TREACHERY IS THE MOST INFAMOUS AND DETESTABLE VICE
On treachery, meanness and treason, a close look at Joseph Stalin’s treachery.
TREACHERY IS THE MOST INFAMOUS AND DETESTABLE VICE
Trump is a disordered individual whose ego is monster-sized,
Realistically one can only expect him to be himself; psychopathic,
Early on it should have been apparent, but apparently it hasn’t been,
And we are left to question the sanity of his followers; as this matters,
Certainly the mainstream media is mostly in la-la land over it all,
How things turn out will depend upon clear-eyed, clear-talking,
Each pundit who can’t clearly call this joker as a joker will fail us,
Republican normal went up in smoke long ago after all; you must know,
Yesterday’s Republican only belongs in a museum we must comprehend.
Indeed Trump’s love of Putin only shows the depth of his diseased brain,
Somehow we can only hope that enough of us will remain sane ongoing.
Tough Trump is what they perceive in this guy it might appear,
How we can see the errors in their thinking, they think he is normal,
Enabling his sociopathology, his psychopathology; he needs no help folks.
Insanity in the form of Trump’s brain seems to not register to so many,
Now the train has been off the tracks for an eternity now; yet it runs,
For one must realize that Trump is only capable of treacherous thinking,
And mistaking his pathology as a kind of strength is a common blunder,
Maybe the fog of misperception might lift a little for a certain percentage,
Of those of us who ascertain the reality of the moment; we’re deranged,
Under this danger we all face, we must not lose faith in humanity,
Somehow we can get through this nightmare; we tell ourselves solemnly.
Although in the Twenty First Century the ones who know are gone,
Nothing might penetrate the steel wall of ignorance we all feel,
Democracy’s destruction, it’s nearly inconceivable that it’s only now blasé.
Doing what to stem the tide, we ponder this much too much,
Each one who knows the stakes in this hour can only be tortured,
Trump was bound to show up in some form we realize; it’s perhaps time,
Every new day we might be arriving at our nightmare; we honestly feel,
Somehow we might escape the sledge hammer of treachery unleashed,
Treachery is the sword of Damocles hanging over us all; for how long,
And it might appear that it can only be percepted by some of us,
Being that the upsetting of liberals is wholeheartedly worth it all,
Likely, that state of mind is only fossilized in the devoted red hats,
Each of us can only shake our heads at the masses of the foolhardy.
Victory will be in survival from these democracy killing demons afoot,
Indeed Merlin’s spell has overtaken every square inch of our nation,
Conservative to these folks now means only far extremism,
Every day might be our last as a democracy, treachery abounds today.
“Of all the vices to which human nature is subject, treachery is the most infamous and detestable, being compounded of fraud, cowardice, and revenge. The greatest wrongs will not justify it, as it destroys those principles of mutual confidence and security by which only society can subsist.”
— L. M. Stretch.
STRETCH, L. M., born about 1720: an English divine, historian, and author, (London, 1769-91.).
“There is no traitor like him whose domestic treason plants the poniard [dagger] within the breast that trusted to his truth.”
— Byron.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824) was an English poet and peer. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; much of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular. Byron's extramarital children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh, daughter of his half-sister Augusta Leigh.
“In general, treachery, though at first sufficiently cautious, yet in the end betrays itself.”
— Livy.
Titus Livius (59 BC – AD 17), known in English as Livy, was a Roman historian. He wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, titled Ab Urbe Condita, ''From the Founding of the City'', covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional founding in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own lifetime. He was on good terms with members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and was a friend of Augustus, whose young grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, he encouraged to take up the writing of history.
Following are several additional quotes on treachery and with characteristics closely aligned with it, including just plain meaness.
“A mean spirit boweth down the back, and the bowing fostereth meanness.”
— Tupper.
Martin Farquhar Tupper FRS (17 July 1810 – 29 November 1889) was an English poet and novelist. He was one of the most widely-read English-language authors of his day with the poetry collection Proverbial Philosophy, which was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and North America for several decades. Despite his prodigious output and ongoing efforts at self-promotion, Tupper's other work did not achieve anywhere close to the bestseller status of Proverbial Philosophy, and even towards the end of the poet's own lifetime he had become obscure. Nevertheless, the style of Proverbial Philosophy (which Tupper referred to as "rhythmics" rather than poetry) had an influence on admirer Walt Whitman, who was also experimenting with free verse.
