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Karl E.

Francis 9752 words


P.O. Box 2104 Copyright 1997 by
Lancaster, CA 93539 Karl E. Francis
(760)243-4544

THE KEY

A Brief Exposition on the Murderous Nature of Humankind

by Freeman Unger

Reflections in the Eye of Rauk

Surely there is more. Those who walk alone in the wild country know there is more, and
they know it takes many forms. This thing that lies beyond us can take any form, any name we
give it. It reaches out to us not only in these wild places but everywhere; for it is always within
us. Yet in the wilderness, in that calm aloneness beyond human noise, there its reach is
greatest. There it comes to us with greater ease and clarity.
The wild country from which I come is a place sometimes of deep cold, cold that focuses
the mind. Here the edge of life rubs smoothly against the edge of death. They merge and seem
to be one thing. Few tread this sometimes bitter ground, not the center of it, although some sniff
at the edges and return shaken to report all manner of nonsense. The colder it becomes, the
fewer there are, even to sniff at these edges.
In the deep cold those few hardy creatures that remain hunker down, seeking whatever
shield they can to put between their puny, precious body heat and the open sky that would, in an
instant, suck it all away, out beyond this tiny world into the immense cold of space. Finally, in the
deepest cold, only two creatures continue to move, one man and one other, an improbable pair,
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some might think, to consort in such an improbable place as this. Yet this is entirely as things
should be.
Those who know this north country as home, those whose ancestors are buried and yet
still live here, they know that other and know it well. Yet even to them it is not always quite the
same, never what it might appear to be but always a great deal more.
In some legends that other is called Rauk, for that is one sound it makes. Some call it
Raven. I shall call it Rauk, for so it is in its own language, which, I am told, we must respect.
These thoughts that I would share with you here come from conversations I have had
with Rauk, strange conversations, not chatter but sharp and instant, crystalline projections
without noise, without words or any other sound. They come, perhaps, through the eye. Indeed,
as you look into that eye, into its utter blackness, you see quite distant things ... and things all too
close, even things deep within us.
When the cold becomes so intense that only the black bird remains, and the ape, the
killer ape, who, to live in such places as this, must kill and take the hide and hair and feathers of
others to cover itself, there in that deepest cold we have visited, and I have looked and fallen into
that eye and there spun out far beyond this small universe.
Although I can not say with any certainty, I suspect it is a drug of sorts, the cold, the
stillness, the aloneness and the black eye of Rauk. Nor can I possibly reduce most of what I
have seen in that blackness to words. But some I can and that I must. For in the eye of Rauk I
have seen the key, the clear reflection of what we are and of what we shall be, and Rauk has
said to me that I must find words for it.
This is my attempt to do so.
Karl Francis
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The Friend of Humankind

I once made an error in the manner by which I spoke of Rauk. I was young and he
admonished me gently but firmly, my elder friend, this Han, of the people who live along the
Yukon River near what is now the border of Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada. He said
in deathly quiet tone, as if awaiting some lightning stroke, “You must always respect that bird, my
son. It is the friend of man. For reasons we can never know, Rauk has chosen us and loves us
above all other creatures.”
Of course, Rauk is by no means a creature, but something else, quite the opposite thing,
which sometimes takes the form of a creature. Any who think on it can see that. Real creatures
find a place for themselves, adapt to those places and live only there. Rauk is everywhere and
always the same. I have found it in hot deserts where there was nothing but sand and rock and
unbearable heat. I have seen it hundreds of miles out on barren Greenland ice beyond all other
life or food or any earthly purpose, just sitting and waiting to talk with me as I wandered out there,
also for no good purpose. We have met in such intense cold that the boreal trees around us
exploded, where nothing else could move and stay alive. We have met and talked in that odd
manner that we do on desolate, wind-swept summits of great Polar mountains. And it is always
the same.
The Han and all people close to the earth have seen it. It has spoken the same to each
of them. And so their legends are much the same. Always Rauk speaks to us with both love and
good humor, for Rauk loves us and delights in us, perhaps because we, too, are everywhere. Or
perhaps Rauk made us this way so it might have company in all those many desolate places to
which it goes. We can puzzle on this, but we shall never know, for knowledge of its intent Rauk
keeps to itself.
Yet some small knowledge is given us, knowledge safe for us to have. In the eye of
Rauk I have seen not only its great love for us and the boundless peace that awaits beyond but
also there in that dark eye the reflection of unspeakable horror, the horror of what we are.
What can it mean? How could we possibly be the favored creature of Rauk when we are
an abomination, an affront to our very creation? And to that question as well, in the eye of Rauk,
I have seen the answer and so much more.
By whatever means we came by it -- and here the legends differ -- humankind has the
ability to see itself, to see what it is and to see beyond. We have that ability even though we
seldom use it. In that way Rauk has made us different from all other creatures. We can see
ourselves, and in so seeing, we can be otherwise. Yet to be otherwise we must start with that
unbearable horror, with what we truly are. If we are to escape that reality, the monster that lies
within us, we can not deny it. For denial only compounds the horror and closes the door before
us. To be free of our own wretchedness we must grasp it. And to grasp it we must find and use
the key, this gift from the eye of Rauk.
Karl Francis
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The Murderous Ape

