There is approaching, in 2011, perhaps the greatest opportunity in history.

This opportunity will offer one island and one people the chance to be the seed of change in the world. From that seed might grow a great olive tree of love that will spread to the world's peoples, setting them free, bringing the chance for humanity to live in a different light, to live under the sun of peace, of learning, of wisdom, of kindness, of sharing and a collective nurturing of nature and our mother earth.

A chance for the world to start again.

My wife and I have had the great fortune to have lived on this island and to have lived amongst its people for almost five years. There is one thing we know. These good folk, sons and daughters of the earth, not perfect (as none in the world are), have in their history the seed that today is represented as the racial memory of what was one of the world's first civilisations, the ancient Minoans.

They have it within them now to be that thing again, a civilisation that the rest of the world will look to for example.

It is rare, such a thing.

In a sense, we have come to feel that these people know this, that they understand more than other peoples within the family that is humanity that somewhere in history the world went wrong. They feel it instinctively, speak of it in their hearts and in their communion with nature and their love of their place and of family.

When we speak with them we find what can only be described as a sense of duty, a longing for things to be right.

They speak of it that way, this idea that is rough and unformed but an idea still that nags at them from within. They know there is something wrong with the world, and that somebody, somewhere has to do something about it.

That somebody somewhere could be them.

2011 gives them the chance for it to be so.

They have, for thousands of years, lived under the heel of one invader or another, one bullying and murderous regime after another. They live now under the heel of another invader, an insidious and sneaky invader that came as a friend bearing gifts under a flag of unity and peace. It is called the EU and it is part of the greatest bully of all time, the bully that strides the world killing whom it likes, stealing what it likes and doing so while it tells the world's peoples, through its clever media and the political parties it owns everywhere, the politicians everywhere that suck at the nipple of this great evil, that all of this evil is good!

This preposterous lie is seen here for what it is. These good people have an unerring ability to smell a rat, to see when something is rotten.

The centuries of experience of continuous invasion and subjugation has given birth to a small nation of people that have grown to understand how to deal with bullies, understand how to resist, have within them in bone and fibre and spirit and courage the instinctive will and determination to throw these invaders back into the sea.

Time and again through history at great cost of life they have fought back with a courage that astounds, with a selflessness that confounded the invaders. They are a land of heroes and that blood flows through their veins still.

That hardship taught them how to value each other, how to value life and the earth, never to forget how to live in a civilised way with one another even though they endured poverty, often because of it

It taught them how to recognise invaders, to see them for what they are even when they come dressed in suits and pretending friendship.

It taught them, too, how to see those amongst them that have become collaborators with the invaders, those that are traitors to their own people for the sake of a pocket full of silver, those that adapt to the new rulers and use their systems of power to have authority over the common people and to steal from them.

Every place on earth has such people and here is no different. They are the minority that grease the wheels of the evil power that rules the world, the enemies of humanity.

Now that the whole world lives under the boot of this great evil such people as these, traitors to their own kind in every walk of life, slick politicians and pompous civil servants, crooked businessmen and organised criminals, those policemen that are crooked and other bullies are riding high, grinning as they fill their bank accounts and spend their stolen money, smirking as they exercise their government granted licences to bully and to act as lords whilst they look forward to their unwarranted and undeserved retirements and their fat and unequally generous pensions or spend their ill-gotten gains, flash their stolen money, sport their finery in front of those they have robbed.

Most in these positions resist the temptation to be bad people, most are driven by a desire to do good public service and, in times of struggle, humanity relies upon them to do their duty to those that pay their wages and to the higher calling that is in their core.

But for the important core of them that are or have become bad, that have acted as traitors, know this:
There is something in this world that sits above the system of this “law” that is currently in the hands of the insidious rulers of the planet. It is a system of law that humanity understands instinctively and needs no books nor lawyers nor statutes nor artificial regulations to understand.

It is something called justice.

It is given out by the wise and the fair in considered thought and after true deliberation.

It will come to you one day, unless you redeem yourself.
The world you are supporting is the world in which your children and their children will have to live.
If it is a continuation of this worsening evil then that will be your legacy to them.

You have an opportunity to change that.

These people, these good folk that have had the grace to allow us to live amongst them and to learn from them have a particularly sharp eye for these collaborators and traitors to their own. They know who they are. They know where they live. They know they are small in number. They will spit them out when the time comes.

2011 will be that time.

The island I speak of, the place we are blessed to call home, the place where we grow our olives and plant our garden is Crete. By a quirk of history this gem that nestles in the bosom of the Mediterranean is a part of the greater Greece and therefore of the greater EU and therefore of the greater evil that sucks the blood from humanity across the globe..... by treaty alone.

This treaty is up for renewal in 2011.

To throw out the invaders this time will not cost the blood of the people of Crete, just an exercise of the willpower of its people and the courage to stand on their own two feet in the world and the wisdom to see that the servants of the great beast will, in their newspapers and their television programmes and the mouths of their politicians and the grubby efforts of their collaborators and the media they own try and persuade the Cretans that they cannot possibly cast off the yoke, that disaster will come, that they are too poor and feeble to stand alone, that their economy will collapse, that law and order will disappear.

The Cretans will know how to reply:
“Better that, than live under the heel of an invader.”

The rulers of the world want no exceptions, they need their EU empire to stay whole, to grow.

They will send their agents to stir trouble, perhaps to riot and create division.
They will seek to create enmity and discord, to plant a few bombs and blame them on other Cretans. (This tactic is well known to them. It is how they continue the unending bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan so that they can continue to steal the oil and grow the opium that puts Heroine into the blood of the weaker of our children. It is how they created their “war on terror”.)

They will perhaps use religion, they will use the twisted politics they know so well, threats and cajoling, violence and the law, money placed in the pockets of their servants, bribery and corruption, the newspapers and the television, anything they can to prevent Crete standing free from the global wickedness of financial, military and political slavery.

They may just make sure that even if Crete votes itself free that their systems and their people and their wickedness will still prevail, that the victory will be a hollow one.

Caution and wisdom will be required to prevent that, and a care that the new Crete does not hand power over to the servants of the world order.

So what, after the people of Crete throw out the serpent of power that spans the earth, will this island do to establish the world's first new civilisation, to stand in the dawning light of a new hope for the world, this little place, this bulwark against the tide of evil? What can this small place possibly hope to achieve?

Well that, of course, is up to the Cretans who have no shortage of wisdom, but one thing is sure:

Across the world millions upon millions of human beings hope for change, hope for freedom, hope for good to somewhere take the reins of power from the evil we live under, hope for wisdom and love, justice and a new path to follow, hope for a world which rests in the brilliance of humanity and benefits its peoples with the light of its achievements.

Help and advice and support and love and hope will rain upon this island and its people. That hope will be the guiding star.

Crete cannot get it wrong, for the future depends on her if she has the strength to make it so.
She has.

With love will evil be confronted, for the path to the future can only be lighted by the light of love.
The future humanity, living in the peace and goodwill of millennia of grace, will look back upon these days as the beginning and revere those that took it upon themselves to bring the change to the world.
Crete could begin that change.

In hope,
Olive Farmer xxx xxx xxx
http://olivefarmercrete.blogspot.com/