“It is easier to bear oppression than treachery.”
— Al-Aziz.
Abu Mansur Nizar (10 May 955 – 14 October 996), known by his regnal name as al-Aziz Billah (al-ʿAzīz biʾllāh, lit. 'the Mighty One through God'), was the fifth caliph of the Fatimid dynasty, from 975 to his death in 996. His reign saw the capture of Damascus and the Fatimid expansion into the Levant, which brought al-Aziz into conflict with the Byzantine emperor Basil II over control of Aleppo. During the course of this expansion, al-Aziz took into his service large numbers of Turkic and Daylamite slave-soldiers, thereby breaking the near-monopoly on Fatimid military power held until then by the Kutama Berbers.
“Fear and terror are but slender bonds of attachment; as fear ceases, terror begins.”
— Tacitus.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus (c. AD 56 – c. 120), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. As a young man, Tacitus studied rhetoric in Rome to prepare for a career in law and politics; like Pliny, he may have studied under Quintilian (c. 35 AD – c. 100). In 77 or 78, he married Julia Agricola, daughter of the famous general Agricola.
“Men are oftener treacherous through weakness than design.”
— Rochefoucauld.
François de La Rochefoucauld, 2nd Duke of La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (15 September 1613 – 17 March 1680) was an accomplished French moralist of the era of French Classical literature and author of Maximes and Memoirs, the only two works of his dense literary œuvre published. His Maximes portrays the callous nature of human conduct, with a cynical attitude towards putative virtue and avowals of affection, friendship, love, and loyalty. Leonard Tancock regards Maximes as "one of the most deeply felt, most intensely lived texts in French literature", with his "experience, his likes and dislikes, sufferings and petty spites ... crystallized into absolute truths."
“Where trust is greatest, there treason is in its most horrid shape.”
— Dryden.
John Dryden (19 August 1631 – 12 May 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".
“The man who pauses on the paths of treason halts on a quicksand; the first step engulfs him.”
— A. Hill.
Aaron Hill (10 February 1685 – 8 February 1750) was an English dramatist and miscellany writer. Hill was the manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane when he was 24 years old, and before being summarily fired for reasons unknown, he staged the premier of George Frideric Handel's Rinaldo, the first Italian opera designed for a London audience. The composer was very involved in the production, and Hill collaborated on the libretto, although it is disputed what his actual contributions were.
“A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.”
- H. W. Beecher.
Henry Ward Beecher (June 24, 1813 – March 8, 1887) was an American Congregationalist clergyman, social reformer, and speaker, known for his support of the abolition of slavery, his emphasis on God's love, and his 1875 adultery trial. His rhetorical focus on Christ's love has influenced mainstream Christianity through the 21st century.
“Treason and murder are ever kept together, as two yoke-devils,* sworn to either's purpose.”
- Shakespeare.
* (archaic) a companion devil
William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[b] was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
“Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.”
- Burke.
Edmund Burke (12 January 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher who spent most of his career in Great Britain. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of Parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state.
“Treachery is the violation of allegiance, or of faith and confidence. The man who betrays his country in any manner, violates his allegiance, and is guilty of treachery; this is treason. The man who violates his faith pledged to his friend, or betrays a trust in which a promise of fidelity is implied, is guilty of treachery; the disclosure of a secret of one in confidence is treachery.”
— N. Webster
Noah Webster Jr. (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education". His "Blue-backed Speller" books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read. Webster's name has become synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.
As far as treachery in people goes there have been many throughout history. I choose to include some excerpts from a book purchased on Amazon ($1.99) on Joseph Stalin who murdered many, many in his years in Soviet Russia. I thought a look at his character might be insightful. I’ve only included his rise to head Soviet Russia. He seemed to be primarily a criminal from early on in his life. I found this rather interesting. He was educated it seemed, had a large library but apparently did not read all that much. He was a womanizer early in life. He was ruthless. He seemed to have intelligence and no one ever threatened his life. In any case hopefully this will fill in some questions on treachery. I recommend you consider the autocratic forces in America currently when reading this.