Some legends have it that humankind is made in the likeness of God, but in the eye of
Rauk we see this simply can not be. That would make God a kind of murderous ape, for such
clearly is humankind, and that is not the image of God we see in Rauk’s black orb. These false
myths of our godliness treat our fears, provide us places to hide, but do us little good. It is not
some comforting myth but the hard truth that we must discover and face, a truth so frightening to
us, so appalling, that to avoid it we hide behind all manner of lies. But now Rauk insists we put
these lies aside and face this simple and clear reality.
That we are murderous apes has hardly gone unnoticed, but as serious as it is, we rarely
treat it so. We fear that obvious truth and seek every kind of denial. We pretend to be somehow
vastly superior to other apes, to be of some much higher order. And yet, although we are
different from any other ape we know, it is hardly clear that we are superior. What is far more
clear is that we are the abomination of apes.
Even without benefit of the dark eye of Rauk we can see this to be true. Whereas most
apes are peaceful forest grazers, the human ape is a barbarous killer and flesh-eater with a
gruesome taste and talent for murder and torture, not only of other creatures but especially of its
own kind.
We deny all of this in the face of overwhelming evidence. We are masters not only of
monstrous savagery but also of massive self-deceit. It is some measure of this deceit that the
words by which we describe our most distinctively human behavior derive from beasts entirely
innocent of such dreadful acts. Indeed, there is nothing else in the entire animal world to
compare even remotely with the hideous appetites of the human ape.
In the eye of Rauk I have seen with blinding clarity both this wretched reality and our
denial, not all of it, for its entirely would have destroyed my mind, but a few small pieces of our
blood-drenched human nature, enough to shake me from my complacency and drive me to this
task. I have seen there that it is in our roots, in our essential being, that we come from an
unbearably cruel ancestry and, far worse, that these origins remain a crucial part of what we are
today … and forever.
Should you recoil from that notion, as well you might, then look yourself to our wretched
past and beyond, as I was bade to do. Look yourself into the eye of Rauk or by whatever means
you access reality and see there what happened just yesterday and is happening at this moment
to our hapless victims in back alleys and dungeons, on our farms and in our laboratories, in our
police stations and courts of justice, in our prisons and our schools, in our homes, and wherever
there is war or just one human being tormenting and destroying another. Screw up the courage
just once to look at what we are and what we do.
Then, worst of all, look here into your own heart and mind and see, as I have done by
searching that black pit, the eye of Rauk, that right here in you and me lurks the monster. Yet
there too lies the key. When we look clearly at humankind, we are shocked and terrified by what
we see, the paradox that we find so revolting, the horror of what we truly are. Yet therein lies the
key.
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Human sanity has depended on our denial of that reality; the minds of those who do
grasp it are often lost to further contact with any reality. But human survival, indeed the survival
of all life, depends on our coming to grips with this unbearable truth. It is the will of Rauk, or so it
has been put to me, that now the time has come for us to look deeply into that black pit, to see
there our reflection and to face the murderous ape we are given to be.
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The Horror Without

