held in books the false propaganda of the state. 

     The present day version of this same evil, of the witch who is censorship, is put upon us now by the individually mindless monkeys of the current phenomenon of social media. They are her same old useful nameless mob, hiding away from us in their chambers where they arbitrarily decide which voice of ours should be silenced. Removed. Deleted.

     These monkeys and their new age helpmates, the social algorithms, offspring of the monkeys, are servants of censorship. And that witch wrongly believes she has authority to determine which ideas are heard and which not. 

     With every post pulled off of instagram or one of its brethren of the internet for no reason but that its author dared think and write something not in lockstep with the state and its current odd ally, media, all of us have our freedom curtailed. Even the freedom of the monkeys is shrunken by the beating of their own wings as the witch judges and they delete. But they do not see it. All suffer loss of freedom with each deletion, each attempted extinction of thought. But the monkeys, gripped by the, for them, seductive rapture of the homogeneous, their eyes are too dimmed to see what they do to us and even unto themselves.

     If you scoff at my warning, if you think today’s media censorship is not that one same witch as labored so joyously for stalin and hitler, then you commit the cardinal sin. You do not think. Commit this sin at your own peril. 

     The monkeys are swarming. They fly here among us. Now.

                                                                             END