STALIN:The Kremlin Mountaineer
Paul Johnson
About the author
Beginning with Modern Times (1985), Paul Johnson's books are acknowledged masterpieces of historical analysis. He is a regular columnist for Forbes and The Spectator, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
@Paul_Johnson [this may be the author, unsure, but a journalist active on Twitter (X)]
Stalin’s tenure as a revolutionary activist, which lasted eighteen years, completed the formation of his character. He engaged not merely in armed robberies involving murder, but in blackmailing colleagues, forgery, and constant intrigues. The Christianity he learned from his mother was totally expunged and replaced by a hardened and vicious secularism, which placed the advancement of “the cause” above any form of morality, and justified any crime in defense of “revolutionary principles.” There was also the first appearance of doublespeak in his language. Armed robbery of banks was “expropriation.” Killing of “class enemies” was “direct action” or “prime action.” “Extreme measures” covered anything, including torture.
In the decade before the First World War, Stalin had many affairs. He combined his criminal activities, along with his intellectual interests and turgid theoretical writings, with a part-time career as a Romeo. Some of the women he enjoyed have been identified. One was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.
He never forgot a blow, an insult, a grievance, or an injury, and nursed his resentment over decades until the opportunity arose to express it, usually through murder.
Siberia gave him a terrible fear of wolves, especially in packs. He also feared spiders, and disliked and distrusted both cats and hedgehogs. He owned at least four dogs, one of whom, Tishka, a small mongrel, he adored. He liked mice and sometimes fed them. He loved toffee and indulged his taste, to the neglect of his teeth, which gave him trouble and caused intermittent but intense pain until he had them all out in his forties.
He had a sense of humor, though it increasingly acquired a morbid tendency, and he laughed loud and long, especially (in later life) when he saw a colleague marching himself inadvertently toward the scaffold.
Stalin received a great many people in private, but by the early 1930s he had become addicted to the telephone, which he used increasingly to govern Russia. He was probably the only person in the entire Soviet empire who had a comprehensive phone directory: it included thousands of secret numbers used by the secret police, and all the unlisted numbers of the Soviet bureaucratic aristocracy, or nomenklatura. Stalin was well aware of the power conferred on anyone in a totalitarian dictatorship who had knowledge of such secret phone numbers, and he used it constantly, especially on the various occasions when he carried out major purges and destroyed the head of the secret police. It would be an exaggeration to say that Stalin ruled by phone, but it was probably the single most important weapon in his armory of control.
Stalin had to dial only one six-digit number, on a special line that bypassed all secret police networks, to alert over a thousand armed members of his personal protection force. Stalin supervised his own bodyguard system in minute detail, and although no one knew exactly how it worked, a preemptive strike at Stalin was almost certainly futile. None was ever made.
The food varied: a dozen types of smoked, pickled, and cold fish, assorted caviars, suckling pig, six or seven different kinds of sausages, boiled, smoked, and fried ham, hot steaks, and cold roast beef and mutton. Vodka was always available in different flavors, but as Stalin grew older he tended to drink light Georgian wines, if at all. He never drank brandy, though he sometimes encouraged others to do so. The toasts might begin at any point in the meal and go on all night. Stalin always had his own bottles, which often contained only water or watered lemon juice.
The regulars in Stalin’s latter years included Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoyan, Beria, Khrushchev, and Bulganin (the last to be made a regular). The regulars had to submit to Stalin’s jokes. The Mikoyan jokes were about Armenian moneylenders; Kaganovich jokes were about anti-Semitism (after the Holocaust, Stalin called him “oven-dodger”); Khrushchev was made to do Ukrainian dances. Bulganin was told, “That beard, it reminds me of Trotsky’s.” Although the atmosphere was in some ways like the court of an Oriental potentate, with everyone on edge, in other ways it was rough and uncontrolled. If regulars were not invited, they came all the same, provided they could find out when and where the dinner was taking place. Stalin’s staff could be cajoled into providing this information. Molotov and Mikoyan always turned up; it was impossible to disinvite them.
Stalin’s part in the October Revolution was insignificant, and his writings in Pravda on the events leading up to it were curiously indecisive. He was a member of a central committee and one of five members representing the Bolsheviks on the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Soviet, but he declined a leading role. (Trotsky later jeered, “The greater the sweep of events, the smaller was Stalin’s place in it.” He added, “Not that he was a coward. There is no basis for accusing Stalin of cowardice. The cautious schemer preferred to stay on the fence at the crucial moment.”) But Stalin must have taken part in the final assault on the Winter Palace, for there is evidence that “he did not take off his clothes for five days” and there is a vignette about his announcing the final fall of the palace to friends—dirty, disheveled, but triumphant.