We are entirely too familiar with the bloody acts of the murderous ape. These acts have
been seen, reported, and written about in great detail. What escapes us, is that it is we
ourselves who have been so reported.
We see this wretched behavior as though we were seeing some other creature,
something not at all like ourselves. We try with all our might and in every way to put distance
between what we see and what we would like ourselves to be. But if we look squarely at it, as
one must do in peering into the eye of Rauk, the awful truth of it is both inescapable and
unbearable. But bear it we must. As Mary Shelley so nimbly wrote, her Dr. Frankenstein, both
the monster and the man, are one and the same, and both are what we are.
When we dare to contemplate our evil deeds, we have much to consider, for it is nearly
boundless: the holocausts, the inquisitions, the wars, the waves of invading hoards and all the
millions of smaller and lesser known atrocities of humankind. We must think of Bosnia, of
Rwanda, of Cambodia, of Uganda, of Auschwitz, of Dresden, of Hiroshima, of Rosewood, of
Detroit, of Wounded Knee, of Chickamauga … The list in endless, and it continues relentlessly
to grow. Indeed, it is this growth of evil, its currency, that should most concern us. It is not going
away but remains as strong today as ever and is always a part of us.
Yet, with all this evidence, the essential quality of evil escapes us. There is no focus, no
point of reference. To comprehend them, to see, as Rauk would have us see, the atrocities of
humankind, one must go more to the instant, into the mind of the individual, into the beauty of the
victim. There we can see that the essence of evil is the deliberate destruction of beauty.
Thus, Ann Frank’s dairy tells us far more of the horror of the Holocaust than all the
numbers or even the chilling records and reports that depict so graphically the actual torture and
slaughter. The horror of war takes its full meaning more in the face of one burned and screaming
child, in the vacuous eyes of one soldier than through any measure of the quantity of suffering
and destruction. These tragic events can not be added to nor multiplied. Each instance is too
great to affect any other. Each is overwhelming in itself. And within each of us, for each
instance, there is … or should be … massive outrage.
Yet each of us responds differently to any particular villainy. Our sense of outrage
depends on our feelings towards the thing that is harmed, the value we put on it and the way in
which it is harmed. For some there could be no greater crime than the wanton slaughter of a
beloved pet or a wild creature; for some defiling a work of art is the most unbearable tragedy.
Evil, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, for it is simply the obverse.
For a Russian who once told me of it, the worst evil for him, in a lifetime of horror and
war, his worst nightmare, was the slaughter he witnessed and perhaps more than witnessed of
the Polish intelligencia, which he described to me as a dense smoke, a thick yet invisible fog of
souls that arose from those massive killings in a dark forest, choking and haunting him to his
death.
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For a neighbor, a German who once shared it with me, her greatest horror was stumbling
back, a starving, lone and frightened child, through the smoldering cinders of Dresden, searching
in vain for any small piece of the only world she had ever known.
In one brief glance from Rauk we can see all of these things and thousands more, see
there and feel all the agony and destruction even at this moment and back through and far
beyond our tiny history, into so many dark forests and dank dungeons of unspeakable atrocities
never recorded and yet all there in that one glance.
The worst for me, a vision that cuts through every nerve in my body, that even now
pushes me against the threshold of sanity, I have seen only in the eye of Rauk. There, in that
blackness, in the year A.D. 415, in Alexandria, I saw the death of a single human being. In that
year in that seemingly civilized city a philosopher died at the hands of a mob. Her name was
Hypatia. Her life was beauty itself. Her death was obscene beyond description. And she dies
still. Somewhere and everywhere, she is dying at this very moment, her pleas and screams
eternal.
Evil, that eye tells us, is not measured in the amount of death nor the amount of pain, for
pain and death are essential parts of life, and there has always been massive pain and death that
has nothing to do with human intention, and so has little meaning or significance. Rather it is the
purposeful acts and the the purposes of those who do it that speak to the evil within humankind,
the human penchant to hurt and to destroy.
Nor does it matter about the quality of beauty lost. For nothing is more transient than
beauty. The loveliest flowers bloom and wilt and die and rot. We see the sunset and then it is
gone into shadow and darkness. We enjoy rapturous love and then it leaves us all alone. We
create life and then it too is gone. There is no evil in that, no meaning reflected from the eye of
Rauk.
Evil lurks instead in the willful destruction of human values, in the willful harm we inflict
on others. It is in our precious will where evil lurks, and it lurks in all of us. That is the reality we
must accept when we find the courage to look.
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To Murder and to Kill

