John Pilger describes the important part played by the Australian government in the spread of nuclear dangers, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard's ending of her party's long-standing ban on the sale of uranium, an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons.
“I can think of five reasons why Cindy Sheehan’s protest against the Iraq war is succeeding where others, thousands of times bigger, were less successful.
Her motives are impeccable. Her son was killed. She is grieving. She is particularly suffering because her son sacrificed his life without obvious benefit to his country. She cannot be discounted on political grounds. She can’t be dismissed as some radical peacenik. She is American as American Gothic.
This is how the Vietnam protest started. History is repeating itself. Even Bush [and now Obama] knows it is only a matter of time until her growing protest succeeds.”—Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
By William T. Hathaway
“We’ve always had wars. Humans are a warring species. Without an army to defend us, someone will always try to conquer us.”
These assumptions have become axioms of our culture. They generate despair but also a certain comfort because they relieve us of the responsibility to change.
Some politicians and pundits declare that human nature makes peace impossible, that war is built into our genes. They point to research by evolutionary biologists that indicates our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, make war. Therefore war must be part of our heredity.
It’s true that in certain situations chimpanzees do raid neighboring colonies and kill other chimps. Those studies on killer apes got enormous publicity because they implied that war is hardwired into human nature. Most scientists didn’t draw those conclusions from the evidence, but the mass media kept reinforcing that message.
Further research, however, led to a key discovery: The chimps who invaded their neighbors were suffering from shrinking territory and food sources. They were struggling for survival. Groups with adequate resources didn’t raid other colonies. The aggression wasn’t a behavioral constant but was caused by the stress they were under. Their genes gave them the capacity for violence, but the stress factor had to be there to trigger it into combat. This new research showed that war is not inevitable but rather a function of the stress a society is under. Our biological nature doesn’t force us to war, it just gives us the potential for it. Without stress to provoke it, violence can remain one of the many unexpressed capacities our human evolution has given us. Studies by professors Douglas Fry, Frans de Waal, and Robert Sapolsky present the evidence for this.
Militarists point to history and say it’s just one war after another. But that’s the history only of our patriarchal civilization. The early matriarchal civilization of south-eastern Europe enjoyed centuries of peace. UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas describes the archeological research in The Civilization of the Goddess. No trace of warfare has been found in excavations of the Minoan, Harappa, and Caral cultures. Many of the Pacific islands were pacifistic. The ancient Vedic civilization of India had meditation techniques that preserved the peace, and those are being revived today to reduce stress in society: www.permanentpeace.org.
Our society, though, has a deeply entrenched assumption that stress is essential to life. Many of our social and economic structures are based on conflict. Capitalism’s need for continually expanding profits generates stress in all of us. We’ve been indoctrinated to think this is normal and natural, but it’s really pathological. It damages life in ways we can barely perceive because they’re so built into us.
We don’t have to live this way. We can reduce the stress humanity suffers under. We can create a society that meets human needs and distributes the world’s resources more evenly. We can live at peace with one another. But that’s going to take basic changes.
These changes threaten the power holders of our society. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power. They view the world through a lens of aggression. But it’s not merely a view. They really are surrounded by enemies. So they believe this false axiom they are propagating that wars are inevitable.
In the past their predecessors defended their power by propagating other nonsense: kings had a divine right to rule over us, Blacks were inferior to Whites, women should obey men. We’ve outgrown those humbugs, and we can outgrow this one.
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William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran and an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His latest book, Radical Peace: People Refusing War, presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Chapters are posted on a page of the publisher’s website at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace. His first book, A World of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award for its portrayal of the psychological roots of war: the emotional blockage and need for patriarchal approval that draw men to the military. He is also the author of Summer Snow, the story of an American soldier in Central Asia who falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her that higher consciousness is more effective than violence. Chapters are available at www.peacewriter.org.
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By Glenn Greenwald
Cross-posted from The Guardian
Reflecting the Obama legacy and US culture, the Time columnist says: “the bottom line is: ‘whose 4-year-olds get killed?'”
Establishment shill Joe Klein: epitome of what’s wrong with the American media, and the sickness afflicting American society. Ubiquitous vermin.
(updated below)
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe program this morning (see video below), which focused on Monday night’s presidential debate, the former right-wing Congressman and current host Joe Scarborough voiced an eloquent and impassioned critique of President Obama’s ongoing killing of innocent people in the Muslim world using drones. In response, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein, a stalwart Obama supporter, offered one of the most nakedly sociopathic defenses yet heard of these killings. This exchange, which begins at roughly the 7:00 minute mark on the video embedded below, is quite revealing in several respects.
