.
W A R N I N G :
__You won’t be forgiven
for the belt road you are living
for flat miles that you have driven
over roadkill stacked and striven
on your blood red ride to hell.
__You, the swollen high-ups,
laced with torture-rapture tie-ups
with your knuckles ever-tightening
as you find your slippage frightening
as your power-base is slightening
with the carcass-burning smell
down your Red World Wishing Well.
__You, who stole fresh organs
in the back of a theatre van
in white surgeons’ robes just like
the white sacks of the Ku Klux Klan,
you who will be little more
than an ugly also-ran,
__You and not your people,
you, and not your citizens,
you and all your followers,
you will have your just deserts,
you who lead the sleeping masses
to the place that really hurts.
__You won’t be forgiven
for the Good Books that you flattened
for the good folk you have batoned
for the evil you have fashioned
on your blood red road to hell.
.
.
Damian Robin is a writer and editor living in the United Kingdom.
Why don’t you tell us how you really feel? Isn’t it good to have an enemy you can count on always to justify your misgivings about it? I’m not sure that Hell would have them, but Hell is a multiverse where everything has a place, or so Dante claimed.
Yes, Kip, thanks. The attitude of the poem does suggest the CCP has an unrelenting negativity. Doing some ‘telling off’ is easy when the baddie is increasingly acknowledged as unforgivably evil.
To put stuff here that you already know :
The evil of the CCP is huge —even when the measure is restricted to the numbers of its people-killing. And if you include the ideologies from which it came, and the way communism and socialism are carried out, the numbers rise — and with the German National Socialist Party of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the death piles are . . . Many want to dismiss any association of NAZIism with left wing politics on the grounds of it being fascist. But that party and environment came from the social giving promises of socialism — http://www.discouragecriminals.net/nazi/ .
Dante met with individuals. He used a human scale. While the CCP is made of human individuals, it has an existence of its own. It is beyond the usual measures. It’s understandable to “not [be] sure that Hell would have them [it]” as old concepts of Hell are not enough for it. It (and communism/socialism generally) is a form of negativity unknown before.
I’ve been away from these pages a while
Here are some poems on similar theme/subject
https://staging.classicalpoets.org/2021/07/21/theyre-here-by-susan-jarvis-bryant/
https://staging.classicalpoets.org/2021/08/03/chinas-twisted-gymnastics-by-bethany-mootsey/
https://staging.classicalpoets.org/2021/07/27/intelligence-from-cuba-by-margaret-coats/
please look at the UPDATE poem at the bottom (and sign the petition)
https://staging.classicalpoets.org/2021/07/28/big-shots-by-mike-bryant/
But of course there are plenty of independent thinker poems around the site. And beautiful observed ones too. And fun competitions too. I need to get re-acquainted.
A righteous rant! Good to get some strong feelings out on the page. One observation: Even at the very highest points of power in the CCP no one seems the least bit happy. Ever.
Damian, yours is surely the most castigating and damnatory of poems we have seen on the subject. The scale of negativity may justify that, as you point out. Yet as the world has known from the beginning of such cult governments (early Soviet famines in agriculturally rich Russia, for example), the people and the Party are never the same thing. We know it today from the astounding “Leave the Party” movement in China.
The ideologies, tyrannies, and atrocities are products of human minds that will be judged for them, and that includes not only leaders who direct policy, but the many thousands of yes-men and yes-women who carry out the evil while aware that it is evil. Thus I think you’re right to say, “You won’t be forgiven.” The concept of Hell makes it a place not only for unrepentant human beings, but for the devils–angels who chose evil fully aware of its eternal consequences.
In my opinion, Hell is the “safe place” God allows evil thinkers and evildoers to create for themselves and their ideologies. They will lose many of their victims in this world, but whatever scale their doings reach in Hell, they will be inescapably confined there, and whoever is there will be there by choice, even if it is a choice to be tortured by devils because divine mercy is simply impossible to accept.
Interestingly, I know a young person who recently defended the currently unpopular idea of eternal Hell in an academic thesis. But if we truly believe that God created angels and human beings with the capacity to love, and the freedom not to love, the doctrine of eternal Hell is an affirmation of both love and freedom.
Anyway, thanks for your poem and for the mention of mine, including the Update and the petition. Signatures on the petition went swimmingly for a while. It took only a few days to reach the first goal of 15,000–but now at 70,000 it may have reached a snag, because who wants to ask Biden to go into Cuba when they see what he achieved in Afghanistan? I’ll state here again that the main goal of the petition is to encourage Cubans by letting them know the world is aware of them. The same organization did a petition drive for Lithuania back in the 1980s, when paper copies had to be made and mailed in. Even so, years later, Lithuanians expressed tremendous gratitude for their only known support outside the country, which of course gave them no food or weapons. The Cuba petition is still worthwhile.