We humankind are killer apes. To deny it, although we strive desperately to do so, is
absurd. Indeed, that is perhaps the most remarkable thing about us, our genius for cruelty and
killing. We are quite good at it, entirely too good, it would appear. And yet, in a sense, a sense
you must look very deeply to see, it is one of our great virtues, given to us by Rauk itself.
This is, after all, a world in which killing is essential to life. We kill to eat. We kill not to
be eaten. We kill to protect our young. We kill to protect essential territory for survival. We kill
to breed. We kill to eliminate that which our competitors have bred. We live as a species
because we have long been gifted killers. We live as individuals today because those from
whose genes we come were better killers than those whose genes are no longer with us. Each
of us who lives and breathes today, no matter how gentle our disposition, how ill-disposed to
savagery we pretend to be, each of us stands at the pinnacle of millennia of successful slaughter.
As revolting as that thought may be to you, there is something yet far worse lurking
beneath it there in the baleful eye of Rauk. If we are to pass the torch, if we are to be part of that
which survives, if our genes are to reach successive pinnacles of life, we must continue to be as
skillful at killing as our bloody ancestors were. Such is life. Any of us who can not find it in
ourselves to kill … or to have others do it for us … condemn ourselves and such children as we
would have had to the genetic trash heap. Those of us unable to kill will simply leave the world
cleaner of our good conscience.
And yet there is something immensely important in that feeling, in that conscience, in our
revulsion to killing, something that has much also to do with our survival. It is from this revulsion
of it, as well as our penchant to killing, that we take our essential humanity. That seeming
contradiction is part of our precious gift, part of the key that Rauk has given us.
Throughout our history and before history our great brains have struggled with this
contradiction. Our laws say we shall not kill … and yet we do. Every generation has puzzled
over this enigma and asked of their preceding generations, who have provided little help.
Yet the answer has been there all along. It is well within the capacity of our brains to see
it. But it hides, as so much does, in its utter simplicity. It is just this: that some killing is good and
some is not. It is the bad killing that is wrong. What is not so simple, of course, is distinguishing
between the two. In that too we often deceive ourselves. And we change our minds. Even at
any one time there is little agreement about which killing is good and which is bad. So, with
Rauk’s good help, let us consider it.
Today, killing chickens to eat is broadly accepted as good, although there are some who
feel otherwise and feel so quite strongly. And many who approve and benefit from others killing
chickens for them would not, perhaps could not, do it themselves. Still, by and large, we have
become very clever at killing chickens and living comfortably with it, if not at understanding what
it means to do so.
Without much concern we also kill things that bother us, things like boll weevils and
mosquitoes and cock roaches and coyotes. We are surely adept at killing things that could kill
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us. Long ago we eliminated certain bears and great cats that would eat us, and we have beaten
their modern relatives out of our neighborhoods so that most of our children can now walk safely
to school – not fearful at least of great cats. We have driven smallpox and poliomyelitis viruses
into extinction or near extinction, and we pound ruthlessly away at all manner of other microbes
that can harm us.
In the abstract one must ask by what license we do all this. The logic that we are
perhaps here primarily to serve as interesting but not terribly important bacteria fodder is difficult
to put aside, as is the logic that by defeating these natural culling forces, we contribute to our
genetic weakness and final demise.
Rauk, however, suggests otherwise. It is in the eye of Rauk and such other places that
we find answers that go beyond such logic.
What remains, the thing that most threatens us, as it has for so long, are other human
beings, other killer apes. And so we do as we have always done. We kill them when they
threaten us, sometimes before, especially those we can easily see as different from us. To some
extent we have accepted this kind of killing as being, if not good, at least necessary. Doubters
should compare the resources we humankind dedicate today, openly and apparently in good
conscience, for the sole purpose of killing other people with the resources we appropriated for
any other purpose.
While we may profess some anguish about it, we surely have a demonstrated and
serious commitment to killing people who threaten us, a commitment that speaks quite eloquently
of our nature and our values.
Beyond these kinds of killing that appear to be generally accepted, there is other, more
problematic killing, such as the killing of human fetuses, the killing of other creatures for sport or
for unessential consumption, the killing of criminals and other social deviants, the killing by
withholding of vital support to those with lives of questioned value, the killing of oneself. Our
responses to these differ from individual to individual and from society to society.
Beyond these more ambiguous killings there are killings that once were or are in some
places more-or-less acceptable but not everywhere today. These include the killing of
threatening individuals, killing in fair combat, killing of unfaithful spouses, especially in the heat of
discovery, and perhaps the killing of abusers. As we cross the line between acceptable and
unacceptable killing, the word “murder” offers its services. With this word we try to make the
distinction between bad killing and killing that is not so bad.
From these more-or-less questionable killings we move into the massive realm of killing
that is clearly and generally abhorrent, killing which, like war, appears to be peculiar to the killer
ape. In its worst forms these killings involve the deliberate and relished infliction of pain and the
deliberate destruction and degradation of human values and beauty.
Unlike the baiting of live prey by cats and other predators, these heinous human acts
appear to serve no useful organic function. Indeed, since they are often aimed at the more
advanced and productive members of a society, this apparently perverse behavior seems to fly in
the face not only of reason but of all natural and social order.
Yet this destructive killing is with us today as it has been with us throughout the ages. If
it is perverse, then it is a perversity that is part of our essential nature, a seeming contradiction
that has long puzzled us, one that has been addressed in one manner or another in nearly all of
our legends and by our greatest philosophers and prophets. Still, we have found no adequate
explanation for it. And so while we continue to indulge ourselves, we also continue to deny it.
But there is an explanation. And it is there, right there, right in front of us. It has been
there all along, and we have always had the capacity to see it. If we failed to see it, then we
simply failed to look in quite the right place.
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Bloodless Horror

That we are killers, that we are the most proficient killers, does not in itself make us
abominable, any more than it makes a shrew or a peregrine or a shark abominable. So it is not
the actual bloody acts that matter. Indeed, we are capable of horrible atrocities without actual
killing. And we can kill in such ways and in such circumstances that the act itself could be
viewed by all but perhaps a very few as good and worthy.
We killer apes are crafty. We have learned not only to deceive ourselves but also to
deceive others. Early on those with poor killing skills themselves learned to put to their own use
the killing skills of others.
We have learned extremely subtle ways to kill or, often worse, to accomplish the same
thing without the killing. Our most heinous acts can be bloodless. We can remove from another
human being nearly all the value and all the beauty and all the meaning of life, leaving only an
empty but still living hull. We can disparage and torment and degrade and enslave and
discourage and steal the essence of another’s life and yet avoid the stigma of killing.
We commit these massive crimes in the name of justice. We do it in the name of love
and of beauty. We do it in the name of self-sacrifice, in the name of education, in the name of
economy, in the name of necessity, in the name of marital harmony. We do it in the name of
peace, of reason, of order. We do it most often, perhaps, in the name of God.
There are entire professions dedicated to this kind of butchery, professions we have
known and despised for centuries, although we may not know why. In their bloodless slaughter
houses, in their immaculate torture chambers, we have suffered far more than in all the wars and
in all the murders of our history. You know them. We all know them, and they know themselves,
those who do the bloody work but yet with blood-free hands.
In fact, much of the war and murder we witness arises in reaction to the works of these
more subtle butchers. One theory of our history holds that war has its roots in the inherent
conflict between the free nomads and the enslaving hydraulic civilizations, a theory born of the
Nazi death camps in the mind of a Jew named Karl Wittfogel. Not surprisingly, this distant kin of
King David sides morally with the wild and deadly horsemen, the “hordes” that sweep out of the
deserts from time to time to retrieve their freedom and seek blood revenge for the enslavement
of their people ... by such “civilized” societies as Egypt, Rome, Britain and the Third Reich.
And here, if I am not mistaken, Rauk’s eye winked. At least, it seemed to, and in that
instant I came to know what it was about the killer ape that so excited the love of Rauk and
elicited his good humor.
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Of War