But he successfully thwarted a Ukrainian bid for independence, which he regarded as unacceptable politically and economically disastrous, as it might have cut off Russia’s supply of food.
But Stalin grasped, almost from the first time he met him, that Lenin had what he called “a powerful combination of theoretical grasp with practical skill.” In the revolution he made, unlike the French Revolution, the terror came almost immediately. It was entirely Lenin’s creation, with some assistance from Trotsky, and Stalin had little to do with it, though he later made the fullest possible use of its methods and personnel.
On December 7, the secret police achieved formal status, becoming the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, or Cheka, although its creation was not made public until a decade later, by Stalin’s order. The tsar’s secret police had numbered fifteen thousand; by 1920, the Cheka had over a quarter of a million full-time paid agents, plus a host of informers and part-timers, since every Soviet (of Council of Workers Delegates) was ordered to set up its own security body to supply information to the Cheka. The scale of the killings was vast from the beginning. While under the tsars the average number of executions was only seventeen, by 1918 the Cheka was killing an average of a thousand people a month for political crimes alone. There is some dispute as to whether the preferred method of dispatching victims—shooting through the back of the head by handgun—was ordered by Lenin or Trotsky. (Stalin, when he specifically ordered a killing, always specified use of an ax, the body to be run over afterward by a heavy truck.)
The entire apparatus of the Soviet tyranny, as it was to exist for over three-quarters of a century—secret police, trial in secret without law, prisons and concentration camps, mass killing—was in existence while Lenin was in power, long before Stalin got his hands on it.
Lenin telegraphed Stalin that he was to be “merciless, ruthless and uncompromising in dealing with counter-revolutionaries, whites and traitors.” Stalin had over a score shot his first weekend, and thereafter he used a squad of Chekists to carry out “a ruthless purge of the rear-echelons.” He recruited two swashbuckling cavalry officers, Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, both later made marshals. They were as ruthless as he was and encouraged him to kill enemies and colleagues alike. Stalin dropped them both in the end—he never had old friends—though, oddly enough, he let them both live.
Stalin’s power was reinforced by interlocking appointments. He was already commissar for nationalities, which gave him control over 65 million of the country’s 140 million inhabitants. These included Georgians, Belorussians, Kirghizians, Tartars, Tadzhiks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Buriats, Uzbeks, and a dozen others, including the Ukrainians, the most important nationality of all. Most of them had no party organization when Stalin formed his commission, appointing his own people. Gradually, in the years from 1919 to 1922, he systematically replaced his swashbuckling fighters in the higher ranks with gray-minded bureaucrats, who appointed their own people lower down the ranks. Soon he had over twenty thousand bureaucratic followers in the nationalities commission alone.
Lenin then dictated a postscript to his will on January 4, 1923: “Stalin is too rude and this becomes unbearable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the Comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint someone more patient, polite and attentive.” He also implied that it would prevent a split breaking out between Stalin and Trotsky, though he believed the politburo would remain in charge, uniting party and government.
Without the army, Trotsky was nothing. He was expelled from the politburo in October 1926, from the party the next month, sent into internal exile in 1928, expelled from Russia in 1929, and finally murdered, on Stalin’s orders, in Mexico in 1940. The weapon, an ice pick or axe, was Stalin’s favorite device for “solving a problem.”
Stalin cut short the roars of execration. “Enough, Comrades, an end to this game.… Kamenev’s speech is the most mendacious, scoundrelly, humbugging and gangsterish speech that has been made by the opposition from this platform.” The two were arrested (with many others) and put in camps, but saved for a show trial in 1936. When sentenced to death, Zinoviev begged for mercy on his knees, actually licking the boots of the Chekists who were about to carry out the execution. He shouted: “Please, Comrades, for God’s sake, call Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin]. He promised to save our lives!” Kamenev tried to silence him and curry favor with Stalin at the last moment: “We deserve this because of our treacherous behavior at the trial. Be quiet and die with dignity.” But Zinoviev continued to shout and was taken to the cell next door and shot immediately. After both were dead, the bullets were dug out of the skulls and given to Genrikh Yagoda, then head of the Cheka, who cleaned them and placed them among his erotic treasures of ladies’ suspender belts and silk bras.