Here are the relevant portions of the exchange, which was triggered when regular guest Mike Barnicle announced how amazing he found it that so little public attention and debate is paid to the fact that Obama simply kills whomever he wants “without any kind of due process”:
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SCARBOROUGH: “What we’re doing with drones is remarkable: the fact that over the past eight years during the Bush years — when a lot of people brought up some legitimate questions about international law — my God, those lines have been completely eradicated by a drone policy that says: if you’re between 17 and 30, and within a half-mile of a suspect, we can blow you up, and that’s exactly what’s happening … They are focused on killing the bad guys, but it is indiscriminate as to other people who are around them at the same time … it is something that will cause us problems in the coming years.” …
There are several points worth noting about this exchange:
(1) Klein’s justification — we have to kill their children in order to protect our children — is the exact mentality of every person deemed in US discourse to be a “terrorist.” Almost every single person arrested and prosecuted over the last decade on terrorism charges, when asked why they were willing to kill innocent Americans including children, offered some version of Joe Klein’s mindset.
Here, for instance, is what the Pakistani-American Faisal Shazad said after he pled guilty to attempting to detonate a bomb in Times Square, in response to an angry question from the presiding US federal judge as to how he could possibly be willing to kill innocent children:
“Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims….
“I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And, on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die.”
The mentality of Faisal Shazad and Joe Klein are completely identical and indistinguishable: it is justified for us indiscriminately to kill even your innocent children because doing so will help stop you from killing ours.
And here’s what Osama bin Laden had to say on the same topic:
“The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the land of the two Holy Mosques over and above its meddling in its affairs and its politics, and its support of the oppressive, corrupt and tyrannical regime that is in control. These are the reasons behind the singling out of America as a target….
“Besides, terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible. Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property….
“The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation. Terrorizing those and punishing them are necessary measures to straighten things and to make them right….
“It is not enough for their people to show pain when they see our children being killed in Israeli raids launched by American planes, nor does this serve the purpose. What they ought to do is change their governments which attack our countries. The hostility that America continues to express against the Muslim people has given rise to feelings of animosity on the part of Muslims against America and against the West in general. Those feelings of animosity have produced a change in the behavior of some crushed and subdued groups who, instead of fighting the Americans inside the Muslim countries, went on to fight them inside the United States of America itself.”
The only difference between the Joe Kleins of the world and Osama bin Laden is that they’re on different sides. To the extent one wanted to distinguish them, one could say that the violence and aggression brought by the US to the Muslim world vastly exceeds — vastly — the violence and aggression brought by the Muslim world to the US. That’s just a fact.
(2) Leaving aside the sociopathic, morally grotesque defense of killing 4-year-olds with a “joystick from California,” Klein’s claims are completely false on pragmatic grounds. Slaughtering Muslim children does not protect American children from terrorism. The opposite is true. That is precisely what causes the anti-American hatred that fuels and sustains terrorism aimed at Americans in the first place, as even a study commissioned by the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon recognized almost a decade ago.
The reason American 4-year-olds are in danger from terrorism — to the very limited extent they are — is precisely because those empowered in US government and media circles think like Joe Klein does. Soul-less cheerleaders for indiscriminate killing like Joe Klein — who once went on national television and advocated that the US should preserve the right to launch a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop its nuclear program, prompting host George Stephanopoulos to label that statement “insane” — are the reason there is a terrorism risk to Americans, not the solution for that risk.
If you want to understand why there is such a widespread desire to engage in violence against the US, look at Joe Klein’s face and listen to his words. Every Muslim who has ever engaged in violence against the US will make that as clear as can be.
(3) This exchange is a perfectly vivid expression of the Obama legacy. Here we have a standard Democratic/progressive pundit who is one of the media’s most stalwart Obama fanatics defending indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim children. Meanwhile, it’s left to a former right-wing, Gingrich-era congressman to raise objections, call for more public scrutiny, and cite the moral and strategic dangers, one of the very few commentators on MSNBC – the progressive network — who has ever voiced such passionate criticism of Obama’s ongoing killings.
Obama has led all sorts of progressives and other Democrats to be the most vocal supporters of unrestrained aggression, secret assassinations, and “crippling” the Iranian people with sanctions. It is completely unsurprising that the most sociopathic defense of drones comes from one of the most committed Obama supporters, and that it’s now left to a former GOP Congressman to raise objections. As much as anything, that is the Obama legacy.
(4) One of the primary reasons war — especially protracted war — is so destructive is not merely that it kills the populations at whom it is aimed, but it also radically degrades the character of the citizenry that wages it. That’s what enables one of America’s most celebrated pundits to go on the most mainstream of TV programs and coldly justify the killing of 4-year-olds, without so much as batting an eyelash or even paying lip service to the heinous tragedy of that, and have it be barely noticed. Joe Klein is the face not only of the Obama legacy, but also mainstream US political culture.
Afghanistan
Speaking of killing children, the Afghanistan government said this morning that a NATO operation on Saturday killed three more Afghan children, ones who were tending to livestock.
UPDATE
There’s one other vital point to be made here. Klein says that “there is a really major possibility of abuse [of drone power] if you have the wrong people running the government” — in other words, we can trust Obama with it, but not the big bad Republicans. This was precisely what Bush followers used to say about his claimed powers of due-process-free eavesdropping and detention: maybe this would be scary if Hillary Clinton could do this, but I trust Bush to use it only against the Bad Guys.