In the eye of Rauk there is no confusion, no clamor, no deceit, but instead the most
brilliant and simple clarity. There the nonsense with which we confound ourselves every day falls
away, and in its place everything suddenly fits. That too has its reason.
The human mind is so complex, so powerful and manifold in its capacities that it runs
away from us, leaving us lost in information and feeling and vast arrays of tools for manipulating
that information and feeling. The human brain can cope, more-or-less, with the infinitude of
reality. But it does so outside our control, beyond our capacity to focus and provide direction. It
is in the eye of Rauk, and in other places too, that our brain finds its focus.
To grasp even the outer edges of that unimaginable reality we have to control this wild
and massive tool. We must domesticate our brain, train it, reduce the circuits, eliminate the
subtleties, slow it down so that we have it working at a rate that allows us to direct its function
and to comprehend. We must, in fact, make ourselves “simple-minded” in order to see the
obvious.
But that is not an easy task. Our brains are not only wild but willful. They enjoy their
freedom, the thrill of racing with abandon through impossible complexities, laughing and leaving
us gasping and utterly confused. But when we look into the eye of Rauk, and all those other
ways as well, the mind slows to allow us to keep up with it, to make sense from the rushing
gibberish. Then we see the inner structure of things, the bones concealed by flesh and hair and
noise. For many this tool is called science.
Fools often contend that some sciences deal with simpler subject and so have an
advantage over other sciences. The closer science comes to the study of humankind, such fools
have said, the more complicated it all becomes. Humanity, they contend, can not be reduced to
the simple theories of, say, physics, because physics deals with simpler things.
This is, of course, absurd. A single grain of sand is infinitely complex. As the brilliant
petrologist, P.D. Krynine, was wont to brag, “Show me just one grain of sand, and, from it, I shall
tell you the history of the Appalachians.” Or was it the world? Indeed, somewhere in that grain
of sand lies an indelible record of everything that has ever happened to it. And although
Professor Krynine was very good at reading that record, what we call petrofabrics, most of its
mysteries even he left untouched.
Aunt Suzy and the Mongol hordes are just as infinitely complex, no more, no less … and
incomprehensible if we allow them to be … as is Professor Krynine’s grain of Appalachian sand
or the movement of the Moon. Or comprehensible if we insist, as Albert Einstein insisted that the
universe fit onto his blackboard, even though he knew better than anyone that he would have to
squeeze very hard to make it happen, that great parts would have to be set aside, and that it
would never work entirely right ... just well enough to do some quite remarkable things.
On the other hand, people who study war and humankind seldom even try to see the
simple way it works, seldom try to set aside the flesh and get to the bones. Instead, they focus
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on the noise and the shouting and the odd events. They try to see it all at once, with all the flags
waving and the trumpets and the screams and death gurgles and that awful stench.
Although these things can be interesting enough, they mostly add to the confusion and
fog our minds. And they seldom tell us very much about what is behind it all, why we do such
things and what’s to be done about it.
Indeed, war is terribly complicated; it is precisely as complicated as an apple seed, an
apple, or the history of apple growing in the Wenatchee Valley, which is to say, infinitely so. But
we study apples and apple growing, and we change things to suit us as a result of those studies.
We don’t always get it right. Indeed, we never get it entirely right. But we produce pretty good
apples, considerably better, I believe it safe to say, than the little green ones we were given.
The problem with war is we don’t study it right, or, put another way, we don’t have the
right people studying it ... right. Yet war would seem to be worth serious study. If we could do as
well with war as we do with apples it might save us from blowing up a lot of orchards.
In fact, we have hardly even made up our minds whether war is good or bad, at least not
in terms that stand up to serious debate. Everyone has an opinion, but few pose any cogent
arguments. Was it bad for the United States to have gone to war with Japan ... or Japan with the
United States? Was there any moral case for us to try to defeat Hitler in war? Was the war of
the American Revolution warranted, or the War Between the States, and was that the same war
as the Civil War? What about the Spanish Civil War? Is war ever just or right or anything but a
grievous mistake? Does it ever have a reasonable purpose. Can it ever do any good?
Yet, if you will allow it, war is simply the threat or fact of heavy institutionalized killing to
exert the will of one group on another, or to resist that exertion. It is a natural outgrowth of
organizing killer apes into large and competing groups.
War was the obvious thing to do. Once you had people organized, you could put a few
specialized killers to work making a great many other people put their land and hands to work for
you. Or you could just take over new country as you felt the need and kill the people who were
there or use them as you liked, which pretty much describes most of human history. Since we
have lived so close to it, we should have quite a good understanding of war.
The problem is we are not at all comfortable with that history. We don’t like what we see.
And so we try to confuse ourselves about it, to find some more comfortable vision. We shift the
focus to the other side. They are warlike; we try only to protect ourselves from them. When we
get caught out in the open, with a bloody dagger and no plausible excuse, we try to minimize it by
reducing our victim to some lesser thing than we see ourselves to be, some mad dog better off
dead, some sub-human slime, as if slime were a demonstrably lesser thing.
We have never learned to be comfortable with our war-like nature. And it is just as well.
For, as everyone knows, our skill and capacity for killing ourselves and everything around us has
reached extremely dangerous levels. We know and look with dread at the easy if uncomfortable
conclusion that our skills and predilections for war threaten not only our continued existence as a
species but perhaps all of life on earth.
We know that but instead of dealing with it rationally, we are increasingly plagued with
comforting absurdities posing as solutions.
We should begin by discarding any and all solutions that gloss over or fail to recognize
the fundamental character of humankind. Solutions that fail to recognize that we are killer apes
and that war arose quite naturally from this basic human quality do not even speak to the issue
and can hardly give us useful insights. Although we studiously avoid being reasonable and
honest about war and our warlike ways, if we are to survive -- and it is utterly clear in the eye of
Rauk -- that that is precisely what we must do.
For thousands of years we have been what we are, and we have changed little. We
have managed to get away with it, more-or-less, and managed to live with our deceit. It is highly
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unlikely we shall much longer be so fortunate. It is time now to think of war. It is time to take
these powerful brains of ours and put them to work on this most urgent and important issue.
To have the effect we need, we must slow down our brain, set aside all the marvelous
ways it can confuse us, in short, get control of the way our minds deal with war. We should study
war as we study grains of sand and the universe, so that we can make sense of it in the midst of
its incomprehensible immensity, so that we can make things work the way we want them to ... as
we make better apples ... or dance on the moon.
It is time we killer apes condescended to reason.
Karl Francis
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And of Warriors