He began the attack immediately after the meager results of the 1927 harvest had come in by sending thirty thousand armed workers into the countryside. (It is worth noting that Stalin never once went to the grain-producing countryside in these years, any more than he attended an execution: to the greatest extent possible, he tried to keep the horrors he perpetrated in the abstract.)
In 1928 there were 1,400 recorded instances of peasants resisting with improvised weapons, described in government records (later captured and published by the Nazis) as “acts of terrorism.” For the first time Stalin himself used the word “liquidate,” a term he seems to have popularized. Armed party workers, he said, were to “liquidate” the resistance of “capitalist elements in the countryside against Soviet authority.” Various euphemisms, such as “regrettable lapses from Soviet legality” and “competition between grain-collecting organizations,” were used for the killing of thousands of peasants.
The scale of the tragedy is almost beyond belief, though today, with the documentary example of the Nazi Holocaust and the “cultural revolution” of Mao Tse-tung, which cost six million and thirty million lives, respectively, before our eyes, we find no difficulty in accepting the enormity of the human losses. The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski has called it “probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens.” The number killed will never be precisely known. Almost as an aside, Stalin himself told Churchill at their Moscow summit in 1942 that he had “dealt with” some “ten millions” of peasants. One estimate is that, in addition to peasants executed by the OGPU or killed in battle, between ten and eleven million were transported to northern Russia, Siberia, or Russian Central Asia: one-third to the gulag camps, one-third to internal exile, and a third who were executed or died in transit.
The following is what a word search of “treachery” yielded on Twitter (X) related to the overall topic of treachery in our current politics.
My verse in the approximate form of a sonnet.
Sounding the Crisis Alarm Futilely
Treachery is in our faces nowadays,
Mainstream media may not fully get it,
Trump is up to no good - all our alarms lit,
They refuse to level - and we are amazed,
He is only unhinged and speaks in a daze,
The crazy shoe does nothing but snugly fit,
Of his weird mental state they prefer to omit,
Worried democracy will go up in a blaze.
So might all of us blunder out of the trap,
This conniving con man applying his trade,
All of the MAGA devotees being played,
Not ever realizing they’re nothing but saps,
Sounding the crisis alarm seems not to work,
Anticipating many will go berserk.
In my research, I came across what I thought was interesting, CIA documents available to the public. I did a search using “treachery” and from the items was this letter I found rather interesting. Times sure have changed.
Approved For Release 2002/08/21/-CNA7P80B01
THE HAVERFORD SCHOOL
[THE HAVERFORD SCHOOL
Since 1884, The Haverford School has been dedicated to teaching boys and helping them grow in academics, the arts, athletics, and in moral character.
Address 450 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041]
Mr. Allen W. Dulles,
Central Intelligence Agency,
2430 E. Street, N. W. Washington 25, D. C.
January 3, 1961.
Dear Mr. Dulles: I am writing this letter to thank you very much for your courteous reply to my letter pertaining to communism. Your letter was verbally read to the students, placed on display, and it will then be put into the permanent files. Your enclosure is now on the reserve shelf in the library as an assignment for all students in the senior class to read. I wish it were possible for me to express to you my violent hatred of the communist program. I still feel limited in getting the message across to the people. I never fail to make some daily point on red treachery to the students. I have continued the fight into my work as a military intelligence officer(reserve), and write articles on the subject for magazines. There is almost a daily flow of letters from my pen requesting information from world leaders about the subject of communism. Can one do any more? Thank you again for your kindness and I hope that we have the pleasure to correspond.
Approved For Release 2002/08/21 : CIA-RDP80B01676R003600020002-
And this common message that I recall growing up about the communist society at large.
November 14, 1982
CIA
…this all brings us perilously close to the lifestyle of Soviet Russia, where, half the population perpetually spies on the other half and where everyone is guilty unless proved innocent. This is the exact opposite of everything that democracies in general, and Britain in particular, hold dear.
One can only imagine what a second Trump presidency might bring. One would have to expect spying on neighbors would become a feature with a guy who has a gigantic chip on his shoulder running the whole show. A man consumed by conspiracy theories, and paranoia some which he might actually believe.
That’s all I have for today. I hope it might have been an interesting read. Thanks for getting to this sentence, which ends it all.
190th Posting, April 14, 2024.