Leaving aside the authoritarian willingness to trust certain leaders with unchecked power, this is not how the US government works. Once a power is legitimized and institutionalized, then it is vested in all presidents, current and future, Democratic and Republican. That is why Thomas Jefferson warned: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Those who cheer for the unchecked power to assassinate in secret because it’s Obama who currently wields that power will be the ones fully responsible when some leader they don’t trust exercises it — abuses it — in the future.
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The Well Infidel
Iris Vander Pluym Discovers, Classifies and Explores Prospects of Treating A Terrible New Malady – CPD!
Donald B. Ardell – [Originally March 06, 2011]
Paul Ryan: an incurable case.
“Iris Vander Pluym” is a pseudonym adopted by an “an unapologetic, godless, feminist liberal who lives in New York City.” (This is her self-description.) I have not asked, but from reading her blog, I’m pretty sure she would caution that as bad as things are in American extremist politics, they can always get worse. Much worse. See her incisive website –http://perrystreetpalace.wordpress.com/author/irisvanderpluym/
On February 14 of this year, Iris penned a pretty cool tongue-in-cheek blog suggesting that new research offers a promising treatment for CPD, the dreaded “Conservative Personality Disorder.” It was a send-up, of course – there is NO treatment, cure or even hope for a cure for a malady this dreadful. But, it’s interesting and wicked fun to consider a partial list of CPD symptoms:
* superficiality;
* hierarchical worldview
* willful ignorance
* irrationality
* hyper-religiousness
* global warming denialism
* unwavering belief in young earth creationism and the efficacy of prayer
* anti-intellectualism
* emotionality
* authoritarianism
* bullying; controlling and manipulative behavior
* tribalism
* sense of entitlement
* misogyny
* support for “traditional family values”
* anti-choice and anti-contraception
* constant reinforcement of unexamined privilege or bias
* consistent viewership of Fox News
* outright rejection of others’ rights to privacy and personal autonomy
* self-righteousness while judgmental, hypercritical, scornful and disdainful of out-groups
* delusions of persecution and martyrdom
* sadism and vindictiveness
* amoral
* rigid
* poor facility with native language
* limited dimensionality of thought
* little critical thinking ability
* stunted self-awareness
* compulsive political behavior in the service of extreme right-wing views
These are indeed frightful symptoms. There seems little hope for those so afflicted? These behaviors are “counterproductive and dysfunctional in the personal, interpersonal, and societal dimensions.” Sufferers destroy “relationships, communities, entire nations and vast swaths of the planet.” She terms the toll from unchecked, untreated CPD as “truly staggering.” I don’t doubt it for an instant.
Ms. Pluym acknowledges that while we all display some of these symptoms some of the time, few other than sufferers of the disorder display most all the symptoms nearly all the time. She is a tender-hearted and compassionate observer, it seems to me, for she goes so far as to grant that many of the behaviors are “appropriate and quite healthy in certain contexts.” If only all commentators left and right were so gracious. The criteria for the presence of CPD are two-fold: persistence of noted symptoms over many years, and pervasiveness. All aspects of personality are affected.
So, what is the new research that seems to offer hope of a treatment for CPD? It’s all about our evolving understanding of the brain. Learning more about how the brain works, where certain functions reside and what triggers one thing or another. Even CPD sufferers carrying around a wondrous organic supercomputer more powerful than anything IBM or other engineering wizards of the most futuristic technology can managed to design. Unfortunately, all kinds of wires and synapses and other factors can lead to serious malfunctions, as we see in the CPD-afflicted leaders serving in the U.S. Congress, legislatures and state-houses across the land.
The research, which was focused on the effects of meditation, show the following:
* Learning and memory. Meditation helps boost both. Perhaps meditating would mitigate one of the worst symptoms of CPD – forgetting the values the sufferers claim to cherish while improving consistency between their arguments and their actual practices.
* Emotional control. Meditation calms, which anyone who has witnessed CPD sufferers on Fox News and other conservative, wingnut outlets knows is an obvious sign of the affliction.
* Empathy. Meditation has an effect on the brain that seems to induce more feelings for and identification with the experiences of others. Certain regions of the brains of CPD victims where this quality is headquartered clearly not functioning but meditation seems to turn it on, a bit.
Other problems areas are improved because of benefits that meditation brings to selected brain regions. These include perspective and anxiety reduction, accordingly to Ms. Pluym’s critique of brain research with meditation as a treatment of CPD.
However, until such time as more studies are done which prove supportive of these early hopeful findings, exercise great care around CPD sufferers. Compassion and concern are in order, but so is caution and even trepidation.
Until this awful malaise can be brought under control, do not approach sufferers without caution. And, for the love of god (s) and country and all that is good, sacred and/or secular, please don’t vote for them under any circumstances. The disorder is disastrous, dangerous and to those not heavily armed with predispositions of skepticism, reason, science and secular values, possibly lethal. Support further research on meditation and other promising treatments and hope for the best.
Donald B. Ardell is the Well Infidel. He favors evidence over faith, reason over revelation and meaning and purpose over spirituality. His enthusiasm for reason, exuberance and liberty are reflected in his books (14), newsletter (566 editions of a weekly report) and lectures across North America and a dozen other countries. Write Don at awr.realwellness@gmail.com
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