Perhaps it is because it runs so close to our nature that our delusions about war are so
grotesque. It is not that we lack knowledge of war; it is that we refuse to process that knowledge
properly, and we do that quite deliberately. Were we to look at war as it is, as we know it to be,
we would see ourselves as we really are, and that we avoid at all costs.
But it is time now to look squarely into that dark eye.
We know that war has been fought almost exclusively by boys and young men. Until
recently, these young people have done most of the killing and most of the dying. From this we
have allowed ourselves to think that young men have some greater propensity for it, that they are
more warlike than the rest of us, even perhaps that they cause it to happen. But we have only to
look into our hearts and common sense to see otherwise. We feed our young into wars because
they are the ones we can most easily persuade to do this dangerous, disgusting and stupid thing.
As we train our girl children to accept their painful roles, so too do we train our boy
children to accept theirs. We fill them all with nonsense. And they learn it well. We creat
montrous lies that men are strong and fierce while women are kind and caring and gentle. Our
little boys and girls try just as hard as they can to be what they are supposed to be. And, while
some fail, too many succeed.
By killing for so many bloody centuries so many young men before they could leave their
seed in a new generation, we have, no doubt, affected what we are today. We are not so much
the sons and daughters of soldiers but the nieces and nephews. We are the sons and daughters
of those who, by one means or another, did not face the rocks or the swords or the guns or
bombs and so did not die before their time.
It is hard to say just what the full effect has been of this long and intense slaughter of our
youth, but it surely makes us different from what we might have been. It might make us more
clever. And I suspect it makes us more warlike. For soldiers are hardly ever warlike, not in the
ways of those who send them to war.
One can only suspect that such cleverness breeds the strident voices of so many who
purport to despise war with whatever moral rectitude they can muster and yet evade the simple
truth of who they really are, those who protest for the pleasure of purging themselves but, in fact,
do nothing about war. These hypocrits are not the favorite people of Rauk, who prefers the more
honest kind, those who understand that the way to deal with war is to grasp it and not to deny it.
To understand war we must simplify, but we must simplify honestly, deal with its root cause, the
cause that lies within each of us.
Those who despise war, many of them, take great liberties with reason. Some suggest
the solution to war is simply a matter of not going. “What if war were announced, and nobody
came?” Those who have gone to war, for whatever reason, know it is not that simple, that you
can not so readily escape either war or our own part in it.
What if they came to take you to the death camps? Would you go or die fighting not to
go or fight for the lives of your children? What if your own people drove you away, made you an
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outcast in some foreign land, where they also despised you, ignored you, because you would not
go to war? What if bombs fell on your city and armies came to crush you? What limit is there
beyond which you have no choice but to fight?
To say it is a matter of choosing to go or not togo is to offer the most obscene and foolish
insult to all those who went to war because they knew they must, knew that it was the only thing
for them to do, or else could find no other way, because there was no other choice for them, not
even in the horrid face of war.
War is not some game for warriors. Warriors have little to do with it. And it matters little
that they are mostly boys and young men.
It was once held that women should not fight in wars because they were too cruel.
Indeed, the cruelty and the cunning of female killer apes is well known and has been much
feared throughout the ages. We know, each of us, male and female, the lies that say women are
less inclined to savagery than men and we know them to be lies.
On the other hand, many, including Israel, have decided against using women soldiers
thinking they would be treated more cruelly if captured. It has even been said that women might
ruin a good war by eliciting more compassion than men from their fellow soldiers.
To our credit, these silly notions are failing, and few hold lately that women are not
capable of being brutal and effective warriors.
What then of older men? Perhaps we should send them to war. There might be some
advantage in their soldiering, if only to slow the pace of war. And surely children can be soldiers.
In this and the past century we have seen more children sent to war than ever before in the
dreadful history of war, and, as warriors go, they seem to be doing quite a fine job of it.
Indeed, it may not matter whom we send. Arguments of compassion fail utterly in
determining who is to fight and die in modern war, for there is no place for anyone to hide. It is
no longer a matter of who is to die but rather a question of who is given the arms to fight.
All of this is, of course, absurd, for war itself is the untimate absurdity. Nothing about it
can be made sensible, except this, that we must study it and defeat it.
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An Illusion of Progress

You can not look into the eye of Rauk and deceive yourself. It will not permit, and that
makes it a most demanding eye indeed. But the eye is not entirely sinister. Behind each
startling reality lies an answer, and while the reality standing alone may be unbearable, just as
sanity begins to slip away, the answer will come.
I have seen in that eye that there has been no real change in human nature, none to
speak of, and that was surely a most horrible sight. For progress and hope are so important in
the culture from which I come, which is a progressive, even a revolutionary one. We feed on
change, on the idea that everything will soon be better.
Indeed, war has changed and very rapidly, but not for the better. It doesn’t seem to be
better. It just seems far broader and more dangerous than ever before. But that is not the real
issue. War is the product of humankind, and the question is whether humankind is changing.
The answer seen in the eye of Rauk, is sharp and clear ... and that answer is no.
Most of us have great faith that there is progress in human affairs, that we improve
somehow, that we are better than the people from which we come. We like to think we are not
as cruel as we used to be, or as foolish, that we grow smarter and more humane, more godlike
than those who came before us. We have faith that someday soon we shall be able to put war
and our cruel and war-like ways behind us.
But then we are frustrated and bewildered when we are reminded by our daily dose of
fresh new atrocities that it has not yet happened. We have held an image of ourselves for
centuries that is never achieved. And yet we still hold to the image, to the hope that soon we
shall be what we think we are supposed to be.
In fact, there is little to suggest that we are much different from what we were hundreds
or even thousands of years ago. We are not only every bit as war-like as our ancestors, we are
perhaps even less in touch with our cruel and deadly nature. The only direction we seem to have
moved is towards greater self-delusion.
The deeply held notion that we are moving toward better behavior is perhaps comforting,
but it is also confounding. Meanwhile, the nightmare we refuse to believe, the thing we really are
remains. When that nightmare forces itself on us, as it so frequently and persistently does, we
treat it as an exception, an aberration, and its perpetrators as atavistic monsters.
The reality that those who commit atrocities are not monsters but simple people just like
you and me is too horrible to accept. Yet that is the inescapable truth, the truth we each know in
our own heart, the truth we can not deny when we look into the eye of Rauk.
Many of our legends and our prophets have spoken of this truth. Some say we are born
into mortal sin, that our evil ways are put there by our creator, that we must take this or that act
of faith to escape this original and unshakable sin, that there is no other way.
Some prophets tell us this life is as it should be, that our sense of rejection of sin is our
insight into the better world we may see only when we shed this life and move to the next. In this
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life, we are told, although we know we are wrong, we can only be as we are. These legends tell
us how to live with the horror within us as well as with our own unacceptance of what we are.
We rarely fail such legends and such prophets, for they expect so little of us, and, except for
making us feel better, they do us very little good.
Other prophets have tried to tell us to be better here and now, to change our nature and
be what we all feel we should be, to bring the good life we feel into the life we have. We have
invariably failed these latter prophets and profaned their words.
Perhaps the worst such profanity is that practiced by the followers of a shadowy and
gentle Jewish prophet called Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ by his followers, whom he entreated
to denounce greed, hypocrisy, and the cruel nature of humankind. He was savagely crucified for
his efforts by those he tried to save.
But far worse than this are the crimes committed in his holy name over the ages. In no
other legend is the tragic nature of humankind nor the dissonance of the prophets so clearly
apparent as it is in the horrible contradictions between what this great prophet is held to have
said and what his followers have done. Even today there is no war so ruthless nor fierce than
that among those who claim his words ... and yet totally ignore them.
You have only to read the words of the ancients, to look carefully at our history to see the
harsh reality. Though things change, they remain the same. There is no shred of evidence to
suggest that the killer ape is becoming better nor more able to deal with his nature nor even to
see it. The key of Rauk lies not in the human illusion of progress, but elsewhere.
Let us move quickly now to find it. For we can not stay long on this dreadful ground and
keep our minds together.
Karl Francis
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The Paradox

Within us there lies a great paradox, or so it would appear, and it has been there for a
very long time, perhaps since something we might call human first rose up and killed. All of our
legends speak of that point, the common ancestor of us all, for we are one large and boisterous
family, the descendants of that one womankind. You can see it is so by looking into the eye of
Rauk, or into the eye of any of us, or by staring awhile into the sky and letting that great mind
with which you are blessed work as it should.
Recently we found it with our science, that plodding, stolid process by which we have
seen and built so many wonderful things ... even though we knew it all along. Still, it is
comforting to find it standing there so naked, shorn of all mystery.
We are, as we have so often said, each of us brothers and sisters. Our science now
says we come from the same ancient mother, all of us, every last one of us. Thus, to kill another
human being is to kill a brother or sister. Although we do it, and we do it in almost every legend,
we know it is terribly wrong. But now there is no escape, no way to say that he or she is nothing,
a lesser thing. For we are all of the same egg. We are kin. We can put no humankind beneath
us and still claim to be rational.
Yet that knowledge merely points us in the right direction, towards the key of Rauk.
Although we may find it more distasteful and we may do it more reluctantly, perhaps more
deviously, we remain entirely capable of causing great hurt to our own brothers and sisters.
But something far more important derives from this knowledge, that we are all of the
same blood and of the same wisdom. From it we can look into our hearts and understand
everyone else. In each of us lies that same great paradox. We are all killer apes, and, as such,
we find ourselves and our very nature repugnant. No human being is something else. We all
share the revulsion of what we are. We all share both the being and the unacceptance of being
killer apes.
There are no grounds now to deny it. We can no longer think that he or she is so
different from us that we can not comprehend them, that they can not comprehend us, that what
they feel is not as we feel, what they see is not as we see. Whenever and wherever there is war,
whenever and wherever there is atrocity, whenever and wherever someone hurts or takes from
another, it is as though we were doing it. We share the hurt … but we also share the guilt. We
are kin, and so we know one another far better than we have ever been willing to admit.
That we all share this primordial knowledge leads us directly to the key. Within us
through all these times that we have roamed and slaughtered, there has been the voice telling us
that something was amiss, that what we did was wrong.
It has been very confusing for us. We thought that because what we did was wrong,
then something must be wrong with us. And we hid from it, denied it, and fled in horror and fear,
not from evil but from ourselves.
We tried to think of the killer ape as something else. We denied it in ourselves and
attributed to others all the things we saw but could not accept within us. We invented more
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favorable legends and great delusions to help us deal with the unacceptable. We fabricated
better worlds to reflect more coherently the seed of understanding that has for so long been
within us.
In fact, all of our heavens and hells are entirely within us, at least all the ones that we can
know, until we find some greater thing than this life as we know it to be. What Rauk has said,
what we have missed, is that we need not be something we are not and can not be. It is on this
very point that many of our prophets have missed the mark, although only by a hair’s breadth.
That we are killers is not wrong. It is not even wrong that we have war and certainly not
that we have enormous power. Indeed, what we are is potent beyond all comprehension, and
that is just part of the enormous beauty inherent within us, for which we are loved and held in
such esteem by Rauk and by all of those others beyond.
It is because we have such power that we can grow beyond fear and beyond the horror
of life. Within our grasp we have and have long had the means to be what we feel is right, to
throw off the constraints that bind all other life to its inescapable rote.
It is not at all clear that we are imperfect. We may well be precisely as we should be,
and we may well be right on track. And if we do have imperfections, within our massive minds,
we have the capacity to correct them. We have the capacity to reach out and touch that eternity
from which we arose.
The staggeringly simple truth that flashes from the eye of Rauk is that we are exactly as
we are. We can either accept that or try to escape it, and we can escape it only through
delusion, insanity or death. If we choose to live with reality, we must live with the knowledge that
we are all, each and every one of us, killers without equal and that much of what we have done
and much of what we do is not acceptable to any of us.
To survive and to achieve the life for which we are destined we must start with the
certainty of what we are and then heed those feelings that are within us, the knowledge and the
outrage that comes from beyond us and has warned us through all of the horrors of human
existence that we are too powerful and that we must hold back. Some call it compassion. But it
is more. It is the knowledge. Some call it the knowledge of life and death. Some legends say
we paid dearly for it, that it cost us our innocence and discharged us from paradise.
Whatever it is, however we came by it, it is undeniably there within each and all of us,
and it has been there all along. It is our most precious gift. With it we can see ourselves and far
beyond, to the limits of eternity ... and yet beyond that too. It is ours alone to do with as we like,
to see or not to see, to use or not to use. It is entirely up to us. Somehow, by whatever means,
we have been given both vision and free will. For most of our dismal history it has brought us
only agony and damnation. And yet that is the key, to see ourselves as we really are and to
understand what that means.
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The Power and the Glory

From all the creatures that ever moved across the face of Earth, Rauk chose the human
ape to be its favorite. And so Rauk gave the ape these precious gifts: first, a great brain with
which to understand and explore all the ways of the universe and all the things that matter; and
then Rauk made the ape a killer, so that it need never fear another creature, and the ape held up
its head and walked erect.
When Rauk saw that the killer ape was so powerful and so deadly it could kill itself and
all of life, then Rauk gave the ape the key. So much did Rauk love this creature that it gave the
human ape this small piece of the larger knowledge, which the ape feared and did not understand
for many years.
Finally, Rauk said to the ape, “Come, look into my eye and let me show you who you are.
Then you will see why it is that I have such great love for you.”
And the ape looked and saw what it was, what it had always been and what it would
always be. At first the ape was terrified, for the knowledge and the power it saw there in the eye
of Rauk was so profound. Then the ape looked carefully at the key and then at itself, and with its
great brain the ape turned the key.
The killer ape then walked to the outer limits of the universe … and far beyond … where
no other creature would ever go, only the killer ape, alone but for the black bird that always
hovers near, the black bird that is not a creature at all … but quite the opposite thing.

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